So this morning, in a flash of inspiration or gas, I came up with what is seriously the best idea for an SF novel ev-ar.
The plot is trivial, bordering on asinine, but as with all truly Great SF, it’s the concept that sells it, and the concept is this:
The Iliad and the Odyssey turn out to be modern fakes. The hoax was perpetrated by a demented Classics professor at Berkeley and a bunch of drunken frat boys in the summer of 1966. They wrote the original poems, variant manuscripts (which they broke into all the great libraries and museums of Europe and America to plant on the premises), critiques, translations into scores of languages, Cliff’s Notes, etc., etc., and slyly warped the entire cultural matrix of Western civilization to make it look like these poems actually existed and were a founding influence upon everything else in our literature.
Nobody ever noticed that they had pulled off this enormous con, because it was, like, the Sixties, man, and everybody was too stoned to pay attention. Plus everybody knows that human memory is infinitely unreliable, especially when too stoned to pay attention. As a result, the entire world has been taken in, and firmly believes that these are genuine ancient Greek poems, even though the actual Greek is very badly done, and it would have made Sophocles or Demosthenes cringe to hear such language in the agora. And even though all the real Greeks absolutely sucked at epic verse, never rising any higher than that crapulous bore, the Argonautica.
I was all set to put stylus to wax tablet (I am old-fashioned in my choice of writing materials; don’t you know that pen and paper kills the Muse, you modern cretins?), but I thought I’d better CMA via some judicious Google-fu.
That’s how I found out that the whole shebang had already been done, in a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson and Jorge Luis Borges. (Each of whom, interestingly enough, is a fictitious character invented by the other.)
So I abandoned the idea and went back to bed.
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