Off Topic > Other Conspiracy Theories

The Ethics of Fantasy

(1/4) > >>

nomuse:
I'm fascinated by the history of archaeology, by history of course (especially the Ancient World), and by conspiracy theories and fabulous tales and not a little golden age pulp.

As a would-be writer of historical fiction I'd love to do an Atlantis story, or some other tomb raiding lost cities ancient super-science hidden history.

But...I respect real history, real science, and the real people who are out there in the trenches (literally...at least when there's funding) doing archaeology.

Is there any way around the ethical conundrum? Are there any ways of being honest to the real history and real cultures whilst spinning a fantastic yarn about them? Is there, worse yet, any way to touch on the known (and, yes, overused) material -- your Nazca Lines and all that shite -- without giving tacit support to the liars and parasites?

raven:
Make fantasy counterparts? Or use the existing ones and extrapolate forward how having the conspiratorial version would affect things.

molesworth:

--- Quote from: nomuse on August 11, 2018, 05:11:21 PM ---Is there any way around the ethical conundrum? Are there any ways of being honest to the real history and real cultures whilst spinning a fantastic yarn about them? Is there, worse yet, any way to touch on the known (and, yes, overused) material -- your Nazca Lines and all that shite -- without giving tacit support to the liars and parasites?

--- End quote ---
I think it comes down to the difference between a work that's obviously fiction, although set in an ancient culture, and something that's making outrageous claims about said culture.  Compare Robert E. Howard's stories and settings (not just the Conan ones) with Erich Von Daniken's brand of nonsense.

Personally, I'd love to read a story that connected the Nazca lines to Atlantis...  :)

nomuse:
Howard is quoted as going to Conan because he had found historical research was too time consuming to allow him to continue to make a living in the pulp field. Conan allowed him to play with historical cultures but fake a lot more of the details.

Back towards the ethical conundrum, I recently read a couple books from a series where the author would first thoroughly debunk something like the Bermuda Triangle...then go on to use it in the plot anyway. I'm on the fence whether that helped. At best, you can take it as a stage magician's game, a wink and nod that it is all bunk anyhow and now that that's out of the way, let me show you a trick.

The alternate universe idea is intriguing. Say Atlantis (well, some version -- what a confused myth that is these days!) is real. So it isn't just in Plato: Sophocles has a comedy about it. Ovid has a long commentary. Napoleon sent divers after it. Champollion took a first crack at the texts and they were finally cracked by Frank Chadwick. And the entire historical picture is consistent with it being there (well...as consistent as our picture of the Ancient World is, anyhow!)

The thing I totally can't accept is that something revolutionary and paradigm changing could slip through the cracks until the 20th century and only be uncovered by a high school student playing with Google Earth. Or be hidden by entrenched academics an/or a major industrial group with a lousy business plan.

Err...I mean revolutionary on the scale of "the Romans had spaceships and a colony on the Moon," not "The Hittites were a real people and had a massive empire in what's now Turkey."

The alternate world in which a continental mass nearly filling the Atlantic sunk 9,000 years ago is one that ceases to be indistinguishable from our world somewhere between Bacon and Lord Kelvin. But there's real potential in a more conservative Atlantis that gets discovered about the time the Minoans and, well, the Hittites are being uncovered. It's a period piece....and those are a lot of fun.

Peter B:
I think it depends exactly how extreme you want to be. The thing is, there are still mysteries about civilisations we already know a lot about, and it's possible there are events we'll never know about because their archaeological trail is well and truly lost to time.

As an example, think of the Roman dodecahedrons. If you're unfamiliar with them, they're metal objects about the size of a golf ball. They're hollow (that is, they consist only of the faces - they're not solid), and the faces have circular holes in them. Archeologists have found dozens or hundreds of them, and we have no idea what they're for.

But there are other areas you could be free to speculate: one of the plot lines in a Clive Cussler thriller is a Roman merchant ship being blown across the Atlantic in a storm and making landfall in North America. We don't have any evidence of anything like that happening, but it's quite plausible. We know, after all, that in the Hellenistic and Imperial Roman centuries merchant ships sailed directly between the entrance to the Red Sea and India - across the Indian Ocean. And Herodotus relates the tale of a Carthaginian fleet circumnavigating Africa (personally, he didn't believe the story, but the evidence he presents is actually more believable than he gives it credit for).

It's also worth keeping in mind that authors have written historical/archaeological thrillers which sit in gaps in our knowledge. Can I recommend, for example, the author (and professional archaeologist) David Gibbins.

So, in summary, I think there's a lot of scope to write a story about a historical Atlantis that is entirely consistent with our current archaeological and historical knowledge. But, as with most fiction, you need a good story more than you need a good setting: the first can rescue the second, but the second can't rescue the first.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page