Paleomythology

As a geek, I am drawn to science fiction and fantasy. No, wait. As someone who's drawn to science fiction and fantasy, I am a geek. Well. There's no doubt that it's usually a certain type of person who's drawn to those genres over others. Yet I resist the genrefication of sci-fi (or SF, to the SF faithful) and fantasy. I think they're types of literature essential to how we wrestle with the basic questions of life and the universe, where we came from and where we're going, and what it means to be human. In fact in some ways, books like 1984 and the Lord of the Rings have become more firmly enmeshed into our idea of ourselves as a species and a culture than all the great books devoted to a realistic portrayal of our world. It's the indefinable power of myth.

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were obsessed with the nature of myth and thought a great deal of its power. In fact, I believe they... Lewis at least... held myth to be higher and more important than truth. I have no particular romantic notions about myth. But I do believe it has its own place of importance, separate from the place of a good story or allegory or regular old noble literature. There's something in us that wants to believe in good and evil, in the seductive drama of archetypes, in things having meaning beyond what we can see.

But back to the geeks. I've been pondering the nature of geekhood. Specifically, what did computer geeks do before there were computers? Lock themselves in towers and invent, I suppose. Looms and millworks and things. What about before there were looms and millworks? What about before mathematics and written language? Did the chronically technical and analytic and dreamy exist? What did we do? Was there science fiction before there was science?