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.
Millennia ago, before MFA programs and Final Draft drones, when there was no AI because it was all just “intelligence,” humans sat in tents and caves and told each other stories. Stories of the hunt in Lascaux (where the world’s first telestrator followed along on the cave walls), stories of ghosts and ancestors in the American southwest, stories of aliens who built the pyramids or mutilated sheep (or cattle or other quadrupeds). The storytellers created things that didn’t exist—or, more accurately, existed only to the storytellers, and in the telling, existed for others.
From these tales, we went from Homer’s Odyssey to The Tale of Genji to stories of knights and castles, and on through Shakespeare and beyond. Technology progressed, diseases that killed half the world became a simple pill away from a cure, printing presses and movie theaters came about, cities grew as did our technology.
And now what? Corporate executives with bugs in their brains put out superhero movie after superhero movie, with the occasional sprinkling of a reboot of something that booted better the first time. Nothing as creative as our old stories of aliens who build pyramids out of sheep.
This is one of my favorite book covers ever. Many of the stories within, stories almost all of us either know or at least have heard of, have an icon and a banner with their name. I distributed the cubes to try not to cover them up, but I do like that the sword of Excalibur looks like it’s stuck in the stone of the pyramids, the tee-pee looks like Merlin’s hat, and the sheep looks like a cloud in the sky over the Lady of the Lake and Camelot.
The comments section is the perfect place for what you came up with. I’m sure you did better than I did this week!
I'd love to hear from you!