How Stories Last | Neil Gaiman

[Music] yeah evening I'm Stuart brand from the long now foundation stories are something we use something we tell a lot of the time to understand the world we've been doing this for a long time we'll probably keep doing it for a long time you saw on the screen Danny Hillis --is a narrative version of thinking about the 10,000 hour clock and we're actually building a 10,000 year clock physically in Texas our speaker tonight is a prolific writer this is Sandman Volume one and he's also a prolific reader grew up basically in libraries he says and libraries are these time spanning places where stories and other such things collect and as a writer he's unusually transparent about being a writer about the writing about stories and we can think of no one better to talk about the long now question how exactly do stories last Neil Gaiman [Music] [Music] many many years ago I remember defining art as something you could use successfully to stun a burglar and was very proud of myself for having written enough sandman to do that watching Stuart drop it on the stage I did actually try and persuade DC Comics to do the one volume Sandman and failed because apparently bookbinding is not up to the task and also it might kill the poor burglar so Thank You Stuart thank you to the long now foundation thank you to everybody who's invited me to come and talk particularly Danny Hillis who is not here Thank You Danny I want to talk about stories the first emperor of China died 2,300 years ago he did a lot of very important things in China things they still talk about for example he regularized the distance between the wheels of cards now this may not seem an incredibly important thing to you how how far apart your cart wheels are but when you realize that all carts and carriages essentially traveled in the ruts in roads in muddy roads that at some point would be mud and then they would dry out and you're traveling in ruts standardizing the distance of your wheels meant that you could travel from one end of China to the other a wheeled conveyance could go from one end of that vast empire to the other end he did a lot of other things to was absolutely the most powerful man in the world and like many such powerful men he became obsessed with immortality with not dying ever under any circumstances his unfortunate failure to achieve success in this by the usual magical and alchemical roots resulted in his death they actually tried covering up his death for a while they sent his body home in a carriage filled with rotting fish to mask the smell-- and claim that the smell was the fish and he was rapidly interred in a tomb that he had been building for quite a bit of his life the location of the tomb was soon lost and pretty soon there were only stories stories about his tomb stories that said the tomb contained unimaginable treasures including a terracotta army of soldiers and ships that floated on seas of underground mercury they built whole lakes of mercury and put ships on them there was another king whose name we do not know his likeness was carved in marble and placed on a marble plinth to last forever and the reason why we do not know his name is his name was carved into the marble on the base of the plinth but after a few hundred years the marble peeled away and was lost leaving the granite on the plinth with the name of the sculptor carved into it so we know who did it the oldest forms of life around right now if we are to believe Wikipedia are probably trees and the oldest tree that we know of a Great Basin that Bristlecone pine in northern california is five thousand and sixty four years old just quite old when you stop to think about it five thousand 64 years life again according to Wikipedia you can see why I did my research on this is the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter we are told which definitely disqualifies stories but then we discover that it includes the capacity for growth reproduction functional activity and continual change preceding death so animals animals live at the outside 300 years really long-lived ones trees really long-lived once again four to five thousand years the stories can live longer than that and we know because we have stories that go back longer than that there are Native American stories from the Pacific Northwest that tell a forbidden love between a woman of astonishing beauty and a young man and of how their love was punished of how the earth rumbled of the black snow that came out from the mountaintop and then how the top of the mountain the King fire killing a great many people only to be stopped when the young woman was pushed in to the flames and it's a story that survives and was collected first in the 1920s and it survived because it contains elements that people love to tell and to retell forbidden love tragic death but the story itself tells us a lot of other things it tells us most importantly that those mountains that you're looking at those great big mountains that seem like they must have been there forever are not permanent things it tells us that volcanoes can happen it tells you of the early warning systems the idea that the ground can shake that ash will fall and if you are passing on a story generation to generation and you want that information to travel you really have probably about three generations of passing it on as pure information you can say to your children and to your grandchildren you know those mountains over there that look kind of solid well they aren't and ash can fall the ground can shake and they will turn to flame and and this hot flaming Rocky stuff will come out of them and your grandson may believe this but his grandson when he says you know my grandfather told me it's gonna go yeah really it's a mountain and his grandson is gonna go you people are mad no I'm not passing on that story but if the story has things that make it sweet around it things that make it fun to pass on things that make it pleasurable to tell in this case beautiful women forbidden love grumpy gods somebody being sacrificed into a volcano people get them thrown into volcanoes it always works it is it is you know in the giant list of things that we authors have tricks that never fail right after somebody comes through the door with a gun is throw somebody into a volcano the tale of two brothers is the story dates back about 2,000 BC to SETI the second setting it was recorded on papyrus by a scribe about 4000 years ago the story centers around two brothers UNPO the elder who is married looks after the younger buttah the brothers work together farming land raising cattle one day um whose wife attempts to seduce butter but he rejects her advances she then tells her husband that his brother tried to seduce her and um puh obviously very sensibly tries to kill his brother who flees prays to be saved the god save him by creating a crocodile-infested lake between him and his brother across which barter explains his side of the story and to emphasize his sincerity cuts off his genitalia throws him into the water and they are eaten by a catfish [Music] it's only just begun barter then says that he is going to go to the valley of the cedar where he will place his heart on the top of the blossom of a cedar tree so if it's cut down I'm who will be able to find it and allow bata to become alive again and he gives um puh a he taught me he tells him that if ever his bier mysteriously Frost's he knows to come and hunt down his brother and then hump who goes home kills his wife there was a theme in these things and it's not particularly cheerful meanwhile bata has a new life for himself and he has a wife a new wife created for him by the gods and because she is divine Pharaoh falls in love with her and she tells the Pharaoh to go and cut down the tree how much barter has his heart and butter dies and then the beer gets frothy and um puh goes off and there's all sorts of fun barter keeps getting resurrected first is a bull and they murdered the ball and then two drops of blood get rescued from the ball and they become trees and butter in the form of a tree you know appeals to his wife but she goes she goes back to the the Pharaoh and she says look let's make furniture those trees that as they are making furniture a splinter enters her mouth impregnating her and thus her son is her resurrected husband and becomes Crown Prince and appoints his brother as his co ruler and it's all fun and games in ancient Egypt and the reason I've told you that story it's actually it's a 4,000 year old story that's a long time you think about 4,000 years and a couple of years ago I was chatting to an Egyptologist and she was telling me about how they were on an archeological dig with the locals in Egypt helping them as the support team and they started telling stories around the campfire and the oldest man told them that he would tell them a story that he heard from his father and he began to tell them the tale of two brothers named Dan pou and bata and she realized she was hearing the oral version of something that was written down 4000 years ago that have been told as a story 4000 years that's right up there with the trees a story's alive can they be considered alive what was our list growth reproduction functional activity and continual change the stories grow pretty obviously anybody who has ever heard a joke being passed on from one person to another knows that they can grow they can change can stories reproduce well yeah not spontaneously obviously they tend to need people as vectors we are the media in which they reproduce we are their petri dishes but they can and they do stories grow sometimes they shrink they reproduce they inspire other stories and of course if they do not change stories die it's fascinating going back and looking through old fairy tales old oral tradition stories and watching the ones that just do not get told anymore there is nothing about them that impels people to say let me tell you the story where as stories sometimes will simply enter the oral tradition and sometimes stories will find they would they were mutate they will change just a little and they will wind up with an evolutionary advantage over other similar stories I've been told this isn't true but damn it's a good story so I'm going to tell it to you anyway in a story about stories it seems only fair the story of Cinderella Cinderella probably began in China there are there are definitely there is definitely evidence that it may have begun in China there are very few Western cultures in which having incredibly small feet was actually deemed a mark of obvious princess wood there is a case to be made he said rather nervously because maybe there isn't somebody sent me hi somebody heard me talking about this recently and sent me a thing completely disproving it and I went no it's too beautiful but one of the most significant things about Cinderella is the glass slippers they're probably the most memorable bit of Cinderella the idea of slippers made of glass there is a theory that originally those slippers might have been fur which in French is their Vai R and that threw a homonym ik shift they became their ve double r e and slipped from fur slippers which sound fairly regular two glass slippers which are gloriously unlikely and stick in the memory and give the story of Cinderella a tiny evolutionary advantage over all the stories that are kind of like Cinderella of which there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and yet Cinderella is the one that we remember and people go oh well that's Disney and you know actually it's not I mean if one of the things that fascinates me is that there are places where Disney would take an old story a fairy tale and try and retell it and bump into some of the problems inherent in the actual story they were they were telling for example Sleeping Beauty the best thing about Sleeping Beauty is she falls asleep for a hundred years and during that hundred years thorns grow up around the castle and eventually after a hundred years a prince hacks his way in snog her and everybody wakes up Disney ran into obvious problems with that which is it's really hard to start a story and then have hundred you know a solid hundred years your if you if she meets a prince early on in the film he will be dead it's not gonna be him so they made it an afternoon you go back and watch Sleeping Beauty they fall asleep the ones grow up prince gallops in kisses her everybody wakes up they barely had a nap but that hasn't lasted that's not the way people will tell the story although of course Sleeping Beauty has originally told in a lot of the versions we have was actually just a prelude it was where a story began Sleeping Beauty was the intro to the real story which is she goes home with the prince and his mother is appalling and does all the things that appalling mother-in-law's do vision to wit try and frame her daughter for having killed and even her children and that was the exciting bit that was that was where the story went but that bit kind of faded it it died the story itself mutated and people seemed perfectly happy to have the happily ever after happen there happen after after the waking up stories have creators every story begins at some point with an act of imagining scientists who are not in other ways fanciful get reinvented when it comes to the origins of stories I've read otherwise sensible papers articles and books which assume suddenly the existence of a communal undermined yours mine everybody in histories and stories sitting deep in their already fully formed like jewels in a deep mine the idea of an individual storyteller is actually discouraged as it's the idea that somebody plotted a story stories can only be seen in this context as being passed on from one person to another with details accreting or being lost on the way as they change and some people who wrote about stories went to even stranger places Perik states with certainty that in any story any early old story in any folktale in which a character falls asleep we know that this story was originally a dream and because primitive humans were unable to tell the difference between waking and sleeping they would have woken up with the story in their heads produced on some magical unconscious level I remember reading that story and being absolutely fascinated by it have you ever tried to tell someone even a friendly sympathetic even as someone who loves you a dream of yours the next morning have you ever watched their eyes glaze over watch them slowly lose the ability to feign interest probably along with the will to live even as you start to suspect that threads of narrative causality that seemed obvious on waking don't exist you're saying well then we were back in my old school which was a kind of castle and in the toilets there was a tree so we climbed it and you realized that no matter how gripping it was for you while it was going on it is not going to be gripping by lunchtime pictures I think may have been a way of transmitting stories the drawings on cave walls but we assume are acts of worship or of sympathetic magic intended to bring hunters luck and good kills I keep wondering if actually they're just ways of telling stories we came over that Ridge and we saw a herd of wooly Bisons and I wondered that because people tell stories it's an enormous part of what makes us human we will do an awful lot for stories we will endure a lot for stories and stories in their turn like some kind of symbol help us endure and make sense of our lives a lot of stories do appear to begin as intrinsic to religions and belief systems they a lot of the ones we have have gods or goddesses in them they teach us how the world exists they teach us the rules of living in the world but they also have to come in an attractive enough package that we take pleasure from them and we want to help them propagate human beings appreciate human beings are hard-wired to appreciate simile and metaphor for those of you who are incredibly relieved to no longer be at school and who are pretty sure you know the difference between the two it's the ass simile is as beautiful as an airport that was Douglas Adams this example of a simile but nobody has ever used he said nobody ever says as beautiful it was as beautiful as an airport and a metaphor is when you say that something is something else to help you understand it better the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon stormy seas and isn't it's not what the moon is it's a big lump of rock in the sky not a ghostly galleon but it is our capacity to use simile and use metaphor that I think allows us to understand and appreciate the best things of our stories because people can have two contradictory things going on in their heads at the same time and those contradictory things are these a story is a lie her story is true stories let us make no bones about it a lies they didn't really happen Once Upon a Time is a code for I am about to lie to you for that matter this really happened to a friend of someone I know is also code for I'm lying to you but I believe there is a possibility that this might actually have happened to somebody somewhere somehow the act of reading a story or listening to a story is the act of knowing you are being lied to but it's a true thing you have walked with the people in the story you've looked out through their eyes you know what they believe you walk with them and by walking with them you have left your own reality and entered theirs and that gives us something very strange because information in a story is something that you can access as real information you can access it as if you have experienced it you can use it and then you can pass it on there's meant to be a break and a huge difference between the oral tradition of storytelling in the written tradition of storytelling I'm not as convinced people tell each other stories there's a lovely example from the 1920s of folklorists collecting a story that have been told that had been written in the 1890s by a lady named Lucy Clifford and she'd written a story called the new mother and it was collected under the name of the pair drum and what was great is they'd left out all of the bad writing all of the weirdness of the prose they just got down to the story but they kept the oddest bits of the story the fact that it had happened this weird story had happened to two children named turkey and blue eyes that got remembered that stayed in the oral tradition there's a story I like to tell because it changed me and stories should change you good stories should change you and this story this isn't mine this is a story of something that happened to my cousin Helen she's 97 and she was in Poland during the war and was the ghetto for some of the war she was a Holocaust survivor a remarkable woman and a few years ago she started telling me the story of how in the ghetto they were not allowed books if you had a book somebody could well not just somebody the Nazis could put a gun to your head and pull the trigger books were forbidden and she used to teach under the pretense of having a sewing class of doing sewing she would actually teach a class about 20 little girls and they would come in for an hour a day and she would teach them maths she keeps the Polish she teach them grammar and one day somebody slipped her a polish translation of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind and Helen stayed up she blacked out her window so she could stay up an extra hour and she read a chapter I've gone with the wind and when the girls came in the next day instead of teaching them she told them what happened in the book and each night she'd stay up and each day she told them the story and I said why why would he risk death for a story and she said because for an hour every day those girls weren't in the ghetto they were in the American South they were having they were having adventures they got away I think four out of those 20 girls survived the war and she told me how when she was an old woman she found one of them who was also an old woman and they got together and called each other by names in Gone with the Wind the names of characters and I thought you know we decry too easily writers what we do has being kind of trivial the creation of stories as being a trivial thing but the magic of escapist fiction and the thing I think that some people miss I think I missed is that it can actually offer you a genuine escape from a bad place and in the process of escaping it can furnish you with armor with knowledge with weapons with tools you can take back into your life to help make it better I doubt there's anybody who loves reading who hasn't at some point gone to a book sometimes when they're young as a means of escaping from an otherwise intolerable situation and you know what it's a real escape and when you come back you come back better armed than when you left Helens story is a true story and this is what we learn from it that stories are worth risking your life for they're worth dying for written stories and oral stories both offer escape escape from somewhere escape to somewhere I mentioned Douglas Adams before Douglass understood media understood change he essentially described the first ebooks long before most commuter trains were filled with people reading on them and he also correctly perceived why even though most commuter trains are a hundred percent people with ebooks there will always be physical books and a healthy market for physical books because Douglas told me books of sharks I remember saying to him I have no idea what that means he said it incredibly confidently simple books of sharks it's like no I have no idea what you're talking about and he said well what you have to understand is that there were sharks back when there were dinosaurs in many cases before there were dinosaurs there were sharks and now there are sharks and the reason that there are still sharks hundreds of millions after the first sharks of years after the first shots turned up is that nothing has turned up that is better at being a shark than a shark is [Applause] ebooks are absolutely fantastic at being several books in the newspaper they're really good portable bookshelves that's why they're great on trains but books are much better at being books you can drop them I can guarantee that copy of the first sandman omnibus still works [Applause] but stories aren't books books are simply one of the many storage mechanisms in which stories can be kept and obviously people one of the other storage mechanisms stories change the professions and the media that we use to store and record and transmit stories will change not long ago the people who stored and transmitted information were stonemasons now not so much unless we want the information to last paper or solar-powered digital headstones may be a thing but a big lump of granite is pretty much forever as individuals we are cut off from humanity as individuals we are naked we do not even know which plants will kill us without the mess of human knowledge accumulated over millennia to boy us up we are in big trouble with it we are warm fed we have popcorn we are sitting in comfortable seats and we are capable of arguing with each other about really stupid things on the internet that's because we have stories it's because we have information in 1984 a man whose name I don't know how to pronounce I think it's thomas sebeok wrote a report for the department of energy he was asked to create a report because they had a problem what to do with nuclear waste repositories they needed to devise a method of warning future generations not to mine or drill at that site unless they're aware of the consequences of their actions and because the stuff that they would be putting in these nuclear waste repositories had a half-life of 10,000 years they needed to figure out ways to get information to last for 10,000 years and they started by looking at all you can write you can write things but trouble with writing things that's writing things lasts a certain amount of time but anyone here who's actually tried to read Beowulf in the original knows that that only takes you so far language changes words change meaning you know you could write that something is wicked you could warn that this is like the bomb and a generation could somehow come along and go wicked the bomb we got cool stuff in there you could it could happen inconceivable I know but language changes and if language is changing what about pictographic what if you put a big scale up and said oh point it out I'm gonna call him Tom because I know how that's pronounced Tom pointed out that even a scowl means different things in different cultures some cultures might go ah skull symbol of warning some might go symbol of fantastic candy days this is the place where the good stuff is what he actually came up with I'm gonna read this because I love it he said that the the the the prime recommendation of the human interference task force of the Department of Energy was that information be launched and artificially passed on into the short-term and long-term future with the supplementary aid of folkloristic devices in particular a combination of an artificially created and nurtured ritual and legend the most positive aspect of such a procedure is it need not be geographically localized or timed to any one language and culture so the uninitiated would be steered away from the hazardous site for reasons other than the scientific knowledge of the possibility of radiation and its implications essentially the reason would be accumulated superstition to shun a certain area permanently a ritual with the legend retold year by year with presumably slight variation the actual quote truth would be entrusted exclusively to what we might call for dramatic emphasis and atomic priesthood there is a commission of knowledgeable physicists experts in radiation sickness anthropologists and whatever additional expertise may be called for in the future membership in this priesthood would be they would pick themselves and the best mechanism for doing this he says is at present unclear folklore specialists that they've consulted say they know of no precedent nor could they think of a parallel situation except the well-known but ineffectual curses associated with the burial sites of some Egyptian pharaohs which didn't deter greedy grave robbers from digging for hidden treasure which is true up to a point the first emperor of China died over 2,000 years ago and the site of his tomb was lost very intentionally lost you know he killed anybody who knew where it was it was a magnificent act of tomb losing and then one day in a field in China somebody unearthed a terracotta warrior and then they found another one and they excavated the Warriors and archeologists worked out very quickly where the actual mausoleum had to be but the stories that have come down to us 2300 years after the emperor of China had died now became a warning remember those links of mercury that stuff is really poisonous it doesn't even have a half-life it's just there as terry pratchett once said radiation is 10,000 years but arsenic is forever and so they didn't immediately start digging instead they checked confirmed the presence incredibly high quantities of mercury and have been figuring out what to do ever since and when they figure out how to get in there without dying they will start excavating the long now and the clock of the long now is about planning for the long term and thinking in the long term in a world in which people appear to be thinking in the shorter and shorter term not even necessarily at this point about things that will take them to the end of their lifetime which at least at one point you would have thought people go WOW you know I'll be dead before that's a problem looking around now at the mess that we're making of things on this planet you want to go to people you know actually you won't be you will still be around we could run out of water you'll be here having to figure out what to do with no water what to do when the oceans are screwed up what to do when Twitter finally becomes sentient Tom servo concluded you couldn't actually create a story that would last 10,000 years you could only create a story that would last for three generations for ourselves for our children and for their children but what we can do I think is try and create stories that are interesting enough and important enough but our grandchildren might want to tell those stories to their grandchildren because that's the purpose of stories it's what they're for they make life worth living and sometimes they keep us alive [Applause] sorry you know Danny Hillis her friend thinks that humanity is in a kind of transition now from one narrative to another and there's some of the confusion we have is that the narrative that he thinks it's been going on for a long time is man conquers nature we basically take on all the difficulties of natural world and one by one after them and so we talk now about the end throught the scene and if that's in and we see the downside of mastering nature and getting into some of the problems you mentioned so he thinks we're working up on another narrative that doesn't have the problems that emerge from the last minute but is equally compelling and it gives the kind of meaning that you talk about you have any sense of one what that transition what a transition from one grand narrative to another is about and do you have any sense of what narrative wants to emerge what a great question I think that for me it's much more of the idea of going back and I think it's partly about the the narrative that we're in now feels like a narrative defined by by the Alvin Toffler future shock mm-hmm idea the idea that things are just changing so rapidly that we are all we're scrambling to catch up we're scrambling to stay in the present if you stop paying attention you will be swept back in time it's it's wonderful right now talking to people about telephone use I heard somebody say last night use the phrase of course I'm of the generation where you could just telephone somebody call them make a voice call you didn't have to text them to let them know you were going to be calling them right and I thought I'm not that generation that's that's it the you know might my daughter Maddie who I can embarrass just by acknowledging her existence from this stage I'm at is her telephone her phone is something that the only people who ever actually phone her to talk on it is me and her mum it is a device that is used for a thousand things and that peculiarly parents used to call you I love that I love the idea that I am now some kind of weird fossil I'm like my mum's friends who would write thank-you letters if you and and you know in the 1970s I'm going why I was at your house yesterday why have you written a thank-you letter it's it's it seems so peculiar it seemed like a remnant of of a Victorian time it seemed like a remnant of something um the idea that you're getting swept up and moving forward and the things are changing so fast and you know the lovely thing about for me about coming to the Bay Area is there are people who will use phrases like the singularity and actually mean it like it's not even ironic but you want to be able to but for me the the Danny narrative is actually not a narrative of moving forward it's just taking taking a step back taking the long view going look it actually doesn't matter what you do with your phone and it doesn't matter that everybody here who is of the generation that knows you have to text before you would make a voice call which why would you do that that they in their turn are going to turn around in eight years time and say to people but why do I have to send them a photograph of my genitals before I talked about people how can you trust anybody who has sent you a photo of their genitalia and you know I'm just in a generation where you've got to know somebody first before you introduce your genitalia and they don't well you're old you know and it's gonna be a whole kind of you know that sorry Mary um you know that things are going to keep changing and that is the only constant except that there are things that don't change and there are people and there is this planet and we're on it and we had better you know for me but the whole thing of the clock of the long now and of the long now is just try and think in big chunks because at the moment that you're trying to think in a 10,000 year chunk you go you know if if we use all that stuff up there won't be any which is kind of one of those moments of horrible realization I remember writing a book years ago called called Good Omens with Terry Pratchett and and we had a little rant in there about the idea of the afterlife of telling people that you know it all gets sorted out in heaven and we're saying actually you know its reeyou SFIL to point people at the fact that you are here right now on this planet and if you kill whales and you've got dead whales if you kill all the whales you don't have any whales and that's nobody's going to come in and sort that out so you had better look at consequences and you were better try and look at things long-term and for a humorous book about the Antichrist the end of the world and why we're all going to die we tried to say you know useful things in there you know I realized I was for fossil when I read the other day that in Thailand they're having a problem with up boobs selfies a boob selfies of I guess ladies being photographed looking up that don't include their faces so the Thai government is having a real problem finding who the criminals are that are doing this now that's a workaround Chris does have a relevant question here do you think the internet Facebook Twitter blogs and so on is helping or hurting literacy and the quality of writing and storytelling um I think a lot more writing is happening yes buta the Internet and I think that bit is great I just love the fact that more people are writing I think the biggest problem that we have and I think this just applies to that in the same way that it applies to everything else is we have gone from a scarcity based information economy to a glut information economy in the old days finding the thing that you needed was like finding the flower in the desert you would have to go out into the desert would find the flower and it's like finding a flower on the jungle or worse finding the flower in the flower gardens so do I think it's helping do I think it's hurting I think it's great that people are writing I think a lot of people are writing who would not have to have written and did not expect themselves to be writing but I also think that thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people are writing fiction are writing things that they simply wouldn't have written because they wouldn't have been an audience because there wasn't a way of getting it out there's more storytelling in more story reading there's more storytelling there's more story reading the task becomes finding the good stuff for whatever your definition of good stuff is and your definition of good stuff might be some horribly specialized form of Harry Potter / but it's finding the good stuff out there in the glut in the jungle and it it fascinating about Good Omens just now Good Omens is about a hundred and five thousand words right as always you know exactly how many words and there's probably out there in the world five million words of Good Omens fanfiction really oh my god and you sort of go what about reproducing it's out there it's the idea of stories getting out there and just reproducing I love that I think that that's that's very strange and very it's a wonderful thing I don't necessarily know how how things are gonna work in the world of publishing story finding story reading five years from now ten years from now 20 years from now but at least I'm not pretending that I know I I think weird things are happening and it's it's really interesting watching some systems break and watching other things make people very very happy see RIF kind of on your point about Twitter going sentient you would be the first to know I think if that happens oh do you have million and a half to 1 million followers out there and you know I suspect that some of them may not exist in real life and the reading you instead reproduced number nina salvador asks much of our media right now is concerned with the idea of the emergence of a strong I sent you Twitter if you were to write this story how would it go the strong AI think is the current dark singularity version story that's going around and so you know Hawking is scared to death of it Elon Musk is geared to definitely would I write it how would it go I don't I I don't know I do know that I would write it personally first make it I would make it small and personal because that's how I write stories so you would be Kurt he would be taking the reader inside the emerging consciousness of this a eyes much more likely you know inside the consciousness of the person who owns the toaster in which the AI is no story I one of those things that was when I was a kid reading science fiction and loving science fiction I thought you could classify science fiction into the people who were obviously writing about the future that you were traveling into mm-hm there was there was Asimov there was Heinlein there was Clark maybe Larry Niven thank you know these guys who would they could do the techy stuff and it was all right and then there was the ones who were just making it up and wouldn't frankly weren't even trying like JG Ballard and and philip k dick and now I look around and I go now I got it right dick got it right I'm you know Heinlein and as more than Clark bless their little cotton socks got it so gloriously wrong pretty much completely you know if you read philip k dick now and you watch your your toaster arguing with your fridge yeah I know this this is this is the world we are heading for you watch Ballard writing things like memories of the Space Age or crash you know a terrifyingly percipient piece of fiction about the death of lady died long before she had that's really you know it's it's like going oh this is they were there were definitely it was the ones who I thought we're just making it up as they went along who actually were getting the future kind of right well in there's bill Gibson of course I'm never sure with Bill how much of it was just making him making up a future and I saw going yeah that's cool we'll go there James Walter asks he's worried about the dark side of stories that stay with us for a long time such as many stories that blame women for original sin there's some stories worth forgetting I think there is an incredible amount of misogyny and an awful lot of old stories and and I tend partly because of that to find myself sympathizing with those methyl Griffin's and such who go well it probably started out with women in charge and having the stories and having the magic before one day some guy went well you know they may may be able to do this amazing baby-making magic and they may be smarter than us but we're big and we're hairy so haha we are we are now going to cast them down you know and and and we're going to make up our own stories and religions and in those we are going to we're going to put them in their place which idea that one of the things we're doing now is trying or some of us are trying to redress that balance so genders are occurring story theme animals are an astonishingly recurring story mode what's have you do you use animals you told if I hung around the cat I mean yes you you have to I don't believe there's any any there's an entire website of just authors with cats and you can tell that they are giving us all our best ideas I love writing animals animal but I also think that one of the things about animals in fiction is they are your first attempt to put your head into the other into experiencing another the idea of another one thing that I thought about talking about in that talk and then I thought you know it's John I'm gonna wander all over the place probably this is too far to wander so I didn't but fiction I list a bunch of things that fiction does and bunch of things that stories do I don't talk about probably the most important thing that I think fiction does which is it lets us look out through other eyes I said that but it also gives us empathy the act of looking out through other eyes tells us something huge and important which is that other people exist that we are not you know it's it's very very you you you look at some narratives from some cultures and you go there is absolutely no empathy here there is no idea that what you are doing that that anybody exists as anything other than a self-motivated thing I think one of the things that fiction can give us is just the realization that no behind every pair of eyes there's somebody like us and perhaps looking out through animal eyes there's something like us looking out through alien eyes there's somebody like us one of our speakers in this series was Steven Pinker who did this book the better angels of our nature about the basically perpetual decline and cruelty violence and injustice and he points to the rise to the novel in Europe as one of the sort of turning points where the circle of empathy was encouraged to get suddenly wider mm-hmm because we get inside characters who you would never meet or talk to in real life but you're inside their story and so a book comes along like Uncle Tom's Cabin yeah and you're inside characters in a sympathetic frame that you now have to take their situation seriously in a way you never did before and a change human behavior absolutely and and people and and what's wonderful about that is these characters were lies they didn't exist Harriet Beecher Stowe had gonna made-up people but making up people those made up people when you've lived with them and you can care about them you can suddenly extrapolate you can make the head jump to real people you live with them means you're living with them through a tale through a series of events situations they have to deal with and you now are with them trying to solve the problems that they're facing exactly so you're you are walking a mile in their shoes Christopher I was just a sale so I mean you look at somebody like Dickens the social novels of Dickens where Dickens actually for good or ill wound up when a lot of his novels just taking social situations that he wanted to let people know about and in a lot of cases causing reform real actual social reform happened people changed their behavior or institutions were abolished things were changed because people who had nothing to do with something or were content to let it go suddenly had their noses rubbed in the Victorian workhouse system in the court of chancery in the things that he had problems with in you know the terrible schools and reformers came from they came from caring they came from having traveled with fictional people to whom terrible things were happening and going this thing which has happened with these people that I care about should be stopped and they and it was stopped it seems like he did attempted an even more amazing thing with something like the Christmas story Scrooge and so on it has become a mythic level story which is sort of told at Christmas time again and again and and the terms of that plot as a story that everybody now can refer to do you think you've looked at Dickens pretty closely you think Dickens had in mind that he was going to do a mythic level story and it had to be short and it had to have a ghost and it was going to be this amazing long now a story of binding past present and future and he was gonna go deep and lasting you think that was actually in his mind where he was just writing a good yarn I think I think he was writing a good yarn I think he also discovered having written it what a good story he he'd written performed it he did I I actually performed it at the New York Public Library dressed as Dickens using his his copy because Dickens had a he he worked up a performance version of it and which cut out anything he didn't need and the New York Public Library approached me and they said would you come in for Christmas and read from Dickens's prompt coffee the the version of a Christmas carol that Dickens performed and I said I will only do it if you give me dickens gear and at that and a beard because I didn't have one at the time so somebody stuck one on and it was so disappointing I grew this one mostly in case somebody asked me again I will have a beard ready but it was absolutely fascinating for me reading Dickens his version because this was you know I was talking about sort of evolution honing he done it in front of crowds and in front of crowds and in front of crowds and he knew what worked and there was stuff when I read it through beforehand I was like you've thrown out some of the most famous lines you know really that the lines you expect to have and some of them just be taken out and you've included the scene of playing blind man's buff with the fat cousin why would you have that in there okay well you've got that in all and then I performed and it ran beautifully and just as the tension got to its highest then we have the scene a blind man playing blind man's buff for the fat cousin that everybody's laughing this is brilliant he actually he really did hone this thing in performance but he also had hit upon this beautiful structure which then you could take you could insert almost anything in it be it Muppets or Blackadder and it will still work it's like somebody who built a train you go it's a train it will work it will work I've only I think stolen it once but I remember the point where I woke up and it was one of those moments of actually waking up in the night there's a long time you're 26 27 years ago I had a phone call from DC Comics my editor at DC Comics saying you know we'd like you to write something could you write something that is a guide to all of the magical characters in the DC Universe that also has a story and is interesting but that well people could buy as a sort of guide to everything and has a plot and I said no that's stupid put down the phone and did that thing where you are almost asleep and you're almost almost asleep and then I went oh hang on I could do a Christmas Carol you just need past present future only I'd have to be past present weird fairy lands and places future yeah I can do that and I got up and wrote it down because I knew that it would actually vanish if I just let it go to sleep and I did a book books of magic which was me just ripping off and again it was ripping off that structure going it works you have you know you have a structure I didn't actually need to reform anybody in that one so when you perform I mean talk about empathy you studied their kids you really didn't you think about Dixie steals from Dickens and then for one amazing evening you are Dickens on the stage it was absolutely fascinating and it was fascinating for me mostly because one of the things that have fascinated me most about Dickens was why he did these talks why he did public you know Dickens went on the road and and would be when all when all over America doing an evening with Charles Dickens where he would read selected passages where he do the whole of this cut down Christmas Carol and a bunch of other stuff three hours of Dickens I first became aware of that when I was about eleven when a Welsh actor named Emlyn Williams came to my local theater doing his version of the evening of Charles Dickens and I went and loved it and never forgot that Dickens did this thing and the reason he did it was that at the time copyright was broken and his books he was the best-selling author America and because copyright didn't quite work between England and America his books were all pirated and even make any money so he went more how can i monetize being the best-selling author in America and making no money and he all people will come and see me and that absolutely you know he went home rich and with a solid American audience having actually taken something that should have been a huge problem that that the copyright didn't actually provide him with the royalty the costume cost him some of his health I was gonna say custom significantly in his health and yet he had that thing writers as writers seldom have which is the instant feedback instead of the 14 months later feedback of the normal book publishing process and the people are not getting online and a Twitter writer gets you know there is still not really feedback feedback for me is that moment where I read a short story to an audience and I hear you know that my favorite moment of audience feedback ever was in 2008 I had this mad idea of instead of doing a signing tour with the graveyard book there were eight chapters one of which was twice as long as all of the others so I would divide that one in half and I would do nine stops and I would read a chapter at each stop and I thought that will be honest or pre-sign a thousand books or 2,000 books at each place just like I signed the books out there this afternoon you but I can sign fast and I don't mind doing it if it's and that's that's a quick process it's stopping and talking to people and you know hugging people and telling them and answering their questions that's the thing that keeps you there till three o'clock in the morning but the signing is quick so it's pre-signed a bunch of books and I do the reading and I hadn't realized when I thought okay I will just stop halfway through Chapter seven that chapter seven has the biggest at the exact point that I needed to stop on that page there was the biggest twist and cliffhanger and of course it's not a cliffhanger really if you're reading chapter seven except that I'm in Los Angeles and I got to that moment in the story and the audience went and I could hear two thousand people or going at the same time which was a feeling of power that I have never experienced before and then I closed the book and an entire audience but oh and it's great we were filming it you can actually go online and watch you can watch me doing it but you can hear the sound effects that was them that was power and that was feedback and that was going okay this thing works and you left them in hanging and they all went and bought the book to find out how to turn down yeah cliff fingers are amazing then and we all know what a cliff is and what a hanging off of it actually means something Christopher writes you write frequently about life death and their connection have your thoughts about death changed over the course we were working and you and terry pratchett they've gone round and round of this and and terry pressure recently died what's death for you lately death you know it's interesting my thoughts about death my feelings about death have not really changed I you know I've always regarded death in some ways as at least for a writer and emotionally the line from Peter Pan death will be an awfully big adventure has always been huge for me as I remember the the times that I was scared of dying the time I was most scared of dying I was three maybe four issues into Sandman I'd written I think I'd written four and the first couple were getting drawn I'd written the whole of Black Orchid my first graphic novel which Dave McKean had been painting Dave was three-quarters the way through it and already decided that the artistic style that he had used in blackhawk it was simply wrong and was not quite sure whether it should be buried felt if she probably shouldn't because he'd done it but now he needed to move on and do something else and he gave me all of the art that he'd done so far to take to DC Comics on a plane with him and because he couldn't afford to get it scanned so I'm on a plane careering I'm going from England to America on a Pan Am flight Pan Am flight 5 going to DC and I'm carrying with me 3/4 a black orchid and I know that if that plane goes down Dave is never gonna redraw that stuff he's already itching to get on with Arkham Asylum I know that the beginning of Sandman isn't really very good but this thing in my head that I think it can get to is gonna be really good but I'm gonna have to at least get through about issue eight where death appears to get that to work and frankly if I die at issue 3 DC probably are just going to dump the thing it's pretty easier so that flight hmm I did I was just scared I did the entire flight mentally trying to hold the plane up scare that if I took my attention off it maybe it would crash it was and it was that and I was absolutely terrified of dying because I thought if I die right now there's this really cool and interesting career and this is life of stuff that I want to do and it will never happen and nobody will quite know that I could have been good and rather peculiarly exactly one week later to the day Pan Am flight 5 exploded it was it was a I was vaguely relieved but I you know there was it was interesting toward the end of Sandman when I thought actually I would think die not die if I die now nobody will know how Sandman would end it'll be like Edwin Drood would drive them nuts probably shouldn't I'm but mostly my attitude towards death is I've done so much fun stuff I think I've done all of this great stuff so all this has to do where you are in the archive and it's ok to have done about then death is not such a big deal but early on and you know soldiers dying in war almost all young he's interrupted and it's like it's for me it's all about potential Terry Terry's death made me a lot of things made me very sad losing my friend I had also made me really angry I remember that and when he was sort of fading into that what were you angry about I was angry about a lot of things I think one of the things I was angry about angriest about was one of the things that Terry pointed out when he announced to the world incredibly bravely that he had Alzheimer's when he was he was diagnosed he was you know 59 years old 58 years old diagnosed with Alzheimer's and he pointed out that for every 200 dollars spent on cancer research there's some like three cents spent on Alzheimer's research except the possibility that you were going to get one of these cancers is relatively low and the probability that you're gonna get Alzheimer's is relatively high and but because we regard it as inevitable we're not trying to fix it and we should be and didn't he become sort of an advocate for [Applause] voluntary dying assisted dying yes he he definitely became a a serious advocate for having the right essentially the right to choose your own death mm-hmm the right to go when you want to in a situation like that in a world like that and he did it angrily nobly and then as it happened he never you know there was a the last time I I saw him and we talked he rather proudly confided in me that you know he had the stuff stuff had arrived mysterious and it was kept in a secret place I'm looking at him going Terry you need help to find your way to the bathroom at this point you are never going to find the secret container with the death pills that you have put in Sunday the combination thing the secret stuff but you've stashed you will never find it you are gonna have to say to rob your assistant Rob can I have the death pills now and Robbie's gonna say no Terry but he never came to that I must he had some comfort that it was there even oh I think I think it gave him enormous comfort that it was there I think that was actually what in a strange way allowed him to face his death with equanimity you know much as when I gave up smoking I kept which was oh well over 30 years ago now at least for several years there was a carton of cigarettes in the freezer just I knew it was there if if I got up in the middle of the night and thought right that's it I'm giving up giving up smoking it would be there and that carton actually was what allowed me to give up smoking it was there when I needed it so I didn't need it and I think the same with Terry's mysterious Terry's mystery pills that he could never actually have found but he knew they were there something about options in their maintaining options so probably the last question you hauled off and wrote a whole talk for tonight which thank you this is not just standing I'm doing a reading or or you know your standard neil gaiman talking really thought through this thing and delivered it having thought through this thing about how stories last was there anything that trend up in the research when thinking of how to tell about it that surprised you were interested you were sort of made it worth it for you to go through the exercise I what's interesting for me is I'd been we started talking about me giving this talk about two years ago two and a half years ago and so I've spent two and a half years obsessing the long hard it's the long time for the long now it's over now but the weird thing is then I would every time I would find the thing like I think I'm gonna use this in my long now talk I would then try it out and so I would I would tell people things and and go on follows and they would they would then give me feedback and I would follow things up so that actually was lovely because it kept accreting mm-hmm more and more information so this was positively Homeric tonight it was tonight was was it's like the last time mm-hmm but I get to say some of this stuff because this was what it was for it was for this talk um I think for me the thing that I really took away from two-and-a-half years of thinking about this was an idea that I talked about in the talk but I don't go as mad as I do occasionally when I I'm actually you know in a bar explaining this idea that that really you can just view people as this peculiar by-product that stories used to breed you know really it's the stories that are the life form they are older than us they are smarter than us they keep going but they need human beings to reproduce much as we need food or whatever to replay you know we need we need things to keep ourselves alive and maybe stories are really are like viruses but the idea that that functionally they are symbiotic they give and they give back and the reason why people are genuinely I think addicted to story we need it so much more than we think we need it and the reason why story is so important to us is because it's actually this thing that we have been using since the dawn of humanity to become more than just one person whether you want to go to the the the Australian Indigenous people and their stories of the Dreamtime which are not only stories of the some lines stories where you actually get to tell a history that is a legend that is a myth it is a map and there is a map mega about 20,000 years or thirty thousand years ways that stories of ways that we communicate important things but the idea that maybe stories are these things that really are genuinely symbiotic organisms that we live with that allow human beings to advance it's this mad thing that really did turn up and become very real to me while I was preparing the talk and which I kind of throttled back because I didn't want any of you to think I'm odd [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 63,470

Rating: 4.9646606 out of 5

Keywords: Culture, Art, Civilization, Future, Gaiman, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, storytelling, stories, myth, oral tradition, terracotta warriors, Sandman, American Gods

Id: Xn2n7N7Q2vw

Length: 103min 27sec (6207 seconds)

Published: Sun May 03 2020