If you don’t know what story cubes are, see the introduction to the story cubes series.
To see the original roll of the story cubes, see yesterday’s post.
A god creates a garden for its amusement. His favorite tree is the Tree of Golden Apples. A band of curious nomads come across this tree and shake the apples onto each others’ heads, causing them to injure each other and sparking wars among the once-peaceful tribe. The god locks these annoying creatures out of its garden forever. They wander for thousands of years, researching greater and greater means of waging war. One of them tests a weapon of destruction on an asteroid just to show off. This is noticed by aliens, who come to Earth and tell them the way to peace. They give the humans the gift of interstellar flight, which the humans waste no time in using to conquer the hippie, peace-loving aliens’ home world.
If you thought me creating a rip-off of V in the introduction to story cubes followed by a, umm, reboot of Jurassic Park last week was bad, I’ll raise you half a dozen more. Here are the cultural “readymades” I packed into this:
- Garden of Eden
- Golden apples of Greek mythology stands in for…
- …the famous “monkey finds a bone” opening from 2001: A Space Odyssey
- “Aliens notice Earth when humans invent X” trope
- The Day the Earth Stood Still, except Klaatu just drove his flying saucer in from Woodstock
- The hubris of the George W. Bush administration—how poorly the occupation goes is obvious sequel bait
This story isn’t particularly good; when you’re just rolling dice, you’re only going to get something that’s above the average Hollywood movie, which is a bar so low it takes a shovel to jump it. Nonetheless, the principles of where it came from is. What you’re seeing is not mere laziness, it’s the power of the stock of shared cultural knowledge.
In Should Writers Read?, the size of the multiple stacks of books on my desk shows that I definitely believe one can’t be a good writer without being well-read. Why? Precisely this. The more you read, the bigger your store of knowledge, both intellectual and cultural. The more ideas you access, the more you have access to. You have more plants in your garden to cross-pollinate and create hybrids the likes of which no one has seen. Apple trees, for example, require at least one other tree to produce fruit, and good ideas are often the same way.
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