Cultural References
In 1903 Simplicissimus magazine printed an adaptation of the story by the Austrian author Gustav Meyrink, "The Curse of The Toad" ("Der Fluch der Kröte"). The fable was also published in Meyrink's 1903 collection of tales, The Hot Soldier and Other Stories.
The fable was later applied in Spider Robinson's Callahan's Crosstime Saloon story of the same name, in which an amoral but unimaginative man was using an unusual psychic power to win games, do well as a fisherman, and steal booze from others in the bar. He was found out, and when asked how he did it, he replied that he made things "want" other things. His glass "wanted" booze, the dartboard "wanted" darts, and so on. When pressed for details on what the "state of wanting darts" was like, which he had never actually considered before, he created the state in his own head—which caused the darts to fly from the dart board to hit him, luckily non-lethally, in the forehead. Robinson also used the concept in his completion of the Robert Heinlein novel Variable Star.
Read more about this topic: Centipede's Dilemma
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)