Dear Log,
When post-humans fight:
«Prospero spread his arms in a conciliatory gesture. "An archetypal quest narrative must be kept simple. To burden it with technicalities -- "Sachio inclined his head briefly, fingertips to forehead, downloading information from the polis library. "Do you have any idea what archetypal narratives are?"
"Messages from the gods, or from the depths of the soul; who can say? But they encode the most profound and mysterious -- "
Sachio cut him off impatiently. "They're the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity's greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you've created is not only devoid of truth, it's devoid of aesthetic merit."
Prospero was stunned. He looked around the room expectantly, as if waiting for someone to speak up in defence of the Ballad.»
--"The Planck Dive" by Greg Egan
