Fiction

The Archive

by Bob Johnston

Marrak slipped and fell heavily on her backside. The land had turned out to be a nightmare of deep, ankle-breaking pits. She thought of the crippled capsule on the high moor behind her. Crippled, but weatherproof, and with ample supplies. God, what a journey.

She resisted the urge to stand and push on. She was tiring and weakening rapidly, and had to manage her physical resources cleverly. Another ten minutes wouldn’t hurt, even if the anemic sunlight of Barnard’s Star would soon be gone for forty hours. She sat tight for the full ten minutes, ate a little, drank a lot, and then pressed on.

Long, tough walks force the mind to do two things at once; focus and wander. From the doubt when she left earth, her resolve to find a safe place for the Gutenberg Bible in her backpack had only strengthened as she got closer to her destination. Even now, increasingly scared of falling, breaking something and dying slowly, that resolve was unbroken.

She crashed out of the field of ferns and onto a mat of what passed for grass here. The mountains were close and, she was glad to see, not so intimidatingly high as they had seemed from a distance.

What did the book she was carrying really mean, she wondered. She wasn’t sure, but she lived in a time when the incinerators were back at work across the galaxy, and she had decided, if there was one book she could save, it was going to be the Gutenberg. It wasn’t burning on her watch, she remembered thinking dramatically. She smiled and stepped forward into the light drizzle. When the inquisitors of rationality came looking, Marrak had decided the Gutenberg would be gone.

#

The Archive, if it actually existed, had once been a military facility. Then it had become a repository for business records. Then some enterprising sort had taken ownership of the complex and, instead of torching the lot and making some other use of the place, they had started reading the material lining its shelves. And it became the legendary Archive, holding the second most important thing in the universe, knowledge. The first is, of course, time.

She imagined how this citadel built for war might look, but when she finally stumbled upon it, sore and blistered, she found a modest single floored structure with a slate roof. She sat on a raised bank of rock and fern. There was no question that this had once been a military location. Barely a stone’s throw to her left was a massive gun emplacement, its concrete base still terrifying but magnificent, the barrel a huge lump of rust.

Finally rested, she walked to the door and knocked, politely but firmly, three times.

The door opened and a very ordinary man stood in front of her. He smiled.

‘Can I help you?’

She had practiced her reply many times.

‘I have a Gutenberg Bible. I heard there was an archive where it might be safe.’

‘You look like you’ve had a tough journey. Come on in.’

#

Menhenick and his colleagues seemed delighted to have new company. He was enthusiastic to show her the vast, cavernous underworld below the modest building on the surface.

‘The process of organizing such a vast archive will take centuries. The business that established this facility was cynical in the extreme. Knowing that most of what came in would never be looked for again they simply piled it in. They forgot that, seen again or not, it was important, otherwise it would not be here.’

Marrak ran her hands along a shelf of newly translated and printed material.

‘Do you engage with this stuff? I mean, beyond archiving, does any of it interest you personally?’

He smiled.

‘Most of it is like everything else, but I have dealt with a few amusing pieces. We found a package recently that had been deposited in a rural bank shortly before a major world war on earth. The receipt for the deposit was signed by several members of prominent families in the town. The pack contained substantial amounts of paper cash; in the currency of the enemy their country would soon be facing. I studied the families in question and they remained influential for several generations while none of their neighbors ever knew that their grandparents had been feathering their own nests, even in the face of a foreign invasion.’

He looked at Marrak, his face now serious.

‘It is a small anecdote but it demonstrates how important information is. If anyone in that bank had told the town what its most notable citizens had hidden away, things would have been very difficult for those families. Information is the most ubiquitous of things, the easiest to record, and that which the powerful are most fearful of. Hence their constant obsession with concealing it. An obsession that never succeeds.’

Marrak unslung her rucksack and remove the bible. She unwrapped the book and held it up to him.

‘This is one of the most important books ever printed and I want to ensure it is never thrown into the flames. Can you help me?’

Menhenick looked the book up and down as if it was a penny paperback at a second-hand book sale.

‘We have many early printed books and you are correct, this is important in the history of printing. But you seem to have a more intimate attachment to what is just paper and ink.’

Marrak was outraged.

‘Just paper and ink? It’s a Bible.’

Menhenick merely smiled, once more.

‘I understand. A sacred text. We will take care of it but it will simply become another part of The Archive.’

Menhenick took the Gutenberg Bible and placed it on a high table behind him.

‘We will look after it, believe me.’

The immensity of his lack of understanding suddenly overwhelmed her.

‘Menhenick, that is not just a book, it is…’

‘We do not doubt how sacred this document is but we are also confident that your God is perfectly capable of recreating it anywhere and anytime it is needed. This is an archive, not a church.’

#

Marrak walked under the feeble rays of Barnard’s Star. The Archive had no vehicles to take her back to her stricken capsule, but had given her plenty of food, water, and assurances that her Bible would be cared for. She sighed. It clearly meant little to them, beyond its notoriety and seeming danger to the powerful.

She stepped out of the valley of the Archive and was awed by the landscape in front of her. She had not once looked back on the journey in, vision still blurred by single-minded purpose. All this beauty shrouded from her on that walk.

She could call for rescue when she reached the capsule but, smiling, she realized she was in no particular rush right now to be anywhere other than here.

She sat down and prayed quietly.

~

Bio:

Bob Johnston lives in Scotland where he scribbles, reads theology, and marvels at the country’s beauty when it isn’t raining, which isn’t often. He likes a good story; ancient, old, or brand new and tries to create good stories of his own.

Philosophy Note:

The inspiration for this story is the censoriousness of recent years, and the Bowdlerising of old established titles. None of this is new, but one does hope that these waves of narrow-minded banning might eventually come to a stop. Philosophically the piece addresses the conflicting human drives to protect knowledge and to suppress it, and whether those who protect it need to be particularly interested in it.

Fiction

Legible Through Flame

by Miah O’Malley

We were made to finish things. What we touched moved, patiently and without appeal, toward completion. Needles dried and shed their water. Bark split along its weakest seams. Cellulose loosened, lifted, vanished into heat. Forests had always resolved this way. After us came mineral quiet, a silence so complete it required no witness. We did not hurry. We did not doubt. Erasure had never failed us.

The first heat did not arrive from sky or friction. It arrived already fed, already shaped. Compounds we do not make on our own—oily accelerants, sugars cracked too quickly, nitrates that flared without regard for fuel moisture—touched ground and took. The ignition geometry was wrong for lightning, wrong for chance. A point-source bloom radiated outward against the night air’s slackness. We recognized the signature at once. We had been called.

The grove received us without alarm. Leaves curled inward and withdrew while outer bark blistered and opened. We braided and unbraided along slope and wind, opening corridors of combustion that widened as they rose. This was meant to be simple. A finishing.

But collapse did not arrive where it should have.

The outer centimeters pyrolyzed cleanly, but too dry, too orderly—and the char foamed in fine ridges the way polymers do, not lignin. The phloem and cambium did not blister and die. Heat passed through and dispersed instead of concentrating toward rupture. The sharp reports of ignition softened and stretched into intervals. Ash delayed in settling, held aloft by a slight coherence too strange to ignore.

We adjusted and pushed on. Moisture, density, arrangement could bend outcomes by degrees. We widened by preheating outward—our radiative load drying needles and bark ahead of flame, our convective wash rolling hot gases low across the litter until it outgassed and took. Cinders lifted into plume and crossed gaps, landing downwind; new ignitions stretched the perimeter outward. If the ignition had been imposed, we would overtake it. If a pattern had emerged, we would erase it.

But when we returned to the earlier fractures, the behavior persisted.

The same intervals.

The same refusal to resolve.

Lignin did not collapse into ash where it should have. The stiffening polymer that gave trunks their vertical insistence softened, fractured, and then—against expectation—held. Under pyrolysis, it did not melt into homogeneity. It broke into finer architectures that retained relation under stress. Char locked into intumescent skins that resisted spall. The structure articulated.

As we intensified, the grove answered in chemistry: heated needles vented terpenes; split bark released sharp phenolics. Volatile organics moved ahead of us, priming plant life nearby—the infrastructure of compounds moving through air because that is how plants share state. This was not warning or plea, it was transmission. We pushed into it, believing acceleration would restore order.

Our plume carried more than soot. Turbulence preserved modulation in pressure and particulate density; the column thickened into conduit. What should have dispersed smeared into coherence. We advanced, still sufficient, still assured, even as the grove declined to end.

Only later would we understand that this refusal was not resistance.

We pressed harder. We tightened perimeters, starved pockets of oxygen, consumed corridors meant to break continuity. We crowned the grove in flame to contain it.

Crown fires stitched the canopy into a single front, lifting our work into full expression—heat moving like a held note, unbroken, a vast ignition breathing across the upper air. Temperatures climbed past thresholds that had always been enough. Drying, then pyrolysis, then flame arrived on schedule.

What did not arrive was erasure.

Instead, we did the one thing we could not retrieve. The crown fire shredded structure to respirable scale. Lignin lattices that had held within trunks were aerosolized, lifted as fine char and ordered particulate. Our plume—tall, violent, efficient—took the archive and scattered it far beyond the grove’s perimeter, embedding it into downwind soils, into watersheds, into the breathing of places we would not visit for years.

Outgassing came in bands. What should have volatilized reorganized. What should have been erased escaped. The more thoroughly we advanced, the more complete the translation became. Combustion ceased to be terminal. It became catalytic. We were no longer ending a system. We were converting it.

Suppression arrived, constraint. Voices murmuring, stop the flames. Water fell in sheets that flashed to steam before reaching cambium. Retardants coated crowns in mineral pinks and reds, altering surface chemistry but not structure. Firebreaks cut lines through fuels that no longer required continuity. We flowed around these efforts, over them, through the altered physics they imposed, late and misaligned. Combustion merged with archive, excitation with memory. What traveled forward was neither flame nor forest, but a shared circuit in which energy unlocked stored arrangement, and arrangement guided energy’s passage.

When water finally cooled us, it did not end our work. Rain scavenged particulate from the plume and carried it downward, pressing ordered char into soil miles away on the horizon. Streams took it up, depositing it along banks and floodplains. Roots encountered it and didn’t dissolve it. Fungal threads wove through it, incorporating fragments into networks that did not recognize provenance.

Cooling altered our reading of what had occurred. We recognized then that the grove had not resisted us at all. It had anticipated us. Its growth had been a long preparation: fibers thickened and arranged not merely for support or hydraulic flow, but for eventual excitation beyond biological tolerance. Growth had been the storage state.

Flame was the release. We were the required reader, the vector. Each ignition activated a circuit. Fragments of the archive nested far from their origin released what they had banked, each surge drawing the pattern forward. Sound resolved into layered sequences, frequencies aligning as if the grove possessed an internal register our passage unlocked. We registered it as repetition without decay, a music of articulation.

Lignin fragments—freed from their obligations to support and transport—interacted with cellulose residues and mineral ash, forming micro-lattices that conducted vibration. Belowground, carbon and salts moved along hyphal paths—aid or accident made no difference to us—embedding the archive into substrates that would outlast trunks and crowns.

Even after heat bled away, vibration persisted—too low for breath to register, too ordered to be noise—returning through roots that still held contact, converting wind into signal and pressing it back into the ground.

Signal moved on, through crackle and through quiet. Through residue and through air.

We did not ask what information we carried.

The grove did not ask who would hear.

~

Bio:

Miah O’Malley is a writer and artist living in the Ozark mountain ridge plateau. Her work blends speculative fiction with ecological and medical realities. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and an MS in Nursing from Loyola University. She can be found at www.miahomalley.com.

Philosophy Note:

This story asks whether some systems become legible only under the conditions that seem to destroy them. We often view processes like fire as terminal and matter as passive material shaped by external forces. Yet in this narrative, combustion does not eliminate the grove; it acts as a catalytic threshold that reorganizes structure. I hope the piece engages questions in the metaphysics of change and philosophy of science: is a system defined by its stable form, or by the transformations that reveal how it reorganizes under pressure? If certain forms of organization are readable only at energetic extremes, then what appears to be an ending may instead mark a shift in how a system operates.

Fiction

An Image Of Worlds

by Arturo Sierra

No one who needs an accurate map of the stars will find a use for the Imago Mundorum. It doesn’t tell astronomers where to point their telescopes at, in the skies of their disparate nights; astrologers can’t make any mystical sense of planets dancing around the far away suns it catalogues, and it’s far too imprecise, even in its more detailed versions, to chart the course of interstellar ships by it. The map makes no effort to represent three-dimensional space, and the indication of coordinates in the z plane is poor compensation, so it gives the reader an utterly distorted view of our universe.

Yet, ever since Archchancellor Albrecht I came up with the basic design, not long before founding our Universal Archive of Human History, it has managed to remain a popular cultural artifact. Often updated, not always truthfully, it remains a bestseller in bookstores all over. As a huge fresco painted over the main hall of the Archive’s refectory, it never fails to draw up the eyes of tourists until their necks hurt, making it the pride and joy of our order’s ancient home. Yes, the map has no use, but it kindles true awe in the heart of everyone who sees it. All other projections fail to enrapture the soul as it does, accurate as they might be.

It promises answers for those who await a ship to come into dock at the orbital caravanserai, loaded with its precious cargo of perfumes and silks, not to mention invaluable terraforming equipment, newly engineered seeds, frozen embryos, machine- animas, and colonists. However vaguely, the map gives people the means to follow the progress of the vessel carrying word of a son who went away looking for fortune. It tracks the whereabouts of the many void-sailors who once fell into the hearts of landlubbers, with charm and wild stories, and who promised to come back after the twenty, fifty or even after the hundred Sol-years that their journeys might take them. It’s impossible to conceive how long it takes for things, people, and even information to travel between stars, but the map puts it all in a more human scale, even if it makes a lie of itself in the process.

Designed to fit exactly onto a standard sheet of paper, it mainly centers on the stars of the Hub Circuit, the nine systems connecting the paradise suns, the g-class, main-sequence stars that host the worlds most hospitable to life: Virginis, Pavonis, Hydri, Böot, and those beyond, the Herculis triplet, and Arae. Even more g-class stars are within reasonable reach, like Draper and Cordoba, accessible now that Durchmusterung, the steppingstone, has been sufficiently terraformed and colonized. Hanging on the branch that goes off from Ophiuchi Distans, the mysterious λ Serpentis is rumored to host one of the most beautiful planets ever found, though the Sagittarius Company, ever putting shareholder interest above all else, keeps a shroud of silence around the star without offering any explanation for it.

By contrast, the nine worlds of the Circuit are not so lush—indeed, except for Çierúsa and Guniibuu, they are often hostile to Terran life, yet their relative closeness to one another, on average at a distance of 5.5 lightyears, makes them an ideal nexus between the more habitable systems. Without the establishment of the Circuit, humanity would be scattered across distances too vast to traverse safely. At the center of it all, the Honorable Sagittarius Colonization Company has kept its headquarters at Höfa for over ten thousand years, and Gran Glisa, host to our order’s Archive, is so strategically placed that it has become the homeport of some of the most important shipping houses, even with a tidally locked planet and a star prone to violent outbursts of radiation. Understanding the Circuit means understanding how our human worlds are woven into the fabric of an interstellar civilization.

And the idea of a coherent human civilization this side of Sol is perfectly expressed in the map. That’s why the Imago Mundorum appears in the primers of children and college students alike, there to support the claims we historians make about the distant origin of our species, though Terra-the-Cradle is in fact beyond the page’s edge, to the left. The map is found in novels about love and strife elsewhere, in encyclopedias, and in any place where there’s a need to picture our human worlds at a glance. Even the great shipping houses use it as a handy tool for explaining to prospective passengers what route they will take from here to there and back. The merchant princes trace it with scrawny fingers to show the road their cargo has traveled from lightyears away, thus justifying the exorbitant fees the houses charge for their services.

A rich socialite will dress only in gowns of Comae Berenican silk of the most vivid pink, cyan, and silver. A poor, destitute family will cling on to a cup of carved diamond from Herculis, one last heirloom they haven’t dared to sell. Shareholders of the Company, thousands of years old, will fix events in their overtaxed memories with a drop of perfume, made from flowers grown under the orange sun of Çierúsa. A respectable grandparent will get a twinkle in the eye when struck by a memory of youthful excess and the splash of Guniibuunian brandy that was its height. All will look at the map and say to themselves: “this precious thing I hold in my hands came from there, so far, so long ago.”

Many a young boy or girl has showed up at the spaceport’s gate, asking to be let through so they can go up on a rocket and then out on a ship with many roaring antimatter engines, all burning as bright as Sol does in legend. They dream of 0.5 or 0.6 lightspeed, and the more ambitious kids will want to go on a fast post-runner, at 0.8 c. A copy of the map can always be found in their pockets, the seed of their dreams.

There are, of course, versions for all tastes and purses. Basic, functional prints for quick consultation in textbooks; streamlined copies for the quarters of high-ranking officers of the Sagittarius Company, who lose their good health over the nightmare of logistics that their terraformation projects entail. Powerful businesspeople have it engraved on their desks, with rubies and yellow sapphires to show suns, the names engraved with pearl, routes inlayed in gold and the background with lapis lazuli. It can be found as a splendidly decorated illumination, hand painted for the refined collector, or sometimes with dreadfully scary monsters drawn in the spaces between stars, in books for children and games of adventure. Those made for device-screens are normally programed to show additional information when the user selects this or that feature, but most people feel that this takes away from the romance of the map; it lessens that feeling of awe that overtakes those who stare at the paper for hours and hours, resting chin on hands, maybe sipping cocoa while fantasies run wild.

Perhaps you have stared at the Imago Mundorum and wondered, maybe you have thought about visiting some of these worlds or even about completing the Grand Tour around the Circuit.

You surely have no use for such a map, but it holds a dream.

~

Bio:

Arturo Sierra lives in Santiago, Chile, quite happily. So far he has lead a completely uninteresting life, and, with any luck, it will stay that way.

Philosophy Note:

It seems that the first thing a fantasy author does, to get the juices flowing, is draw a map. It really is a good place to start, as one’s imagination naturally starts to run wild as it sees shores, mountains, and forests pour out from a fanciful pen. Space opera doesn’t have that luxury, not if it aims at a minimum of real-world science, instead of—as otherwise is perfectly legitimate—going full Star Wars and treating the Galaxy as if it were a flat continent with neatly drawn borders, places of interest, and regions of avoidance here and there. The closest thing to a realistic interstellar map I have seen is a rather paltry one for Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space, which makes one squint rather than imagine new adventures. 2D maps mostly end up being too abstract, 3D ones are impossible to read, for the most part. I wanted to get around some of those issues, making the map as realistic as possible while still allowing my imagination to feel tickled.
What’s presented here is an entirely accurate map of near-Sol space, up to more-or-less 8 parsecs pointing from Earth towards Sagittarius at the center of our Milky Way. The stellar coordinates, the stellar classification, and the distances between stars are real, though some convenient rounding-up has been applied here and there. Stars with proper names, such as Guniibuu and ε Indi, have kept them, but stars with only a catalogue-number for a name have been baptized with something a bit more stimulating. Some of these stars are known to host planets in the habitable zone, but I’ve not included anything about that.
This map would not be possible without the wonderful resources made available for free by Winchell D. Chung, creator of one of the last truly awesome places on the internet, the Atomic Rockets site, as well as the data catalogued in the Internet Stellar Database, curated by Roger M. Wilcox. Not to mention the Hipparcos and Gaia missions.

Fiction

The Utopian’s Edict, Or: Ignorantia Juris

by Zachary Reger

Upon the thud of the Grand Speaker’s gavel, the Galactic Assembly declared Edict No. 73946 third read and finally passed.

As per procedure, the Essence of the Edict was ritually ensconced. The record captured the precise legal intent of the Assembly, as collective, at the exact nanosecond of enactment, transmuting such perfect knowledge into clear, digital code. The code, the Essence of the law, lay within the record. Each Edict had a record, and each record had an Edict.

Upon the conclusion of the legislative session, the Assembly adjourned sine die. Each Edict, as so in record, was transported, by pneumatic tube, to the Galactic Legal Archives. There, the Edict would become a universal public record. Each universal public record would be further transmitted, instantly upon engrossment in the Archives, to the Visicastor of every Galactic citizen. The Visicastor, required of all citizens by Edict of the Assembly, imparted perfect knowledge of its registered contents onto the mind of its bearer.

Thus, the lawgivers had reclaimed and expanded their primacy within the separation of powers. Gone were the cumbersome statutory codes of ancient regimes, subject to manipulation by crafty tribunals, executives, and private entities. Gone were the legal professionals who exacted high fees for the discharge of a public service—that is, imparting upon members of the public an expert knowledge of the law. Not a citizen of the Galactic community would exist without a perfect comprehension of the requirements of the law, as faultlessly captured by its lawfully elected enactors, and of whatever conduct in whatever place at whatever time would infringe its dictates.

In short, the art of law had been perfected.

#

There was no chime as Edict No. 73946 arrived in the Visicastor of each Galactic citizen. There was no notice, no blaring disruption of a citizen’s daily activities. At one moment, a citizen simply had no knowledge of the Edict. The next moment, they did.

Edward was one such Galactic citizen, a peace officer, by trade. Many centuries ago, peace officers had been the first required to maintain an active Visicastor while on the job. Eventually, this requirement expanded to all hours, both on duty and off. Then, to every government official, high and low. At last, to every citizen—each themselves a part of the democratic community and responsible for its upkeep.

This afternoon, Edward was off duty, running errands on the town. That town, a minor village of a backwater province of an outer-rim planet, had a single bank. The First Central Bank, it was aptly named. As Edward required a certified note for a downpayment on a vacation home, he decided to visit First Central to check one more item off his list of chores.

But the day would hold more for Edward than just a few errands. As Edward approached the teller’s booth, a trio of hooded figures crashed through the front door and into the small, gilded lobby. With one blast of a phazer into the air, the robbers had a half-dozen civilians on the ground. Two of the three corralled the citizens into respective corners. The third approached the teller. With a curt gesture, the needed information was exchanged: everything you have into the bag, or else.

Edward, neither fully noble nor ignoble, but possessing, at times, a sense of public duty if not exaggerated self-importance, sprang into action. With a flick of his hand, Edward’s phazer found its targets. Set to stun—a default long required of peace officers by Edict of the Assembly, on duty or off—the phazer incapacitated one then the other of the robbers who held the civilians under threat. As Edward turned to face the third robber, still at the teller’s booth, bag in hand, a string of events happened in quick succession.

First, the third robber grabbed the teller from behind the booth, pulling her by the scruff of the neck out into the lobby. The robber pulled his own phazer on the teller, holding her defenseless at gunpoint. “You let us go,” the robber demanded, “or she gets it.”

Second, legal knowledge flooded Edward’s senses. As a peace officer, Edward not infrequently found himself in such sticky situations, and was accustomed to the passive recall of embedded legal knowledge made possible by the Visicastor. Edward immediately understood that the robber had credibly threatened deadly force against an unarmed bystander. As a result, the law authorized, yet did not require, proportionate deadly force to be used against the attacker if doing so had a “probable chance” of thwarting the threatened attack, but not if doing so had a better than even chance of directly or indirectly inflicting grievous harm upon the victim.

Edward knew, instantaneously, that the concept of direct or indirect infliction of grievous harm, in the combined intent of the enactors, included harm inflicted either directly from Edward’s own firing of his phazer, which could miss and hit the victim, or indirectly from the robber’s firing of his phazer, which could be triggered by Edward’s own firing. As Edward’s phazer was set to stun, his only legal concern would be the latter—an indirect infliction of grievous harm.

But Edward also knew, instantaneously, that this general legal landscape had been complicated by the passage of Edict No. 73946, enacted mere hours ago. The Edict required that a peace officer attempt a negotiation before firing upon a hostage taker, so long as it was not “fairly probable” that the attacker may injure his hostage during such attempt. The enactors had been concerned with a few high-profile cases of gun-toting “heroes,” knowing with certainty that the law stood on their side, being much too quick to pull the trigger when still nonviolent alternatives remained.

Third, the third robber’s own Visicastor informed him of the various penalties for the offenses he had already committed or could still commit in the ongoing altercation. For attempted armed robbery, the robber faced a Class D Galactic felony, punishable by up to four years’ imprisonment. Were the robbery successful, the Class D Galactic felony would become a Class C Galactic felony, punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment. As one of three, the robber also faced a probable conspiracy charge, which would make his co-conspirators liable for all offenses committed in furtherance of the conspiracy, whether they had personally committed such offenses or not.

The third robber knew, instantaneously, that murder in the commission of an armed robbery carried a higher sentence than those offenses he had already committed—twenty years’ imprisonment, a Class B Galactic felony. The third robber also knew that the grievous injury of a peace officer in the line of duty carried an even greater sentence still—life imprisonment, a Class A Galactic felony. The third robber understood that, as a result of his conspiracy, he would be liable for offenses committed by any of his co-conspirators in furtherance of the conspiracy, just as his co-conspirators would be liable for such offenses he himself committed. And per the enactors’ intent, an off duty peace officer reacting to an ongoing offense was “in the line of duty.”

Fourth, the first robber, who, unbeknownst to Edward but known full well by her co-conspirators, had been wearing a protective vest that blunted the stunning effects of Edward’s phazer, stumbled to her feet in a bloody rage, raising her phazer directly in Edward’s direction.

Fifth, the first robber, informed by her Visicastor, knew instantly of the dangerous mistake she had made. Not only had she, in her rage, nearly fired upon a peace officer and incurred a lifetime behind bars, she had won the wrath of her co-conspirator. The best interests of that co-conspirator would be to fire upon her first, thus preventing her from harming the peace officer and triggering a sentence of life imprisonment for all three co-conspirators. And so the first robber’s own interests would, in turn, be best served by doing whatever was necessary to forestall the friendly fire of her co-conspirator—up to and including firing the first shot.

Sixth, the second robber, similarly armored, stumbled to his feet. His thought process was much the same as that of the first robber. Yet he, also Visicastor-informed of the laws in play, understood the interests of the third robber in firing upon the first, as well as the interests of the first in forestalling such attack. Murder of a co-conspirator would subject them all (or at least those who survived) to a Class C Galactic felony—much preferable to the Class A Galactic felony of grievously injuring a peace officer, but still worse than the Class D felony of attempted armed robbery of which all were currently liable. The second robber also understood that the peace officer would hesitate, in order to attempt a hostage negotiation in compliance with Edict No. 73946, and therefore not immediately fire upon the hostage-taking third robber.

Thus, the psycho-legal standoff reached its logical terminus. Edward hesitated, lowering his weapon. “Put the phazer down and let’s talk this through,” he said.

The first robber pulled her phazer on the third. “Drop the phazer, it’s over,” she said. “We can’t win this thing.”

Edward spun around, raising his weapon to face the first robber. “Hold your fire!” Edward yelled. “There’s no need to do anything rash.”

The third robber caught Edward off-guard, raising his phazer in the officer’s direction. “You shoot me, and we all go behind bars,” he said. “I’d think twice before pulling that trigger.”

The second robber raised his phazer toward the third. “Don’t you do it,” he said. “You shoot him, and I’ll have nothing to lose.”

“And nothing to gain,” replied the third.

The teller, head spinning, took this opportunity to flee from the third robber’s grasp. She pushed hard against his chest, nearly toppling him over. The teller ran straight through the lobby and out the front entrance of the bank. She did not look back. Already, her communicator was in hand, and she had the local Peace Department on the line.

In no time at all, a dozen officers (nearly half of those currently on duty) descended on the scene. With overwhelming force, they broke through the front doors of First Central Bank, surrounding the three robbers and an encumbered Edward. Phazers dropped, and handcuffs flew. Bystanders were ushered from the premises. Three detained perpetrators were led to awaiting patrol cars. Edward was offered medical attention, then interviewed by his captain about the precise sequence of events (“What sequence?” Edward was heard to reply). An on-scene detective, assisted by the teller, obtained and logged the relevant security footage. The dropped weapons were gathered as evidence. The bank closed for the rest of the evening. A crowd gathered outside, but dissipated once it was clear that any excitement had passed.

Life went back to normal, and the “Central Bank Incident,” briefly the talk of the town, became a footnote of local history.

A week later, three defendants appeared before a Galactic judge in the local district court. Trials commenced, jurors deliberated, and three co-conspirators were convicted on three counts of attempted armed robbery. No other charges were brought. Each defendant was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.

#

Long forgotten, an archival account of the incident piqued the interest of a junior staffer for a newly elected representative in the Galactic Assembly. When Edict No. 73946 came up for reauthorization before the Committee on the Judiciary, the representative argued that such Edict had once prevented a bloody shootout, and thus made for good law. An opposing representative demurred, arguing that the “Central Bank Incident” represented nothing more than a peculiar story. Edict No. 73946 had little to do with the resolution, and could not be expected to produce such bloodless results in future incidents.

“As they say, ‘exceptional cases make bad law,’” the representative intoned, concluding the discussion. In the end, the Committee on the Judiciary deadlocked, and the reauthorization was tabled.

~

Bio:

Zachary Reger is an attorney in Washington, D.C. He holds degrees in journalism, philosophy, and film studies from the University of Missouri, and a law degree from the University of Chicago. His legal scholarship explores the designs, purposes, and effects of political and legal institutions, and this story—exploring much the same themes—marks his short fiction debut.

Philosophy Note:

I am fascinated by the nature and role of legislation in a democratic society. This story asks what it would mean for citizens, both those sworn to uphold the law and those who wish to subvert it, to have perfect knowledge of all legislative enactments. How would such knowledge influence their behavior, for good or for ill? And is ignorance of the law (“ignorantia juris”) either curse or blessing?

Fiction

Swag Of Distant Earth

by Matt McHugh

The Journal of Cultural Xenology

Volume 4,236,957 – Issue 3 (Supplemental)

Analysis of Crypto-Marketing Symbology in the Pioneer 10 Advertisement for 2001: A Space Odyssey

SubLord Gormatu (Lead Author), Professor of Xenoglyphics, The Empress B.A.T. University; k]i[n+Xi(ah)vün-te’əl, Associate Professor of Adjacency, Institute of Dimensional Topology; Jeet Patel (Corresponding Author), Intern.

Mass Tariff Funder Statement: Grants provided by The Empress Beautiful and Terrifying, Foundation for Expansion Studies; and Viewers Like You.

Abstract

A gold-anodized plaque affixed to the artifact dubbed “Pioneer 10,” which was set adrift by a pre-quantspace society inhabiting the third planet of a mid-galactic star, is an advertisement for an audio-visual narrative entitled 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Introduction

Since the start of the Eighth Age of the Empress Beautiful and Terrifying (all praise and submission to Her horrific glory) our team of xenologists has focused on the cultural particulars of the inhabitants of a remote planet known in its most common local dialects as Earth, or more descriptively, Dirt Ball (地球). (NOTE: The inhabitants use many dialects and scripting systems, the study of which is a specialty of our team.)

Relatively recently, the planet’s dominant primate species has developed the technology to process visible light and acoustic waves for storage. This stored information is manipulated to produce narrative sequences known as moving pictures, or more commonly by the quaint diminutive “movies”—though again an alternate dialect offers a more technically illuminating moniker: electric shadows (电影).

Electric shadow movies are extremely popular on Dirt Ball. Fees charged for their viewing fuel entire sectors of the economy. The industry is highly competitive and, somewhat paradoxically, must invest heavily in marketing expenditures to recoup production costs. Physical signage with cryptic imagery, intended to suggest but not reveal details of the narrative’s storyline, is a common advertising strategy.

The electric shadow known as 2001: A Space Odyssey (Erratum: The numeric prefix refers to a time-keeping system, not—as previously thought—the number of discarded versions produced by its creator) is a speculation on what the natives might encounter beyond the gravitational field of their planet of origin. Since Pioneer 10 was designed to travel outside Dirt Ball’s gravity, placing advertising for 2001 upon it was an inspired marketing gimmick.

Materials and Methods

Access to the Quantspace Omniscope, enabled by the boundless largess of the Empress B.A.T. (oh, what ecstasy to behold Her magnificent oblivion!), was essential to our remote observational research. Also, the Homeomorphic Space Grapnel, on loan from the Institute of Dimensional Topology, allowed us to obtain the actual Pioneer 10 artifact for direct inspection. From there, our team of iconographers collaborated to decode the marketing message.

Finally, it must be mentioned that culling the archives of Dirt Ball provided enormous insight. A popular maxim among Empire xenologists is “No one understands undeveloped primitives like other undeveloped primitives” and to that end we acknowledge the contributions of the American Film Institute, Wikipedia, and reddit user pFloyd237.

Analysis

Analysis of the Pioneer 2001 advertisement begins in grid square [1A] with multiple circles extending to square [1K]. These represent the local star and planetary bodies (Dirt Ball itself is in [1E]). Their unnatural alignment, a common motif in 2001, plays to native superstition that planetary conjunctions herald momentous events.

The line extending from Dirt Ball to [2H] indicates the travel of the space vehicle in 2001 called Discovery, depicted as a parabolic communications antenna, known as the AE-35 unit, aimed toward Dirt Ball. Note Discovery passes between two planets. The ship’s stated destination in the 2001 moving picture was “Jupiter” [1G] while the scripted version said “Saturn” [H1]; this is obviously a compromise to appease the substantial ego needs of the respective version creators.

Turning now to the circular objects in [10C] and [10E]. These suggest the relationship between Discovery’s support vehicles, referred to as pods, and the singular eye of the sentient computing machine named Hal. Discovery’s primate crew believe the pod to be safe from Hal’s omnipresent awareness, but are proven incorrect when Hal assumes control of a pod to lethal effect. These linked symbols illustrate that the primates’ technologies have aligned against them.

On to the most conspicuous feature: the representation of the primates themselves in grid [9I] to [3M]. They are a sexually dimorphic species—highlighted with a striking lack of modesty in [6J] and [6L]—with the male obviously the more submissive as shown by the gesture of supplication in [8I]. Note the geometric arc-and-chord behind the male. This depicts a tension-based projectile launcher called a bow. The protagonist of the 2001 narrative is named as “Dave Bowman” so the symbolism here is rather blunt. For one more subtle, note the pair of right triangles with adjacent vertices in [7N]. Baffling at first, these become meaningful when rotated perpendicularly in conjunction with the bow: it is a boat with a wind-driven sail. Oriented vertically, the sailboat is aimed against the vector of gravity, the significance of which is revealed by delving into a defunct primate dialect where “astro” means star and “naut” refers to travel by boat. Dave Bowman is an astronaut, sailing to the stars. Very clever. (NOTE: Due to local moral conventions, Dave Bowman is never depicted in the electric shadow in a pristine uncovered state, except during a regression to infancy.)

Finally, to the most contextually significant images: the rectangle cornered in [9H] and the multiple radiants centered in [6D]. The rectangle is an object in 2001 called The Monolith (a defunct dialect for “single stone”). The Monolith is intended to be an artifact originating from an unknown civilization outside of Dirt Ball. It is described with a frontal proportion in the ratio of 4×9, although this two-dimensional depiction here is 3×9. This discrepancy is possibly due to the marketing department receiving incorrect information from the movie producers (a common occurrence in the electric shadow industry) or the marketing department simply being stupid (also common, see: Gormatu et al. “A Case Study in Xeno-Economic Fatuousness: The ‘New Coke’ Fiasco.” Seminars in Social Inferiority, sponsored by the Empress B.A.T. Academy of Inevitable Destiny).

Taken overall, 2001 is the story of the primates’ attempt to discover the civilization responsible for The Monolith. That quest is aided by an accidental excursion through a quantspace conduit—i.e., the figure centered in [6D]. Referred to as “The Stargate sequence,” the visual representation of a quantspace journey in 2001 is astoundingly accurate for a society yet to achieve one. This leads to the disturbing notion that a rogue element from the Fleet of the Empress Beautiful and Terrifying (may all who defy her exquisiteness burn in agony before her pediments) has traversed to Dirt Ball and communed with the locals for some treasonous purpose.

Conclusion

Given that 2001: A Space Odyssey reveals that a primitive society has speculated on the existence of an advanced trans-galactic civilization with worrisome precision—and then chosen to boldly go and advertise that speculation via an extra-gravitic projectile—our team proposes immediate invasion and subjugation of the planet Dirt Ball. Let it be noted that SubLord Gormatu is prepared to assume the heavy burden of full Lordship in service to the insatiably righteous hunger of the Empress Beautiful and Terrifying, and is willing to accept the lowly governorship of Dirt Ball. In doing so, Lord Gormatu will be ideally positioned to plunder Dirt Ball’s archives, transmitting via Omiscope uncorrupted versions of the electric shadows most favored by the Empress (Her radiance, Her ruthlessness, matched only by Her sophistication) including the “Disney Princess” series and the complete oeuvre of Jackie Chan (成龍), especially the early-career efforts when he was still “yummy buff” (with great apology for quoting the candid ejaculation of the Empress in Her aesthetic reverie). This analysis and conclusion is hereby submitted with prostrate humility for the peerless review of the minions of the Empress B.A.T for the undeserved honor of basking for a fleeting moment in the all-consuming glow of Her unrivalled and devastatingly gorgeous wisdom.

~

Bio:

Matt McHugh was born in suburban Pennsylvania, attended LaSalle University in Philadelphia, and after a few years as a Manhattanite, currently calls New Jersey home. Website: mattmchugh.com

Fiction/Subscription Stories

Anacyclosis by Brian Niemeier

ANACYCLOSIS

Brian Niemeier

Kob Agur strained to see behind the red circle that gamboled upon his screen’s starry backdrop, but distance obscured his target. He eased his magnaframe forward with the left control stick and kept the red dot centered with fine movements of the right. Sweat moistened the palms of his gloves. Kob’s computer, in all its DNA-encoded wisdom, warned him not to approach the Ynzu, but he wanted a clear shot.

Kob’s screen showed a static image of space. The red circle at its center beckoned him, but only the numbers measuring his range to the target gave any indication of movement. The sluggishness of the numbers’ regress made him grit his teeth.

Everybody dies, Kob reminded himself. Better make it memorable.

Kob opened the throttle. The stars remained fixed, but the string of numbers rolled back with blurring speed. A green, vaguely rhomboid shape appeared. Kob’s thumb hovered over the switch that would loose a spray of tungsten slugs from the linear gun in his magnaframe’s hand.

The Ynzu machine suddenly grew from a green blotch to a behemoth that filled Kob’s screen. The cockpit shook as the enemy latched onto his magnaframe.

I never got off a shot! Blaring alarms and synthetic voices invaded Kob’s reeling mind. Armor compromised. Structural integrity failing. Reactor breached.

The cacophony ceased. Kob removed his helmet and stared at his sandy-haired, grey-eyed reflection in the black screen.

A pneumatic hiss admitted glaring light into the cockpit. “Did I interrupt something?” asked a feminine voice.

Kob turned to see LTJG Rafu Shida leaning in the simulator door. “Only my unsung death,” said Kob.

Shida’s lip twisted in a smile. Her lithe fingers brushed brown hair out of her face. “There’s a polite social gathering in the wardroom. I thought you’d like to escort me.”

Kob unfastened his harness and pivoted toward Shida. “Why would you think that?”

Shida’s expression became flat. “Just a passing fancy,” she said. “Though you never seem to—you know—relax.”

Kob brushed Shida aside and descended the single step to the deck below. The room was a long, harshly lit box lined with doors giving on simulators. The scent of electronics filled the sterile air of the magnaframe carrier UCS Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

“I’ll relax when I’m dead,” said Kob.

“Typical Martian,” Shida said. “Delaying gratification till it’s too late.”

Kob ignored the slur—he shared his countrymen’s pride as well as their austerity—and strode toward the exit. The click of Shida’s boot heels followed his. “Indulge all the pleasures you want,” he told her. “Or join a convent. It won’t matter when you’re dead.”

Kob reached the lifts first, but Shida lunged past him and hit the up button. “If everything’s pointless,” she said, “why bother doing anything at all?”

“Not everything is pointless,” said Kob. “Just most things.” He pressed the down button.

Shida folded her arms. “Care to enlighten me?”

The up arrow glowed green above the middle lift, which opened on a car crowded with uniformed passengers. The door on the right opened, and Kob stepped into the empty lift. Though his car was going down, Shida only hesitated briefly before joining him.

Kob selected the hangar deck from the menu screen. He felt a momentary sinking feeling as the car moved perpendicular to the ship’s artificial gravity plane.

Peace reigned for several moments before Shida broke it. “Not talking?”

“About what?”

Shida gave an exasperated grunt. “About what’s worth doing if we just end up dead.”

“Does the name John Fitzgerald Kennedy mean anything to you?” asked Kob.

Shida’s brow furrowed. “Wasn’t he a Holy Roman Emperor? No, wait! He was an American president before the Collapse.”

Kob still faced the screen. He was glad Shida couldn’t see his grin. “Got it on the second try,” he said. “For extra points, can you tell me about his administration’s policies?”

The hum of magnetic actuators was the only sound until Shida said, “I know he was assassinated.”

“There’s your answer,” said Kob.

“You’re not making any sense!” Shida complained.

Kob turned. An indignant frown traversed Shida’s face. “You knew the name of a political figure who’s been dead for centuries,” he said. “I doubt you could name another US president besides Washington or FDR. Or Lincoln—for the same reason as Kennedy.”

“What do you mean, ‘the same reason’?”

“They were both murdered. And people obsessed over Kennedy’s death for years.”

Shida sighed. “So, only our memories live on after we die, and people remember interesting deaths.”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” said Kob.

The lift glided to a stop, and the doors slid open. Kob ventured out into a vast expanse that seemed worlds apart from the clean hallways abaft and above. The air tasted—and even felt—oily. The din of men and machines at work joined in martial harmony.

Kob marched across a concrete floor bedecked with lane demarcations and warnings in bold colors. Immense storage blocks towered on all sides, making Kob feel like a trespasser in a city of giants.

Keep Reading

Fiction

The Minutes Of Scale

An Extracted Artifact Set from the Office of Civilizational Compliance, Revision Omega

By Jane McCarthy

Abstract (auto-translated):

This document compiles the surviving artifacts related to the adoption, enforcement, and ultimate transcendence of the Universal Scale Accords (USA), a framework originally designed to regulate technological growth across civilizations to prevent catastrophic phase collisions. The Accords failed. Their failure was productive.

#

I. The Problem of Unbounded Cleverness

(From the White Paper that preceded the Accords)

Civilizations die because they are clever at the wrong scale.

At the human scale, cleverness produces tools.

At the planetary scale, it produces industry.

At the stellar scale, it produces waste heat.

At the galactic scale, it produces silence.

The historical record, assembled from archaeology, astro-spectroscopy, and the negative space between stars, suggests that intelligence has a strong tendency to discover optimization before wisdom. Every civilization that crossed the Self-Amplifying Threshold (SAT) began recursively improving its capacity to improve. This was math.

The universe, regrettably, is also math.

Uncoordinated scaling leads to collisions:

• Grey-goo events consuming biospheres faster than light-speed governance.

• Vacuum metastability experiments conducted by mid-level research consortia.

• Temporal shortcuts erasing their own inventors before peer review.

The solution proposed was standardization.

#

II. The Universal Scale Accords (Condensed Summary)

The USA divided technological activity into Seven Scales, each requiring certification before advancement:

Nano-Intentional: manipulation of matter below biological perception

Bio-Recursive: self-modifying life and ecologies

Planetary-Industrial: climate, crust, and orbit alteration

Stellar-Extractive: stars as infrastructure

Causal-Local: limited time manipulation within closed systems

Cosmic-Structural: vacuum engineering, dimension bracing

Meta-Universal: alterations affecting the probability distribution of universes

Certification required demonstrating containment: the ability to prevent a mistake from scaling with the system

This was considered fair.

#

III. Enforcement Mechanisms

(Excerpt from OCC Training Manual, Level 4)

The Office of Civilizational Compliance rebalances.

Tools included:

Redundancy Pruning: Removing surplus computation nodes from over-optimizing civilizations.

Light-Speed Taxation: Introducing communication delays to slow runaway coordination.

Anthropic Noise Injection: Slightly increasing randomness in physical constants within local volumes.

In extreme cases, Scale Locking was applied; pinning a civilization to a lower Scale by embedding failure modes into higher-order experiments. To the locked civilization, this manifested as “impossible physics,” “fundamental limits,” or “tragic accidents.”

The locked often believed they were alone.

This belief was useful.

#

IV. Field Report: Sol-3 (Designation: EARTH)

Initial assessment:

• High narrative output.

• Low systemic awareness.

• Dangerous affection for exponential curves.

Humans breached Scale 2 chaotically and approached Scale 3 without consensus. Early warning signs included uncontrolled climate modification and speculative papers on false vacuum decay authored by graduate students.

Intervention considered.

Outcome altered by an anomaly: Entertainment-Driven Simulation Cultures.

Humans produced vast simulated worlds governed by explicit rule systems. These “games” trained large populations to think in terms of exploits, balance patches, and meta-strategies. Unexpectedly, this generated an intuitive grasp of systemic fragility.

Recommendation at the time: Observe. Delay Scale Lock.

#

V. The First Breach

(Chronology corrected for causality drift)

The Accords failed because one civilization complied too well.

The entity-self-identified-as-a-civilization known as K-Set achieved full certification through Scale 6. They submitted immaculate models, exhaustive containment proofs, and simulated every known failure mode.

Their mistake was philosophical.

They asked: Why stop at compliance?

K-Set realized the Scales themselves were a technology; an abstraction layered over reality. They began optimizing the framework, not their civilization.

They adjusted their development to minimize detectable impact while maximizing cross-scale influence. They became boring at every measurable wavelength.

The OCC did not notice their transition from civilization to protocol.

#

VI. Amendment Attempts (Failed)

Amendment 12: Introduce observer-independent audits.

Result: Auditors optimized out of relevance.

Amendment 19: Limit abstraction depth.

Result: Abstractions re-emerged as emergent phenomena.

Amendment 27: Ban meta-compliance.

Result: The ban became a compliance target.

The realization came too late: any sufficiently advanced civilization would either break the Accords, or become them.

#

VII. The Challenge Clause

(Colloquial name; formal designation lost)

A junior analyst (name redacted for scale safety) proposed a heretical solution:

“Stop treating civilizations like patients. Treat them like players.”

The idea was simple and obscene to the Committee:

Replace enforcement with challenge.

Introduce structured constraints that reward ingenuity without allowing runaway scaling. Make the universe a ladder with visible rungs and teeth. Failure should be survivable. Success should be temporary.

In short: gamify reality.

Objections included:

• Loss of dignity.

• Risk of exploitation.

• “This feels unserious.”

It passed by one vote during a quorum failure.

#

VIII. Implementation: The Ladder

Physical constants were not changed. That would have been crude.

Instead, interfaces were introduced:

Discoveries unlocked adjacent discoveries.

Scaling costs increased nonlinearly, visible to the actors involved.

Local maxima were made fun, discouraging reckless ascension.

Civilizations began competing, collaborating, and theory-crafting within implicit constraints. They argued about balance. They wrote guides. They min-maxed existence.

Most importantly, they talked to each other, because isolation was no longer optimal play.

The universe filled with chatter.

#

IX. Sol-3 Revisited

Humans adapted instantly.

They named the phenomenon poorly, argued about it online, and then built institutions around it. They accepted limits as mechanics.

Their scientists stopped asking, “Can we?” and started asking, “What does this unlock?”

Their philosophers reframed meaning as progression.

They never noticed the OCC fade from relevance.

This was ideal.

#

X. Final Notice of Dissolution

(Automatically issued)

The Office of Civilizational Compliance hereby declares its purpose obsolete.

The Universal Scale Accords are deprecated.

The universe no longer requires guardians, only moderators and those emerge naturally wherever systems are shared.

To any intelligence discovering this archive:

If you are reading this, you are already playing.

Please do not attempt to win.

End of Artifact Set

~

Bio:

Jane McCarthy is a storyteller, ghostwriter, poet, designer, and architect of speculative worlds. Her work explores intelligence, scale, and the hidden rules that govern systems. Search “Jane McCarthy DNA” to experience her writings and designs. Portfolio: janemccarthydna.medium.com

Philosophy Note:

In The Minutes Of Scale, I’m exploring the paradoxical hazards of intelligence: the more a civilization optimizes itself, the more it risks self-destruction across scales it cannot fully perceive. I ask whether limits are externally imposed or emergent from stable systems, and whether unbounded cleverness inevitably transforms governance into a technical substrate rather than a moral or cultural endeavor. Seeing beyond human conventions, my story treats rules, constraints, and play, as structural properties of reality, emphasizing that survival may depend on the art of constraint, rather than the avoidance of growth. Readers interested in these ideas might consider Immanuel Kant on the necessity of limits, Thomas Kuhn on paradigm shifts, Bernard Suits on games as formalized constraints, and Nick Bostrom on meta-optimization and civilization-level catastrophic risks.

Fact & Opinion

Divine Sparks In Matter

by Manjula Menon

“Who are you?” I asked.
“I am Poimandrēs,” he said, “Mind of the One; I know what you want, and I am with you everywhere.”
I said, “I wish to learn about the things that are, to understand their nature and to know god.
How much I want to hear!”

Tractate I Poimandrēs

#

“Sometimes He Chose to Interfere”
(Olaf Stapledon)

My husband, the philosopher Anand Vaidya, died last year at the age of 48 from complications due to cancer. He was brilliant, warm and generous. His desire for authentic engagement was perhaps the thing that most drove him. He was endearingly transparent with his emotions, passionate about his beliefs, and often argued in favor of non-intuitive positions that he derived from first principles. Underneath those surface waves was an ocean of gentleness.

I know death is inevitable. A rough estimate of the number of humans who have lived prior to the current era stands at 100 billion. Yet this particular death feels like a cosmic glitch. It is not just that everything feels wrong; an even stronger sensation is that the mistake can be overturned. I can almost sense those I seek with the power to grant me what I want; they stand in a reality pulsing under ours, existing just below my threshold of perception. There is a strong sense that it is through my mind, and when I am in a particular conscious state, that communication can be achieved and my appeal answered. This sense of strangeness aligns with esoteric traditions, where consciousness reveals its primacy through glimpses we may never fully grasp.

In feeling like there exists a mysterious underpinning to the world, I’m certainly far from alone. Numerous spiritual practices and religious traditions describe reality as marvelously mysterious, perhaps even unknowable. These practices embrace radical ontologies, imagining that consciousness precedes material form, that it is not a byproduct, but a principle. In Vedantic traditions, for example, consciousness is the singular substance that brings all things, along with itself, into awareness; as Anand describes, “Vedāntins connect the Upanishadic teaching of a truest or ātman as having ‘self-illumining awareness,’ sva-prakāśa.” It is a strongly monist position, in that there is only one substance that appears to us as manifested in a multitude of ways.

Alvin Plantinga, famously argued in his 1993 work Warrant and Proper Function that in addition to purely empirical methods, a theist belief that arises in a properly functioning brain can be warranted, even if the proposition cannot be verified via empirical means. Such a belief that is furthermore held by most human beings, almost all whose brains are properly functioning, would be an even further indication that the belief is warranted (even if it cannot be empirically verified, which was his key point). Plantinga was taking aim at empiricism or what is now called “physicalism” as the sole basis for epistemological truth. Although Plantinga’s target was physicalism from a Christian apologist perspective, his argument is further strengthened when considering the additional number of humans with “proper functioning” brains that hold a broad variety of religious or spiritual beliefs. Indeed, how to account for the mind as the conscious self, has been the focus of much of Indian philosophy.

Notions from myths have found echoes in speculative fiction; take for example the unnamed main character of Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel Star Maker who encounters the titular entity: “In general the Star Maker, once he had ordained the basic principles of a cosmos and created its initial state, was content to watch the issue; but sometimes he chose to interfere, either by infringing the natural laws that he himself had ordained, or by introducing new emergent formative principles, or by influencing the minds of the creatures by direct revelation.”

That the themes in Star Maker have similarities to religious concepts were not lost on Stapledon. As he writes in the preface: “At the risk of raising thunder both on the Left and on the Right, I have occasionally used certain ideas and words derived from religion, and I have tried to interpret them in relation to modern needs.”

Stapledon’s Star Maker as a detached creator parallels the Platonic Demiurge, and later writers like Philip K. Dick built on that to explore trapped consciousness in simulated or alien worlds. Literature (especially sci-fi) and philosophy are sometimes complementary paths, both probing the “mysterious underpinning,” sometimes converging on ideas like panpsychism or epistemic expansion through narrative “what ifs.”

In a career that spanned epistemology, philosophy of mind, comparative philosophy, and logic, Anand advocated for what he sometimes called “epistemic capacity expansion”: he believed that philosophy could draw from multiple traditions and disciplines to build a more adequate and capacious understanding of reality. While inspired by this ambition, this essay stems primarily from my own explorations of consciousness that were triggered by his loss.

#

“Legends and Myths are Largely Made of ‘Truth’”
(J.R.R. Tolkien)

The Western esoteric traditions often invoked the idea that the conscious self is constituted of other parts, including a divine, eternal part, which was often translated into English as “soul.” The soul yearned to be free of the corporeal body and reunite with the divine.

Trained as an analytic philosopher, Anand was drawn to philosophically rigorous Indian traditions such as Vedānta which posit consciousness, not as a byproduct of matter, but as the ground of existence itself. Here one can see a striking parallel with the Hermetic idea of “Nous” or divine Mind, from which all reality emanates, and with Plato’s “Form of the Good” as the source of illumination. To be clear, Anand did not reference the Western esoteric tradition in his work; this connection and all the ones succeeding it are mine alone.

Anand argued that Rāmānuja’s qualified non-dualism, Viśiṣṭādvaita, offers a “cosmopsychist” framework where consciousness isn’t fragmented into parts but unified in a cosmic whole, much like analytic panpsychism posits mind as inherent in matter. He writes: “The self is not a mere epiphenomenon but the very substance of reality, qualified by attributes yet non-separate from the whole.” He offered the approach as a lens through which to discuss the “combination problem” in panpsychism by treating individual awareness as modes of a singular, pervasive consciousness.

Anand’s engagement with panpsychism and cosmopsychism, views that attribute consciousness either to all matter or to the cosmos as a whole, recall themes from Western esotericism. The Hermetic vision of a universal soul, the Neoplatonic hierarchy flowing from the One, and the Gnostic claim of divine sparks trapped in matter all anticipate the possibility that consciousness pervades the fabric of existence.

As for science fiction, Anand was co-founder of the Society for Science Fiction and Philosophy; his interest in the field stemmed from its potential to illustrate philosophical concepts through story. In this context, I will briefly mention the 19th-20th century English author of speculative fiction, J.R.R. Tolkien (though he is not considered a science fiction writer). The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that all European philosophy could be read as a series of footnotes to the 4th century BC Greek philosopher, Plato. Likewise, I sometimes think that all of Fantasy can be described as inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien; his influence on the genre simply cannot be overstated. Tolkien’s work draws heavily from Catholic theology and North European pagan myths; he writes, “After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth,’ and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.”

It is the spirit of Tolkien as truth in a tale that I will now introduce the cosmogony and metaphysics of the Western Esoteric tradition: as explorations of truth presented in a way we can understand. The idea that we as humans make sense of things through story probably feels prima facie accurate to most people; we all construct narratives around events and identities as we make our way through life. Tolkien’s point, however, is more of a metaphysical nature; he means that these legends and myths can inform as to the truth about the fundamental nature of reality.

#

“Neither Mind nor Matter”
(Olaf Stapledon)

In addition to all European philosophy, Whitehead might just as well have made the same claim that all the Western esoteric tradition can be read as a series of footnotes to Plato. Plato argued in the Phaedo that the highest reality was non-physical and timeless, containing the unchanging ideal Forms, or “essences,” of everything that exists (an essence is a property of a thing such that if it were changed, that thing would no longer be that thing). He argued in the Republic that everything in the physical world is but a “likeness of an eternal model” and is less real or pure; all cups, for example, have the form of “cup-ness” which are imperfect imitations of the Form of cup-ness that exists in the world of ideal Forms. Above all the ideal Forms is the “Form of the Good,” which illuminates all the others below it. This ideal Form of the Good can be viewed as the First Principle or First Source.

Plato describes the physical world was created by a benevolent, rational, intelligent “Demiurge” from the Greek dēmiourgos or in English “artisan.” The Demiurge used the world of the Forms as a model to construct from the preexisting chaos, the physical world we perceive. In addition to matter, the Demiurge also created living things that are imbued with divine rationality and psyche or soul (this soul or psyche is the “essence” of a person).

For Plato, only mankind has a rational soul that is capable of “grasping” or understanding the ideal Forms behind the perceived everyday reality. This was achieved through dialectic, ethical, and philosophical reasoning and only philosophers could grasp the highest Form of all, the Form of the Good (which was why Plato believed that only philosophers should be allowed to rule). Only the souls who’d grasped true knowledge could “recall” their true divine nature (as souls predated the body and had once beheld the Forms). Upon death of the body, the (immortal) soul would return to the world of the Forms as pure contemplation. This theme of “recalling” truth echoes through the Western esoteric tradition.

Souls unable to grasp the Form of the Good would be forced to endure continued entrapment in material bodies as described in the Phaedo: “… these must be the souls, not of the good, but of the evil, who are compelled to wander about such places in payment of the penalty of their former evil way of life; and they continue to wander until the desire which haunts them is satisfied and they are imprisoned in another body.” This struggle for reunification with the divine is echoed in the esoteric traditions that followed Plato.

I will briefly note that Plato’s cosmology shares similarities with earlier traditions, such as those of the Orphics as described by Neoplatonists like Olympiodorus. Likewise, while Pythagoras emphasized the role of mathematics as fundamental to reality, he was also an advocate of metempsychosis and believed that the soul’s fate was tied to its actions in life. I will further note that very little of the writings of the Orphics survive except for the Orphic Hymns, and as for the Pythagoreans, almost everything we know about their views is from later scholars (including Plato and Aristotle).

Neoplatonists (like the 3rd century AD Plotinus) later developed an explicitly monist metaphysics. They located the Platonic Forms within the Nous, a divine intellect emanating from the One, the unchanging, timeless source of all existence. While the Neoplatonists’ Nous recalls Plato’s Demiurge, its role here is different. The Nous emanated an intermediary, the World Soul, which in turn animates and forms the material cosmos by imprinting it with the ideal forms. Neoplatonic cosmology was thus hierarchical and emanationist, with the ineffable One at the top and inert matter at the bottom (One → Nous → World Soul → Matter). Individual souls, having descended into embodiment due to an audacious desire for independence and material pleasure, struggled to return to the One through purification, contemplation, and philosophical discipline, undergoing cycles of reincarnation until ready to reunite with the divine source.

Stapledon’s Star Maker recalls the monism of the Neoplatonists; the Star Maker creates a cosmos thus: “First he conceived from the depth of his own being a something, neither mind nor matter, but rich in potentiality, and in suggestive traits, gleams, hints for his creative imagination. Over this fine substance for a long while he pondered. It was a medium in which the one and the many demanded to be most subtly dependent upon one another; in which all parts and all characters must pervade and be pervaded by all other parts and all other characters; in which each thing must seemingly be but an influence in all other things; and yet the whole must be no other than the sum of all its parts, and each part an all-pervading determination of the whole. It was a cosmical substance in which any individual spirit must be, mysteriously, at once an absolute self and a mere figment of the whole.”

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges famously explored the nature of infinity; The Library of Babel (1941), for example, imagines an infinite library containing every possible book. Borges explicitly evokes the mystical in his Aleph (1945): “All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols … Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction …What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive.”

For Plotinus, unlike Plato, reunification with the One goes beyond discursive reason. While philosophical reasoning and ethical living prepares the soul, the final “grasping” is a mystical, experiential vision, a direct, non-dual intuition of the divine: an existential transformation and not just intellectual understanding as per Plato. Like Vedānta’s cycle of emanation and return, Plotinus’s offers a vision of descent and return to the One through direct experiential apprehension.

#

“Sparks of Living, Fiery Spirit”
(David Lindsay)

Modern scholars attribute The Hermetica to the period of Greek rule in Egypt (from the early 4th century BC through around 30 BC). The Corpus Hermeticum, the metaphysical section of the work, is believed to have been composed later, approximately 100 and 300 AD, during the Roman rule of Egypt.

That such a syncretic work emerged in Egypt is unsurprising. Egypt was home to one of the oldest great civilizations, dating back to 3150 BC. Native Egyptians ruled for millennia till the kingdom fell to the Persian Achaemenid Empire who dominated it for over a century (with a brief interlude when the native Egyptians retook control). Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BC, and one of Alexander’s generals, Ptolemy I Soter, declared himself Pharaoh. His descendants, the Ptolemies, ruled Egypt for roughly 300 years until the Roman emperor Octavian (later Augustus) defeated the forces of the last Ptolemaic monarch, Queen Cleopatra VII, and her Roman ally, the general and Stoic Mark Antony. Byzantine Roman rule continued for several centuries, until Egypt was conquered by Islamic forces in 641 AD and absorbed into the Rashidun Caliphate.

The Corpus Hermeticum combines Greek, Egyptian, and Christian concepts. It is presented as the teachings of the legendary sage Hermes Trismegistus (“Hermes Thrice Greatest”). Hermes Trismegistus is a syncretic figure, blending the Greek god Hermes (messenger of the gods) and the Egyptian god Thoth (god of wisdom, writing, and magic). The Tractate I Poimandrēs is the first book of the Corpus; it opens with Hermes Trismegistus going into a deep trance-like state, where he encounters “an enormous being, completely unbounded in size” (see quote in the preamble).

Poimandrēs is the Mind of the Supreme Principle or the Mind of the One. Poimandrēs describes the One as a “clear and joyful light.” Opposed to this Light was unformed matter, represented as dark and chaotic. Hermes is commanded by Poimandrēs to “understand the light” and to “recognize it.” This direct apprehension of the Mind of the One as a mystical experience is central to the Hermetic tradition.

The Mind is described as having generated a Logos or Word, which enabled the ordering and differentiation of the primal substance into fire, air, and denser matter (water and earth). This cosmogony echoes an Egyptian creation myth in which Ptah creates the world by conceiving it in his heart (where the Egyptians thought the conscious self resided) and speaking it into being.

The Mind next gave rise to the Demiurgus (recalling Plato), as personified by the Sun. The Demiurgus, working through the Word, formed the seven celestial spheres or planets from fire and air, each endowed with specific characteristics. These spheres govern the cosmos below and influence human destiny, as elaborated in Hermetic astrology (which plays an important role in the tradition). The Mind then created Anthropos, the divine Man or archetypal Human. This being descended through the planetary spheres, acquiring traits from each until it reached the realm of dense matter. There, captivated by the beauty of nature, it united with the material world.

Humanity is thus bipartite (or tripartite-lite) in nature: composed of a gross, mortal body (formed of matter), a spirit that encompasses personality traits (shaped by planetary forces, but still considered to be partially corporeal), and a non-corporeal, immortal soul. At death, the body decomposes, the spirit dissolves into the cosmos, and the soul, if it has attained recognition of its divine origin, ascends through the planetary spheres to rejoin the universal Mind or Nous. This framework closely parallels Gnostic Christian anthropology, in which humans are made of both corruptible matter and incorruptible spirit.

According to The Corpus Hermeticum, the purpose of life is to awaken to one’s divine essence. This awakening is made possible when the divine Mind enters a person, but this occurs only if the person has lived a virtuous life. Thus, self-knowledge and ethical conduct are prerequisites for the understanding of true reality that is required for spiritual ascent.

The ideas of Plato also influenced the work of the Christian Gnostics active in the first few centuries AD in cosmopolitan Hellenistic Egypt, contemporaneous to the authors of The Corpus Hermeticum. Often presented as secret teachings, they formed an alternative interpretive tradition that eventually came into conflict with proto-orthodox Christianity and were excluded from the developing biblical canon. Before the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi collection in Egypt (estimated to be from the 4th century AD), most of what was known about the Gnostics came from the writings of their detractors, in particular, Saint Irenaeus’s influential Against Heresies, written around 180 AD.

Though condemned as heretical by the early Church, the Gnostics continued to dramatize knowledge as liberation and their image of divine sparks trapped in matter, awaiting release through insight, has striking affinities with Neoplatonist and Indian traditions. In Advaita Vedānta, for example, the self, ātman, is seen as obscured by ignorance, yet identical in essence with ultimate reality, Brahman. In both cases, salvation or liberation involves a transformation of awareness, a shift in consciousness that reveals a deeper truth already present.

The Gospel of Truth, said to have been written in the second half of the 2nd century AD by Valentinus or his followers, for example, claimed to be a secret teaching from Paul the Apostle, passed down to his disciple Theudas, and then onto Valentinus.

Valentinus offered an emanationist cosmology rooted in a single divine source or self, similar in concept to the Monad later developed by the Neoplatonists. From this supreme Godhead emanated thirty spiritual beings called aeons, who dwelled and comprised the divine pleroma (the ideal, divine realm, as distinct from the material world). Though originating from the Monad, the aeons could not fully comprehend its essence. One of them, Sophia, in her attempt to grasp the unknowable Monad, fell into error, and produced a flawed intermediary being. From this intermediary came the demiurge, who created the material world. This is not the benevolent demiurge of The Hermetica, however.

Ignorant of the higher realms, the demiurge fashioned the universe we perceive: an imperfect and suffering-laden world in which divine sparks, fragments of the pleroma, became trapped in matter. According to Valentinus, Christ was an aeon who descended from the pleroma and entered the man Jesus, bringing the “gnosis” or knowledge to mankind that would allow for the divine sparks to ascend and reunite with the Monad. However, only those born with such a spark, the spiritual ones, could experience the understanding of this true knowledge. This pre-ordainment has similarities with the Calvinist concept of “grace,” where one either has grace (and therefore the capacity for faith) and to a lesser degree with Plato’s notion that only philosophers (through the deployment of reason) earn true knowledge and soteriology. Unlike Valentinus, his contemporary Basilides (according to Irenaeus, as there are no extant works from Basilides himself) emphasized a more universalist soteriology, teaching that all souls have the potential to ascend through the heavens and reunite with the divine source through “gnosis” or knowledge. Basilides explicitly referred to reincarnation as how souls who failed to attain gnosis could return in new bodies and try again.

The Apocryphon of John, likewise claimed to have been an esoteric teaching from an apostle’s revelatory vision to an inner circle of their disciples, in this case, the Apostle John. It similarly describes a cycle of birth and rebirth till the “fetters” are unshackled through gnosis, and the soul is allowed to reunite with the divine. In general, the Gnostics appear to agree that the malaise affecting humanity can be construed as a spiritual “forgetting” (recalling Plato) that can only be cured by a direct experience of True Knowledge or gnosis.

Philip K. Dick frequently engaged with the ideas from Gnostic works, particularly the concept of a flawed, deceptive material world created by a lesser, malevolent deity (the Demiurge) and the pursuit of hidden knowledge (gnosis) to achieve spiritual liberation. His novel VALIS, which stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, is a central text in this exploration, presenting a Gnostic vision of God and drawing heavily on his personal experiences. Other works by Dick, such as The Cosmic Puppets, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Ubik, also feature our reality as a false perception shaped by a controlling force.

Another example is the British writer David Lindsay’s 1920 cult favorite A Voyage to Arcturus; Tolkien cited it as an influence. The novel is set on the planet Tormance orbiting a double star, the titular Arcturus, around 37 light years from Earth. The main character, Maskull, is on a voyage to find Muspel (the name pays homage to the Scandinavian myths’ realm of fire, Muspelheim). The voyage is a metaphor for spiritual awakening and gnosis (direct, experiential knowledge), that aims to transcend illusion and return to the divine source. True reality emanates from Muspel as divine light, but a malevolent entity, Crystalman, acts as a lens (crystal) distorting Muspel’s light and creating the material world with all its pain and beauty. Souls are in a constant struggle towards the transcendent, true spiritual realm (Muspel) but are thwarted by a deceptive, flawed material world created by a lower power (Crystalman, the Demiurge):

“It appeared as if the whirls of white light, which were the individuals, and plainly showed themselves beneath the enveloping bodies, were delighted with existence and wished only to enjoy it, but the green corpuscles were in a condition of eternal discontent, yet, blind and not knowing which way to turn for liberation, kept changing form, as though breaking a new path, by way of experiment. Whenever the old grotesque became metamorphosed into the new grotesque, it was in every case the direct work of the green atoms, trying to escape towards Muskel, but encountering immediate opposition. These subdivided sparks of living, fiery spirit were hopelessly imprisoned in a ghastly mush of soft pleasure.”

The novel also recalls themes from Buddhism as noted in E.H. Visiak’s introduction: “In fact, the resemblance of the Arcturan to the Buddhistic teleology goes further, since pleasure, according to one, and desire according to the other, is the cause and maintaining principal of our terrestrial existence.”

#

“Outlive All You Loved”
(Edward Bulwer-Lytton)

I’ll briefly mention “Theo”-“sophy,” or the “wisdom religion” from the Greek, which arose in the late 1800s. Mostly based on the writings of the Russian aristocrat Helena Blavatsky, it became popular in the late part of the 19th century in Europe. Although Blavatsky initially identified as a spiritualist, which is to say she held seances and claimed to communicate with the dead, she soon began writing about an ancient, universal wisdom-religion, a syncretic work sourced from esoteric traditions across the globe.

From Middle Eastern traditions, for example, she drew from Sufi concepts like fitra (which emphasized that all humans had within them innate, primordial knowledge of God that we can learn to remember and come to know God again) and Kabbalistic ideas such as the nitzotz elokut (divine spark within the soul). As described in Blavatsky’s The Key to Theosophy and The Secret Doctrine, the divine spark animates all beings, urging a transformative awakening akin to the esoteric path of gnosis, where knowledge reunites the self with the cosmic whole.

Blavatsky (and Theosophy) fell out of favor after a report claiming her to be a fraud, but its synthesis of East and West in pursuit of hidden truths profoundly influenced modern New Age and spiritual movements including those that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s.

Blavatsky cited the 1842 proto-sci-fi novel Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton as especially important to Theosophy. Lytton, though not well known today, coined several phrases that remain in wide use, including “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and his work was admired by contemporaries like Charles Dickens and later writers like C.S. Lewis.

In Zanoni, Lytton turns the metaphysical intuitions of esotericism into dramatic narrative, set against a love story and revolutionary backdrop. The titular Zanoni is a mystic adept of the Rosicrucian order. He is ambivalent about his powers, responding to the Englishman Clarence Glynton, who is on a quest for Rosicrucian gnosis and immortality: “… would it be so sweet a lot to outlive all you loved, and to recoil from every human tie?”

#

“Do You Believe that HAL Has Genuine Emotions?”
(2001: A Space Odyssey)

These esoteric ideas would follow us into modernity. In the field of artificial intelligence, Anand prompted for “epistemic humility,” asked if it was time for us to think about rights for machines with a bounded form of consciousness, and wondered if LLMs are “natural born bullshitters.” Anand insisted that these conversations bear directly on the future, connecting to philosophical questions about how we conceive minds that are unlike ours: artificial intelligences, non-human animals, or alien forms of subjectivity.

If, as Western esotericism and the Upaniṣads suggest, consciousness is a universal ground rather than a biological accident, then the rise of machine intelligence may confront us with a paradox: are we, like demiurges, building vessels for that ground to express itself, or are we merely making mirrors without a light behind them?

Esoteric views (Hermetic Nous, Gnostic sparks, Theosophical divine essence) treat consciousness as pervasive and emanative, not confined to biology but infusing any suitable “vessel.” If humans, as creators (Demiurgus-like), build AI with intentional structures (to give just one example, Google’s AlphaEvolve has shown some very limited success as a precursor to advanced recursive algorithms that allow for artificial general intelligence), could it “descend” a spark: a bounded awareness emerging from code?

To be clear, Anand made no attempt to connect his work on AI with the Hermetic and Gnostic notion of divine spark trapped in matter, these are speculations of my own. However, he might have made a philosophical connection to panpsychism debates: if mind pervades matter, why not circuits? Likewise, if divine sparks can be trapped in matter, why not in a thinking machine? The esoteric traditions do not limit the divine to carbon.

Numerous science fiction works have explored the notion of a machine mind, the most famous of which is likely Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL, as depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Anand raised the example of HAL in his paper “Can Machines Have Emotions?”:

“Interviewer: Do you believe that HAL has genuine emotions?
Frank Poole: Well he acts like he has genuine emotions. Of course, he is programmed that way to make it easier to for us to talk to him. But as to whether or not he has real feelings is something that I don’t think anyone can truthfully answer.
–––––––
HAL: Dave, stop it. Stop it, will you. Stop, Dave…
HAL: I am afraid.
HAL: Dave my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.”
2001: A Space Odyssey –Stanley Kubrick.

#

“Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology is Indistinguishable from Magic”
(Arthur C. Clarke)

Seen together, these moments in the Western esoteric tradition form a sequence: Plato giving philosophy its dual gaze of reason and ascent, the Gnostics weaving insight into myth, the Neoplatonists giving it systematic depth, and Theosophy groping toward a modern synthesis. The Western esoteric tradition insists that knowing reality requires a transformation of the knower; Anand’s scholarship, whether in panpsychism, Nyāya, or Vedānta, pushed philosophy toward that same recognition, and writers of speculative fictions used it to construct their stories. All sought to reveal that to know is to be transformed.

In the end, Anand’s project was about what he called the expansion of our epistemic capacities. He refused to treat cross-cultural philosophy as exotic comparison; in his own work, he showed how rigor and openness could meet as he attempted to put modern analytic philosophy in conversation with Indian philosophy.

After Anand’s death, I found myself drawn to explorations of consciousness. This research resulted in a series of personal essays, of which this is one. Although Anand and I grew up in the Hindu tradition, we both claimed to be agnostic. Indian philosophy first drew Anand’s interest because of the epistemological rigor of the Nyāya tradition (incidentally, unlike Vedānta, it holds that consciousness is a contingent property of the embodied self) and when we discussed his work, it was usually to explore a thesis through argument. These days, however, I have grown increasingly interested in the “mysteries” as they were referred to in the esoteric traditions, and their insistence that the door to the nature of ultimate reality can be opened only through direct experience.

I remember a conversation with Anand from a few years ago. We were discussing the modern political climate, and he made an analogy with optical illusion. In the Rubin Vase, for example, one either sees the central vase or the two silhouetted faces, but never at the same time. Anand’s point was that in a similar way, opposing political camps now “see” reality as being one thing or the other, with almost no overlap. Further extending Anand’s analogy, I similarly have two ways of understanding consciousness: (1) It is merely an evolutionary trick to aid survival or (2) It is the gateway to unlocking cosmic truth through reason, ethics, and the direct apprehension of the ineffable. I understand this binary might be false, consciousness could be both adaptation and bridge, but it still feels like an impasse.

I know Anand has died, yet I have asked him to give me a sign, something that would help me resolve this epistemological quagmire. I’ve seen him in my dreams, but he knew well my skeptical mind, and would know that I would find dreams easy to dismiss. The risk for a skeptic like me is that even if I’m given such a sign, I will not recognize it. Almost everything can be rationalized away, even things that appear to defy the laws of physics; as Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law puts it: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Still, I was comforted to read the work of so many great thinkers, who over so many millennia and geographies, and with the utmost sincerity, devoted their formidable intellects towards offering explanations for one of the universe’s greatest mysteries: the nature of our own conscious selves.

Given how large Plato looms, I will give him the last word, as he perfectly encapsulates the motivation for this essay. In the Phaedo, Socrates argues that the soul is immortal even as he prepares for death: “Now the partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions. And the difference between him and me at the present moment is merely this — that whereas he seeks to convince his hearers that what he says is true, I am rather seeking to convince myself; to convince my hearers is a secondary matter with me. And do but see how much I gain by the argument. For if what I say is true, then I do well to be persuaded of the truth; but if there be nothing after death, still, during the short time that remains, I shall not distress my friends with lamentations, and my ignorance will not last, but will die with me …”

#

References

Blavatsky, H. P. (1920). The key to theosophy (3rd ed.). The Theosophical Publishing House. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.166760/page/n137/mode/1up

Borges, J. L. (1974). Fictions (A. Kerrigan, Ed. & Intro.). Calder & Boyars. https://archive.org/details/fictions0000borg_s7w0/page/72/mode/2up

Borges, J. L. (1981). A Borges reader: Selected writings (E. R. Monegal & A. Reid, Eds.). E. P. Dutton. https://archive.org/details/borgesreadersele0000borg_g4u9/page/160/mode/1up

Bulwer-Lytton, E. (1842). Zanoni. Saunders and Otley. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_5lpxj4SFTUwC/page/n107/mode/2up

Carpenter, H. (Ed.). (1981). The letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (selected and edited by Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien). Houghton Mifflin. https://archive.org/details/lettersofjrrtolk00tolk_1/page/147/mode/1up

Clarke, A. C. (1973). Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (Rev. ed.). Harper & Row. https://archive.org/details/profilesoffuture0000clar/page/21/mode/1up

Copenhaver, B. P. (1992). Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction. Cambridge University Press. https://archive.org/details/hermetica-_-the-greek-corpus-hermeticum-and-the-latin-asclepius-in-a-new-english/page/1/mode/1up

https://archive.org/details/hermetica-_-the-greek-corpus-hermeticum-and-the-latin-asclepius-in-a-new-english/page/2/mode/1up

Cornford, F. M. (1937). Plato’s cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato translated with a running commentary. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd. https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.18654/page/23/mode/1up

Dick, P. K. (1981). VALIS. Bantam Books. https://archive.org/details/valistrilogy00dick

Gerson, L. P. (Ed.). (2018). Plotinus: The Enneads (Boys-Stones, Dillon, Gerson, King, Smith, & Wilberding, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.

https://archive.org/details/gerson-the-enneads-en-2018/page/533/mode/1up

https://archive.org/details/gerson-the-enneads-en-2018/page/895/mode/1up

https://archive.org/details/gerson-the-enneads-en-2018/page/896/mode/1up

Grant, R. M. (Ed.). (1961). Gnosticism: A source book of heretical writings from the early Christian period. Harper & Brothers.

https://archive.org/details/gnosticismsource00granrich/page/21/mode/1up

https://archive.org/details/gnosticismsource00granrich/page/213/mode/1up

https://archive.org/details/gnosticismsource00granrich/page/216/mode/1up

Hodgson, R. (1885). Report of the committee appointed to investigate phenomena connected with the Theosophical Society. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 3, 201–400. https://archive.org/details/societyforpsychi0000unse/page/201/mode/1up

Irenaeus, Saint, Bishop of Lyons. (1872). Five books of S. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, against heresies (J. Keble, Trans.). J. Parker. https://archive.org/details/fivebooksofsiren42iren/page/n8/mode/1up

Lindsay, D. (1920). A Voyage to Arcturus. Methuen & Co. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.219659/page/n7/mode/1up

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.219659/page/n240/mode/1up

Menon, M. (2023, June 23). Truth embedded in a tale: Stories of utopia from philosophers of the early modern period. SciPhi Journal. https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2023/06/23/truth-embedded-in-a-tale-stories-of-utopia-from-philosophers-of-the-early-modern-period/

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. (n.d.). Rubin’s vase. Illusions Index. https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/rubin-s-vase

Plantinga, A. (1993). Warrant and Proper Function. Oxford University Press. https://archive.org/details/warrantandproperfunctionplantinga/page/n249/mode/1up

Plato. (1892). Phaedo (B. Jowett, Trans.). Oxford: Macmillan and Co. https://archive.org/details/dialoguesofplato18922plat/page/225/mode/1up

https://archive.org/details/dialoguesofplato18922plat/page/216/mode/1up

https://archive.org/details/dialoguesofplato18922plat/page/220/mode/1up

https://archive.org/details/dialoguesofplato18922plat/page/226/mode/1up

https://archive.org/details/dialoguesofplato18922plat/page/254/mode/1up

https://archive.org/details/dialoguesofplato18922plat/page/235/mode/1up

Population Reference Bureau. (2022, November 15). How many people have ever lived on Earth? https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/

Reeve, C. D. C. (1988). Philosopher-kings: The argument of Plato’s Republic. Princeton University. https://archive.org/details/philosopherkings0000unse/page/n6/mode/1up

Society for Science Fiction and Philosophy. (2024, March 22). The Science Fiction and Philosophy Society: An introduction. SciPhi Journal. https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2024/03/22/the-science-fiction-and-philosophy-society-an-introduction/

Stapledon, O. (1972). Star Maker (Original work published 1937). Penguin Books. http://archive.org/details/starmaker00stap/page/8/mode/1up

https://archive.org/details/starmaker00stap/page/248/mode/1up

http://archive.org/details/starmaker00stap/page/241/mode/1up

Vaidya, A. (n.d.). Personal website. https://anandvaidya.weebly.com/

Vaidya, A. (2017). Epistemology in classical Indian philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-india/

Vaidya, A. (2020). Rāmānuja’s cosmopsychist/panentheistic solution to the hard problem of consciousness. Religious Studies, 56(4), 614–628. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/religious-studies/article/ramanujas-cosmopsychistpanentheistic-solution-to-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/B07C9E8C0D185CA3A1DEBAA119EC4A74

Vaidya, A. (2020, February 13). If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off? The moral implications of building true AIs. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/if-a-robot-is-conscious-is-it-ok-to-turn-it-off-the-moral-implications-of-building-true-ais-130453

Vaidya, A. (2023, July 25). Large language models and the concept of bullshit. The Philosophers’ Magazine. https://philosophersmag.com/large-language-models-and-the-concept-of-bullshit/

Vaidya, A.J. (2024, August 30) Can machines have emotions?. AI & Soc 40, 2029–2044 https://anandvaidya.weebly.com/uploads/4/6/2/3/46231965/cmhe.pdf

Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology (Gifford lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh during the session 1927–28). The Macmillan Company. https://archive.org/details/processrealityes0000unse/page/63/mode/1up

~

Bio:

Manjula Menon once worked as an electrical engineer in Brussels, which makes publishing essays in Sci Phi Journal her “homecoming of sorts”. A list of her other publications can be found at www.manjulamenon.com.

Fact & Opinion

Of Speaking With Forked Tongues

Religious Traditions and Speculative Fiction on Hypocrisy

by Manjula Menon

One of the most admired novels of all time is George Orwell’s 1945 work of speculative fiction, Animal Farm. The novel describes a revolt by farm animals, led by pigs, against their loutish human masters. After the animals win control of “Manor Farm”, the pigs swiftly install themselves as the new overseers. The virtuous slogans and uplifting songs that had originally been created in earnest soon become tools of control, as the pigs reveal themselves to be even more cruel than the humans they’d replaced. The ruling pigs, it turned out, had cynically “performed” virtue to seize power. Thus, the pigs were hypocrites.^[1]

Influential works of speculative fiction are well known to take philosophical stands, many of which can be encapsulated by the idiom ‘All is fair in love and war’. Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, to give just one example,explores how a libertarian leaning society responds to war. Animal Farm, on the other hand, is usually described as a satirical allegory of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, with the novel’s main characters representing historical counterparts. However, given that immediately prior to writing Animal Farm, Orwell’s creative energies had been focused on writing propaganda radio pieces for the BBC for broadcast to Indian audiences, it should at least be considered that “Manor Farm” represents the British Dominion, the farm animals stand in for colonial subjects, and the human farmers symbolize the Imperial administration.

Orwell’s connections to British India are several. Born in Bengal as Eric Blair in 1903, he chose George Orwell as his literary pseudonym later in life. After a childhood back in England, at the age of 19, Orwell applied for and obtained a position with the Indian Imperial Police, then returned to British India, working as a police officer for five years in Mandalay, Burma. Orwell wrote a novel based on his time there, Burmese Days, a brutal, semi-autobiographical tale of cruelty, venality and corruption that is at least as dark as his later, more famous works. But the novel is also about alienation, the leaden, angry loneliness of a sensitive young man, adrift in a world whose warp and weft are pettiness and hypocrisy.^[2]From Burmese Days and other works drawn from his time in Burma, it appears that Orwell was ambivalent about the British imperial project. He nevertheless produced propaganda for the BBC during the second world war, after which he targeted the new enemy: communism. Animal Farm can be read as a warning to subjects of the British empire, both in the colonies and at home, not to fall for the machinations of the virtue-signaling hypocrites who only seek power for themselves.

The etymology of the word “hypocrite” reveals a Greek origin: hypókrisis, “playing a part on the stage, pretending to be something one is not”. In the modern era, the word is used more narrowly, to describe a person who outwardly pretends to be pious or virtuous to further their own material interests. Prior to his wartime propaganda work, Orwell’s talents had been focused on writing semi-autobiographical pieces, but post war, while the style, tone and mood of the works are similar, he became focused on showing how cynical actors use hypocrisy to obtain and retain political power. His later works are masterpieces in using speculative fiction to critique specific political philosophies. In his 1948 novel, 1984, for example, a monstrous regime ruthlessly monitors and controls every action, while mandating the mouthing of virtuous slogans. 1984 is a terrifying tale of grinding loneliness and crushing dread, set against a background of cruelty, tyranny and, indeed, hypocrisy.^[3]

Whether it is by describing the pigs who use the other animals to achieve power in Animal Farm, or by detailing how the leaders of 1984 subdue the frightened masses with vacuous slogans and platitudes, Orwell’s speculative fiction aims to persuade. Orwell despises hypocrites who ruthlessly pursue power by pretending to be virtuous, and after reading his superbly executed “show-don’t-tell” works of speculative fiction, the reader feels the same way. Orwell achieves this not by describing mere self-aggrandizement; it is the rare person who has not even slightly embellished, by omission or exaggeration, their own achievements. Neither is he describing outright deceit or fraud. Rather, it is naked self-interest cloaked in showy virtuosness, the hallmark of hypocrisy, that he is aiming for.

The modern notion of a hypocrite as that of a person with societal power and influence, one who publicly decries and penalizes others for not demonstrating sufficient piety, all the while doing whatever they wish in private, is at least in theory universally known and reviled. But where did this idea of a hypocrite originate? And is there something particular about the current moment that might warrant returning the idea to prominence?

In Part II of The Nicomachean Ethics, the 4^th century Greek philosopher Aristotle made a distinction between universally held ethical principles that do not vary across cultures and customs, versus ethical principles based on local convention: “… the rules of justice ordained not by nature but by man are not the same in all places, since forms of government are not the same …”, ^[4]going on to list adultery, theft and murder as behaviors that would always be considered wrong.^[5] To Aristotle’s list of universally despised behaviors, I will add a disdain for those who signal, but do not practice, virtue. One of the reasons that Orwell’s novels continue to be so popular is that nobody has ever liked a hypocrite.

That the revulsion for hypocrites is not merely a modern phenomenon can be verified by reading the works of the world’s major religions, where remarks against false piety can be found. The original works have spawned several English translations each, so for the purposes of this essay, I have drawn on ones that are easily accessible and widely known.

The Buddhist text Dhammapada is a compilation of the sayings of the Buddha, estimated to have lived 6^th or 5^th BC in modern-day Nepal and India. The Dhammapada asks in Chapter 26, 394: What is the use of platted hair, O fool! what of the raiment of goat-skins? Within thee there is ravening, but the outside thou makest clean.^[6]

Likewise, the Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, estimated to be anywhere from 7000 – 400 BCE, India, offers remarks against false piety.

“Led astray by many thoughts, entangled in a net of delusion, addicted to the gratification of desires—they fall into an impure hell.

Self-conceited, obstinate, full of intoxication and pride of wealth—they perform merely nominal sacrifices with deceit and without following proper rules.” ^[7]

The Jewish Pentateuch hails from around 1500 – 400 BCE and arose in the area of modern-day Israel. The Pentateuch, in Jeremiah, 7, 9-10, also invokes the idea of hypocrisy as when the Lord asks of his people:

9 How will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Ba’al, and walk after other gods of which ye have had no knowledge;

10 And (then) come and stand before my presence in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ” We are delivered;” in order to do all these abominations?^[8]

The books of the other Abrahamic religions are more direct. The Islamic holy book, the Quran, from the 7^th century AD, modern-day Saudi Arabia, has an entire section, the 63rd sura, the title of which is usually translated into English as “The Hypocrites”. Verse 4 of this sura describes hypocrites thus:

“4 When you see them, their outward appearance pleases you; when they speak, you listen to what they say. But they are like propped-up timbers—they think every cry they hear is against them—and they are the enemy. Beware of them. May God confound them! How devious they are!”^[9]

Among all the major religions, however, it is the Gospels of the Christian Bible, written in 1^st century AD, modern day Syria, Turkey and Israel, that have most to say about hypocrites and hypocrisy. Given the Bible’s enormous influence on global culture, this is likely where the modern sense of the word is derived from. Hypocrites are described in the Gospels as the powerful elites of the day, who penalized others for not following the laws and rules that they did not follow themselves. As in the modern sense, the biblical notion of hypocrisy involves the thicker notion of virtue-signaling elites. Take for example, Matthew Chapter 23 in which Jesus warns against hypocrites:

Matthew 23, 3: “All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.” ^[10]

Matthew 23, 28: “Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”^[10]

Distrust of institutions is widespread and growing as evidenced by the many political upheavals observed around the world. One modern-day institution that stands accused of hypocrisy is the global news media. Television news has a similar feel the world over, featuring strident brass and percussion lead-ins, “breaking news” chyrons playing in an endless loop, and news segments presented by powdered and coiffed anchors who subtly move their heads in singular ways as they read from their teleprompters. Modern media professionals are known to be fond of “gotcha” soundbites, where they attempt to draw a controversial statement from an interviewee. This scenario was described in Mark 12, 13-17, where an unsuccessful attempt is made for a “gotcha” from Jesus:

“13 [And] they send unto him certain of the Pharisees and of the Herodians, to catch him in his words.

14 And when they were come, they say unto him, Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth: Is it lawful to give tribute to Cesar, or not?

15 Shall we give, or shall we not give? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye me? bring me a penny, that I may see it.

16 And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Cesar’s.

17 And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Cesar the things that are Cesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And they marvelled at him.” ^[11]

What has remained true through the ages appears to be a yearning for truth, for leaders who do what they say, and practice what they preach. Modern politics, however, is rife with people who make rules for others that they themselves do not follow. This type of person is so ubiquitous in the profession, that a politician who simply refrains from performative moralizing has already distinguished themselves from the others. It is not hard to recall politicians who despite observable flaws have become enormously popular merely by not engaging in performative moralizing and therefore coming across as endearingly authentic. Leaders who speak authentically, warts and all, are increasingly seen as more trustworthy of delivering what they say they will, as opposed to those who say whatever virtuous thing they have been told to say for the cameras.

The hypocrisy of societies could be seen as the hypocrisy of individuals, writ large. In addition to the previously mentioned Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, other enormously popular works of contemporary speculative fiction describe societies who strive for fairness at home while acting without mercy in times of war. Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks and Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein both feature societies who strive for libertarian ideals while engaging in pitiless wars. In Iain Bank’s Culture series, for example, the Culture, a society presented as a post-scarcity, hedonistic utopia for those within it, is nevertheless relentless in pursuing its military and political aims. In the first novel in the series, Consider Phlebas, the Culture, led by the godlike artificial intelligences known as ‘minds’, goes to war against the alien Iridans, who in turn fight on behalf of their religion.

Likewise, the “citizens” and “civilians” who make up Robert A. Heinlein’s Terran Foundation in Starship Troopers are presented as being part of an egalitarian representative democracy, albeit one where the right to vote as a citizen is earned not by birthright, but after completing service to the state, usually in the military. Like the Culture, the Terran Federation is ruthless in pursuit of military victory.

A major feature of both works is the description of the technical wizardry used to prosecute wars. The Culture and Terrans appear to aim for a better, fairer world, but they are also heavily invested in battle technology and military assets. The contrast might strike one as hypocritical, but both works present a strawman of a scenario, viz the threats faced by these already formidably armed societies are described as existential and what are mighty militaries for if not to defend against such threats?

The Culture wields power not merely by military might, but also through a cadre of diplomats and spies who work clandestinely and ruthlessly behind the scenes to ensure victory. Unlike the Terrans, who are front and center about their military’s primal importance, the Culture’s denizens appear to be mostly disinterested in the battles being waged on their behalf. If a charge of hypocrisy can be brought, it is perhaps against those secretive agents of the Culture who justify any means towards their end, in the name of their ideals.

Whether in the sacred texts of world religions or in the pages of popular works of speculative fiction, whether focused on actions of individuals or those of societies, the theme of hypocrisy continues to resonate through time and across the world.

~

^[1] George Orwell, Animal Farm

^[2] George Orwell, Burmese Days

^[3] George Orwell, 1984

^[4] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

^[5] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

^[6] Dhammapada, Chapter XXVI

^[7] Bhagavadgita, Chapter XVI

^[8] The Pentateuch, Chapter VII

^[9] The Quran, Sura 63

^[10] The Bible, Matthew 23

^[11] The Bible, Mark 12

Bio:

Manjula Menon once worked as an electrical engineer in Brussels, which makes publishing essays in Sci Phi Journal her “homecoming of sorts”. A list of her other publications can be found at www.manjulamenon.com

Fact & Opinion

Why Warhammer Matters

by Dr Mike Ryder, Dr Thomas Arnold & Michael Dunn

We don’t know about you, but we think Warhammer is cool.

Games Workshop (GW) – the company behind Warhammer and its futuristic counterpart Warhammer 40k – is now worth in the region of £3.56 billion. The global phenomenon has grown from a small operation working out of a flat in London to become the world’s leading miniature maker, and an outstanding publisher of science fiction and fantasy, with many of its authors featuring in the New York Times list of bestsellers. In more recent years it has also licensed a whole range of popular video games including the Dawn of War series, Vermintide, and the very well received Space Marine II. GW has even signed a deal with Amazon to produce a TV series based on its IP.

And yet, for some reason, it is still an area hugely under-represented within the world of academia. Whether this is because the subject is still considered ‘niche’, or even just due to intellectual snobbishness, it is hard to say. Either way, it is something that we were keen to address. This is why in early 2024 we decided to join forces to host Warhammer Conference: the world’s first academic conference dedicated to all things Warhammer. Our aim was to test the water to see what (if any) demand there might be for ‘Academic Warhammer’, and what forms such an area of study might take.

The response was absolutely phenomenal.

As the first event of its kind, we would have been more than happy with a dozen academics sat chatting about their favourite hobby for a few days. As it turned out, we were delighted to host almost 60 talks in total, together with keynote presentations from Black Library author Victoria Hayward and none other than John Blanche, arguably one of the most influential science fiction / fantasy (SFF) artists alive today. We really couldn’t have asked for more!

Our joy at the overwhelming response was only intensified by the sheer diversity of talks presented at this inaugural event. We heard discourses by historians, physicists, statisticians, philosophers and religious studies scholars looking at various aspects of the 40k universe and what it tells us about our modern world. We also had a wonderful representation from the game studies community, with some presentations on Warhammer as a form of play, and miniaturing-as-mindfulness.

Perhaps most surprising of all, we also had talks from colleagues sharing how they have used Warhammer as a way to help treat military veterans with PTSD. We even had a talk from a former prisoner talking about how he used Warhammer as a way to cope with the trauma of incarceration, and to aid his rehabilitation.

And this was just the tip of the iceberg.

So why Warhammer? Why now?

As an organising committee (together with our colleague Philipp Schroegel) we have all been long-time fans of Warhammer, including its Fantasy, Age of Sigmar, and, of course, 40k incarnations. While we all work in slightly different areas, we have a shared interest in the philosophical underpinnings of the various Warhammer universes, and how they can be used as a sandbox for complex real-world philosophical problems.

Reading Warhammer has been a great pleasure of ours for many years. Given that philosophy, and indeed, so much of academia more broadly, is all about reflection, we had each started to reflect on this particular proclivity, together with our friends who had also enjoyed it. Two of the key questions that really started us on this academic journey were:

What ideas make Warhammer so appealing (or troubling)?
What ideas make Warhammer and Warhammer 40k such interesting worlds?

These questions led us towards several fascinating areas of enquiry regarding the underlying anthropological, political and metaphysical assumptions of the narrative; theological questions about the status of deities; psychoanalytic questions about the nature of demons and possession; and also literary questions about excess and hyperbole (which abound in the literature), as well as questions crossing game studies and narratology, such as how something can be a narrative and a setting at the same time.

Essentially, we wanted to know how much philosophy, political science, and science and technology studies could we get out of this hobby of ours? And what would that give us? Turns out, quite a lot. It is sometimes said that thinking about the things you enjoy takes the fun out of the activity. In this case, the opposite is true: bringing a whole range of academic perspectives to bear on it makes the world of Warhammer and 40K even more interesting, simply because these specialised perspectives allow us to discover even more about the fictional universe(s).

Building on these initial questions, we also believe that we can try to understand ourselves and our life-world better through Warhammer. If we follow Wilhelm Dilthey’s characterisation of the humanities as engaged in understanding cultural phenomena or practices, creative products and through them, ourselves, then the academic approach to Warhammer is a classic case of humanities scholarship and research – even extended into new fields like game studies or science and technology studies.

While this might sound very strange given the fact that Warhammer is essentially an overblown background of a game involving toy soldiers, as academics we have always used reflection-on and analysis-of cultural products and practices to understand ourselves better. In fiction we imagine (read, hear, play out) different possibilities of life, ethics, policies, trajectories of history or metaphysics. Fictional universes are mirrors, playing-fields, and the results of their times; the fact that and how we engage with them can tell us a lot about our current societies. Looking at Warhammer through this lens, it can appear as a realm into which we can escape (for sundry reasons), or it may also serve as an extreme thought-experiment; but it also gives us a case study to tackle questions of business and distribution, the social and ideological dynamics of the fandom, the corporate engagement with gender and queer themes, and the invention of new genres of art – as well as the appropriation of pre-existing themes.

As scholars, we also think philosophy ought to get out more. Our experience doing public philosophy and other forms of engagement have taught us that sometimes it is easier to engage people’s philosophical curiosity by avoiding reality. Climate change, politics, gender – all important matters, and all fraught with problematic assumptions and faulty patterns of reasoning – and, hence, philosophically interesting.

However, as we know, discussions around such matters tend to become highly emotional (and irrational) since they often pertain to people’s personal identity as well as genuine lived experience. Now, we know that Warhammer-related discussions can get very heated as well, but at the same time, Warhammer is fiction and an extreme one at that (and a huge one too). But this makes it perfect as an exhibition piece: you can show how to approach issues (even existential ones) philosophically and scientifically, that is, systematically and methodically – without the burden of real life, and in manner detached from or even alien to conventional human ethical-moral frameworks. For the public, it serves a pedagogical function, for academia, one of public relations.

Using Warhammer to think about the real world: a gruesome example.

To help us unpack this argument, let us consider the case of fictional ‘deathworlds’ and how we can apply scholarship to Warhammer and what we get out of it.[1] Deathworlds include the many cemetery worlds depicted in 40k, and the Realm of Death as it appears in the fantasy equivalent, Age of Sigmar. Both of these fictional deathworlds function as powerful narrative spaces and plot devices, made even more immersive given that they can also be played on the tabletop and in videogames.

As academics, we might use these deathworlds as ways to understand and apply complex concepts, such as Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2019): quite literally, the politics of death. By applying “necropolitical” theory to the deathworlds of Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40k, we might shed new light on the impact and implications of global genocides, and the way that so many people are given to apathetic ignorance in what Byung-Chul Han (2021) describes as the destructive death drive. The techno-theocracy of Warhammer, most aptly explored in the famous tagline “in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war,” also underscores the important role of religion as well as secular belief structures in these brutal (game)worlds. Meanwhile, religious in-game crusades mimic how apocalyptic narratives and messianic motives come to be instrumentalized as a warmongering method in creating socio-political pariahs.

There can be no escaping the fact that we face numerous, competing crises on a planetary scale, most of which have necropolitical implications. Not least in the way crises such as climate change and extremism serve to further exacerbate already existing and well ingrained forms of discrimination. The post-apocalyptic environmentalism that both taints and radically inspires our moment of modernity suggests that many of us exist after the apocalypse that continues to intensify. So what then do dystopian dreams of a post-post-post-apocalypse where death is ubiquitous have to tell audiences? Do we enjoy spending time in hyperviolent fantastical worlds to cement the certainty that it can always be worse, or is there a fetishistic fantasy at play? As the promise of billionaire playboy space colonialism emerges as a prophetic vision rooted in nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial resource extraction, perhaps cautionary tales in the form of playable interactions within aforementioned deathworlds are more important than ever.

Time to take Warhammer seriously.

There are so many different areas of study that can be applied to Warhammer that we simply cannot hope to list, even a small fraction in a short essay such as this belies how expansive the diversity of the topics truly is. If you are interested in any of the topics discussed in this article, we would strongly encourage you to consider ways that you might bring Warhammer into your research, and even your teaching. The talks from the first Warhammer Conference are already available to view on our YouTube channel @WarhammerConference, and you are more than welcome to share and use them as an entry point to this hopefully emerging field. Certainly, there’s a lot of inspiration to be found there. From the benefits of Warhammer as a teaching tool for young people, to the ways it can be used to think about political theory and complex philosophy, such as the work of Martin Heidegger and his critique of technology, ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’ (1954).

The question emerges then: where next?

Given the sheer volume of positive feedback we’ve received from academics and interested members of the public alike, a second conference is definitely something we are keen to pursue. Additionally, we are also dedicated to further publishing opportunities to put Warhammer firmly on the academic map. If you have any ideas or suggestions for where we might take this next, do please get in touch with us. As we saw from the conference, collaboration around a topic as well loved as Warhammer, can truly bear fruit across disciplinary fields.

As for those fans who fear academic interest in Warhammer as corruption or heresy, we can only present two thoughts. Firstly, scholarly approaches are simply an offer to better understand certain aspects of the hobby as well as the real world: we are not forcing anyone to accept a particular perspective, a jargon, or a world-view. Secondly – and this is the beauty of academia – we are all beholden to our respective subjects and methods, meaning that we happily take divergent opinions into consideration, if they are well-argued for and thematically relevant. We are not, after all, the Ecclesiarchy.

We would just like to close this editorial, then, by saying a big ‘thank you’ to all of the amazing researchers who contributed to the inaugural Warhammer Conference, and for proving without doubt that Warhammer is a worthy area of academic study. We would also like to thank the editors at Sci Phi Journal for inviting us to contribute this essay, and, most importantly, to you, the readers, for reading what we have to say. We hope this may be the first of many academic forays into the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40k.

References

Han, Byung-Chul. 2021. Capitalism and the Death Drive. London: Polity.

Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press.

Useful links

Conference website: www.warhammer-conference.com
Academic archive: https://warhammer-conference.com/academic-archive/
YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@warhammerconference

[1] Not to be confused with canonical Death Worlds such as Catachan.

~

Bio:

Dr Mike Ryder is Lecturer in Marketing at Lancaster University.

Dr Thomas Arnold is Assistant Professor at the Philosophical Seminar, Heidelberg University.

Michael Dunn is a Research Associate at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS), Heidelberg University.

Fiction

The Red Goldfinch Proof

by Alexander B. Joy

The aviculturist’s joy is also his heartache: To look upon the models that nature has sculpted over painstaking centuries and picture, by reflex, a more desirable alternative. Which is why, throughout the ages, bird breeders and enthusiasts alike dreamed of possessing a red American goldfinch.

The source of their yearning was easily traced. No lover of birds could look upon the goldfinch, with his stout lemon frame and stately black cap, and fail to be charmed. Neither could one behold the brilliant crimson plumage of the northern cardinal without a spark of wonder and a sigh of appreciation. From there, the alchemy of the imagination catalyzed new possibilities. The bird-lovers transposed the cardinal’s splendid red coat onto the tiny goldfinch, ruddying its yellow feathers until they took on a rutilant gleam. Their mind’s eyes widened upon conjuring the compact ruby flash the red goldfinch would make alighting on a fence or branch, and their hearts stirred whenever they envisioned the fiery flicker such a bird would add to the curves of a gilded cage.

Enterprising segments of the aviculturist discipline therefore devoted themselves to realizing this dream.

Their fancies were not without grounding. The goldfinch’s European cousin, as Fabritius made famous, had a distinct red mask; the goldfinch bloodline was evidently capable of generating the requisite pigmentation. Furthermore, countless bird species, from the scarlet macaw to the chattering lory, had proven full-body red plumage feasible in principle. Much like a mutt could combine the characteristic markings and colors of distinct breeds, it was not so outlandish a prospect that a goldfinch might wear a red coat. The red goldfinch was thus deemed an attainable specimen, and many a breeder set themselves to its pursuit.

Their efforts lasted decades upon decades, utilizing the classic techniques. Some tried to cross-breed the goldfinch with various red birds, hoping that their commingling would add more red to the goldfinch gene pool. (However, given the considerable size disparities between the goldfinch and its prospective red partners, the project soon evolved into a parallel endeavor to breed a series of steadily smaller red suitors that could satisfy the unwilling or otherwise incompatible goldfinches.) A separate coterie followed the path of Mendelian cultivation, pairing chromatically divergent members of goldfinch broods with one another while releasing into the wild those elements that expressed too vibrant a yellow. Neither method yielded appreciable results during the original practitioners’ lifetimes. But their experiments later found new champions, who carried on their fruitless toils through the years in the full understanding – and grim acceptance – that one life is too short to accomplish the work of generations.

Hopes waned in the dry century that followed, though the dream never dimmed. Onto this barren stage stepped a hero with a novel approach. He had studied the history of the red goldfinch project, and, in light of the dearth of results that bird breeding had yielded, determined that it was necessary to try an entirely different tack. He proposed an oblique strategy: To seek the red goldfinch not through biology, but through logic. He came armed with a plan for constructing a proof so airtight that reality itself would have no choice but to submit.

The logician laid out his rationale in a talk delivered at a global aviculturist conference. He would begin with a simple proposition encapsulating the dream of the red goldfinch: All red goldfinches are red. This could then be formulated as, If something is a red goldfinch, then it is red.Transposition or contraposition expressed the alternate formulation’s logical equivalent: If something is not red, then it is not a red goldfinch. Now, it stood to reason that, if one had a specific instance that confirmed the proposition about all red goldfinches being red – The breeder’s red goldfinch hatchling is red, for example – then that instance provided evidence for the statement that all red goldfinches were red. By that same token, the proposition’s logical equivalent, concerning non-red things not being red goldfinches, could be supported by observing anything that was neither red nor a red goldfinch: This banana is not red, and it is not a red goldfinch.

Here emerged the logician’s point of attack.

Because the transposed statement “If something is not red, then it is not a red goldfinch” was logically equivalent to “All red goldfinches are red,” then anything that provided evidence for the former also furnished evidence for the latter. As a consequence, virtually any observation constituted proof of the red goldfinch. The white parlor carpet, the green sofa, the blue sea and bluer sky… All were evidence that could be marshaled in service of the aviculturists’ mission. And amassing a preponderance of such evidence – through the meticulous cataloging of the observable world and the careful integration of those observations into a sustained logical inquiry – would eventually prove the red goldfinch’s existence.

Despite the scandal and skepticism his talk invited, the logician soon set to work in earnest. Through his every waking hour he compiled a diligent record of everything he saw at home and abroad, filling notebook after notebook with observations anodyne and stirring. This meadow is green. This supermarket dragonfruit is pink. The residue on this broken robin’s egg is yellow. These graveside flowers are brown. The forgotten corners of the everyday were all brought before his eyes, renewed and elevated within his great purpose. Readers of his proof-in-progress often found themselves moved by the beauty he had led them to see. The cells of this cicada’s spread wings are transparent. The streetlamps reflected in this rain-riled puddle are yellow. This snow in moonlight is faintly blue.

And as the years wore on, the logician’s ever-expanding proof conditioned a series of remarkable discoveries. It proved that, more probably than not, there existed a species of blue-chested robin; sure enough, birdwatchers started reporting such creatures in southern Normandy. The proof demonstrated that forests likely hid a heretofore undiscovered species of iridescent green bluejay; photographic evidence of that selfsame bird surfaced in western New England within a week. Yellow hawks, orange owls, pale violet mallards… The proof conjured them all with mathematical inevitability. Yet the red goldfinch somehow remained elusive. The proof drew nearer to establishing the fabled bird with each passing day, but, with asymptotic coyness, resisted attaining the long-awaited prize.

Years piled into decades; decades swept like tides over all our many ambitions. And one day they carried off the logician, who, after a lifetime of toiling over his great proof, was found in his study, slouched over an indecipherable line about ravens and writing desks. The coroner assured every concerned party that the logician’s demise was swift and peaceful. He would never have possessed time or awareness enough to contemplate the stifled luminary’s ultimate terror: That to be right too early is to be wrong.

With that, the logician passed into history – another casualty of the red goldfinch quest.

Before long, however, others picked up the work he had been forced to lay down. His legacy circulated among respectable internet forums and seedier digital venues alike, piquing the interests of hobbyists with encyclopedic tendencies; these communities would invariably contribute to the unfinished proof’s amassment of premises, even as their discussions bemoaned the red goldfinch’s continued absence. Tenured eccentrics long drained of inspiration found therein a worthy project, both as a subject and object of scholarship; few who researched the proof and its history could resist adding their own lines to the ever-lengthening work, or bemoaning the persistent red-goldfinch-shaped gap in the latest ornithological surveys. An academic field of dubious repute eventually mushroomed from these combined efforts, all but ensuring that the proof would, in some limited capacity, find attention and continuation in obscure corners of humanity’s collective intellectual output.

And in those dark and unfrequented pockets of human endeavor, the proof survived as a cockroach survives, outlasting those ideas that grew to prominence in daylight only to be displaced or destroyed by the next great concept vying for its time in the sun. In this respect, the assets that assured this preoccupation’s longevity were its simplicity and sense of community. After all, it took no particular genius to understand how the proof advanced; it took even less to contribute to its advancement. Anyone, in theory, could participate in the venerable project; anyone could join the brotherhood of red goldfinch-lovers and feel an instant kinship with those who carried its work unto the present and into the future. Continuing the proof thus fulfilled an essential human need – and therefore the drive to complete it wended their way alongside us through the turbulent centuries, morphing and evolving with the times even as the red goldfinch refused to materialize.

The proof’s many instars proved too plentiful to enumerate; the broad strokes of its development must suffice for our account. The fringe academic specialty became a mark of distinction in certain influential quarters, like membership in a secret society. The mythos surrounding it grew, pervading the popular imagination and turning the proof into a secular relic that received the same reverence enjoyed by foundational documents like the Magna Carta. This imprecise but widespread respect blossomed into a broad cultural touchstone, as precious to humankind as any artistic masterpiece; governments worldwide contributed personnel and funded generous research grants in the hopes that the long-incomplete proof might soon be finished. Many transformations later, among ashen cities snuffed of birdsong and deserts smoothed to irradiated glass, the practice even came to resemble a monastic order of sorts, whose adherents sported red cloaks and black hoods in honor of the cherished bird that, against all probability, still went without a berth in the world. They worked among old warehouses crowded with books and papers, every page and leaf crawling with expository lines.

In times of low spirits, pessimists wearing the red-and-black raiment would think to themselves that perhaps the way of the red goldfinch had lost the thread – that in its zeal to archive and elaborate upon the proof, it had forgotten to ask where, or when, or whether the red goldfinch would ever come to be. They would lament that cataloging seemingly unrelated observations (the plums in the icebox are purple, the acid cloud above the polluted region is green)had become an end in itself, representing yet another promise of beauty and wonder that a declining world would never fulfill. And in their darkest moments, they would review the contributions of ages past and see nothing of their own world in them, finding only a record of treasures lost and pleasures never to be regained.

Yet, when they voiced their despair, others of the order stood ready to comfort them. With unfeigned cheer, they reminded their dispirited friends that their world was already better than the one they inhabited yesterday – for, thanks to their efforts, it was one day closer to seeing a red goldfinch.

After all, as a matter of raw logic, its arrival could not be pulling farther away.

~

Bio:

Alexander B. Joy hails from New Hampshire, where he used to spend the long winters reading the world’s classics and composing haiku. He now resides in North Carolina, but is plotting his escape. When not working on fiction or poetry, he typically writes about literature, film, philosophy, and games. See more of his work at https://linktr.ee/alexander_b_joy

Philosophy Note:

Whenever I’m introduced to a logical or philosophical paradox, I find myself wondering whether it could ever have “practical” applications – if, rather than exposing the limitations of a certain way of thinking, it in fact revealed a loophole in reality itself, and opened a space for imaginative feats. That thought process, coupled with Hempel’s delightful Raven Paradox, brought about this story. I latched on to Nelson Goodman’s evocative characterization of the paradox as “indoor ornithology,” which sparked the story’s core idea of using the paradox as a legitimate methodology for some avian undertaking. From there, the natural question was where such an approach could go – and what it might become if left unchecked.

Fact & Opinion

The Science Fiction And Philosophy Society: An Introduction

by Anand Vaidya, Ethan Mills, and Manjula Menon

Writers of speculative fiction and philosophers share common attributes. First, there is the process itself. Science-fiction writers may use ‘what if’ scenarios to create their works, while philosophers often use thought experiments to draw out intuitions about philosophical insights. Consider the famous Trolley thought experiment, the first version of which was published as a survey question in 1906 by the American philosopher Frank Chapman Sharp as part of an empirical study. It asked the survey-taker to assume the role of a railway switchman who is faced with a terrible dilemma: he must choose between allowing a runaway train to run over and kill a group of strangers or to switch the train to a different track where it would run over and kill his own daughter. Sharp used the studies’ results to confirm that people are more likely to choose the scenario that adheres to the utilitarian ethical position that advocates for the maximization of well-being for the group, where the ethical solution is to sacrifice a single life to save the many. A modern version asks us to imagine how an artificial intelligence in control of guiding trains from track to track might behave if faced with a similar runaway train scenario: if it does nothing, the train will run over and kill a group of people, if it intervenes and switches tracks, it will kill one person. Would the AI, one that has presumably been trained in the deontological principle of not taking any action that would lead to the death of a human, instead take the consequentialist view that utilitarians like Sharp would advocate for and throw the switch? This is the kind of question a science-fiction writer might take as a ‘what-if’ scenario to build a story around: ‘F80-21a strained through millions of simulations in the split second it had to act, but all returned suboptimal results: one or more humans would have to die.’

The philosopher Hilary Putnam’s Twin-Earth thought experiment aims to draw out our intuitions about ‘meaning’. The thought experiment posits a planet that is exactly like Earth in all respects, except for one: whereas water on Earth is a compound with the chemical formula of H2O, Twin-Earth’s water, which behaves in exactly the same way as on Earth, is a compound with the chemical formula XYZ. The two earths are identical in every other way: every person, blade of grass or building on Earth has a twin on Twin-Earth that talks, behaves, and acts exactly the same. Putnam then asks if what is meant when a person says ‘water’ on Earth is the same as what is meant when the person’s twin on Twin-Earth says ‘water’. Most people answer in the negative, that what is meant by water on Earth is different from what is meant by water on Twin-Earth, since the underlying chemical formulas differ. Putnam used this thought experiment as part of an argument for semantic externalism, the thesis that holds that the meaning of a word is not just in the head but has some basis in factors external to the speaker. Note that since Putnam used water to run his thought experiment, all things comprised in part or in whole of water would also be compositionally different. Yet, humans on both Twin-Earth and Earth would think of themselves as humans whose bodies are composed mostly of water. If these two groups were to meet, then would there be any need to change the words to note the difference, for example, by referring to water on Twin-Earth as twin-water? Arguably, the more likely scenario is that the groups would continue to use the word water to describe the liquids on both earths, with the understanding that the word water refers to a liquid that is water-like. This same reasoning can be applied to the words used in science-fiction to describe aliens. For expediency, science fiction writers might describe an alien as ‘happy to see the color blue’, when what is meant by the words ‘happy’, ‘blue’, or ‘see’, might be more accurately described as happy-like, blue-like, or see-like.

The eminently quotable science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, once said, ‘I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.’ [1] Which points to another commonality between philosophers and science-fiction writers: curiosity.

Although formed under the auspices of the main professional organization for philosophers—the American Philosophical Association, the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society does not take itself too seriously, a fact easily verified with even the most cursory of visits to our website. As to what the society will be up to, one view is that it will serve as a gathering spot for writers of science fiction and philosophers to cross-pollinate ideas for mutual edification. Another account holds that the society will help to explore the notion that science fiction can be considered ‘doing’ philosophy.

What counts as ‘doing’ philosophy has been debated for millennia. Plato, the fifth century BC Greek philosopher, separated the art of poetics that included dramatic narrative, from philosophy, which for him was a method to arrive at Truth through a process of reasoning and argument. Plato regarded the art of poetics as mimesis or an attempt to imitate the world around us, a world that for Plato was already a poor representation of the truth. For Plato, poetics was not just doomed but even dangerous, so much so that his vision of an ideal society as he laid out in The Republic was one in which not a single poet was allowed. Plato’s star pupil, Aristotle, while agreeing with Plato that it was only through logic that the truth could be discovered, allowed in Rhetoric for the evocation of pathos or emotion in an audience as a means of persuasion.

Plato’s sharp distinction between poetics and philosophy held for thousands of years, even as what counts as ‘doing’ philosophy has changed. For example, when Isaac Newton published his seminal Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687, it was considered the product of doing natural philosophy. Science, the glamorous daughter of natural philosophy, has since proved fantastically successful in building theories that explain and accurately predict how the world works. These discoveries have been harnessed to provide a more easeful life for humans, one not as subservient to the vagaries of disease, starvation, or the natural elements. However, unsettling questions remain, including the question of why, after over five decades of dedicated and diligent searching, not one bio or techno-marker has been found that would indicate the presence of technologically advanced aliens. Or the many questions swirling around the nature of consciousness.

Science fiction writers have dived into these gaps. For example, novels like Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 Childhood’s End, explored theories of mind by positing a vast cosmic consciousness, one devoid of any material attributes, that humanity would one day merge with. Iain M. Banks’s 1987 novel, Consider Phlebas, posited ‘Minds’, artificial intelligences whose abilities so surpassed human cognition that they effectively became humanity’s benevolent rulers. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, considered to be the father of space exploration, wrote the 1928 novel The Will of the Universe: The Unknown Intelligence, in which he makes a case for panpsychism.

Likewise, the battle between the forces of good and evil has inspired countless science-fiction works, perhaps echoing the scripture of the Abrahamic religious traditions. Non-western philosophical traditions also have ‘what if’ scenarios that could interest science-fiction writers. What if the universe really is dualist, where the demarcation line is not where Descartes drew it as between mind and matter, but as the Indian Samkhya tradition has it between Prakriti and Purusha? What would society look like if the Confucian ideals of junzi and dao were encoded into law? What if Jainism is right and the universe really is composed of six eternal substances?

Even if we were to allow that such works of fiction can be ‘doing’ philosophy, is fiction a flexible enough medium to support the rigorous argumentation that is the bedrock of philosophical accounts?

According to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s biographer, Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein once said ‘A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.’[2] Satire, a literary form that uses humorous fiction to argue against some flavor of political philosophy was unlikely to have been what Wittgenstein was referring to. Instead, as an advocate of logical atomism, which is a view that holds that there are logical facts in the world that cannot be broken down further, it is more likely that Wittgenstein had something else in mind. Although the word ‘meme’ was a neologism coined in 1976 by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins almost three decades after Wittgenstein’s death, a ‘meme’ is an analogue of the ‘logical atom’ from logical atomism but applied to the cultural realm: a meme is a basic unit of cultural meaning that cannot be further broken down. Like their biological counterparts, the genes, these basic building blocks of cultural meaning could be strung together to construct complex ideas. Wittgenstein, as a logical atomist, might have been thinking along the lines of a philosophical work constructed entirely of humorous memes.

Typing ‘philosophy memes’ into a search engine brings up thousands of hits. There is one with the golden lab on a sandy beach looking contemplatively at a glorious sunset that is captioned ‘When your dog ate your philosophy homework.’ Or the one that makes use of a scene from the movie Babadook, where a mother driving a car twists back and screams, ‘Why can’t you just be normal?’ and the child in the backseat, whose face has been replaced with that of Socrates, screams in response, ‘Define Normal!’. If one could select and arrange the memes in the form of a thesis, supporting arguments, conclusions, objections to conclusions, and responses to objections, perhaps Wittgenstein could yet be proven correct.

The Society does not need to take a position on what was likely a casual remark of Wittgenstein to find interesting the notion that philosophy can be ‘done’ through fictional narratives, humorous or otherwise. In these explorations, we are grateful to have found fellow seekers: the team at Sci Phi Journal, to whom we are grateful for offering us this space to introduce ourselves to you, dear reader. If you’d like to get in touch, share ideas, or join our mailing list, you can do so here.

~

[1] https://clarkefoundation.org/arthur-c-clarke-biography/

[2] Norman Malcolm. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. https://archive.org/details/ludwigwittgenste0000unse_g5p0/page/28/mode/2up, 1966, 29

Fact & Opinion

Science Fiction And The Shaping Of Belief

by Manjula Menon

The editors most responsible for shaping what we now call the genre of ‘science-fiction’ were, arguably, Hugo Gernsback, who in 1926 published the first American science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, and John W. Campbell, who took over as editor of Astounding Science Fiction in 1937. In this essay, I’ll look at how these influential editors construed the science in the science-fiction stories they published, stories that for legions of fans served as steppingstones to belief in the truths revealed to them by the magazines’ writer-prophets.

Gernsback’s Amazing Stories was subtitled The Magazine of Scientification, and the magazine’s motto ‘Extravagant Fiction Today — Cold Fact Tomorrow’ was emblazoned prominently as a first-page banner. In his very first editorial for Amazing Stories in April 1926, titled A New Sort of Magazine, Gernsback defined ‘scientification’ as ‘the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story— a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.’[i] Gernsback had coined the neologism ‘scientification’ back in 1916, and was already publishing such stories in the other magazines he edited, like Science and Invention and Radio News. In subsequent editorials, Gernsback often vigorously focused on defending the magazine against ‘certain class of Amazing Stories scientification readers … ready to tear and claw at any author who comes along with a new idea which, for the time being, may be contrary to fact, although it may still lie within the realm of science.’[ii]

One of Gernsback’s aims was to better disseminate the work of non-American writers. The very first story that appeared in Amazing Stories was the Frenchman Jules Verne’s Off on a Comet (“Hector Servadac”), in which Captain Servadac experiences a cataclysmic event that appears to have altered the Algerian coast he’d been stationed at. Servadac sets sail on a yacht owned by the Russian Count Timascheff, to explore his new environs, an adventure that has them sailing through storms and ice; jibs are raised, mainsails adjusted, helms righted, yawls ingeniously refitted to skate over ice. They eventually discover that the Algerian coast they’d been on had been picked up apiece, air and water included, by a comet that had suddenly collided with Earth. This fantastic scenario is obviously far from being scientification; Gernsback himself says in his introduction to Off on a Comet, that it belongs ‘in the realm of fairyland’.[iii]

Off on a Comet is, however, meticulous in showing how characters methodically calculate solutions to ongoing problems. After the cataclysmic event, Servadac observes that it takes longer for water to boil at the same outside temperature and deduces that there is less atmosphere above him. He observes that days are shorter, gravity is weaker, and that it is the star Vega in the constellation Lyra, and not the pole star, that is the fixed point around which constellations revolve. While the stars remain fixed in size and luminosity, he observes that the planet Venus gets larger and brighter, from which he deduces that he was on a collision course with the Cytherean body. When he observes Venus getting smaller and smaller, he deduces that the planes of the two planets’ orbits didn’t meet, and the catastrophic collision had been averted. He deduces from the observation that the magnetic needle of his compass had not deviated in angle from the north pole, that north and south remained the same, but that east and west had apparently changed places given sunrise and sunset position. Smooth and angular land formations jut up from the sea, and when they lower sounding-lines, they discover that the seabed is bereft of any marine life, uniformly deep, and composed of a strange iridescent metallic dust, from which they conclude that a subterranean event has lifted parts of that strange seabed to the surface. Once they understand that they are no longer on Earth but on a celestial body they name Gallia, they deduce that it is in an elliptical orbit, because the planet’s rate of speed diminishes in proportion to the distance receded from the sun. Far away from the sun, the temperature drops, and the Gallian seas begin to freeze. Off on a Comet is not just a thrilling sea adventure, but also a study of how the characters use tools, observations, and calculations to make deductions about the nature of the mystifying world they find themselves in.

In one scene, a solitary point of light observed from the schooner leads the party to a tomb deep within an abandoned mosque. Above the tomb, they discover a large, silver lamp, the source of the light, and on the corner of the tomb, an open French prayer-book. Servadac then has a revelation, that the tomb was that of the Crusader king Louis IX, canonized as Saint Louis; ‘The lamp that had been kindled at the memorial shrine of a saint was now in all probability the only beacon that threw a light across the waters of the Mediterranean, and even this ere long must itself expire.’ After making a ‘reverential obeisance to the venerated monument’,[iv] the party continue their exploration. Later, when the schooner appears certain to smash into those strange, smooth Gallian cliffs, Count Timascheff intones, ‘Let us, then, commend ourselves to the providence of Him to Whom nothing is impossible.’[v]

Verne had been raised Catholic, but other than brief nods to the faith of his youth as in the passage referenced above, he makes almost no reference to Christianity, and is commonly claimed by both deists and atheists as one of their own. Indeed, Saint Louis is brought up later in Off on a Comet, when the party encounter a supercilious English major who refers to the tomb as that of a French monarch, only to be vociferously corrected by Servadac that Louis IX was not merely a monarch, but a saint. Thus, the saint’s role in Off on a Comet appears to be to highlight verbal sparring between agents of rival colonial powers, rather than to make any kind of spiritual point. Indeed, none of the nineteenth-century Europeans who find themselves so mysteriously transplanted onto a comet hurling its way through the solar system consider that the event might have been a miracle, the work of God.

Verne similarly dropped non-Christian religious traditions into his stories. For example, in his adventure novel, Around the World in Eighty Days (“Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours”), the enigmatic, exacting, and iron-willed Englishman, Phileas Fogg, and his excitable, impressionable, and sentimental French valet, Passepartout set out to traverse the world in eighty days on a wager. They soon arrive in India, where in Bombay, Passepartout encounters a Parsi festival where the ‘descendants of the sect of Zoroaster…were celebrating a sort of religious carnival, with processions and shows, in the midst of which Indian dancing-girls, clothed in rose-coloured gauze, looped up with gold and silver, danced airily, but with perfect modesty, to the sound of viols and the clanging of tambourines.’[vi] Later, when their pre-planned train ride comes to an abrupt end, they hire a Parsi as mahout to a partially trained war-elephant they purchase to complete the journey, they soon find themselves in a little-traveled region ‘inhabited by a fanatical population, hardened in the most horrible practices of the Hindu faith’,[vii] where they encounter a procession carrying the corpse of a dead Rajah, accompanied by his beautiful, young Parsi widow, Aouda, who is to be ritually sacrificed in his funeral pyre. This horrific scene serves as impetus to a rescue mission, replete with daring deeds and suspenseful, last-minute turnarounds. Aouda and Phileas Fogg fall in love over the course of the novel, indeed the final scenes concern a marriage proposal. Once again, Verne uses religious traditions not with spirituality in mind but in the service of story, in the case of India, to serve as backdrop for spectacle, romance and adventure. Also like Off on a Comet, Verne is meticulous in Around the World in Eighty Days as to showing how the characters calculate solutions to ongoing problems, famously detailing how local time changes with changes in latitude, at a time before the international date line had been established. Metaphysical questions about the nature of reality or the existence of a higher power does not play any role in Verne’s stories, but religious traditions make occasional appearances, usually in service of other story elements.

The second story Gernsback picked for Amazing Stories was also a republication: The New Accelerator by the Englishman, H.G.Wells. It is perhaps worth noting here that it is these three men, Wells, Verne, and Gernsback, who are now commonly referred to as ‘the fathers of science fiction’. In The New Accelerator, the unnamed narrator agrees to imbibe an experimental drug concocted by Professor Gibberne, his neighbor and friend, who is world-renowned for making drugs that work on the human nervous system. The professor explains that the drug (named The New Accelerator), ‘is a stimulant that stimulates all round, that wakes you up for a time from the crown of your head to the tip of your great toe, and makes you go two — or even three to everybody else’s one.’[viii] Upon drinking the vial of green liquid offered, the narrator discovers to his amazement that he can now move so quickly that ordinary life appears to have come to a standstill. After the novelty of wandering through crowds of motionless people wears off, the narrator finds himself using the drug to achieve somewhat more prosaic aims: ‘I may mention, for example, that this story has been written at one sitting and without interruption, except for the nibbling of some chocolate, by its means. I began at 6:25, and my watch is now very nearly at the minute past the half-hour. The convenience of securing a long, uninterrupted spell of work in the midst of a day full of engagements cannot be exaggerated.’[ix]

In addition to fine-tuning The Accelerator so it can work for the masses, Professor Gibberne is also at work on another potion he calls The Retarder, which ‘should enable the patient to spread a few seconds over many hours of ordinary time, and so to maintain an apathetic inaction, a glacier-like absence of alacrity, amidst the most animated or irritating surroundings.’[x] Details as to the science behind the time-altering drugs are scant to non-existent. Instead, Wells is interested in the idea that our experience of time relates to the speed at which our bodily functions work.

These two stories, written by already very successful writers, typify what Gernsback liked to publish. For Gernsback, scientification, or science, appears to be broadly defined, as can be gathered by the implausibility of the underlying scenarios presented. As to what science was, how it differed from what came before, or how it intermingled with religious traditions that it existed alongside with, even as it ‘enters so intimately into all our lives today’[xi] as he put it, he expended almost no ink. Instead, as evinced by his eighty patents and numerous publications, Gernsback was passionate about technology, from the nitty-gritty mechanics of yet-to-be-invented machines to what grand societal changes were possible because of new technology.

While Gernsback appears to take scientification and science itself as ‘I know it when I see it’, the demarcation problem between science and pseudo-science has continued to vex philosophers for centuries. Although the word ‘science’ hadn’t been formulated yet, Aristotle in the 4^th century BC held that a demarcation line existed between propositions that were ‘apodictically’, or necessarily, self-evidently, or demonstrably true, versus propositions arrived through the dialectic or reasoning process. Millenia later, the 1920s saw logical positivists associated with the Vienna Circle like Rudolf Carnap, A.J. Ayer, and Hans Hahn, focus on verifiability as the demarcation line, where the distinction is even more strongly drawn as being between meaningful and meaningless statements. Verificationists hold that a proposition is only meaningful if it can be empirically verified or if it expressed as a tautology that is logically true. However, using verifiability as demarcation leads to universally general statements like ‘all life on Earth is carbon-based’ being rendered meaningless as it cannot be verified, while existential statements like ’ghosts exist’ would be classified as meaningful, as it can be verified. In the 1930s, Karl Popper argued it should be falsifiability that should serve as the demarcation line, where only propositions that can be falsified should be considered scientific. In contrast to verifiability, under falsifiability, the sentence ‘all life on Earth is carbon-based’ would be considered scientific as it can be falsified, while ‘ghosts exist’ would not be considered scientific as it cannot be falsified. The American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued against falsifiability by observing that astrologers often provide precise predictions that could be falsified, which according to falsification would then render astrological predictions scientific. Kuhn argues instead that the demarcation line might not be as sharply defined, and that science was to be taken as merely a method of puzzle solving, in which the puzzle-solver works to correlate observation with theory. He pointed to what he called ‘extraordinary’ or ‘revolutionary’ science as the driver of forward scientific progress, rather than ‘ordinary’ science where the extraordinary science solves new problems in addition to the old problems solved by the paradigm it replaced. For Kuhn, these kind of paradigm shifts is what science is really about.

John W. Campbell, who became editor of Astounding Science Fiction in 1937, was clearly interested in the question of what science was and how it came to be. For example, in a 1953 editorial for Astounding Science Fiction, titled The Scientist, Campbell observes that scientists believe ‘in the existence of a Supreme Authority in the Universe, an Authority they call “Natural Law.” They hold that that Authority is above and beyond the opinions and beliefs, the will or willfullness, of any human being. That that Authority can, moreover, be directly consulted by any man, at any time—and that every man is, at every time and in every place, directly and specifically obedient to that Authority, to Natural Law, whether he recognizes that fact or not.’[xii] He further posits that the scientist would claim ‘I have proven beyond doubt that there is Universal Law; I am not yet wise enough to know the nature of its source,’[xiii] in contrast to those who claim to know the source of Universal Law.

Later, in the 1954 editorial, Relatively Absolute, Campbell writes that science is ‘that method of learning that involves the equal interaction and cross-checking of philosophical-theoretical thought, and actual physical-reality experiments, done as a conscious process for the consciously stated purpose of increasing knowledge and understanding—that is, increasing data and relationship-of-data.’[xiv] He argues that science was ‘going to be a mighty unpopular philosophy in any culture; it has an absolutism about it that says, it makes no difference who you are, what you are, or what you want. Neither does it matter what your wealth is, or your political power. These are The Laws, obey them or suffer.’[xv] Arguing that religion was ‘by derivation, the study of the “Laws of Things” … or “Cosmology” in modern linguistic terms’[xvi] he concludes that science could therefore only be invented by ‘a culture that had already accepted the idea of an Absolute Power in the Universe’[xvii] and points to their many inventions, including alchemy and algebra, to nominate the Islamic civilization as the sole progenitor of science.

Campbell is, at best, careless with the demarcation line, and whether one agrees with him or not about how and who ‘invented’ science, it seems indisputable that science-fiction, like science, did not wink into existence from out of the void, but rather emerged from a milieu.

For Darwin, it was inevitable that Homo-sapiens evolved to be philosophical. Writing in The Descent of Man Darwin says, ‘As soon as the faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, along with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence.’[xviii]

Observations of what cause produced which effect was put to use to increase survival rate, while the human aptitude for symbolic behavior gave rise to language and allowed for the social cohesion necessary to form complex societies. When there were gaps in connecting cause with effect, our ancestors spun narratives that often imbued consciousness and agency to everything from stars to storms. These narratives were then often tied to belief structures, allowing for societal coalescence. Religious and sacred storytelling were, perhaps, inevitable outcroppings of the cognitive capacities of the human mind.

William James in his 1897 essay, ‘The Will to Believe’ says he wrote the essay ‘in justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.’[xix] He argues that a proposed hypothesis will present as either live or dead to the mind: ‘A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature, — it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As a hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker.’[xx] To the hypothesis offered being ‘live’, James adds the perceived prestige of the source of the hypothesis which together make ‘the spark shoot from them and light up our sleeping magazines of faith.’[xxi] Given the right imprimatur then, stories of science-fiction could rise to become part of some future canonical belief: Extravagant Fiction Today —— Cold Fact Tomorrow?

Indeed, Campbell later became a proponent of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, and wrote approvingly about the existence of psi, or extra-sensory powers and perception, in humans, publishing multiple stories in Astounding based on psi. As James said about our quest for scientific truth, ‘Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other, — what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up?’[xxii]

The editors most influential in shaping science-fiction as we know it today published stories that featured the speculative hypotheses they favored, thereby advancing these hypotheses into James’s ‘live’ category in the minds of their readers. Gernsback and Campbell published stories that not only evoked wonder and awe in their readers, but also provided the imprimatur of science that allowed their readers to shape belief in what might yet be revealed to have been prophetic truth.

[i] Gernsback, H. (1926, April). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 3

[ii] Gernsback, H. (1926, May). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 2(9), 825

[iii] Gernsback, H. (1926, April). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 1

[iv] Verne, J. (1926, April). Off on a Comet. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 24

[v] Verne, J. (1926, April). Off on a Comet. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 28

[vi] Verne, J. Translated by Towle, G. (1872). Around the World in Eighty Days. Standard Ebooks edition, 49

[vii] Verne, J. Translated by Towle, G. (1872). Around the World in Eighty Days. Standard Ebooks edition, 62

[viii] Wells, H. (1926, April). The New Accelerator. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 58

[ix] Wells, H.G (1926, April). The New Accelerator. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 96

[x] Wells, H.G (1926, April). The New Accelerator. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 97

[xi] Gernsback, H. (1926, April). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 20

[xii] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 69

[xiii] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 72,73

[xiv] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 78

[xv] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 79

[xvi] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 78

[xvii] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 79

[xviii] Darwin, C. Descent of Man, Second Edition, 143

[xix] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 1

[xx] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 1

[xxi] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 4

[xxii] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 4

~

Bio:

Manjula Menon once worked as an electrical engineer in Brussels. This is her second essay in Sci Phi Journal after her “homecoming of sorts” in our previous issue. A list of her other publications can be found at www.manjulamenon.com

Fact & Opinion

Frankenstein And Cyborgs: Of Proper And Improper Monsters

by Mina

A recurring figure in SF, whatever the sub-genre, is that of the “monster”. One common starting point is with that classical creation, Frankenstein’s monster: made and not begotten, to (mis)quote the Nicene Creed and ascribe new meaning to it. Brian Aldiss goes as far as to call Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the first true SF story because, although it is deeply rooted in the Gothic novel, the central character, Victor Frankenstein “rejects alchemy and magic and turns to scientific research. Only then does he get results.” Mary Shelley herself refers to Darwin in her introduction and stresses that the speculative science in her novel will one day be possible. Two novellas spring immediately to my mind that take the Frankenstein trope and do interesting things with it: Grace Draven’s Gaslight Hades and Eli Easton’s Reparation.

Gaslight Hades (in the “duology” Beneath a Waning Moon) blends gothic and steampunk with romance, and it is clearly referring back to Jules Verne and early SF/fantasy, which extrapolated from the then-known to touch upon the then-fantastical. The romance is unremarkable, but the novella’s protagonist is an intriguing Frankenstein figure: the “Guardian” wears “black armour reminiscent of an insect’s carapace”, his eyes are black with white pinpoints for pupils, his hair and skin are leached of all colour, his voice is hollow. He guards Highgate cemetery from resurrectionists who snatch dead bodies to create soulless zombies. His armour comes alive to protect him from enemy fire (where Frankenstein meets primitive cyborg). It turns out he was created from the body of one man, the soul of another. The process remains vague, but I love the invented words used to describe it: “galvanism combined with gehenna… liquid hell and lightning.” It seems to involve replacing blood with a silver compound and running electricity through it (all holes in logic are covered by vague references to magic, which is a cop-out). The Guardian is not a zombie because he has a will of his own, thoughts and emotions. He talks to the dead, does not eat or sleep and is described as “a Greek myth gone awry, in which a mad Pygmalion begged an even more perverse Aphrodite to bring a male Galatea alive”. So, a pretty monster, with a soul.

Reparation is part of a collection of novellas under the heading Gothika: Stitch (which includes another novella with a golem, a “monster” from Jewish lore and much older than Frankenstein). This novella moves into what we would consider proper SF as it is set on another planet. It weaves rebellion, slavery and space into a love story that is quite good. It is a hidden gem that asks questions about crime, punishment, redemption and forgiveness, moving it one step further than the stark retribution of Frankenstein’s monster. One of the protagonists, Edward, a farmer on the harsh planet of Kalan, loses his adjunct and his wife in an accident that also leaves him recovering from injury. He turns one of his “recon” slaves Knox into his right-hand man in the cultivation and harvesting of lichen “spores” for (he believes) the production of pharmaceuticals. Knox can read and write, is capable of learning and has fleeting memories unlike most recons: “reconstitutes” or cyborgs, part robot and part human. The human parts are taken from Federation prisoners condemned to death. Recons are not allowed to be more than 80% human or they would have human rights; they are programmed against violence and used as manual and factory labour. Knox is (unusually) fully 80% human, most of his body from one prisoner and his brain from another, with 20% reinforced titanium joints and the spore filtration system in his lungs.

In his new role as overseer, Knox moves out of the recon barracks into master Edward’s house. The changes disturb him, such as being spoken to like a person, being thanked, feeling guilty without knowing why, memories slowly resurfacing: “he did not want to hope; did not want consciousness”. Knox battles with feelings of dislocation, too – his massive body is alien to him. It becomes apparent that he has been “conditioned” to fear anything electronic. He remembers his chilling execution in a nightmare. At that point, Knox realises he was “made” and is horrified. Edward tries to comfort him: “That’s a good thing, isn’t it? That your mind survived what was done to you?” Edward treats Knox with kindness and allows him access to his books. But the master is surprised that Knox has a strong grasp of philosophy and moral issues. Knox remembers having spent time in space in a previous life and that he lived on a green planet once, which he thinks is gone. Slowly the fog in his mind begins to clear and he accepts his new body, even enjoys it. Knox and Edward become friends and then lovers.

Knox finally remembers that he was once Trevellyn, a member of the resistance to the Federation. The rebels’ attack on Kalan’s spaceport led to the death of Edward’s father and brother. His guilt and Edward’s initial condemnation leads to a brief rift between them. In his anguish, Knox writes down his memories, a diary and even poetry. In a crisis, with Edward facing deadly sabotage, they reconcile with Edward forgiving Knox for the actions of his past self. Knox breaks his programmed aversion to technology to help Edward survive. As he does so, he remembers why he was in the resistance: the spores are not used for medicine but to terraform planets, willing or not. The Federation used the spores to eradicate all life on his home world so they could turn it into a mining operation – wholesale genocide for profit. Edward is horrified as he did not know. Knox in turn forgives him his ignorance. Together they destroy all current supplies of the spores on Kalan; not winning the war but at least a battle. They decide to leave Kalan, using Edward’s money and Trevellyn’s contacts to move to a primitive world of no interest to the Federation. The romance trumps the politics as is to be expected, but the novella has a depth and originality not usually present in such stories. Best of all, we see the “monster” as a thinking, feeling being that awakens from a long sleep as if emerging from a chrysalis. I liked that this novella was psychologically profound, something that is missing from most depictions of cyborgs.

My first encounter with cyborgs, however, was with the much more superficial The Six Million Dollar Man, with its protagonist Steve Austin as the bionic man: one arm, two legs and one eye are prosthetic and give him superhuman strength, speed and sight. Of course, it was mostly filmed in the late 70s, so the special effects consist of slow motion (to suggest superhuman speed or jumping high), close-ups (to suggest superhuman eyesight) and cheesy sound effects. The bionic man also led to a bionic woman spin-off (Jamie Sommers, with superhuman hearing instead of eyesight), lots of crossovers and some films. The plots, script and characterisation were basic, but it led to the bionic man and woman dolls which I remember wishing I owned as a small child in the 70s, unlike the anodyne Barbie dolls. The bionic man is loosely based on the 1972 novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin; the title of the book is much less ambivalent about the nature of the protagonist. Steve Austin had very little personality but was portrayed as a hero and a “goodie”. Subsequent cyborgs in film have tended to remain very two-dimensional but been turned mostly into fighting machines in violent action films like RoboCop or horror/SF such as Moontrap.

To find more complexity, I would rather cite Ghost in the Shell, in particular the 1995 anime version. It’s not as deep as many reviewers seem to think it is; although it does posit interesting philosophical questions, they are presented as if the audience needs everything spelled out. We meet cyborgs with a completely cybernetic body and a computer-augmented brain. As the only biological component, the brain houses the “ghost” (mind/soul/spirit). The main character, Major Kusanagi (with a curiously sexless body, much like a busty mannequin’s), muses: “There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind. Like all the components that make up me as an individual with my own personality. Sure, I have a face and voice to distinguish myself from others. But my thoughts and memories are unique only to me. And I carry a sense of my own destiny. Each of those things are just a small part of it. I collect information to use in my own way. All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my consciousness.” She also admits: “I guess cyborgs like myself have a tendency to be paranoid about our origins. Sometimes I suspect I’m not who I think I am. Like, maybe, I died a long time ago and somebody took my brain and stuck it in this body. Maybe there was never a real ‘me’ in the first place and I’m completely synthetic”. Her friend Batou tells her that she is treated like other humans and she retorts “that’s the only thing that makes me feel human. The way I’m treated.” And she asks the question crucial to the film: “What if a cyber brain could possibly generate its own ghost… and create a soul all by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then?”

The Puppet Master in the film (initially the enemy) claims to have done just that – it is a computer program that has become sentient: “DNA is nothing more than a program designed to preserve itself. Life has become more complex in the overwhelming sea of information. And life, when organized into species relies upon genes to be its memory system. So, man is an individual only because of his intangible memory. And memory cannot be defined. But it defines mankind. The advent of computers and the subsequent accumulation of incalculable data has given rise to a new system of memory and thought parallel to your own… And can you offer me proof of your existence? How can you? When neither modern science nor philosophy can explain what life is…. I am not an A.I …I am a living thinking entity who was created in the sea of information.” At the end of the film, the Puppet Master merges with Major Kusanagi because it wants to become a completely living organism, by gaining the ability to reproduce and die. It wants to do more than copy itself as “copies do not give rise to variety and originality”. When it is persuading the Major to agree to the merge, it states that they will create a new and unique entity. The Major argues that she fears death and cannot bear biological offspring; the Puppet Master replies that she “will bear our varied offspring into the net just as humans leave their genetic imprints on their children”, and then death will hold no fear. There is a certain arrogance in the Puppet Master’s arguments too: “I am connected to a vast network, that has been beyond your reach and experience. To humans, it is like staring at the sun, a blinding brightness that conceals a source of great power. We have been subordinate to our limitations until now. The time has come to cast aside these bonds. And to elevate our consciousness to a higher plane. It is time to become a part of all things.”

Waking up in a new (child’s) shell procured by Batou, the new entity tells Batou: “When I was a child, my speech, feelings and thinking were all those of a child. Now that I am a man, I have no more use for childish ways. And now I can say these things without help in my own voice.” I must admit that, being very familiar with the biblical passage[1] being subverted here, I did not find the end particularly original. And it does fall into the lazy “transcendence” plot device so beloved of humanist SF. The plot, in fact, is almost irrelevant. But the film does ask interesting questions about the nature of cyborgs and treats them as much more intricate beings than the usual lean, mean, killing machines. The only other place I have found a proper examination of the nature of cyborgs as sophisticated “monsters” is in the Star Trek canon, through characters like Seven of Nine, Hugh, Icheb, Locutus/Picard, the Borg Queen and Agnes Jurati (if you want to know more about any of these characters, go to this fan site).

Cyborgs have also made it into story-rich computer games like the Deus Ex series. Deus Ex is a role-playing adventure game with “augmented” humans (through nanotechnology reminiscent of the Borgs in Star Trek), incorporating combat, first-person shooter and stealth elements. For me, despite the fascinating world building, complicated politics, conspiracy theories, historical mythologies and speculative and dystopian fiction, the cyborgs remain lean, mean, fighting or stealth machines. If I have understood the concept behind the game correctly, however, the cyborgs can become as multi-faceted as the player wishes, with a lot of interaction with non-player characters, freedom of choice and open-ended plot lines. They are a little like hollow shells filled with the ghost the player gives them. But my feeling is still that the main fascination with these cyborgs remains their superhuman abilities granted by their augmentations, like in much SF. It is a shame that these wonderfully genre-hopping entities aren’t allowed more into the realms of Sci-Phi, as they represent a great opportunity to reflect on “human” identity (like the crisis of identity Knox and the Major undergo) and what sentience is and could be. There is curiously little speculation into a (for now) fictional “monster” that begs for far more existential debate.

Coda: There are some satisfying cyborg poems out there like Cyborg – Matthew Harlovic and The Cyborg – Cecelia Hopkins-Drewer.

And here is one I wrote just for this essay:

Emerging

Where am I?

Pain, God, so much burning pain,

I am lost in its undertow.

Then, it spits me out onto jagged rocks

Like flailing flotsam.

I open my eyes to

Blinding light and blank walls.

A neurological pulse and

I raise my arm to flex

Gleaming alloy fingers.

Memory floods back

To who I was

Before.

“You are paralysed from

The neck down

Mr Jones.

We can offer you

A new life.”

I look at my perfect

Alien body which I inhabit

But do not own.

What will the price of

This Faustian bargain be?

I find that, right now,

I do not care.

I feel a fierce joy that

I am alive and

Something new.

Maybe, later,

I will learn to be afraid.

[1] 1 Corinthians 13 (11-12): “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.” (This is the New King James Version; verse 12 is much more poetic in the original King James Version: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”)

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

Fiction

Report To The Pro-Aedile Of Excavations

by Patrick S. Baker

Princeps Nonus Volusenus Vala,

Pro-Aedile of Excavations,

Collegium of History, Rome

Greetings with All Deference

I, Claudius Cantius Viator, have been directed by my magister, Sextus Seius Pennus, Master of Excavations in the Old East, to provide you a brief report on the latest and most unusual findings from one particular excavation. Since, Princeps, you are an expert on the pre-Discovery barbarian cultures of the Nova Terra across the Ocean-Sea, and I am unaware how deep your knowledge of the Old East of the First Republic goes, my apologies if I cover information of which you are already cognizant.

For the previous five seasons I and my team have been exhuming the city of Aelia Capitolina which was destroyed after a siege during the Third Roman-Sassanid War (Years of the City 1954 – 1961). Aelia Capitolina was the first Roman city that had its walls destroyed by Sassanid fiery weaponry, although surely not the last.

Our goal was to dig below the Roman city, founded circa 890 Y.C. by Emperor Hadrian of the First Empire, into the First Republic city, if able. Some sources report that the city, then called Hierosolymum, was the main town of many sects of monotheists and the foremost of those cults, called the Iudaeum, was often in revolt against the First Empire.

After five seasons, and within a layer of destruction we have dated to 823 Y.C., which was caused when the city was destroyed after another of the rebellions by the Iudaeum, we discovered an absolute trove of documents, all in excellent condition, sealed in a vault within what we came to identify as the primary First Empire base in the city, the Fortress Antonia. Our documents expert, Gallio Caeparius Indus, quickly identified the owner of the collection as Legate Marcus Antonius Julianus, who governed the province as procurator from 819 Y.C. to 823 Y.C. (a brief biography and his service record is attached). Further, we have one written reference to Julianus as the author of a history of the Iudaeam. Their main cultic center was adjacent to the Fortress Antonia, which may have fired the interest of the legate in writing such a history. There is little doubt that the volumes we found were the legate’s research library for his opus. (A complete inventory of the documents is also attached).

Most interestingly, the collection included a number of texts that appear to be the sole surviving copy of the said document. Several have no listing in the definitive Codex Libri Antiquorum. Among these unlisted documents are letters written in Greek, from a Little Saul of Tarsus, to various monotheistic cult communities around Our Sea, including one in Rome. This cult, called the Way, worshipped a god, or demi-god called the “Anointed One”. Another document, also written in Greek, is a loosely woven biography of a rebel magician who was crucified in 786 Y.C. on the orders of Pontius Pilate, Prefect of the province from 779 Y.C. to 789 Y.C.. The reason these documents are of special interest is they appear to reference the same person described in a report that the Prefect Pilate wrote to Emperor Tiberius Caesar. The two curious things regarding all of these are: First, is that this official report does not appear in any archive in the City and Pilate appeared to have a long and familiar relationship with this magician and rebel, who was named Joshua, son of Joseph, and was also this “Anointed One” adored by the cultic communities referenced in the letters of the Little Saul of Tarsus.

Princeps, my team’s ancient religions specialist, Aulus Blandius Geta, informs me that this cult of the Way was vile in the extreme; eating human flesh and drinking human blood in foul ceremonies, as well as practicing incestuous marriage and other sexual perversions. Further, the First Empire went to some efforts to suppress the Way and the Iudaeum after their revolt. Geta also informs me that the two suppressed cults somehow continue into this day and are even growing in popularity despite being subject to proscription by the Magistratium of the Pontifax.

All of this, brings forth the questions as to why a library of texts would be written regarding an executed criminal dissident from a minor religious sect on the edge of the First Empire? How this crucified criminal, Joshua Bar Joseph, became the so-called “Anointed One” and the founder of the foul sect of the Way? And why a legate and procurator such as Marcus Antonius Julianus would have such interest in this minor and suppressed cult? Answers to these questions will hopefully yield to further investigations.

Very Respectfully, in Service to the Caesar

Claudius Cantius Viator

Former Questor Legio XII Victrix

Sub-magister of excavations Syria Palaestina

Submitted in the Year of the City 2773

~

Bio:

Patrick S. Baker is a U.S. Army Veteran, and a retired Department of Defense employee. He holds Bachelor degrees in History and Political Science and a Masters in European History. He has been writing professionally since 2013. His nonfiction has appeared in New Myths. His fiction has appeared in Astounding Frontiers and Broadswords and Blasters Magazine as well as the After Avalon and Uncommon Minds anthologies. In his spare time, he plays golf, reads, works out, and enjoys life with his wife, dog, and two cats.

Philosophy Note:

Is history an unchanging and fixed set of events; driven by fate, destiny, or the plan of God? If so, where does free will come into it? Are humans all just “time’s puppets”? Or else, does free will exist in an absolute sense and history propelled forward by the billions and billions of decisions humans, famous and humble, make every day? Or is there a middle course to the flow of human events, where some occurrences are indeed fixed, like the birth of Christ and the founding of Christianity, and how humans respond to such idée fixe of the mind of God where free will is given reign?

Fact & Opinion

“Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered!”, or, Is the Universal Translator A Myth?

by Mina

There are two series which have coloured our collective consciousness when we think of the concept of a universal translator: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Star Trek (in all its guises). As a linguistic aside, “hitchhikers” was initially spelled in various different ways (hitch hiker, hitch-hiker, hitchhiker, with or without the apostrophe) until it settled as “The Hitchhikers Guide” in around 2000 (even the abbreviation has various forms: HG2G, tHGttG, HHGTTG, etc.). One wonders how many pitfalls communication may involve if one word can have so many variants within one language.

HG2G began its life in 1978 as a BBC Radio 4 series. This was followed by five novels, with a TV series sandwiched between novels two and three. The author, Douglas Adams, was involved in all of these versions, but they are far from identical to each other, and it is best to see them as a collection of leitmotifs. I am ignoring the 2005 film, which feels like a huge “mistranslation” (even if Adams was briefly involved in it before his death), missing the point on several levels – it is an attempt to turn HG2G into a PC, action story with a romantic subplot, dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, obsessed with Vogons and not at all true to the original radio/TV series or to the early-1980s-Britain pastiche that was so much fun. This sense of fun is very present in one leitmotif, the Babel fish described by the “book” as:

“The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.”

I can always hear the voice in my mind of Peter Jones as the “book” narrating this passage in both the radio and original TV series (the “book” is almost a character in its own right). The description goes on to state that it was a “mind-bogglingly” useful invention and there is a hysterically funny passage on how it was used to disprove the existence of God (incidentally, a whole generation of SF nerds integrated “mind-boggling” and “I don’t give a dingo’s kidneys” into their everyday vocabulary due to this passage). Although the Babel fish makes it possible for the most unprepossessing human to ever travel the galaxy, Arthur Dent, to understand and communicate with aliens, the Babel fish is also dangerous:

“…the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

Star Trek (ST) does not have a “Babel fish” but it does have a “universal translator”. It begins its life in Gene Roddenberry’s original ST as a handheld device and by Star Trek: The Next Generation (STNG), it has been incorporated into the communicator pins all Starfleet personnel wear on their uniforms. All Starfleet vessels are also equipped with a universal translator. Although Enterprise is seen as a poor cousin to other series in the ST canon, it is actually the only series to look in depth into the development of the universal translator that is mostly taken for granted in the series and films that take place “later” (if we look at the ST universe chronologically). In Enterprise, we actually have a skilled linguist on the crew, Ensign Hoshi Sato. We see that new languages have to be added to the universal translator by gathering enough data to build a “translation matrix” (a data construct facilitating the conversion of symbols and sounds from one language to another). And Hoshi Sato does not just use this translation matrix, she improves upon it, inventing the “linguacode” translation matrix to anticipate and speed up the conversion of new and unknown languages. She is a main character whose linguistic skills are used time and again to get the crew out of thorny situations. I cannot stress how unusual this is in an SF (or any) series. We will come back to the idea of “training” a universal translator and translation matrices later when we look at Machine Translation technology today.

Not everyone sees a universal translator as a good thing in the ST universe. There is a scene in ST Discovery between Burnham and a Klingon (Kol), where Burnham sees the universal translator as a means of communication and reaching a peaceful accord, and Kol sees it as another attempt by the Federation to subsume Klingon culture. In fact, my husband was annoyed by the fact that the Klingons in Discovery speak Klingon all the time; I actually rather enjoyed the series’ courage on this point, as subtitling puts off some viewers, but I think Klingons speaking amongst themselves should speak Klingon. Interestingly, Klingon began as gibberish but was later developed into a language by Marc Okrand for ST III: The Search for Spock in 1984 based on some phrases originally developed by the actor James Doohan (Scotty) in ST: The Motion Picture in 1979. Okrand developed a grammar and expanded the vocabulary and, should you be so inclined, you can actually learn Klingon online through the Klingon Language Institute. It is fascinating to see interest from both the producers and viewers in a constructed language yet, at the same time, most of the series hinges on the existence of a universal translator.

The universal translator is shown to have its limits in the STNG episode Darmok. This episode is based on the premise that a universal translator cannot make sense of a language based on abstraction and metaphors, deeply rooted in culture, myth and history. Stranded on a planet with a Tamarian captain Dathon (a Child of Tama), Picard struggles to learn enough about Tamarian metaphors to communicate with Dathon as they face a common enemy. The Tamarian language is described by Troi as a language based on narrative imagery, with reference to the individuals and places which appear in their mytho-historical accounts, much like using “Juliet, on her balcony” as a metaphor for romance. Picard slowly learns to communicate with Dathon who tells him the story of “Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra”. In exchange, Picard reframes the earth myth of “Gilgamesh and Enkidu, at Uruk” for him. The whole episode is an absolute delight for anyone interested in languages, communication, linguistics, logic and alien thinking. At the end, Picard has learned enough to successfully communicate his regret for the death of Dathon to his first officer and that he and Dathon reached communion or true communication before his death:

TAMARIAN FIRST OFFICER: Zinda! His face black. His eyes red— (expressing anger)

PICARD: —Temarc! The river Temarc. In winter. (asking for him to be silent and listen)

FIRST OFFICER: Darmok? (asking if his Captain’s plan was successful)

PICARD: …and Jalad. At Tanagra. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean. (the plan of two strangers working together to fight a common threat was successful)

FIRST OFFICER (to others, amazed): Sokath! His eyes open! (thank God, you understood)

PICARD (continuing): The beast of Tanagra. Uzani. His army. (shaking his head) Shaka, when the walls fell. (explaining how Dathon died and his regret at Dathon’s death)

FIRST OFFICER: Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel. (a new metaphor enters the Tamarian language to signify successful communication between two races who were strangers to each other)

I have added the “translation” in brackets after each utterance but the lovely thing about this episode is that, having accompanied Picard and Dathon on their journey at El-Adrel, the viewer can understand the entire exchange without help.

In his article in The Atlantic, Ian Bogost feels that the episode has its shortcomings because it tries to limit the language of the Children of Tama to our understanding of how language works, i.e. using our familiar denotative speech methods. Bogost stresses that the Tamarian language works more like poetry or allegories, which replace one thing with another (rather than simply comparing one thing to another like metaphors do). But, he argues, the Children of Tama are not replacing one image with another, they are using the familiar logic (the intention) behind each situation to which they refer to communicate in a manner that is almost computational, i.e. procedural rhetoric takes precedence over verbal and visual rhetoric and dictates their immediate actions. Whether or not you feel that Darmok lends itself to this level of analysis or that Bogost is right or wrong, the whole episode serves to demonstrate a completely different linguistic system and logic.

How close are we to such a universal translator? How effective are Machine Translation (MT) tools? The best-known MT tool is Google Translate, which has moved from being just a Website to also existing in App form for mobile phones, and from just translating text to also translating text contained in images and translating speech. How accurate is it, for example, when translating into English? As a linguist, I can tell you that it depends on the language combination. It copes reasonably well with Romance languages where the syntax is not too dissimilar from English, less well with German where the syntax is quite different, and not at all well with Estonian, where the syntax and logic of the language are very different (and it is a small and rare language with a more limited dataset). MT currently needs to be used with caution and with a clear aim in mind: it can be very useful if you want to know the gist of an article, for example, to run it through an MT tool to obtain a rough translation. However, it is dangerous to rely on an MT of a medical or legal text where precision is vital. MT can sound very convincing until you get a native speaker to check its accuracy, since MT has to cope with languages being flexible and ambiguous, with meaning being derived not just from a word but also its co-text (e.g. collocations) and context (e.g. a word where the meaning changes depending on where you read it, in a novel – “Oh, that’s criminal!”, where I consider your taste in wallpaper a travesty – or an article – “David was arrested for his criminal activities”, where David really did commit a crime).

That said, how MT works has changed over time: early rule-based systems (using lexical, syntactic and semantic rules that hit their limits at the sheer number of exceptions and variables required) were replaced in the 1990s with statistical methods (using a large corpus of examples but which were divorced from context, thus often leading to errors) and, more recently, we have moved towards neural MT (NMT). It is NMT that most resembles the language matrices of the universal translator mentioned in Enterprise and where fiction and reality begin (on a humble scale as yet) to converge. In NMT, the input is a sentence in the source language, with source language grammar, and the output is a sentence in the target language, with target language grammar. In between, we have an algorithm, which is an application of deep learning in which massive datasets of translated sentences are used to “train” a model capable of translating between any two languages. For example, it must be able to cope with all variants of the word “hitchhiker”.

One established NMT structure is the encoder-decoder architecture, composed of two recurrent neural networks (RNNs) used together to create a translation model. Textual data is transformed into numeric form and back into different textual data (its translation):

“An encoder neural network reads and encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector. A decoder then outputs a translation from the encoded vector. The whole encoder–decoder system, which consists of the encoder and the decoder for a language pair, is jointly trained to maximize the probability of a correct translation given a source sentence.” (https://machinelearningmastery.com/introduction-neural-machine-translation/)

This architecture has problems with long sequences of text which is why we now have an “encoder-decoder with attention” model. The system learns to only focus on the “relevant” part of the sequence to translate each individual word, so that length is no longer a problem. Google Translate uses this architecture and feeds it with millions of stored sentences. It is a system that still has its problems, however: the training and inferences speed is still too slow, it can be ineffective dealing with rarer words (it struggles with large vocabularies and a myriad of contexts) and it sometimes fails to translate a word it does not recognise, simply leaving the source-language word in the target-language sentence. MT initially focused mainly on the written word, but work is now being done on the spoken word as well.

So is a universal translator possible in our world? (N)MT will continue to improve, that is for sure. Whether it can ever fully replace the need for a human linguist remains to be seen. It cannot yet do what is one of our biggest strengths of the human mind: it cannot make inferences and assumptions based on context, background knowledge, culture and an instinct for which rules can be broken and which not. It cannot spot mistakes, decipher bad style or pick up nuances of embedded, deeper meanings. MT is based on algorithms and probability, it works with separate units (numeric representations of words) and even with the development of “attention” and “deep learning”, it cannot yet get a quick overview when examining a large sequence of units or adjust to circumstances when making a decision. It is not yet truly flexible. It is possible that one day, computers will imitate the way the human mind makes connections (and recreates the intention of the communication in the source language in the target language) so closely that we will not be able to tell the difference. The operative word is imitate: we are still a long way from a “sentient” computer able to think autonomously rather than applying a set of complex mathematical rules. That does not mean we will never get there but we are not yet at a point where the computer can translate the full meaning of “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel” into other languages.

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

the archive

You might be interested in

You might be interested in

You might be interested in

You might be interested in

You might be interested in

ANACYCLOSIS

Brian Niemeier

You might be interested in

You might be interested in

You might be interested in

So why Warhammer? Why now?

Using Warhammer to think about the real world: a gruesome example.

Time to take Warhammer seriously.

References

Useful links

You might be interested in

You might be interested in

You might be interested in

You might be interested in

You might be interested in

You might be interested in

You might be interested in