Wednesday 29 May 2013

Can we create anymore?

Can we create anymore?

The Glass Bead Game
The Glass Bead Game (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of my favorite books is “The Glass Bead Game” by Herman Hesse.  I can only really describe it as cultural science fiction. The people in the future don’t really create culture anymore, they just manipulate it put it together using the bead game. It’s not a terrible future, but there is something sad about it.  In many ways it seems like this the way that things are going.

I was looking for a film to watch the other day and all I could really find were remakes of older films. It’s not even just remakes, now it’s remakes of remakes.”Spiderman” is good example. Having just finishing remaking the film with Toby Maguire, they’ve started again remaking the remakes with a new actor.

It’s not just straight remakes either. There are plenty of books and stories that are little more than retellings of the same tale with a different name.  I think I remember Steven King pointing out that authors like Terry Brooks are not really making their own new work, they’re just trying to rewrite the works of Tolkien that they love.

It does make me wonder, are we gradually losing the ability to create? Will we be left with only the glass bead game?

2 comments:

  1. Everything is influenced by something else anyway. The original part comes in the originality of the telling in my opinion.

    From the moment you, as a person become aware, you start being influenced by the things around you, things that happen to you, media you consume. And it comes out in your work.

    I don't think something is less original just because you can work out what its influences have been.

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