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“In what way does fiction make it more likely we can still be alive the next day? My guess is that early fiction was about perils survived. Maybe the very first story ever told was about a man who was attacked by a sabre-toothed tiger but escaped. Then maybe over a thousand years that developed, and a man met a sabre-toothed tiger and killed it . . . So I think that adventure fiction, suspense, whatever you want to call it, was the fiction. That’s how it started and it has continued in an unbroken line for 100,000 years. As everything has got much more civilised, more coddled, then all these other genres grew up alongside it, including literary fiction, as a luxury, as a kind of barnacle on our boat.” -Lee Child
