Episode 16: Inside the Music

Here's a quick, silly one that would go well with weekend coffee or the like. The story follows from a pressing question: why do society's arguably freest people - rock stars with protective staffs, endless latitude, and millions of dollars - always blow it in the same way? Why can't one of them get really into exotic fish or ham radio, instead of cocaine? (We know it's possible: consider the lonely example of Brian May, who spends his free days on astrophysics and the defense of hedgehogs.)

Episode 15: Mr. Meaningless

Cheerfully dedicated to Robert L. Darling:

Episode 14: The Royal Road

I can say I owe a debt in this story to Arthur C. Clarke's Nine Billion Names of God. But in the history of science fiction there's no shortage of stories on the theme. So call this a new spin on an old classic.

To my knowledge, recasting our inflationary universe as some kind of geometric problem is original: given the vast amount of science fiction I'm ignorant of, I could be wrong. But to that degree, "The Royal Road" is an original idea to me, and I'll stick widdit.


My only footnotes are that (1) I could have been more specific in mentioning it was Ptolemy I Soter who studied with Euclid. He wasn't any-ol' late Ptolemaic king, but rather the first Ptolemy to rule Egypt - just installed by Alexander the Great. The royal road Euclid had in mind would have been the one built by Darius the Great, connecting Persia with Asia Minor....

(2) I placed this story at Stanford, and went out of my way to mention its situatedness by California's first highway, El Camino Real, because that name means, in Spanish... oh, you know. ECR connected the original Spanish Missions in California, and has roots going all the way back to the late 1600s.

(3) In the story I refer in passing to a family of superlogical abstract maths, with the power to reconcile seemingly conflicting concepts, called Balalgebras. That's utterly made up. (This idea comes from a long-ago and somewhat longer version I had written of this story.)

(4) James Franco and Morgan Freeman are real actors, used fictionally. They were not harmed in the making of this story.

(5) (Note from 5 years later, 3/2021) In preparing a new thumbnail drawing, I relocated from Stanford a little north up the peninsula to the NASA Ames center; and I swapped in ~1980 Scott Baio in place of James Franco. Why? Because I was moving real fast with these drawings and did not bother listening to my old story for specifics. Also, I did not care. But in reading these notes now, I can see how confusing my choice of new illustration might be. Well, whatever. Baio seems funny to see in the sky, and I am keeping him there.

Episode13: The Alchemist

A lot of sources to mention here! My most important recent read feeding into "The Alchemist" was John Fleming's kaleidoscopic Dark Side of the Enlightenment. And of course magician Ricky Jay's marvelous new book from earlier this year, Matthias Buchinger: The Greatest German Living.

As the existence of the second book implies, Buchinger is a real person, and my use of him fits within the limits of what we know about his career. On the other hand, my protagonist Hartwig is very much made-up... though his former patrons are not. Maximillian II Emanuel and his wife Theresa Kunegunda Sobieska are real people - Electors of Bavaria in the Holy Roman Empire, who resided in Nuremberg, and were caught up in the now-well-forgotten War of Spanish Succession. I have, I admit it freely, libeled these people 300 years after the fact by inventing an affair between Therea and her astrologer. I officially apologize. There is no evidence for this. There's no evidence she even had an astrologer!, but that part's not too far-fetched.


...A little more distantly influencing the story, a favorite book of mine is Rupert Hall's From Galileo to Newton, which I read ages ago and like to leaf through again from time to time. Also, in the last year, a great book has come out touching on the interplay between truth, falsity, empiricism, and mysticism that were all warring for intellectual preeminence in Europe in the 16- and 1700s: this is John Glassie's Man of Misconceptions, about the seemingly-half-mad Jesuit polymath Athanaeus Kircher. (I only found space to name-check Kircher in passing in this story. But if you're ever in Los Angeles, make a point of seeing the exhibit about him at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. Fascinating stuff, and also... sort of... funny?)

In its best form, "The Alchemist" would make up a little meditation on how close mystical and superstitious thinking can be to any more refined concept of scientific method. Newton was an alchemist himself, Leibniz rubbed elbows with the practice (and with everything else under the sun). Kepler was as mystic as they come.* I am not suggesting anything woo-woo, just that to get science right is hard. And it seems to require sliding through error and weird thinking on the way.

In 15 quick minutes here, I only wander into the neighborhood of that theme, the thing which at bottom was really on my mind. So maybe someday I can extend and expand on what I have. But it does me good to have pinned this much down! A draft of a chapter to serve as down-payment toward a novel. That's what we have.



* Obscure Note: In the story I refer to calculus as the original invention of an Otto von Hohensteigen, independently rediscovered by Leibniz, plagiarized by Newton - and that the whole thing's a kind of kabbalistic mathematics. This is a deliberate muddle on at least three levels. One: Hohensteigen is a person I invented in an unreleased story, which no one has read, so that is really obscure. But, fun for me to slip in. Two: Newton has priority over Leibniz for nailing down calculus, but I am picturing my characters as partisans for their fellow-German. And needless to say, Three: calculus has nothing to do with the kabbala. But my guys are speaking of its strange symbols and surprising results in the terms that make the most sense to them.

Episode 12: Morbid-Vernal

Here's a deep echo coming up from 1999.

In the 24 episodes we plan for this "season" of stories, today's is probably going to be the only one brought out of our archive. It was a nifty achievement when we recorded it - fifteen minutes of integrated storytelling and music, straight to tape without a single edit - and it pointed the way for what Michael and I have had the happiness to be able to work on together since then. Plus, barely anybody's ever heard this thing.

So. Morbid-Vernal:



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Episode 11: The Racist Police Support Group

So this is a touchy one. (For one thing, the title doesn't imply exactly what it sounds like.)

Why invite misinterpretation? Well, why not. Damned if you do or don't. Overall, the trouble seems to be that Americans feel one must support our police in the dangers they face on the job, or oppose the fact that people - routinely innocent and predominately black - are being shot in the streets by police.

It would be hard to think of a better example of a false dichotomy. That you're either against police or for shooting innocent people.

In the story here (maybe it's more of a "bit" than a story), I posit some enormously conscientious police officers, rubbing elbows with some highly racist ones. This seems accurate enough, to say we have both. --And then, hopefully before the whole thing gets too uncomfortable, we launch sideways into a loud advertisement for the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.



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Episode 10: The Cruise

Here's the link:

• Sound effects this week (wind, seagulls, helicopter) were gotten royalty-free from soundbible.com.
• A distant inspiration here was David Foster Wallace's essay about a Caribbean cruise, published in Harpers in 1996, called Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise. It was later reprinted as the title essay of his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The inspiration from DFW's essay is very distant, but I like including the link just in case somebody might actually go read the thing. It sets a kind of comic equivalency between luxury and unreality.
• I cop to cribbing the slow, florid announcer voice from Lorelei, a hostess on the Danube river cruise my wife and I were enormously privileged to be able to take last year. (Also, yes, the tour of the Castle Schmönigkönigstein was inspired by that cruise.) All of the diabetic comas are invented.