Exhausted Ideas

I just finished Alien Omnibus 6 yesterday; never was I so glad to escape from a library's sewn-binding clutches! Alien Omnibus 6 is the sixth volume of illustrated action stories which extend the original Alien story and keep it going.
I know how surprising that sounds. Surely you are thinking, "Gadfrey Daniels! I should have thought that the film 'Alien Versus Predator' would have been the epitaph on that artistic endeavour!"
I understand your consternation.
However, you can not keep a good gimmick down. Remember just how infinite are the permutations upon the idea "Vampire":  from the hideous Nosferatu of Max Shreck to the urbane Dracula of Christopher Lee, from the oddly interesting rendition of Jack Palance to the Gary Oldman portrayal; each one with their own quirks, yet each adding a small bit of novelty and interest - which small portion of delight justifies their existence at all! I mean, once you run through the theme and can not come up with anything, you are either dead or you are too imprisoned by the conventions already established for the theme.... or the powers that be have ruled that Aliens, even Aliens in an inter-stellar remake of Stagecoach, are out!

Try it yourself: find a topic and go through it. See how infinite are the possibilities; see how sometimes those possibilities are reduced and hardened into a few concrete nodules from which escape is impossible, or see how the possibilities keep extending.

The same process holds true for our Philosophies, our Cosmologies, even our Religious Discourse. Ideas are born, they grow, they transform and are transformed; some die, and some go on forever. For example, the iconic god who dies and then is re-born has had a very long lifetime.

Terry Pratchett's novels have shown us that even moribund concepts may take on new life in a universe slightly different from our own. I remember reading a Vampire novel where some of the Night Brood sat in the House of Commons, and the main discord between them and mankind was political and artistic. (I wish I could remember the name of the novel! It was quite good.)

As intelligent beings, we are as finite as our ideas. We are as infinite as our aspirations. Let us ask ourselves: the things we see today, our ideals, political and artistic and philosophical... will they be a branching tree to climb to freedom, or will they be a iron-jawed trap into whose steel-cold embrace we stumble?
Answers, my good friends, abound.

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