W
hy do people love
fantasy epics like
Game of Thrones so much?
A complex, convoluted,
highly-involved history of
a place that doesn’t exist,
featuring people who
never lived, doing things
that are, in many cases, physically impossible.
Sure, humans love a good story packed with
great characters, but there’s over 5000 years
of the recorded history of a whole bunch of
civilisations to choose from. Why go with fi ction?
The problem with actual history, of course,
is that the story is often not very satisfying.
So many great lives read ”fi rst he conquered
these people, then he invaded this place, then
they gathered a great army against him but
he defeated it... and then he fell off his horse
and died.” Or ”at the height of her power and
infl uence... she got sent to a nunnery and her
nephew took over.”
The character arc of real historical fi gures can
be so problematic, even a show like HBO’s Rome- which tries to recreate an ”authentic” sense of
the lives of Julius Caesar and Augustus - omits
certain battles and events. One example: During
his rise to power in the Civil War, Caesar lost the
Battle of Dyrrhachium against Pompey... which
was totally out of character in the context of a
TV show. So they skipped it.
It doesn’t help that recent history -
specifi cally, the World Wars - reads
very much like a Hollywood script
treatment. Those wars give us a
very skewed idea of what ”normal”
history is like.
To any Westerner of the last
three generations, because of
World War II especially, humans
appear to be divided neatly into
Good Guys and Bad Guys. The Bad
Guys are the ones who invade other countries
and murder millions of people. The Good Guys
are the ones who band together to defy, resist
and eventually defeat the Bad Guys.
Few wars have been as clean cut as World
War II. Thanks to the black-and-white barbarity
of both the Nazis and Imperial Japan, there’s no
sensible way to argue that a German or Japanese
victory could have had a good side to it.
The world wars also gave us this idea that
historical events can have distinct beginnings
and ends. War is declared, war is fought,
victory is achieved and surrender (by the bad
guys) is accepted.
But really, history is messy. Stories are
interconnected and overlapping, and events
that start in one place aff ect events that are
already happening in another. Nothing ever
really ”ends”... and nothing ever really begins
either. You just look around one day and
realise, woah, the world is like this now.
Who knows how long it will take us to ”get
over” World War II. At some point, its relevance
as a defi ning part of our culture will wane.
Someday, the side your ancestors were on
during the Battle of the Bulge will be no more
signifi cant than the side they were on during
the Battle of Waterloo.
Meanwhile, as contemporary events return
to the historical norm of baffl ing, nonsensical
complexity, we can take solace in our fantasy
epics. Here, between the covers of our
favourite books, sides are well-defi ned, the
terms ”good” and ”evil” mean something,
and you can be sure that by the fi nal
page everything will be resolved...
...unless you’re a Game of Thrones
fan of course. Face it: those books
are never getting fi nished.Anthony Fordham
[email protected]THINGS WE LEARNED IN THIS ISSUE
+ The Solar System could be full of DWARF PLANETS
the size of Pluto - or bigger.
+ Everyday objects, EVEN ROCKS (RIGHT) can look
amazing at extreme zoom levels.
+ Future organs for transplant might be GROWN
INSIDE PIGS if we can overcome ethical issues.
+ GAME OF THRONES is unsurprisingly diffi cult to
defend on scientifi c grounds - but not impossible.
+ A disease called ENCEPHALITIS LETHARGICA could
return, and become a new epidemic.Issue #51 (25th May 2017)
EDITORIAL
Editor Anthony Fordham
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The Disappointing Plot Arc of Reality
EDITORIALCover image: NASA
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