(no subject)
This isn't a meme...at least not yet, but you can make it one if you want to. (every meme has to start somewhere, right?)
Have any passages from books or movies influenced you so strongly that you feel the influence shows in more than one of your stories?
For me, there were three. in chronological order:
1) "Give me something that thinks as well as a man, but does not think as a man." -Cambell, senior editor of many science fiction and pulp magazines.
At the very least, this influenced my Enterprise fanfics - a constant attempt to craft something that was just as intelligent as a human being...but follows the internal logic of its kind, not of humankind.
It also influenced me when I worked on a back history for the Goa'uld, Mirmir, and others.
And now I try to keep the angels in Supernatural from being too human....and it touches on something they said in The Mothman Chronicles, "that windowwasher up on the 20th floor, from where he sits, he'll know about a car accident before you do. But just because he can see further, doesn't neccessarily mean he's smarter than you."
2) I don't remember the exact wording, but it was along the lines of "I don't know if they were intelligent or not, nobody does. When they controlled animals, they were more than animals. But if they weren't intelligent, I pray we never meet anything that is intelligent. Because I know who will lose. You. Me. The human race." -the first paragraph in the book Invasion of the Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein.
Humans are arguably the smartest species native to Earth. That does not mean we'd be the best or even the brightest out in the galaxy...and sometimes that means I'm swimming against what the Stargate universe is saying (at times, it suggests that everyone - from the Tok'ra to the Azgard and even the Reetou - all need human help to solve a difficult problem. now sometimes they invoke the "we do not think like you" of #1 above (mostly Azgard), but still)
3) Not sure of the wording, in part because its been a while since I read it, in part because it was parsed as a conversation in the novel Neandertal by Darton: There was an experiment with two chimps.
Initially, they have to figure out how to stack boxes to reach a fruit that the researchers tied to a short rope dangling from the ceiling. This was solved in very little time.
But one chimp was bigger and tougher than the other one. So the big chimp always ended up with the fruit.
So the researchers tried something: they separated the two chimps after the boxes were stacked, putting the big chimp in a room where it could see through the glass that the little one was taking the fruit and (after several tries, eventually) putting it into one of the boxes.
And while the big chimp couldn't see which box it was, when it was let back into the main room, it waited for the little chimp to unhide the fruit - at which point, the big one took it.
So long as the little chimp didn't look in the box, the bigger chimp couldn't take the fruit.
But the little chimp never took that extra cognitive jump, and knowing he was being watched, pretending to see that the fruit was in one of the boxes that didn't actually have the fruit.
This one, being more recent, has given me numerous Numb3rs and Leverage ideas - Supernatural would be scary with that. Sadly the plot simplifies - sadly, but my sanity is grateful - into something with fewer layers.
But I'm always excited to find fics like this (I'm excited to find any fics, mind you). One or two are Dollhouse, actually.
Have any passages from books or movies influenced you so strongly that you feel the influence shows in more than one of your stories?
For me, there were three. in chronological order:
1) "Give me something that thinks as well as a man, but does not think as a man." -Cambell, senior editor of many science fiction and pulp magazines.
At the very least, this influenced my Enterprise fanfics - a constant attempt to craft something that was just as intelligent as a human being...but follows the internal logic of its kind, not of humankind.
It also influenced me when I worked on a back history for the Goa'uld, Mirmir, and others.
And now I try to keep the angels in Supernatural from being too human....and it touches on something they said in The Mothman Chronicles, "that windowwasher up on the 20th floor, from where he sits, he'll know about a car accident before you do. But just because he can see further, doesn't neccessarily mean he's smarter than you."
2) I don't remember the exact wording, but it was along the lines of "I don't know if they were intelligent or not, nobody does. When they controlled animals, they were more than animals. But if they weren't intelligent, I pray we never meet anything that is intelligent. Because I know who will lose. You. Me. The human race." -the first paragraph in the book Invasion of the Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein.
Humans are arguably the smartest species native to Earth. That does not mean we'd be the best or even the brightest out in the galaxy...and sometimes that means I'm swimming against what the Stargate universe is saying (at times, it suggests that everyone - from the Tok'ra to the Azgard and even the Reetou - all need human help to solve a difficult problem. now sometimes they invoke the "we do not think like you" of #1 above (mostly Azgard), but still)
3) Not sure of the wording, in part because its been a while since I read it, in part because it was parsed as a conversation in the novel Neandertal by Darton: There was an experiment with two chimps.
Initially, they have to figure out how to stack boxes to reach a fruit that the researchers tied to a short rope dangling from the ceiling. This was solved in very little time.
But one chimp was bigger and tougher than the other one. So the big chimp always ended up with the fruit.
So the researchers tried something: they separated the two chimps after the boxes were stacked, putting the big chimp in a room where it could see through the glass that the little one was taking the fruit and (after several tries, eventually) putting it into one of the boxes.
And while the big chimp couldn't see which box it was, when it was let back into the main room, it waited for the little chimp to unhide the fruit - at which point, the big one took it.
So long as the little chimp didn't look in the box, the bigger chimp couldn't take the fruit.
But the little chimp never took that extra cognitive jump, and knowing he was being watched, pretending to see that the fruit was in one of the boxes that didn't actually have the fruit.
This one, being more recent, has given me numerous Numb3rs and Leverage ideas - Supernatural would be scary with that. Sadly the plot simplifies - sadly, but my sanity is grateful - into something with fewer layers.
But I'm always excited to find fics like this (I'm excited to find any fics, mind you). One or two are Dollhouse, actually.