Stories that have affected me deeply:
- Children of Morrow - post-apocalyptic story about two children running away from their home, where a strange form of missile worship has grown up around an abandoned nuke silo, towards an ocean where, they are told via psychic dreams, members of a surviving civilized population will pick them up. I've never read another story that comes close to the tone of this one. The problems the children face are ugly and simple at the same time, and they are pushed into a situation for which they are clearly unsuited. I read this book about 11 times, and although I no lonnger own it I know that if I started it today I'd have to read it to the end once again. A totally fascinating piece of fiction.

- The Dark is Rising series - again, an amazing mixture of adulthood and childhood in a single figure. Also some interesting dips into the myths and historical traditions of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Europe.

- Ray Bradbury's work in toto, but especially his short work, Dandelion Wine, and The Martian Chronicles. Poetry in every line, a sense of magic about life, childhood as a time of infinite potential, and a mixture of horror and Golden Age science fiction all identify his works as important to me.

- Greg Egan's Diaspora - The finity of potential described in mathematically poetical framing. Almost a swan song on the limitations of sentience.

- The Catcher in the Rye - Apparently every 19-year-old man who reads this stupid thing sees himself in its protagonist. I am not immune to the allure of such universality, and I am, in fact, a convert to its power.

- On the Road - redefining what a story can be, introducing me to a way of life that, at the time, seemed as mind-expanding as Diaspora's approach.

- Ender's Game/Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide - the meditations on meaning and the development of characters in these books is as mature as any I've read in "serious" fiction.

There are interesting "stories" of other sorts that have affected me as well.

Dramatically, my two shining examples of text worthy of consideration are Death of a Salesman and Angels in America. Both play with levels of conciousness in telling relatively simple stories, introducing elements which actually seem to heighten the sense of reality.

K. Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation, a non-fiction work describing a vision of nanotechnology as a practical, realizable thing, was critical to my intellectual development. The story of mathematics is something I continue to struggle with, in particular the extreme bright lights of the field whose ability to shape our understanding of the only truly universal language is beyond our ability to begin to understand.

The story of Greek and Roman societies (Aegaean societies in general, really) is pretty fundamental, as are many other cultures emerging from the Middle Eastern paradise that seems to have given rise to most of the world's civilizations.

The story of my home is important to me, as it is the story I know best. In that story, a people who for hundreds of years made their primary living harvesting raw resources for shipment to foreign shores, used up much of the potential of those resources before turning to new ways. The impact of urbanization here is still being realized. We are a large island with a small, still heavily rural population. We are making huge gains in terms of education, infrastructure, and economics, but at the price of losing the ways of life which made us the people we always were. My home town in particular continues those ways of life, but at a great cost - there is almost no sense of history where I grew up. Instead, the old buildings have been replaced with new ones, which seems a necessary part of continuing to hold onto fishing as a modern way of life. I've seen much of the province now, and I understand that much of it was built by people like my ancestors, who hiked for a week or more to go work in the woods or the mines when they couldn't go fishing. I've seen much of the country in which I live, and understand that people from my home have contributed to its greatness with their work ethic. I feel ashamed in some ways that many of my people have become identifiably lazy, shifty folks, but I know that many more of them continue to hold fast to the basic ideals that seem to me fixed in the Newfoundland character - honesty, work ethic, quick laughter, and a sense that life is worth living despite the struggle.

As you can probably tell, out of all of those stories, the story of my home and my people strikes the strongest note. If we build myths, I think that those are the myths we should turn to first. We're told to "write what you know", and that is precisely what it means - turn to your roots, study them, try to find their application to new contexts. In reality, there can be no better story with which to begin.

I started looking at the stories I listed, and mentally analyzed them. I found two big, distinct categories that I could stuff them into. The remaining ones were more difficult, and I realized I only cared about a character in those.

I like stories where characters are thrown into situations that are far, far beyond them. Yet, in the end, they manage to emerge from with new or adjusted conceptions of life. The Inferno, Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz, the Middle Earth adventures, Jarhead, the Odyssey, the Dig, Into the Out Of, Narnia's children, and certainly many more. In these examples, the heros do not have any super powers or special abilities (the Matrix is excluded, for example), but instead are able to, through charm, innocence, skill, or cunning, triumph over the evil (or at least the perceived evil) that is encountered. Mostly, the sheer humanity of the character allows him or her to succeed - Frodo and Sam rely on their Joy (c.S. Lewis' Joy, that is), Dorothy on her childlike innocence (she's only 6) and ability to see through many others, Boston on his resolve and acceptance, etc. In most of these cases, there are also forces that watch over the protaganist, and these gods often have extranormal powers (Galinda/Glinda, Virgil, Gandalf, Aslan, Athena). In the end, all of these characters leave by their own successes - or are allowed to leave - their otherworldly prisons. Every one has experienced some cathartic revelation through their travels, and are able to find themselves. Certainly Dante returns with more understanding! At the same time, many of them yearn for the addictive nature of that experience, and wish only to return to it (Jarhead, Odysseus, Frodo, Dorothy - who returns many a time, and Narnia). These people can never live a full, normal life, because a significant part of what makes them them is their experience in this other situation.

Many of my choices also feature alternate views of standard stories. Grendel (Beowolf), Ulysses (the Odyssey), Wicked (the Wizard of Oz), and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (Cinderella) are all examples of this. Ender's Game did this in the final few chapters, actually, by showing the sad nature of his enemy and his war. The original stories were excellent, but they left us wanting more. Suddenly, we're approached by this new variation that doesn't potray the heros are perfectly good and the monsters as perfectly evil. We see what's behind these newly sympathetic characters: "Are people born wicked? - After all, she had a mother, as so many do." Grendel shows us more than a mere monster, the plight of his mother, and the almost predestined battles between instinctively opposed forces. Perhaps Cinderella AND her sisters had genetic pros and cons that disallowed them from normal lives - but that society only cares about beauty. Ulysses is a little different; we assume that Odysseus returns to his home, happy, and wishes for nothing more than to live his life out with his wife and son. Instead, we're shown a man who years and longs to return to the far reaches of the world, and consigns himself and his men to their deaths.

Other stories, like I said, strike me for the character traits. Jack Bauer in 24 is one of my all-time favorite characters. He reverses the plot-driven trend and really warps the story through his actions and beliefs. The story bends for him, not the other way around. Elphaba is another favorite character (the Wicked Witch of the West), but her life is funnelled and forced through an unforgiving world that will never, ever allow her to be happy.

I'm glad I sat down and thought about this. Fun to see what actually struck me about these stories. Thanks, sun [grin].

Quote: Original post by Fournicolas
isn't this the opening paragraphs of "Soul Music"?

No.

Quote: Original post by poss74

Quote: Original post by Fournicolas
isn't this the opening paragraphs of "Soul Music"?

No.

Apparently it was from "Witches Abroad," but I dug it out of the notes section of Lt. Col. Grossman's "On Killing." Regardless of the source, it seemed appropriate.

On the plus side, it's given me more Pratchett books to find and read [grin]. I've read some of the Discworld series, and simply love his style and humo(u)r.

Aeneid book IV - esp. the bit when Dido is commiting suicide (i read it in Latin for an exam and just got hooked onto it)
To Kill a mockingbird is probably the strongest thing I've read. The court scene in it is just unforgettable!
The rising (it was a film)
The Way (an rpg with a flawless storyline - go to crestfallen.us)

Although, most of the stories I come up with are based strongly on classical mythology. Its not very obvious, but its probably the closest thing to my work.

the most scary story to me was a story about a little girl in some warfield, that got taken out and brought to savety in amerika, where it grew... during the years, it made friends over there, learned to life with them.. but it was always a strange girl, always very scared..
at teen age, it finally found someone who cared a lot about her. a boy, a little older, who tried to invest all his time to help her, getting the scare out of her..
after a very long time, with very complex ups and downs, he got, bit by bit further, till he got her back into normality.. i felt very happy, as, short before the end of the book, they nearly got together (teens in love.. so sweet..).

but on those f**king last two pages there was that stupid one crash that made her losing ALL of the advances, scared the hell back into her and she never got back to normal..

she died, years later, in some psycho-hospital..



i was quite young while reading it.. the thought of this story still leads my way, and let me do my choises in life.



it changed the way i act with other people till today.. it changed the way i act with my loved ones.. how i care about them, not trying to scare them..



i don't remember the name of the book (something about a bird..), but i do remember that it's a true story.





besides that, some close science-fiction stories are quite important to me, too.. stories, that show some world similar to our, but scary, as the differences are strange, and not the way we like them... but we can see by today how we're getting closer..

big brother comes to mind.. brave new world, too..

Illuminatus!

You can never tell what's real and what's fantasy in this acid trip of a book, and by the end you come out paranoid that the fnords are going to eat you too.

Michael Moorcock's first Corum cycle. If I ever produce movies, I'll do this one.

I finished reading the first volume of Levi-Strauss's myth analysis, so I thought I'd tell you about some of the things he said in it. One of the main oppositions he found in the myths he studied was that of nature vs. culture. Nature is associated with foods that can be eaten raw, floods and storms, mud, and immortality/rebirth. Culture is associated with agriculture, fire, cooking, ornaments and bright colors, and old age/death. So you see a lot of myths where people gain fire or agriculture but in return have to sacrifice immortality.

Two other subjects which occur very frequently in these stories are the opposition between children and adults and the problem of how a child becomes and adult, and marriage and associated problems and taboos. It is extremely common to find that the main pair of characters in any myth are two brothers-in-law or an uncle and nephew by marriage, and usually one offends or kills the other.

Overall, the problem most of the myths seem to be concerned with is balance - finding a balance between too much water or too little, no fire or a world burned to cinders, men without women or overpowered by them, people without social ties or threatened by their in-laws, animals or supenatural beings.

Personally, I am puzzled by the 'moral' presented in some of the myths, they sometimes strike me as incomplete or nonsensically wrong. But I'll keep reading and perhaps I'll figure out what's going on with that. I also keep feeling very curious what Levi-Strauss would have made of a myth I wrote.