In a post-holocaust society, a religion closely mirroring Catholicism has sprung up, in which the sacred and ancient texts are actually blueprints and instruction manuals for technology. The Abbey of Liebowitz, trying for beatification of their patron, is excited about ancient and venerable writings such as “Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels–bring home for Emma.”
The sequel, written some 40 years after the original, was quite disappointing.
How about that one book that takes the fact that humans exist and postulates this whole elaborate fantasy about a garden and a snake? The one that presumes that death isn’t just the end of life, but merely the passage to some eternal otherworld where all your dreams come true? That everything that exists was somehow brought into being by some invisible dude who really, really hates anybody else taking credit for it?
Or the sequel, where some dude with some good ideas gets followed around by folks, then somebody steals his body and they assume he was resurrected? And because of that, he must somehow be related to (or ‘exactly the same guy as’, the writer never made this part particularly clear) the big guy who made everything in the first book.
I forgot the name of this book, but I think they made a movie about it.
As Scupper rightly points out, that’s Motel of the Mysteries. I saw something else along those same lines once, a set of cartoons in a Reader’s Digest collection. Each cartoon was of some everyday item from a typical 20th century setting, and was accompanied by a comically inaccurate analysis by some future archaeologist. Many of these items were interpreted as being ritualistic. For example, a parking meter was a “roadside deity”; a barbeque grill was a “domestic sacrificial altar”.
Many stories feature this as a plot device. For me, one that immediately comes to mind is the tribe of children that form a religion based on an abandoned B-52 and old magazine photographs (among other things) in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
I read that story years ago. What I found interesting is that Benet’s story, which apparently describes what happens to society many years after a nuclear war, was written well before the first atomic blast in 1945.
I think an old Cracked magazine did something similar, with alien archaeologists in the ruins of Earth. The one part I remember is their conclusion that tombstones were actually private handball courts for a race of lilliputian beings. (You could tell, because the owners had their names carved on 'em.)
Harry Turtledove once wrote an alternate history story about some DEA agents working in a world where caffeine is considered a dangerous drug and menace to society.
In one of Stephen King’s books from the Dark Tower series (I think it’s in The Wastelands), there’s a old city where people lynch one of their own every time they hear the “god drums.” The drums are from a Led Zeppelin song, with everything but the drum track turned way down. A computer plays the song every so often over the city’s loudspeakers.
There are more examples from those books, but that’s the only one I can think of at the moment.
Early in 2005, back when I fancied myself an amateur screenwriter, I spent a little time on a script about this, except that it was from the viewpoint of users. I gave it up when I joined the military, and haven’t picked it up since. I’m glad somebody else came up with the idea. I loved Turtledove’s Worldwar series but couldn’t get into his Civil War stuff.
Either it doesn’t fit the criteria, or you’ve all missed the obvious: The Man Who Would be King. Sean Connery is taken to be the reincarnation of Alexander the Great, because of a lucky deflection of an arrow, and his Masonic medallion.
Douglas Adams’ “Hitch-hiker” series had two variations on this theme:
From the Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Time-travellers Arthur Dent & Ford Prefect find themselves stuck on a spaceark filled with people who believe they have escaped a global catastrophe that destroyed their world. Actually, these sparkark people are the annoying, lowbrow middlemen functionaries whom the rest of their world decided they could get along without - marketing ‘specialists’, joggers, papershufflers and the like. Thus the smarter folks from this world claimed a global catastrophe was imminent, herded all the folks they didn’ like onto the spaceark and sent them off to another galaxy. Anyway, this spaceark full of social rejects crashlands on prehistoric Earth at a point in time in which the indiginous human species (Neanderthals) are dying out. Thus, the whole of human (homo sapien) culture is based upon the remnants of bureaucratic functionary nerds whom the highbrow people wanted to rid themselves of.
From Mostly Harmless: Another spaceark is travelling close to a parrallel world Earth (since ‘our’ Earth was demolished…well never mind that part) and is damaged by a meteor storm. The giant computer containing the collective race memory of the spaceark inhabitants is tossed into space, and the spaceark crashlands on an unknown ‘planet X’ orbiting our sun farther away than Pluto. The survivors of the crash are blank slates, with no culture, history or social mores. They have no choice but to pattern themselves after transmissions from the nearest inhabited planet - Earth. The race therefore base their way of life on old television shows. Thus, their spaceships are lined with plush carpeting and their food is takeout from “McDonalds.” A hapless reporter (the alternate reality version of Trillian) visits their world, makes a video documentary about it, but returns to Earth realizing that she probaby could have faked an alien world that looked more convincing.
There’s a story by Harry Harrison, don’t know the title, in which a scientist invents a camera that can travel in time. He sets it up at Stonehenge and has it jump back in time farther and farther to try and figure out why Stonehenge was built.
It turns out Stonehenge was built because of this mystical object that kept appearning and disappearing.
Nitpick: It was ZZ Top (I think “Velcro Fly”, but I could be wrong).
I vaguely remember another example from the Dark Tower series about a tribe of muties worshipping a gas pump. The head priest used the pump nozzle as a phallus and gave praise to “the high god Amoco” or something. It wasn’t a major part, just something that Roland was talking about or remembering as some point.