Just The Caffeine Talking

The Philosophical Alphabet Inside Us

Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear . . . specifically to Restoration-era England, when a group of intellectually curious men began to meet at Gresham College to watch scientific experiments and discuss matters like how gravity works and whether blood circulates. At first they were informally known as the "Invisible College" (not to be confused with the other Invisible College of that era), but eventually the group secured a charter from the King and turned into the Royal Society.

The membership list of the early Royal Society is a pantheon of Western European scientific greats: Elias Ashmole, John Aubrey, Isaac Barrow, Robert Boyle, Giandomenico Cassini, Kenelm Digby, John Evelyn, John Flamsteed, Edmund Halley, Johannes Hevelius, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Gottfried von Leibnitz, John Locke, Marcello Malpighi, Nicholas Mercator, Isaac Newton, William Petty, Prince Rupert, John Wallis, Christopher Wren, and a host of less well-known figures.

The patron saint of the organization was Francis Bacon — by some accounts the whole idea for a scientific society was inspired by a group called "The House of Solomon" in his utopian novel The New Atlantis. But the real father of the Society was John Wilkins. Wilkins was a Church of England bishop, who managed to navigate the tricky shoals of religious politics from the pro-Catholic reign of Charles I to the arch-Protestant Commonwealth period under Cromwell to the libertine Restoration era of Charles II without losing his head. He wrote books on cryptography, engineering, linguistics, astronomy, and a science fiction novel. But his unfinished lifelong project was the idea of a Philosophical Alphabet (or "Universal Character" as he sometimes called it).

The idea of a Philosophical Alphabet was to do for language what mathematics did for numbers: create a language, ideally one which was ideographic so that words and concepts would have a single symbol, in which the rules of grammar and word formation would encode actual physical reality. That way, just as in mathematics, one could learn truths by manipulating the symbols. So just as by adding the numbers 2019 and 228 we get the result 2247, in Wilkins's hypothetical alphabet we could relate the characters for "Water" and "Cold" and thereby derive "Ice." Naturally, this language would be highly useful in diplomacy, trade, and in communicating scientific discoveries to people in other lands.

More importantly, a sufficiently well-compounded Philosophical Alphabet would allow discoveries to be made in the same manner. By playing around with the characters for "Light," "Velocity," "Time," and "Gravity," presumably Isaac Newton could have come up with General Relativity three centuries before Einstein.

But of course the project ran aground on the fact that a human-created system of characters can't incorporate information which the creators don't know already. (Numbers are a system for representing information, more like an algorithm than a symbol. In the argot of computer games, numbers are "procedurally generated.") Quite simply, there is no necessary connection between symbols and the things they represent.

Unless there is . . .

The "language" of DNA is composed of nucleotide sequences. Those sequences in turn create segments of RNA. And those RNA segments create proteins as amino acid molecules bind to the RNA strands, and then combine into protein molecules. This is not an arbitrary "translation" system: the structure of the protein comes from the arrangement of amino acids, which comes from the sequence of the RNA nucleotides, which comes from the sequence of DNA nucleotides.

DNA actually is a Philosophical Alphabet.

And now a group of researchers in Florida have expanded DNA's vocabulary. They've come up with four additional nucleotides, to create an 8-letter system of DNA instead of the natural 4-letter version. As yet, as far as I'm aware, the team have not created a complementary set of RNA which could then be used for protein synthesis, but I know of no reason why they couldn't go ahead and try.

Think of the potential results! Sure, the most likely product is collections of amino acids which don't bond together into anything useful. But amid the mountains of dross there could be entirely new protein structures — proteins impossible for natural DNA to produce. Proteins never before seen on Earth.

By creating and rearranging the codons of the DNA "language" we can discover new biochemical reality. Bishop Wilkins would be proud.

Art Forms of the Future

Despite the portentious title (or pretentious, your choice), this is actually just a link to a video. Here are some musicians performing in zero-gee, courtesy of a plane flying parabolic arcs. I call this art of the future because I suspect in a few years' time we'll see something like this filmed in orbit.

Changes in Fandom: A Different Perspective

Judith Dial (editor of the delightfully un-redacted Conspiracy! anthology) published some remarks on the Amazing Stories blog about the shifts in fandom which provide an interesting "parallax view" on my own musings about status and social class in SF. You can read her post here.

Boskone 2019

This Friday and Saturday I'll be appearing at the venerable Boskone science fiction convention, at the swanky Westin Waterfront hotel in Boston. Here's my schedule if you want to join in.

Friday, February 15, 4:00 p.m.: The Most Alien Aliens

A panel discussion about creating aliens and what our depictions of them say about ourselves. With me, Stephen Kelner, Jeffrey Carver, Laurence Brothers, and Karl Schroeder.

Friday, February 15, 7:00 p.m.: Game Editing

A discussion of how editing works in different kinds of games, and why it's important. Featuring me, Carlos Hernandez, Melanie Meadors, and M.C. DeMarco.

Saturday, February 16, 10:00 a.m.: Classic Dungeons & Dragons

Join me for a very old-school Basic D&D game. Characters will be provided. This session is only one hour, so be prepared to think fast!

Saturday, February 16, noon: Reading

I'll be reading from Arkad's World and taking any questions my listeners might have.

Saturday, February 16, 4:00 p.m.: Signing

I'll be at the signing table with Dan Kimmel, Bracken MacLeod, and Karl Schroeder. I'll sign whatever you bring me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Retro-Review: Cabaret

This weekend the family sat down to watch Bob Fosse's 1972 film Cabaret, adapted from the famous 1966 musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb. It was a first time for all of us: my wife hadn't seen it, nor had my son, and I had only seen a heavily edited-for-television version in my youth — or so I thought. I had, however, read Isherwood's Berlin Stories, one of the fictional inspirations for the musical, and some histories of the era.

Our reaction: baffled disappointment. It wasn't a very entertaining musical, it wasn't a very interesting depiction of Weimar-era Berlin, and none of us ever gave a damn about the characters.

When a legendary choreographer and musical director like Bob Fosse films a movie based on a long-running hit Broadway show, you expect some amazing dance and music numbers. But . . . the movie cut out half of the stage show's songs, and the dance numbers are all staged in a basement nightclub which looks about the size of Bob Fosse's living room. The dancers can't do much but shimmy and pose in place. Now, I don't need every number to look like Cab Calloway and the Nicholas brothers, but it's odd that Fosse — of all directors — chose to focus on the drama of the frame story at the expense of the musical elements.

This focus is especially weird because the talking-and-dramatic parts of the movie aren't very interesting. Fosse had Weimar-era Germany to work with and wound up making a movie that was pretty tame. I thought I had only seen the PG-for-TV version, but I was wrong. That was the whole film. There is no shocking Berlin decadence. Some girls wear slightly revealing outfits, a dude dressed as a chick uses the urinal next to Michael York in the bathroom, and Joel Grey wears false eyelashes and makeup. Oh, and Michael York's character is gay, sort of.

Christopher Isherwood, who wasn't "sort-of" gay at all, described the decadence of Weimar Berlin, which he observed first-hand, as "nauseating." Icons of the era were people like Anita Berber or Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich's The Blue Angel is a hell of a lot more authentically decadent than the Sixties posers in Fosse's film. Even Joel Grey's Master of Ceremonies isn't as cruel or sleazy as he should be.

The Kit-Kat Club and the Berlin rough-trade gay scene should be nightmarish, so that when the characters go hang out in a rural beer garden and a fresh-faced kid starts singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" the audience should feel a sense of relief and hope . . . right up to the moment when he puts on his Hitlerjugend cap.

(I would also have preferred actual period-style jazz performance to the Sixties Broadway style arrangements in the film. If you've ever heard a sinister old recording of "Mackie Messer" from Kurt Weill's German Threepenny Opera, it just blows Joey Grey right out the window.)  

Finally, I have to say I couldn't believe the main characters. Michael York plays his character as rather aristocratic and very comfortable in himself. We never really see that his main reason for coming to Berlin is to hook up with anonymous male partners, or that he feels any sense of self-loathing for doing so. The only man we do see him sexually involved with is a nice, well-scrubbed young aristocrat — what a charming place Berlin seems!

And Liza Minnelli is utterly wrong as Sally Bowles. Sally's the embodiment of her era, and is heading for an equally apocalyptic end. She needs to be more obviously self-destructive, a true addict who gives up everything for the next fix. Liza-as-Sally comes across as far too down-to-earth and resilient, a jolly 1970s party girl having a bang-up time. Nothing a stint in rehab won't patch up.

So . . . now I'm looking for a better movie about Berlin between the Kaiser and the Fuhrer. It's an incredibly rich period for storytelling. Any recommendations?

Pandemonium Event February 6!

". . . with awful ceremony and trumpet's sound, throughout the host proclaim a solemn council forthwith to be held at Pandemonium . . . " 

— Paradise Lost

This Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. I'll be at Pandemonium Books & Games in Cambridge for a reading, signing, and discussion of my new novel Arkad's World. Everybody come!

Class, Status, and SF Continued

The movie science fiction boom of the 1980s pumped a lot of money into the field. SF and fantasy authors began to get six-figure advances for novels, and sometimes cracked the New York Times bestseller list. Money and status usually go together (but not always, as we shall see in a moment), so you didn't hear the genre condemned as "trash" any more.

Science fiction had arrived, we thought in the 1980s. Academics were giving SF novels and short stories serious attention, bookstores were displaying them up by the front door, and moviemakers were paying big bucks for film rights.

Little did we know . . .

A lot of the SF fans of the 1970s and 1980s went into the hot new fields of computer engineering and programming. Some of them started companies making computers, or operating systems, or games. And by the 1990s some of those companies became global giants. Science fiction books didn't make it onto the bestseller lists as often in that decade, but science fiction fans were making it onto the "Forbes 400" list of the world's richest people.

As I write, the #1 person on the Forbes list is Jeff Bezos, described by Wiredmagazine as a "lifelong science fiction fan." Elon Musk cites the Foundation series by Asimov and The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams as major influences on him. The late Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft, even used part of his fortune to endow the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.

Science fiction isn't just respectable. It's actually cool now. The world's richest men read it when they're not actually building rocketships to colonize Mars. There are TV shows which center on groups of SF fans — the people who would have been the goofy sidekicks of the cooler lead characters a generation ago. We've won!

Ah, but history shows that victors often begin quarrelling among themselves. Science fiction's new respectability has sown the seeds of conflict in the field and in fandom. In particular, its new literary respectability has created a split between the writers and fans in the literary/academic world, and the ones who stick to the older model of writing popular fiction for a mass market.

I think this is one reason why so much conflict centers on the awards and award nominations. For people trying to write for money, an award is a nice cherry on top of the sundae — a prize demonstrating that one has earned the esteem of fellow professionals and devoted fans. But for academics, prizes and awards are serious business. They go on your curriculum vitae and help you get teaching jobs, fellowships, and grants. Winning SF awards is a way to gain status that the academic writer needs. They'll lobby and network and fight to get them. 

The need for status bleeds over into the publishing world, too. If you are, for example, a twenty-five-year-old assistant editor working for a publisher in New York, you're not making much money. You're probably sharing a Manhattan apartment with three other people, or commuting from Queens or New Jersey and wishing you could afford to live in Brooklyn.

Meanwhile your classmates from Sarah Lawrence or Smith are Congressional staffers, or investment bankers, or maybe have a gig at a nonprofit. They have wealth, or power, or both. But at the class reunion, you aren't intimidated, because you're a book editor. That has status, too. But like all status, it has to be maintained. It's fragile. If your classmate the Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of Miscellaneous Affairs asks what you've published lately, it's a little embarassing (still!) to admit it's a book about giant alien lobsters, or space pirates, or treasure-hunters on another planet.

There's more status if you can describe the book as intersectional, or "transgressive" (though not really transgressive), or talk about the author's exotic background. It's much less fun if the writer's just some ordinary science fiction guy writing ordinary science fiction. If that's the case the conversation will shift away from your work and the investment banker will start talking about the condo she's buying on the Upper West Side, and you get to stand there feeling like a failure.   

(I'm not even going to talk about the role of social media, partly because I am not much of a Twitter or Instagram user, and mostly because I think Twitter is the greatest threat to human civilization since the Black Death.)

Meanwhile, the vast expansion of "nerd culture" over the past half-century has created sub-fandoms which increasingly have little to do with one another. A few years back I went to a science fiction convention in Austin, and my wife and I found ourselves sitting across the aisle from a younger couple with a "fannish" look about them. We asked if they were also going to the convention. They said yes — but it turned out they were heading for a different convention in Austin that weekend, one centered on animation fandom, and hadn't even heard of the "literary" con we were attending. There are new status pyramids arising.

I'm afraid this atomization will only continue. As more authors take to self-publishing, I expect to see more and more little unconnected pockets of fandom, possibly unaware of each other. Instead of science fiction conventions, or even specialized written SF conventions, we'll see hyper-specialized single-author or even single-universe meetups. (Anyone who wants to put together a CambiasCon should email me privately.)

On the plus side, I have hope for a revival of local fan communities. It's much easier nowadays for fans outside the big cities to get in touch, and there are so many of us now that even a small or medium town get-together could bring together as many fans as the first Worldcon did. Maybe that's what SF needs — more drunken pool parties and movie nights, less fighting over status. It's something to hope for.