Quote:
Originally Posted by kandwo
And some people, I think Socrates was one of them, were against the written word in general, arguing that it would have a deleterious effect on the human psyche (or mostly on memory).
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Have you read
The Reluctant Swordsman by David Duncan? Excellent series. Wally Smith dies of spinal meningitis and wakes up in the body of Shonshu, a swordsman of the seventh level on an alternate world. He discovers that the World of the Goddess doesn't have writing. It doesn't even have words for it. He tries to ask a girl how to spell her name, and it comes out, "How do you make marks-of-saying for that?"
Wally is the POV character, and he even ruminates on how everyone's memory is so much better than his, and how he's basically an illiterate in their world.
I strongly recommend the series. (There was a time when the SciFi editor of Del Rey books had the same taste that I do. He also always used
Darrell K Sweet as a cover artist. I learned that any book I saw with his artwork on it was going to be something I liked. So I discovered the American
publications of Sir Terry Pratchett, David Duncan's
Reluctant Swordsman and
A Man of His Word series, Terry Brooks's
Magic Kingdom of Landover, and a few others.) Sweet also did the artwork for about 2/3 of Piers Anthony's
Magic of Xanth. He has a very distinctive style.)
What blew my mind is when Wally comments that the invention of writing hampered memory, but it also made knowledge
cumulative, and that without it, societies couldn't truly evolve. (Writing is a
part of the Goddess's mission for Wally. I don't want to spoil it for you.)