I don’t watch a lot of ancient movies. When I was watching the movie Psycho (1960) a few years back, I was taken aback by the cultural gap between the Americans on the screen and my America. The buttoned-shirted characters of Psycho are considerably more alien than the vast majority of so-called “aliens” I encounter on TV or the silver screen.
More history (preferably contemporary writings) would probably give you at least a little more reach into the human range.
Margaret Ball’s Flameweaver duology is about a matriarchal magic-using culture which gets drawn into the Great Game between England and Russia. The Victorian(?) British seemed a lot more alien than the magic users.
Not that that is history. The Vitcorians were capable of expressing themselves in language we can still understand. How alien was Dickens, or his characters?
I suspect there are some pitfalls in treating people as popular as Dickens (or Kipling, etc.) as properly representative of their time, since people that widely read often have a significant role in shaping later culture. A Christmas Carol essentially created the Anglosphere’s modern celebration of Christmas as a family-centered, primarily secular gift-giving holiday, for example.
Conversely, many eras adopted certain conventions to regulate the content of movies (and other media), most of which no longer exist, and that change in production culture adds some inferential distance that wouldn’t necessarily exist in personal culture if communication were possible without the caveats of age, hindsight, and nostalgia. One might develop quite a different view of the late 1950s from listening to the satirical music of Tom Lehrer—or reading back issues of MAD Magazine.
BTW, I seem to recall being surprised by how non-alien characters by Dostoevsky were: it seemed as though differences between that culture and mine were mostly cosmetic or technical. But of course comparing people-novels-were-written-about then with people-novels-are-written-about today isn’t as significant as comparing the median person then with the median person today, and I’d guess the latter comparison would show much greater differences.
BTW, I seem to recall being surprised by how non-alien characters by Dostoevsky were: it seemed as though differences between that culture and mine were mostly cosmetic or technical.
I suspect this may be because you read authors whose culture were significantly different from yours as part of your education, whereas Eliezer got his ideas for what an ‘alien’ culture would look like by looking at aliens as written by contemporary writers.
BTW, I seem to recall being surprised by how non-alien characters by Dostoevsky were: it seemed as though differences between that culture and mine were mostly cosmetic or technical.
I suspect this may be cause you read authors whose culture were significantly different from yours as part of your education, whereas Eliezer got his ideas for what an ‘alien’ culture would look like by looking at aliens as written by contemporary writers.
BTW, I seem to recall being surprised by how non-alien characters by Dostoevsky were: it seemed as though differences between that culture and mine were mostly cosmetic or technical.
I suspect this may be cause you read authors whose culture were significantly different from yours as part of your education, whereas Eliezer got his ideas for what an ‘alien’ culture would look like by looking at aliens as written by contemporary writers.
More history (preferably contemporary writings) would probably give you at least a little more reach into the human range.
Margaret Ball’s Flameweaver duology is about a matriarchal magic-using culture which gets drawn into the Great Game between England and Russia. The Victorian(?) British seemed a lot more alien than the magic users.
Not that that is history. The Vitcorians were capable of expressing themselves in language we can still understand. How alien was Dickens, or his characters?
I suspect there are some pitfalls in treating people as popular as Dickens (or Kipling, etc.) as properly representative of their time, since people that widely read often have a significant role in shaping later culture. A Christmas Carol essentially created the Anglosphere’s modern celebration of Christmas as a family-centered, primarily secular gift-giving holiday, for example.
Conversely, many eras adopted certain conventions to regulate the content of movies (and other media), most of which no longer exist, and that change in production culture adds some inferential distance that wouldn’t necessarily exist in personal culture if communication were possible without the caveats of age, hindsight, and nostalgia. One might develop quite a different view of the late 1950s from listening to the satirical music of Tom Lehrer—or reading back issues of MAD Magazine.
BTW, I seem to recall being surprised by how non-alien characters by Dostoevsky were: it seemed as though differences between that culture and mine were mostly cosmetic or technical. But of course comparing people-novels-were-written-about then with people-novels-are-written-about today isn’t as significant as comparing the median person then with the median person today, and I’d guess the latter comparison would show much greater differences.
I suspect this may be because you read authors whose culture were significantly different from yours as part of your education, whereas Eliezer got his ideas for what an ‘alien’ culture would look like by looking at aliens as written by contemporary writers.
I suspect this may be cause you read authors whose culture were significantly different from yours as part of your education, whereas Eliezer got his ideas for what an ‘alien’ culture would look like by looking at aliens as written by contemporary writers.
I suspect this may be cause you read authors whose culture were significantly different from yours as part of your education, whereas Eliezer got his ideas for what an ‘alien’ culture would look like by looking at aliens as written by contemporary writers.