Monday, September 07, 2015

This is What You Call an "Essential Question"

Charlie Stross:

Assume you are a historian in the 30th century, compiling a pop history text about the period 1700-2300AD. What are the five most influential factors in that period of history?

Please note that this is a 600 year span—around the duration of the entire mediaeval period. Events a mere 20 years apart, such as the first and second world wars, merge together when viewed through the wrong end of a temporal telescope, just like the 30 years' war or the Wars of the Roses. Individual people, even hugely influential thinkers and rulers and tyrants, are a jumbled mass of names with dates attached. This is a question about the big issues—the ones big enough to remember half a millennium hence, like the Black Death, the Crusades, or the conquest of the Americas.

1 comment:

garrett said...

Influential factors? An Underrated factor is The Wimp factor xiv

18th Century PARLOUR ROCK lifts a culture to an ecstatic intimacy of taste. Wimp Factor 14 carries its final leg of the torch run to an Olympic Flame.

Being the archetypal Bad Guy, muslims deserve mention.
"Uzbeckisztan"

"2301"
Death, the void, reflection.
SampleLyric: "Let's have a hand after we have gone"


"Civil war chess-sets"
mass production, pop culture revisionism,

Porn Industry
"At the bookstore where Rob works"
...Venus in Furs thru Jared Fogle 1700-2300