Shaman
A saga of life thirty thousand years ago during the Ice Age depicts the lives of the shaman Thorn, an outsider named Elga, and Loon, the next shaman, who is struggling to find his own path in a treacherous and uncertain world.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
6people
2015–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- When someone gives this opinion, I think to myself they surely must be terrified of a stranger killing their wife with a rock (or merely desiring it themselves). How else can you excuse or explain such an impoverished imagination?
If you are actually looking for an answer and not simply to comfort yourself, I heartily recommend Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson.
- > What did we lose that you think would make us happier?
I strongly suspect any example I provide will be attacked, so I recommend to use your imagination. I think you can do better than this.
If you really want an example I recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Shaman, who can write better than I can, who is thoughtful in his choice in how he uses research versus poetic license, who has already responded to critique on the novel. There's plenty worth critiquing but it's better than assuming the absolute lack of any loss. And I'd like to emphasize I don't believe in past utopia (I think anarcho-primitivism is equally lacking in imagination, perhaps even more so)—just that the idea of one-dimensional progress is moronic.
EDIT: To add on to this, Graeber points out that there's a wide span of time in between the invention of agriculture (~12kya) and the beginning of what we collectively agree is civilization (~8kya). Why this delay, if sedentary farming and market-oriented distribution offers such obvious benefits?
EDIT2: spelling
EDIT3: KSR context
- I'm just finishing Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson. While he usually writes sci-fi, this one is about a group of very early humans. It is absolutely riveting, fascinating, and beautiful. I absolutely recommend this book for anyone who is curious about how early humans might have lived.
- There's a book ‘Shaman’ by Kim Stanley Robinson, who's said to do a lot of research for his writing. In one scene of the book, a man goes into a cave to paint such images. Well, when his fires go out, he then spends three days groping around for the exit in complete darkness and getting weaker from hunger, until people from the tribe come in search of him. Meanwhile I imagined real caves as mostly ’in and out’ kind of thing: out of light sure, but not three days worth of crawling.
- This hunting method features in Kim Stanley Robinson's Shaman where the Ice Age hunters use similar structures to corral migrating caribou. In his account (presumably based on scientific speculation), the hunters glut themselves with meat in order to gain enough weight to survive the winter.
- Dialogues and Letters -- Seneca
Once a Hero -- Elizabeth Moon
Shaman -- Kim Stanley Robinson
Probably Approximately Correct -- Leslie Valiant
Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet -- Kerryn Higgs
Prosperity Without Growth -- Tim Jackson
