Stories
I will always listen to a good story. Facts are dry, often boring. Research and informed decisions are work, like going back to school. Yech. But stories are not work because you don't read them, you live them ,like movies. Stories are fun. The movies and stories we read, view and hear today are the meme programming of empire. The story is the carrier wave of the broadcast and the message is the encoding. And stories go right in! Revenge, greed, persistence, acceptance of duty and obligation (debt) are all encoded teaching you what to feel. Counter programming has to slip in just as easy.
Stories, because we live in the stories. We feel the tension, the problems, the ravel and the unravel and we share and feel and experience the fear of the hero, heroine, antagonist and victims.
So for two days I have been sketching ideas in my head for a group of stories, sort of a franchised reality. A group of short stories that puts you in the future, in various future scenes post peak oil. It would be a sweeping set of stories through several generations, in separate locations; areas of contrasting overshoot, weather patterns and population.
We could follow the characters as they adapted to the changes in this new world and get to hear their reaction to how we lived, back when energy was so cheap that people used to ship, drive, and deliver wheat for pet food from China, all the way to the wheat growing regions of Montana. Wow. "Why did they do that mommy?, it's stupid!"
"We don't know honey. They often said they did things only because they could," she said, knowing there was no answer to satisfy her seven year old tom boy. She knew of her daughter's dream to one day visit the ruins at Old Chicago, a hundred miles away. But even a seven year old knew that it was a very long way to go.
TJ sent me a link to a different kind of story, a future myth. It is excellent. It is about 1/2 way down this blog and is entitled, "The Forest People." It is the entry for April 30th. Myths are often blueprints for a societies cultural structure. I'm guessing this myth is meant as a warning, but of course it is similar to the myths that will be created in our future to warn coming generations against repeating our mistakes.
Labels: future civilization, future stories, peak oil
posted by mcnalan @ Tuesday, May 01, 2007
4 Comments
4 Comments:
Hi really glad you liked it, this link should take you straight to it
http://aucklandsburning.blogspot.com/2007/04/forest-people-this-is-my-first-piece-of.html
I creally like what you write about story's Iv come to realise through personal experience that people are much more likely to act if they have a vision of the future and if you can communicate an idea in a way where they develop their own understanding of the issue.
Anyway glad you liked the story I have a few more ideas which are beggining to come together.
It would be fun to develop the characters as they learned and talked to each other about how they got where they are now, in a low energy future.
I can imagine the scene where the characters are rehashing what they have learned.
"So our ancestors were given this huge pool of primeval energy, a lake of underground energy so vast that they could accomplish almost any dream. They could have gone to the stars, the the bottom of the seas and built their futures there, or they could have used this energy to create vast orbiting energy colonies beaming their energy to our distant colonies at the L5 juncture between the moon and earth. Or they could have created a society where our need to destroy each other was no longer a knee jerk reaction. Hmmm. What did they do with all the oil?
"Says here," replied Jan, "they cruised the gut in their humvees. What's that mean?"
Yea what the fuck did we do with the oil?
I completely agree, Im thinking a dialogue with some cynical teenagers in a post peak oil society would be fairly iluminating. I am baffled by what we are spending our energy on, we dont even have huge pyramids or anything fun like that.
Thanks to both John and TJ for sending me the accurate link for the story!
Post a Comment
<< Home