An image of literary evolution...

I was watching an Open Yale lecture by Paul Fry and it got me to thinking about the context of authors: a world of ideas. My image is thus: take a piece of paper and place three random dots on it, then draw radiating lines in 6-8 directions from each dot. Those dots are books, those intersections are authors. Of course, those authors can then radiate lines as well. You can imagine the lines in three or four dimensions as well. And there you have my own image of cultural/memetic evolution.