Seeking Culture Epics
Most stories are small, about short periods in the lives of a few people or small groups. But some stories are big, about bigger people (e.g., Gods), groups, or timescales. The types of our typical big stories have changed greatly across history.
Power Fights - Most stories are about conflict, and so most big stories are about fights. And long ago, most big stories (e.g., Illiad) focused on powers and alliances fighting within worlds that were relatively stable, especially re tech, and within a context of stable morals. As those didn’t change much, stories didn’t care much about them.
The simplest stories of this type focused on one particular fight, with a start, middle and end. More complex stories, on longer timescales, might depict a sequence of fights with relative peace in between. Even more complex versions might have old powers leave, new powers enter, and changing alliances between powers.
Moral Fights - Starting with religious stories, but then spreading to most centuries ago, the sides in fights acquired stronger moral colors. These fights were not just about power (i.e., dominance) but also moral persuasion (i.e, prestige). The simplest versions had good heroes fight bad villains (e.g., Lord of the Rings). More complex versions had many fighting sides, or all sides seeing themselves as good.
Some moral fight stories have a small group of activists trying to spread their new moral view to a wider world. A common feature here is that the world at story end likely has more or less good morality, depending on who wins the fights.
Unstable Tech - Our modern world often has tech and business changing fast on the timescales of big fights. Tech changes often favor particular sides of fights, and can call into question common assumptions in prior moral positions. Many science fiction stories highlight how tech changes can influence who wins, and how they can force one to reconsider basic moral commitments.
The simplest such stories present a world with quite different tech to ours, but where that tech doesn’t change much during the story (e.g., Dune). This helps readers see how tech differences might translate to fight and moral differences. More complex stories focus on one particular big tech change (e.g., Frankenstein), and show that one change affects who wins in fights, and key moral categories. The most complex stories show long fights in the context of a long history of many big tech changes.
Unstable Morals - I’ve lately become unhappy with science fiction, as I came to understand the basics of cultural evolution. Science fiction’s big or fast changing tech, even with shifting powers and alliances over centuries, are usually set in the context of quite stable morals. Yet in fact over the last century or so key values, norms, and morals have changed about as fast as tech, and due to pretty random and plausibly out-of-control cultural evolution. A similar failure happens when historical fiction sets characters with modern values as heroes against villains with old-style values.
So I’d like to see authors try to write big stories, of whole civilizations over long timescales, that more realistically depict cultural instability. Yes it can be comforting to see key characters long continuing to fight for the same shared moral causes, even as their powers, alliances, and tech change greatly. And it can be disturbing to see key morals changing as fast as tech, and nearly as arbitrarily. But the switch to Unstable Tech type stories similarly resulted from the disturbing realization that fast changing tech often upended our conflicts. And we seem to have managed that switch okay.