Posts Tagged ‘Science Fiction’
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”*…
Philip K. Dick, whose work appeared from the 1950s into the early 1980s, is one of those too-rare writers whose deep questions–and the mind-bending ideas they spawned– are at least as relevant today as then. Jared Shurin offers a path in…
Philip K. Dick is a persistent, iconic cultural presence. His work has given us Blade Runner, Minority Report, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly and a pair of Total Recall movies (one of which is an undisputed cinematic classic, the other of which has Colin Farrell). Like all adaptations, these all have a strained (and occasionally distant) relationship with the source material. But however bastardised they are, they demonstrate the greatest strength of PKD’s work: the big idea.
Science fiction’s history is filled with big ideas. But Philip K. Dick had an exceptional, if not unmatched, ability to think about the biggest ideas of them all. What if we are not who we think we are? What are memories if they are not our own? What if reality itself were not, in any sense, real? His work is unbothered with how we make fusion energy or break light speed or maintain life on the moon. The ‘how’ and the ‘what’ are often taken for granted; traditional science fiction platforms used as launch pads for deeper, more provocative expeditions into perception, interpretation, and the nature of truth itself.
Big Ideas are great for inspiring Big Movies, even if something gets lost in translation along the way. Why have Arnie wrestle with existential angst when he can pull a giant metal booger out of his brain instead? With that ease in mind, it is hardly a surprise that Dick thrives in adaptation while his fiction, I’m sorry to say, remains (relatively, at least) unappreciated.
This is not entirely Hollywood’s fault. Dick is inspirational. He’s exciting! He is challenging and surprising, always finding ways to push ideas forward; often beyond the point of exhaustion. His books can twist like a child’s tangled Slinky, and be—frankly—just as infuriating to unwind. In short, and I say this in full transparency: PKD’s works can be hard to read. Especially if one goes in expecting the film.
They are, however, well worth reading. Below, you’ll find a few suggestions on where to start, and why. I’m a believer in not plunging into the deep end, which, with Dick, can be outright abyssal. Instead, there’s merit in starting with some of the slightly more straightforward (for him) works, which riff off recognisable tropes and scenarios, but in a uniquely Dickian way. (I’m sure there are many brilliant readers out there that read VALIS when they were ten and think I’m a big weenie. I look forward to hearing from you in the comments.)…
There follows a path into the extraordinary works of PKD.
A reader’s guide: “Jump in the Deep End With Philip K. Dick,” from @reactorsff.bsky.social.
FWIW, your correspondent, while agreeing that VALIS (and The Divine Invasion) are titles to hold until one is acclimated, would include Time Out of Joint (1959) as one of the novels with which to start… but then, that’s the point of lists like this :)
* Hunter S. Thompson
###
As we wrestle with reality, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 (on the anniversary of the introduction of the first “TV dinner” about 40 years earlier) that the The X-Files, created by Chris Carter, premiered on Fox. The series– which followed FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigated unsolved cases involving paranormal phenomena, government conspiracies, and extraterrestrial life– spawned two feature films, multiple spin-offs, a revival series, and a dedicated fanbase known as “X-Philes.” The show’s tagline, “The Truth Is Out There,” has, of course, become an enduring phrase in popular culture.
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going”*…
As Anne Lawrence-Mathers explains, centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, and AI emerged promising quick command of any subject to any of us, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning. Anne Lawrence-Mathers investigates the Ars notoria, its supposed powers, and the demonic influence it had upon some users…
Mastering the full range of subjects taught in medieval universities normally required many years of hard and expensive study. From the thirteenth century on, however, an anonymous work known as the Ars notoria promised, through diagrams, incantations, and arcane rituals, to rapidly transmit to scholars the total knowledge of anything they might need. Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.
Its complex diagrams were at the center of its appeal. Unlike diagrams in other magical texts, those in Ars notoria do not illustrate what the text is seeking to communicate. Nor do they act as models to be replicated in three-dimensional form as pieces of magical equipment. Instead, they supposedly work almost in the same way as religious icons. That is, faithful possession and use of them can offer direct contact with powerful and benign supernatural forces — and ultimately even with God. The diagrams themselves are the route to magic and consist of arrangements of symbolic and geometric forms, patterns, and symbols, interspersed with “words”, which are frequently unintelligible combinations of letters.3 Practitioners who opened their minds to receive and imprint these labyrinthine images, while reciting complex verbal formulae and strings of mysterious, almost unpronounceable words and names, are engaging in a significant act of trust.
Several factors made the Ars notoria fundamentally different from other magical texts. First, this is not a text in conflict with the church. In fact, the rituals framing and shaping usage of the images are presented as extremely pious, and the texts to be recited are identified as prayers. The alien words, names, and characters are explained as coming from ancient languages such as Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean”, and are claimed to preserve both the names of angels and words used to communicate with them. Second, the advantages offered are relatively virtuous: contact with spiritual beings and full knowledge of the subjects taught in medieval universities. Such claims cut little ice with thirteenth-century theologians, however, who saw clear links to things condemned as superstitious and demonic by St Augustine, despite the text’s assertion that it contains wisdom revealed to King Solomon.
St Thomas Aquinas was worried enough by the Ars notoria to name and condemn it specifically in his Summa theologiae — one of the most authoritative summaries of Christian teaching. He dealt with the very serious issue of superstition in Book Two, Part 2 — Question 96 is effectively devoted to the Ars notoria. Aquinas’ conclusion is wholly negative: the “art” is both “unlawful and futile”. It is futile because it cannot deliver what it promises. Still more seriously, its “signs” are neither understood by humans (like ordinary words and letters) nor sent by God (as sacraments are), and thus are precisely the type of thing that lures humans into contact and compact with demons.
That may seem a conclusive case for the rejection of the Ars notoria, especially as Aquinas’ objections were echoed by other major theologians. However, the number of surviving medieval copies of the work, and the fact that it was copied and owned in religious institutions until the end of the medieval period, show that the church ultimately had neither the interest nor ability to stamp it out. Moreover, it was translated in the early modern period and also went into print, demonstrating an ongoing — and more widespread — interest…
[Professor Lawrence-Mathers explains how the Ars notoria was used…]
… For some users, the rituals were so powerful that they seemed demonic. One of these was Brother John, an early fourteenth-century monk of the abbey of Morigny, near Étampes. John’s account of his introduction to the text, his powerful attraction to it, and the terrifying experiences he underwent while using it, was given in several chapters of John’s own, visionary work, the early fourteenth century Liber florum celestis doctrine.6
The great attraction of the Ars notoria for John was its promise of quick access to advanced scholarly knowledge. He recounts his continuing wish to study, and how he was lent a copy of a book of necromancy by “a certain cleric”. He copied much of it and wanted more. This led to an encounter with a “medical expert” from Lombardy, who informed John that what he needed was the Ars notoria, and that a copy of it was to be found within the walls of the school (at Orléans) where John had been sent. These details provide important evidence of the liminal status of works of ritual magic. They were recognised as dangerous, and were far from being officially approved, and yet were well known, owned and recommended by educated individuals, including monks and clerics.
For John, the Ars notoria was dangerous not in some abstract way, but very directly. He confesses that it struck him at first as beautiful and holy, and seemed to offer miraculous gifts rather than demonic temptations. It became apparent, however, that the book was utterly deceptive, a work of the Devil, a “sick pleasure” that was actually fatally poisonous to the soul, not only to the body…
Medieval “technology”: “Artificial Intelligence– Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge,” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
Pair with: “The Cost of Seamlessness” from @taotuner.bsky.social, and “Experience vs. Efficiency: Why the Human Still Matters in Learning,” from @lnddave.bsky.social.
Also a (vaguely) apposite, but (very) amusing (in a macabre kind of way) report on a piece of OpenAI’s handiwork: “US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference.”
* Beverly Sills
###
As we do the work, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that Frank Herbert’s Dune was published.
Herbert published a three-part serial Dune World in the monthly Analog, from December 1963 to February 1964. The serial was accompanied by several illustrations that were not published again. After an interval of a year, he published the much slower-paced five-part The Prophet of Dune in the January–May 1965 issues. The first serial became “Book One: Dune” in the final published Dune novel, and the second serial was divided into “Book Two: Muad’dib” and “Book Three: The Prophet”. The serialized version was expanded, reworked, and submitted to more than twenty publishers, each of whom rejected it. The novel, Dune, was finally accepted and published in August 1965 by Chilton Books, a printing house better known for publishing auto repair manuals. Sterling Lanier, an editor at Chilton, had seen Herbert’s manuscript and had urged his company to take a risk in publishing the book. However, the first printing, priced at $5.95 (equivalent to $60.79 in 2025), did not sell well and was poorly received by critics as being atypical of science fiction at the time. Chilton considered the publication of Dune a write-off and Lanier was fired. Over the course of time, the book gained critical acclaim, and its popularity spread by word-of-mouth to allow Herbert to start working full time on developing the sequels to Dune, elements of which were already written alongside Dune.
– source
Herbert died in 1986; his son Brian Herbert and author Kevin J. Anderson continued the series in over a dozen additional novels since 1999. Among them was Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, a prequel which chronicles the fictional Butlerian Jihad, a crusade by the last free humans in the universe against the thinking machines, a violent and dominating force led by the sentient computer Omnius.
“Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.”*…
Henrik Karlsson argues that it can be more symbiotic than that…
Every few months I will read a tweet, or have a conversation, that makes me feel this is important, I must remember this. Often, these epiphanies are accompanied by a sense that I actually know this already, it had just somehow slipped my mind.
And for a few days, I do remember: my life shimmers with a new intensity, and I live the truth of what I grasped. But then, inevitably, the conveyor belt of things to pay attention to keeps churning, and my mind gets filled with small problems I need to solve, or new epiphanies or random noise, like news, and the shining fades from my eyes—I regress to being the same person as ever.
The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia. “Stultitia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,”
is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth.
You can’t just read a blog post about high agency, get filled with a sense of possibility, and become, from then on, an agentic person. As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.
In the same way that it is not enough to make a resolution that you will learn the piano, it is not enough to realize that when the kids act out, you shouldn’t lose your temper but slow down, listen, and regulate their nervous systems with the help of yours. Imagine how good a person I would be if having insights were enough! But reacting to the frustrations of your children with calm and curiosity is a skill as much as playing the piano is—and as with the piano, the act of learning it requires rewiring your nervous system through sustained attention and practice. Realizing the value of acting in a certain way might give you a temporary motivation to do it. But in order to actually live in accordance with what you believe in long-term, you must make it a habit.
And this is much harder than making a habit out of playing the piano. When you’re trying to make something like piano practice a habit, the standard advice is to chain it onto some already existing habit—to practice immediately after you brush your teeth in the morning, for example, or after you change out of your work clothes in the afternoon. Chaining the new habit to an already existing one provides a predictable trigger that helps remind you to practice. But the habits that make up our characters often do not follow a predictable schedule like this. I never know, for instance, when our children will act out (except that it will usually be when I’m least capable of handling it with grace—whenever both they and I are unusually hungry and tired). The conflicts seem to come out of nowhere, so I have to, somehow, always be ready to act in the proper way. I need to have the right reaction “ready at hand” (procheiron), as the Greek-philosopher-Roman-slave Epictetus put it. If Johanna and I talked about how we want to deal with the kids’ conflicts the night before, I will nearly always handle the situation well. The problem is to keep it top of mind.
During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.
This was, as I understand it, an exercise designed to combat the problem I outlined above. Meditating on what matters is a simple habit, which you can chain onto your morning routine, but it reinforces the habits you can’t plan, the habits that make up your character. It was, in the words of the French classicist Pierre Hadot, a spiritual exercise—an exercise because it required work and discipline, spiritual because it engaged the whole person, not just their intellect, but their emotions and their moral character. It was an attempt to treat the formation of character as a skilled practice, as something you can deliberately train and improve through targeted exercises…
…
… I have often noticed that my experience of reality improves if I write and think about something.
But it strikes me now that the practice Foucault wrote about was probably more transformative than what I’ve ended up doing. Essay writing is incredibly time-consuming, and a lot of that time is spent on things that aren’t self-transforming: I spend less time reshaping my mind than I spend solving literary-technical problems that help me write more functional and beautiful essays, for the joy of the craft and for the benefit of readers. Another limitation of my practice is that when an essay is done, I move on. The ideas—though they have been much deepened and more firmly lodged in my mind—fall out of attention and start to fade.
There is an element of self-deception involved here. I like to write essays, so it is comforting to think of it as a powerful practice, something that helps me live more fully and grow as a person. But if I look at it soberly, it is clear to me that essay writing is not a practice that is ideal for the purpose of ethopoiesis.6 It is common to think that what we do achieves what we want it to achieve, even if there is no evidence for it. There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us—therapy, meditation, psychedelics—, but that branding doesn’t mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems. If you want to achieve a particular outcome, it is important to start from that goal and evaluate which practices actually help you.
The most important ideas we need to return to weekly, even daily. Essay-writing, then, is not a functional substitute for having a practice that keeps the important truths top of mind, day after day. But it did help me reach that conclusion…
On a particular kind of commonplace book and staying centered: “How not to forget what matters,” from @henrikkarlsson.bsky.social.
* Abert Einstein
###
As we contemplate contemplation, we might that it was on this date in 1949 that the first science fiction series debuted on American television, the DuMont Network’s Captain Video and His Video Rangers. Written by such luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, and Jack Vance, it was– even in its time, when early television productions often were thrown-together affairs– considered crude, owing much to the fact that the daily show was done live on a meager budget. Indeed, the actors were paid so little they actually made more money from appearing in character at supermarket openings, county fairs, and the like than they did from their salaries.
Still, it ran for a total of 1,537 episodes, and quickly spawned competitive sci-fi offerings like Tom Corbet, Space Cadet and Space Patrol.
For episodes on YouTube, see here.
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”*…
… nor, perhaps, as widely read as it should be. “Urubos” is here to help…
The Extrapolated Futures Archive is a reverse-lookup for speculative fiction. Describe a situation you are facing, and find the SF stories that already worked through the implications.
The catalog connects stories (novels, novellas, short stories, films) to the speculative ideas they explore: thought experiments about technology, governance, biology, society, and more. Every idea is tagged with domains, scenario types, and outcome types so you can filter by the kind of future you are thinking about.
How to use it:
- Search by title, author, synopsis keywords, or idea descriptions
- Filter by domain (AI, biotech, climate, space, governance…), scenario type, outcome, decade, or series
- Browse ideas to find transferable thought experiments, then follow links to the stories that explore them
- Browse stories to see what speculative ideas a particular work contains
- Book Club discussions (marked with 📖) offer section-by-section roundtable analyses by AI personas modeled on SF authors
- What-If Query (via the What-If Query page/link) lets you describe a real-world scenario in plain text and get ranked matching ideas
The archive is designed for decision-makers in government, industry, and NGOs who want to widen their thinking by surfacing fictional precedents for novel real-world challenges…
Over 275 ideas, which cluster into 20 different “domains,” explored in over 1,900 stories, via over 3,500 links…
Mapping real-world scenarios to the science fiction stories that explored them first: “Extrapolated Futures Archive“
* William Gibson
###
As we ponder prescience, we might spare a thought for Charles Hoy Fort, the prolific chronicler of paranormal phenomena; he died on this date in 1932. Fort collected accounts of frogs and other strange objects raining from the sky, UFOs, ghosts, spontaneous human combustion, stigmata, psychic abilities, and the like, publishing four collections of weird tales and anomalies during his lifetime: Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). So influential was Fort among fellow-questers that his name has become an adjective, “Fortean,” often applied to unexplained events… The Truth is Out There…
“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”*…
Most historians of science fiction begin their stories with the likes of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and lean on the extraordinary impact of Hugo Gernsback. Art and culture historian Fleur Hopkins-Loféron reminds us that there was an early 20th-century movement in France that prefigured much of what we now celebrate in speculative fiction…
When Nicolas Vermont entered the greenhouse, he would make a gruesome discovery. It was the early 20th century in rural France, and Nicolas was visiting his uncle – a scientist and surgeon called Dr Frédéric Lerne – after 15 years apart. However, he had soon grown suspicious about his uncle’s odd behaviour, so for answers had decided to explore the grounds of his relative’s estate late at night.
Inside a greenhouse in the garden, Nicolas discovered that Dr Lerne had been conducting disturbing scientific experiments. At first, he saw plants grafted onto one another: a cactus growing a geranium flower, and an oak tree sprouting cherries and walnuts. His uneasy curiosity, though, soon turned to dread. ‘It was then that I touched the hairy plant. Having felt the two treated leaves, so like ears, I felt them warm and quivering,’ he recalled. Grafted onto the stem were the parts of an animal: the ears of a dead rabbit. ‘My hand, clenched with repugnance, shook off the memory of the contact as it would have shaken off some hideous spider.’ [Quotations from published English-language editions translated by Brian Stapleford; the rest are the author’s own.]
Dr Lerne was in fact an impostor. His assistant Otto Klotz had stolen the true uncle’s body through a brain swap, and would not hesitate to punish Nicolas for his ill-placed curiosity… by transplanting his consciousness into the body of a bull.
Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908), or ‘Dr Lerne, Demi-God’, was a celebrated novel by Maurice Renard, hailed by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire as a ‘subdivine novel of metamorphoses’.Published in English as New Bodies for Old, it heralded the dawn of a new French literary genre – one that ventured boldly into the uncertain and the unknown. Renard called it ‘merveilleux-scientifique’ (‘scientific-marvellous’) and its ambition was to help the reader speculate on what could be, and on what exists beyond the reach of our senses, rather than what will be. In other words, allowing a better understanding of what Renard poetically called ‘the imminent threats of the possible’. As he wrote in 1914, the goal was to ‘patrol the margins of certainty, not to acquire knowledge of the future, but to gain a greater understanding of the present’.
Rejecting the ‘scientific adventure’ storytelling of the celebrated French sci-fi writer Jules Verne – who had died only three years before the publication of Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu – the merveilleux-scientifique genre was grounded in plausibility and the scientific method. According to Renard, only one physical, chemical or biological law may be altered when telling a story. This strict discipline, he argued, is what lent the genre its power to sharpen the reader’s mind, by offering a wholly original kind of thought experiment. For example, Renard modelled Dr Lerne on the very real surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel, who had experimented with surgical grafts, transplants and animal tissues… to the point that he even grafted a dog’s severed head on another living animal (the attempt failed). Following in his footsteps, Renard imagines an exchange of brains – and personalities.
Leafing through the merveilleux-scientifique novels today allows for a dual rediscovery: firstly, it uncovers the previously unrecognised richness of Belle Époque scientific fiction, which did not perish with the works of Verne. The stories take in journeys to Mars, solar cataclysms, reading of auras, psychic control, weighing of souls, death rays, alien invasions, even strolls among the infinitesimally small. But exploring the genre also offers insights into the cultural history of the era, marked by a significant permeability between science and pseudo-science. Reading this work, we can learn a lot about the aspirations, fears and beliefs of early 20th-century Europe.
Perhaps more importantly, the lesser-known stories of merveilleux-scientifique allow us to question the official history of science fiction – a term that did not even exist in France at the time as it as it would be popularised in English by Hugo Gernsback only in the 1920s. Whereas today it is sci-fi writers like Jules Verne or H G Wells who are most remembered from this period, the merveilleux-scientifique novels were just as imaginative and visionary, but often far more provocative, daring and strange…
Much more– with wonderful reproductions of the works’ covers: “Merveilleux-scientifique” from @aeon.co.
* J. G. Ballard (in a 1971 essay, “Fictions Of Every Kind“)
###
As we speculate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1850 that the first U.S. patent for magic lantern slides made of glass plate was issued to their inventor Frederick Langenheim of Philadelphia, Pa. (No. 7,784) as an “improvement in photographic pictures on glass.” Magic lantern shows were largely informational, but (especially in Europe in the 19th century) magic lanterns were used to stage “Phantasmagoria,” a form of horror theater that (among other techniques) used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images – such as skeletons, demons, and ghosts – typically using rear projection onto a semi-transparent screen to keep the lantern out of sight.
You must be logged in to post a comment.