I’m looking for works of fiction that feature future societies interpreting artifacts of modern culture, often in humorously misguided ways. A few examples would be
A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which technical materials are interpreted as holy writings. Motel of the Mysteries, in which a modern American motel is uncovered years in the future and explained the way we explain Egyptian tombs. Beatles 3000, a silly “documentary” from the future about the influences of the Beatles.
The beginning of the movie Sleeper.
The Obernewtyn (over new town) Chronicles by Isobelle Carmody has that same idea.
“Modern” stuff is considered to be super evil dark magics. It sortof is, actually, but there are lots of examples of technology being misinterpreted.
I think that Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban is similar in that regard - much like Leibowitz. Good luck reading it tho - it makes Clockwork Orange look like the king’s english.
That’s going back a ways. Nice to know there’s someone else who appreciates early David Macauley.
Many years ago, KING TV did a show called Pompeii on Elliott Bay, in which a future archaeologist was interpreting sites that were unearthed from present-day Seattle. (The city had been buried in ash when “Queen Anne Mound” turned out to be a volcano and erupted.) The only monument of any appreciable grandeur was actually the freeway. A golf course was a simulation of the hardships of war. And the amusement rides at Seattle Center were for punishing misbehaving children.
A spacefaring race comes across a dead, frozen Earth and discovers several artifacts, most notably a cartoon (Disney?) movie reel. They conclude that life on Earth was about car chases and violence.
In Gene Wolfe’s classic *New Sun *books, the hero occasionally reads from an very, very old book about tales of the ancient days; seeing as the story is set on the Earth of some 50 million years in the future, they’re actually deeply distorted mixes of myth and history. For instance, the first story is an insane mashup of the myth of Theseus with the Battle of Hampton Roads, based, apparently, on the similarity between two unrelated words.
Orphans of the Sky by Robert Heinlein, in which a child in a primitive human society that lives in ignorance aboard a generational starship questions his teachers about the ancient writings about the Law of Gravity in a very old Physics book on on the ship, and he is told that the people of old were “hopeless romantics” and that the law of gravity is just their way of saying that if you put too people together, they fall in love, and if you separate them, they get over it. They also treat the story of the ship’s original mission and an “incident” that occurred that threw the ship into chaos in a religious context, and they even refer to life as “the trip” and refer to death as “making the trip to Far Centaurus”.
The short story “The Lost Civilization of Deli” by Jean Shepherd (yes, the “A Christmas Story” Jean Shepherd) from his book “A Fistful of Fig Newtons”
A future archaeological expedition uncovers films of old TV commericals from then contemporary 1970s era (e.g. “At McDonalds we do it all for you” “Purina Cat Chow, Chow, Chow Chow”, “Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Chevorlet” and so on) and of course totally misinterprets their meaning.
Google Books to the Rescue, at least for the start of the story
Slightly triangulated from your intent, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions is written in the style of someone explaining American culture to a Martian.
For those unfamiliar, MotM was done by engineering illustrator David McCaulay, famous for doing such books as How Stuff Works, Pyramid, Castle and Cathedral. I loved his reconstruction of a 1970s priestess headdress.
This SF novel by Donald Kingsbury is partly about that theme.
The current inhabitants of that planet colonized by humans a long time ago discover a data storage crystal from that time, are able to extract some info from it, and become really puzzled by some things. (ex: “what? they were killing each others in huge numbers? why on earth?? you couldn’t eat so many people!”) People on this planet are cannibals due to lack of animals.
The segment that sticks in my mind from that show was the archaeologist trying to determine what function office buildings served. His conclusion: since vast quantities of paper were delivered each morning, and vast quantities of paper balls were removed each evening, they were paper ball factories. He then went on to speculate how the society used these paper balls, and described how one would rise in the hierarchy by creative and more efficient paper ball crafting.
“I shall be taking you to Old London town in the country of UK, ruled over by Good King Wenceslas. Now human beings worship the great god Santa, a creature with fearsome claws and his wife Mary. And every Christmas Eve, the people of UK go to war with the country of Turkey. They then eat the Turkey people for Christmas dinner, like savages!”
[QUOTE=the flowered thundermug, by Alfred Bester]
“We will conclude this first semester of Antiquities 107,” Professor Paul Muni said, "with a reconstruction of an average day in the life of a mid-twentieth-century inhabitant of the United States of America, as Great L.A. was known five hundred years ago.
"Let us refer to him as Jukes, one of the proudest names of the times, immortalized in the Kallikak-Jukes-feud sagas. It is now generally agreed that the mysterious code letters JU, found in the directories of Hollywood East, or New York City as it was called then–viz., JU 6-0600 or JU 2-1914–indicate in some manner a genealogical relationship to the powerful Jukes dynasty.
“The year is 1950. Mr. Jukes, a typical loner'--i.e., bachelor’–lives on a small ranch outside New York. He rises at dawn, dresses in spurred boots, Daks slacks, rawhide shirt, gray flannel waistcoat and black knit tie. He arms himself with a Police Positive revolver or a Frontier Six Shooter and goes out to the Bar-B-Q to prepare his breakfast of curried plankton or converted algae. He may or may not surprise juvenile delinquents or red Indians on his ranch in the act of lynching a victim or rustling his automobiles, of which he has a herd of perhaps one hundred and fifty.”
[/quote]
That’s the first 3 paragraphs. It goes on in that vein, before developing a plot which involves a refugee from our (well, Bester’s) time living in this future society.
Sleeper, by Woody Allen, of course. The re-interpretation (aided by Allen’s character, who is lying through his teeth, is hilarious)
Plenty of books and stories feature future folk puzzling over the remains of 20th century civilization, almost as a throwaway, Stephen Vincent Benet’s By the Waters of Babylon and Poul Anderson’s Vault of the Ages, for instance. Heinlein’s done it in other cases, too, besides the one listed above, as in Space Cadet, where they argue about who Kilroy was.
Ha! I remembered a short story we read in High School that fit this thread but I couldn’t remember enough details to figure out the title but this was it!
Walter Jon Williams’ (very funny) Drake Maijstral series is set in a human civilization that was conquered for a time by aliens who rewrote human history to fit their somewhat weird ideas of what it was supposed to be like. So you have “Westerns” with Albert Einstein and Nikolai Tesla as gunfighters at the OK Corral, Elvis as the Messiah; that sort of thing.
From the end of one episode of an old cartoon named (I think) Zeta or something like that:
