I've been saving up some titles, among them Allan Villiers' Sons of Sinbad, about Arab dhow sailors around 1900; and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines; and Frances Yates's The Art of Memory; and Clifford Geertz's Negara. Maybe George Lakoff's Women Fire and Dangerous Things (how to think like an alien). There's a book about how Polynesian sailors cross uncharted Pacific distances by reading the water surace, bird flight, light at differnt times of day, etc., but I can't remember the title.
I'd like to include a few titles for those as interested in scientific possibilities, but of these I am even less able to suggest any -- I mean I've read the reviews and can recognize the concepts, but have no titles, and no guidelines.
So any ideas, in any of these categories -- unlikely but actual human thought-systems; daily life in unexpected human realms; weird science; historical backwaters or forgotten empires?
Profile
crowleycrow- John Crowley
- Website
Page Summary
- morbidloren : One for the list [+0]
- tomsdisch : Strange Behaviors [+1]
- (Anonymous) : Heian Kyo [+0]
- nightspore : (no subject) [+3]
- janetmk : (no subject) [+3]
- matt_ruff : (no subject) [+0]
- sheherazahde : Non-fiction [+0]
- shewhomust : (no subject) [+5]
- toolmaker : (no subject) [+1]
- (Anonymous) : (no subject) [+0]
- mark_argent : (no subject) [+0]
- (Anonymous) : (no subject) [+0]
- raydavis : (no subject) [+1]
- anselmo_b : (no subject) [+1]
- shaolingrrl : (no subject) [+1]
- memegarden : (no subject) [+3]
- denydenydeny : (no subject) [+0]
- al_zorra : (no subject) [+0]
- mouseworks : I got a lot out of some biology books [+0]
- marconiplein : (no subject) [+0]
- (Anonymous) : (no subject) [+0]
- sheherazahde : Genre Writing [+3]
- walkingscarlet_ : Vance? [+0]
- herr_ziffer : Strange Books [+0]
- betweentimes : (no subject) [+0]
Comments
I hope you'll post the whole reading list. It sounds fascinating!
The Worm and the Cheese); there are many books on the courtisan culture of Venice, including new studies from a feminist perspective; Michener's The Floating World is a great, simple narrative history of the geisha and theater world of the Japanese woodblock prints, which can be supplemented from Donald Keene's anthologies.
Barbarian and nomadic cultures tho interesting are almost by definition ill-documented. We know mostly what kind of belt buckles they favored. Perhaps a tale of a town of bronze buckle makers on a major invasion route and the poor old maker of mouse noodles working for them to pay for herthirteen sons' circumcisions, each of which has to paid for with a separate buckle featuring a special magical gemstone of arcan significance, keyed to a sign of the zodiac, so that the twelve can be name for them: The Amethyst of Aries, the Jade of the Gemini, etc.
Balzac did a whole novel set against the 19th century renovations in the technology of papermaking. The first writer to do the same for Silicon Valley could make a bundle.
What of the artist who did those books, City, Pyramid, Cathedral, about how those feats were accomplished. Who built the first meadhall with a large high unpillared central interior? We take such spaces for granted. The psychology of architecture, from the warren to the dome, has never been treat in an interesting way in either SF or fantasy, where it would seem to be an elephant in the living room. There is Hugo, Notre Dame, and Golding's Spire. I've never read Irving's The Alhambra, which is non-fiction and so a good bet for where to dig.
If you come up with a good title about an abandoned scientific system, let me know. Of course I'm including YAtes's Art of Memory.
On a slightly different tack, there's Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars.and Island of the Colorblind.
Cultural Materialism, he talks about the environmental basis for culture: why cows are sacred in India, why Jews don't eat pigs but Polinesians do. I think he gets off track when he starts talking about witches and messiahs at the end of the book. But thecows, pigs, and wars sections sound like what you are asking for.
Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing
Politics of the Family by R.D. Laing
How do we decide if a person is "sane". How do we drive them insane. He has some very interesting cross cultural examples conflict resolution and family structures.
The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis
What does it mean to be "dead"? What is the function of secret societies? Trial by ordeal, magic, religion?
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
Lucien Febvre's Les rois thaumaturges uses basically the same approach (although he largely precedated Jean-Claude Schmitt) to explain that strangest of belief -- that the kings of France were thought "thaumaturges", i.e. they had the power to heal the "écrouelles" by touching them. This miraculous power came from the ceremony of the sacre during which they received the onction of the holy oil in the cathedral of Reims (in commemoration of the baptism of Clovis in A.D. 496).
Of course, Tom Disch has already quoted Carlo Ginzburg's work, which you already seem to know since it appears in AEgypt.
Maybe Lawence of Arabia's book?
A wonderful thesis in anthropological Greek history (also in French): Philippe Ellinger, La Légende nationale phocidienne. Artémis, les situation extrêmes et les récits d'anéantissement, Paris, BCH Supp. 1993. It explains the role of Artemis, the Greek goddess, in the very special wars in ancien Greece, what we could call the total wars, in which the vanquished cities were destroyed, all the men killed and the women and children reduced in slavery. I fear it will be very hard to find.
Last year I read the memoirs of Cabeza de Vaca about his lost expedition and travel through Florida, Texas, and into Mexico. Bernal Diaz has a diary of his time spent with Cortez.
Back in school, after taking a physical anthropology class I wanted to read more about hunter gatherer societies so I found a book by Marjorie Shostak called Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman which was pretty fascinating.
Mark Plotkin's ethnobotanic Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice book is about his time studying ethnobotany in South America.
But I do not think you should necessarily limit things to human experience and cognition. In school I took classes in animal behavior, ethology, perception, and learning about these things introduced me to alien minds.
What might it feel like to have a mind that sleeps in halves, like a Dolphin? The sensory world of animals that hear things at different speeds -- what sounds like one note to us is many to these.
Think of the experiences of those who see into the infrared or ultraviolet or can perceive the polarization of light and use it to orienteer.
In my neuroethology class I read about the sensory experiences of electrogenic and electroreceptive fish and how they use them for signaling, sensing the environment, jamming, &c.
I wish I could recommend some books on perception and animal cognition, but nothing leaps to mind. Perhaps you could ask for advice.
Oh, and I just thought of Oliver Sacks and Luria and others who write case studies about patients with neurological conditions. Getting back to human experience, then, these types of readings also give insight into alternate states of mind.
Scot
A relevant passage from the (otherwise awkward) frame story to The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt, articulating a notion of "corresponding development": "If you're going to eliminate gunpowder and everything that came out of it, you'll have to replace it with something. After all, a large part of the time and attention of our so-called civilization have been spent in working out the results of the gunpowder and steam engine inventions [. . .] There would have to be a corresponding development in some other field, going 'way beyond where we are."
Back when I was trying to write fiction, the idea of using that voice in dark fantasy fascinated me. Maybe one of your students can succeed where I couldn't.
Texts that always make me wonder at the paradox of beings as human as one can possibly conceive and who are at the same time totally alien and lacking in experiences common to ours, are the epic of Gilgamesh and the book of Exodus, especially the story of the manna.
The theory of Preformationism and the preoccupations and thoughts that led to it are a nice example of serious scientific activities that are quite foreign to us, although only relative distant from us in time since they appeared in our own western culture.
Another one would be Herodotus' Histories, which also has the effect on the reader of inducing a sense of intimate relatedness and total alienation.
There's lots of classical Chinese literature out there, too, like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Heroes of the Marsh, and Journey to the West, but taking on one of those is a pretty big job.
As for scientific possibilities, a fascinating ecosystem can be found in tropical rainforests--more specifically, rainforest canopies. A really good introduction that's on my desk right now is The High Frontier: Exploring the Tropical Rainforest Canopy, by Mark W. Moffett. Highly recommended.
Hope these help--
We read several about the Kaluli people of New Guinea:
The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers
The Give and Take of Everyday Life
Sound and Sentiment
...and a couple on American Pentecostalists, none of which I can currently remember titles of, unfortunately.
and cognitive science/anthropology masterpiece __East is a Big Bird__, Gladwin
East is a Big Bird came into my life at the same time as Songlines, and I consider it formative.
Love, C.
Mammalian Radiations
and The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior which explains the physics of senses.
If I was teaching a class on SF&F writing I would want to impress on the students that the strength of this genre is in exploring ideas. They should not start their novel with a plot outline, a map, or a language but with an idea they want to explore. They should not write if they do not have anything interesting to say.
But fantasy fiction can exist for its own sake, merely as invention, or purely in an aesthetic realm. It's the ideas that are in, say, the Narnia books that are valueless; the inventiveness is all. A summary of Lord of the Rings would be worse than useless.
If an author were writing a story that was human in all its aspects (other than the use of magic) and it was set on another planet, is it all that necesssary to create such a different society? Or does a more 'alien' society, even if it were derived from human experience, simply make the human tale more interesting to read?
I want your teaching notes!!!
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is always struck me as an excellent piece of fantasy that happens to take place in our world, between cultures.
"Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind."
The original article can be found here. An overview of the research can be found on the UCSD site.