The Near Future Issue#1

Issue 1, November 2017

FRACTALS: JACKSON POLLOCK Corpus Callosotomy William Gibson

PLUS: David Lynch Finding Aliens Ralph Steadman

CONTENTS To Find Aliens Pg 4 Split-Brain Pg 8

Feel-good Fractals Pg 10

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Ralph Steadman Pg 15

European Science Photo Competition Pg 24

William Gibson Pg 18 David Lynch Pg 23

Photoworld Pg 16

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Astronomy Space Exploration

To find aliens We must think of life as we don’t know it

by Ramin Skibba

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‘James Webb Space Telescope’ Credit: NASA/MSFC/David Higginbotham

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From blob-like jellyfish to rock-like lichens, our planet teems with such diversity of life that it is difficult to recognise some organisms as even being alive. That complexity hints at the challenge of searching for life as we don’t know it – the alien biology that might have taken hold on other planets, where conditions could be unlike anything we’ve seen before. ‘The Universe is a really big place. Chances are, if we can imagine it, it’s probably out there on a planet somewhere,’ said Morgan Cable, an astrochemist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. ‘The question is, will we be able to find it?’

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‘Jupiter’s icy moon Europa’ Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute

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or decades, astronomers have come at that question by confining their search to organisms broadly similar to the ones here. In 1976, NASA’s Viking landers examined soil samples on Mars, and tried to animate them using the kind of organic nutrients that Earth microbes like, with inconclusive results. Later this year, the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will begin scoping out methane in the Martian atmosphere, which could be produced by Earth-like bacterial life. NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will likewise scan for carbon-based compounds from possible past or present Mars organisms.

But the environment on Mars isn’t much like that on Earth, and the exoplanets that astronomers are finding around other stars are stranger still – many of them quite unlike anything in our solar system. For that reason, it’s important to broaden the search for life. We need to open our minds to genuinely alien kinds of biological, chemical, geological and physical processes. ‘Everybody looks for “biosignatures”, but they’re meaningless because we don’t have any other examples of biology,’ said the chemist Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow.

To open our minds, we need to go back to basics and consider the fundamental conditions that are necessary for life.

First, it needs some form of energy, such as from volcanic hot springs or hydrothermal vents. That would seem to rule out

any planets or moons lacking a strong source of internal heat. Life also needs protection from space radiation, such as an atmospheric ozone layer. Many newly discovered Earth-size worlds, including ones around TRAPPIST-1 and Proxima Centauri, orbit red dwarf stars whose powerful flares could strip away a planet’s atmosphere. Studies by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), set to launch next year, will reveal whether we should rule out these worlds, too.

Finally, everything we know about life indicates that it requires some kind of liquid solvent in which chemical interactions can lead to self-replicating molecules. Water is exceptionally effective in that regard. It facilitates making and breaking chemical bonds, assembling proteins or other structural molecules, and – for an actual organism – feeding and getting rid of waste.

That’s why planetary scientists currently focus on the ‘habitable zone’ around stars, the locations where a world could have the right temperature for liquid water on its surface . hese constraints still leave a bewildering range of possibilities. Perhaps other liquids could take the place of water. Or a less exotic possibility: maybe biology could arise in the buried ocean on an ice-covered alien world. Such a setting could offer energy, protection and liquid water, yet provide almost no outward sign of life, making it tough to detect. For planets around other stars, we simply do not know enough yet to say what is (or is not) happening there. ‘It’s difficult to imagine that we could definitively find life on an exoplanet,’ conceded Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University. ‘But the outer solar system is accessible to us.’

The search for exotic life therefore must begin close to home. The moons of Saturn and Jupiter offer a test case of whether biology could exist without an atmosphere. Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus both have inner oceans and internal heat sources. Enceladus spews huge geysers of water vapour from its south pole; Europa appears to

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Artist’s interpretation of exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

puff off occasional plumes as well. Future space missions could fly through the plumes and study them for possible biochemicals. NASA’s proposed Europa lander, which could launch in about a decade, could seek out possible microbe-laced ocean water that seeped up or snowed back down onto the surface.

Meanwhile, another Saturn moon, Titan, could tell us whether life can arise without liquid water. Titan is dot-

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The Universe is a really big place. Chances are, if we can imagine it, it’s probably out there on a planet somewhere

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ted with lakes of methane and ethane, filled by a seasonal hydrocarbon rain.

Lunine and his colleagues have speculated that life could arise in this frigid setting. Several well-formulated (but as-yet unfunded) concepts exist for a lander that could investigate Titan’s methane lakes, looking for microbial life.

For the motley bunch of exoplanets that have no analog in our solar system, however, scientists have to rely on laboratory experiments and sheer imagination. ‘We’re still looking for the basic physical and chemical requirements that we think life needs, but we’re trying to keep the net as broad as possible,’ Cable said. Exoplanet researchers such as Sara Seager at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology and Victoria Meadows at the University of Washington are modelling disparate types of possible planetary atmospheres and the kinds of chemical signatures that life might imprint onto them.

Now the onus is on NASA and other space agencies to design instruments capable of detecting as many signs of life as possible. Most current telescopes access only a limited range of wavelengths. ‘If you think of the spectrum like a set of venetian blinds, there are only a few slats removed. That’s not a very good way to get at the composition,’ Lunine said. In response, astronomers led by Seager and Scott Gaudi of the Ohio State University have proposed the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx) for NASA in the 2030s or 2040s. It would scan exoplanets over a wide range of optical and near-infrared wavelengths for signs of oxygen and water vapour.

Casting a wide search for ET won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap, but it will surely be transformative. Even if astrobiologists find nothing, that knowledge will tell us how special life is here on Earth. And any kind of success will be Earth-shattering. Finding terrestrial-style bacteria on Mars would tell us we’re not alone. Finding methane-swimming organisms on Titan would tell us, even more profoundly, that ours is not the only way to make life. Either way, we Earthlings will never look at the cosmos the same way again. � November 2017 The Near Future 7

Psychology Corpus Callosotomy

Wait, what? Split-brain

when two personalities live in one body.

Is there a medical case in which a person lives with the two hemispheres of their brain separated?

Would the two halves disagree, fight, have different views, and even different beliefs?

By Samir Elsharbaty

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ince the 1940s, neurosurgeons have been performing corpus callosotomy—a surgery that serves as a last resort for treating epilepsy. It included cutting through the corpus callosum, which functions as the main connection between the two hemispheres of the brain. The procedure was considered dangerous by some and less preferred by many, yet it relieved most patients from unbearable epileptic seizures.

Corpus callosotomy “keeps the electrical signals that cause a seizure from crossing over and wreaking havoc,” says Emily Temple-Wood, Wikipedia editor and medical student who was named the Wikipedian of the Year in 2016. “It’s amazing how well these patients adapt and recover, and this is all due to how plastic the brain is.”

Studying those patients helped neuroscientists make sense of how the two halves of the brain work together, what are the functions of each of them and what would happen if they worked separately. In the last mentioned case, the brain behaved as if there were two separate minds, or what they called later split-brain. Wikipedia tells us about it that: After the right and left brain are separated, each hemisphere will have its own separate perception, concepts, and impulses to act. Having two “brains” in one body can create some interesting dilemmas. When one split-brain patient dressed himself, he sometimes pulled his pants up with one hand (that side 8 The Near Future · November 2017

of his brain wanted to get dressed) and down with the other (this side didn’t).

Also, once he grabbed his wife with his left hand and shook her violently, so his right hand came to her aid and grabbed the aggressive left hand. However, such conflicts are actually rare. If a conflict arises, one hemisphere usually overrides the other.

At the Beyond Belief conference in 2006, neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran shocked the audience with a special case where the patient was half atheist, half religious. But how had Ramachandran been able to interrogate the two halves of his patient?

Since the right hemisphere manages the left side of the body and vice versa, Ramachandran found his way to separately communicate with the two sides by whispering into the patient’s right ear to ask a question to the left hemisphere. He did the same with the left ear to communicate with the right hemisphere.

The major concern with that plan was how to get answers from the right hemisphere. Having the communications center (that controls speaking) on the left side means that it is only possible for the left hemisphere to ver-

bally communicate. So, to get answers from the right hemisphere, the patient was shown a piece of paper with yes and no options to choose from using their left hand.

Studying split-brain patients helped tremendously with distinguishing the differences between the two hemispheres’ functions. While the left side is usually responsible for the language computation, the right side is the face-recognizing expert.

When a normal person is shown a painting by the Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, known for drawing portraits composed of objects (like the one above), they will usually recognize it as a face made of vegetables, fish or flowers. This is not the case for split-brain patients, however—their left side will recognize a face in the painting, while the right side will only see the objects.

“What I find particularly interesting is that consciousness is maintained as a unified state even when the two hemispheres of the brain are disconnected,” Temple-Wood explains. “We don’t understand consciousness very well at all, and it used to be thought that disconnecting the hemispheres would lead to being ‘of two minds’, quite literally. But

‘Vertumnus’ by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, public domain.

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We don’t understand consciousness very well at all....

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there’s no connection between something like dissociative identity disorder and callosotomy!”

Michael Gazzaniga, one of the leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, has dedicated a large amount of his life to studying the split-brained patients. He was concerned about how they act emotionally and physically in comparison to those who do not have a split brain—and if every one of us has two different minds, “why [do] people, including splitbrain patients, have a unified sense of self and mental life”?

Nature magazine featured one of Gazzaniga’s favorite

examples when he recalled “flashing the word ‘smile’ to a patient’s right hemisphere and the word ‘face’ to the left hemisphere, and asked the patient to draw what he’d seen.

“His right hand drew a smiling face,” Gazzaniga recalled.

– “’Why did you do that?’ I asked.

– The patient said, ‘What do you want, a sad face? Who wants a sad face around?’.”

The patient’s left hemisphere had made up a story to verbally justify his drawing, and it had no idea why he made the face smiling because he hadn’t seen the word ‘smile’. “The left-brain interpreter,” Gazzaniga says, “is what everyone uses to seek explanations for events, triage the barrage of incoming information and construct narratives that help to make sense of the world.” � November 2017 · The Near Future 9

Nature & Environment Fractals

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Feel-good fractals From ocean waves to Jackson Pollock’s art

by Florence Williams

Mandelbrot fractal, Credit: Kh627 November 2017 The Near Future 11

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hen Richard Taylor was 10 years old in the early 1970s in England, he chanced upon a catalogue of Jackson Pollock paintings. He was mesmerised, or perhaps a better word is Pollockised. Franz Mesmer, the crackpot 18th-century physician, posited the existence of animal magnetism between inanimate and animate objects. Pollock’s abstractions also seemed to elicit a certain mental state in the viewer. Now a physicist at the University of Oregon, Taylor thinks he has figured out what was so special about those Pollocks, and the answer has deep implications for human happiness.

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his question didn’t always occupy his professional time. Taylor’s day job involves finding the most efficient ways to move electricity: in multiple tributaries like those found in river systems, or in lung bronchi or cortical neurons. When currents move through things such as televisions, the march of electrons is orderly. But in newer, tiny devices that might be only a hundred times larger than an atom, the order of currents breaks down. It is more like ordered chaos. The patterns of the currents, like the branches in lungs and neurons, are fractal, which means they repeat at different scales. Now Taylor is using ‘bioinspiration’ to design a better solar panel. If nature’s solar panels – trees and plants – are branched, why not manufactured panels?

Taylor describes himself as a type of thinker who jumps across disciplines to solve problems.

In addition to his credentials as a physicist, he is a painter and photographer with an advanced art degree. He’s known as a bit of an eccentric around campus. He frequently paddles across Waldo Lake in Oregon when he’s searching for insights, and his hair is so famous it’s almost a distraction.

Long and curly, it resembles the distinctive locks of Sir Isaac Newton in his prime. The public affairs office of the university once actually Photoshopped it out of a publication.

Through his meandering career trajectory, Taylor never lost his interest – obsession, really – in Pollock. While at the Manchester School of Art, he built a rickety pendulum that splattered paint when the wind blew because he wanted to see how ‘nature’ painted and if it ended up looking like a Pollock (it did.)

Then some years ago, he had a seminal insight while working on nano electronics.

‘The more I looked at fractal patterns, the more I was reminded of Pollock’s poured paintings,’ he recounted in an essay. ‘And when I looked at his paintings, I noticed

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that the paint splatters seemed to spread across his canvases like the flow of electricity through our devices.’

Using instruments designed to measure electrical currents, Taylor examined a series of Pollocks from the 1950s and found that the paintings were indeed fractal. It was a little like discovering that your favourite aunt speaks a secret, ancient language. ‘Pollock painted nature’s fractals 25 years ahead of their scientific discovery!’ He published the finding in the journal Nature in 1999, creating a stir in the worlds of both art and physics.

Benoit Mandelbrot first coined the term ‘fractal’ in 1975, discovering that simple mathematic rules apply to a vast array of things that looked visually complex or chaotic. As he proved, fractal patterns were often found in nature’s roughness – in clouds, coastlines, plant leaves, ocean waves, the rise and fall of the Nile River, and in the clustering of galaxies. To understand fractal patterns at different scales, picture a trunk of a tree and a branch: they might contain the same angles as that same branch and a smaller branch, as well as the converging veins of the leaf on that branch.

And so on. You can have fractals creating what looks like chaos.

Taylor was curious to know if the fractals in the Pollocks might explain why people were so drawn to them, as well as to things such as pulsating screensavers and stoner light shows at

Nautilus shell, Credit: Circe Denyer

Cauliflower, Credit: Ben Dalton

the planetarium. Could great works of art really be reduced to some nonlinear equations? Only a physicist would ask. So Taylor ran experiments to gauge people’s physiological response to viewing images with similar fractal geometries. He measured people’s skin conductance (a measure of nervous system activity) and found that they recovered from stress 60 per cent better when viewing computer images with a mathematical fractal dimension (called D) of between 1.3 and 1.5.

D measures the ratio of the large, coarse patterns (the coastline seen from a plane, the main trunk of a tree, Pollock’s big-sweep splatters) to the fine ones (dunes, rocks, branches, leaves, Pollock’s micro-flick splatters). Fractal dimension is typically notated as a number between 1 and 2; the more complex the image, the higher the D. Next, Taylor and Caroline Hägerhäll, a Swedish environmental psychologist with a specialty in human aesthetic perception, converted a series of nature photos into a simplistic representation of the landforms’ fractal silhouettes against the sky.

They found that people overwhelmingly preferred images with a low to mid-range D (between 1.3 and 1.5.) To find out if that dimension induced a particular mental state, they used EEG to measure people’s brain waves while viewing geometric fractal images. They discovered that in that same dimensional magic zone, the subjects’ frontal lobes easily produced the feel-good alpha brainwaves of a wakefully relaxed state. This occurred

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We were delighted to find [mid-range fractals] are similar to music

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even when people looked at the images for only one minute.

EEG measures waves, or electrical frequency, but it doesn’t precisely map the active real estate in the brain. For that, Taylor has now turned to functional MRI, which shows the parts of the brain working hardest by imaging the blood flow.

Preliminary results show that mid-range fractals activate some brain regions that you might expect, such as the ventrolateral cortex (involved with high-level visual processing) and the dorsolateral cortex, which codes spatial long-term memory. But these fractals also engage the parahippocampus, which is involved with regulating emotions and is also highly active while listening to music. To Taylor, this is a cool finding. ‘We were delighted to find [mid-range fractals] are similar to music,’ he said. In other words, looking at an ocean might have a similar effect on us emotionally as listening to Brahms.

Taylor believes that our brains recognise that kinship to the natural world – Pollock’s favoured dimension is similar to trees, snowflakes and mineral veins. ‘We’ve analysed the Pollock patterns with computers and compared them to November 2017 The Near Future 13

Number 1, 1949 by Jackson Pollock, Credit: Dominic Simpson

forests, and they are exactly the same,’ said Taylor.

This dimension does more than lull us; it can engage us, awe us and make us self-reflect.

But why is the mid-range of D (remember, that’s the ratio of large to small patterns) so magical and so highly preferred among most people? Taylor and Hägerhäll have an interesting theory, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with a romantic yearning for Arcadia. In addition to lungs, capillaries and neurons, another human system is branched into fractals: the visual system as expressed by the movement of the eye’s retina.

When Taylor used an eye-tracking machine to measure precisely where people’s pupils were focusing on projected images (of Pollock paintings, for example, but also other things), he saw that the pupils used a search pattern that was itself fractal. The eyes first scanned the big elements in the scene and then made micro passes in smaller versions of the big scans, and it does this in a midrange D. Interestingly, if you draw a line over the tracks that animals make to forage for food, for example albatrosses surveying the ocean, you also see this fractal pattern of search trajectories. It’s simply an efficient search strategy, said Taylor.

‘Your visual system is in some way hardwired to understand fractals,’ said Taylor. ‘The stress-reduction is triggered by a physiological resonance that occurs when the fractal structure of the eye matches that of the fractal image being viewed.’

If a scene is too complicated, like a city intersection, we can’t easily take it all in, and that in turn leads to some discomfort, even if subconsciously.

It makes sense that our visual cortex would feel most at home among the most common natural features we evolved alongside. So perhaps part

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Your visual system is in some way hardwired to understand fractals

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of our comfort in nature derives from fluent visual processing.

If the cause of our relaxation is not entirely rooted in Thoreauvian romance, the solution surely is. We need these natural patterns to look at, and we’re not getting enough of them, said Taylor. As we increasingly surround ourselves with straight Euclidean built environments, we risk losing our connection to the natural stressreducer that is visual fluency. It all adds up to yet another reason to bring greenery back to cities and get outside more often.

I had one final question for Taylor. I was interviewing him via Skype video because he was on holiday in Australia. His soft curls tumbled to the lower edges of the screen like a fine, galloping creek.

‘Is your hair fractal?’

He roared with laughter. ‘I suspect my hair is fractal. The big question of course is whether it induces positive physiological changes in the observer!’ � This is an extract from ‘The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative’ by Florence Williams © 2017, published by permission of W W Norton & Company.

Visual Arts Ralph Steadman

Ralph Steadman

Interview with the legendary cartoonist, by David Pescovitz

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alph Steadman, 81, is best known as the genius social and political cartoonist who famously illustrated Hunter S. Thompson’s depraved adventures in Las Vegas, on the campaign trail in 1972, and at the Kentucky Derby. Juxtapoz’s Gabe Scott interviewed the “crucial comic” about the insanity of today, his friendship with Hunter, and “let(ting) the paper discover things for you.” From Juxtapoz: How do you think the difference in personality type and contrasting level of drug intake between you and Hunter affected your working dynamic?

People would meet him, offer him a pill, he would eat it, and then say, ‘’What was that?’’

Eat it first then ask what it was—he didn’t seem to worry. To him, it was part of his philosophy on life; taking it the way he wants to go, the batty craziness.

How was your attitude or approach different in that respect? Would you consider it sort of a yin and yang?

Yes, I think yin and yang, really. The only time I did drugs with him was for the America’s Cup, where I took psilocybin—he was taking them all the time, and I was seasick, so I asked what he was taking, and he said, ‘’Well, Ralph, these are just pills, you see.” So I said, ‘’Well, would it help me at sea?’’ So I took it and, of course, after about a half an hour, I began to completely lose my mind, and Hunter said, ‘’Here’s two spray cans, Ralph, what are you going to write on the side of the boat?’’ So I said, ‘’How about fuck the pope?’’ And he says, ‘’Are you religious, Ralph?’’ which was such a wonderful reply, you know… And we luckily got caught, otherwise I doubt I would have left America. It was the most criminal idea I’ve ever had, to write something on the side of a million dollar yacht. Anyway, we just hit it off because we were so different. He just thought I was a weird Welshman—he said to me, “They said you were weird, but not that weird.” �

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Destination San Francisco

NGC 2683 as captured by The Hubble Space Telescope is a spiral galaxy seen almost edge-on, giving it the shape of a classic science fiction UFO spaceship. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

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Science Fiction William Gibson

William Gibson Interviewed: Archangel, the Jackpot, and the instantly commodifiable dreamtime of industrial societies by Cory Doctorow William Gibson’s 2014 novel The Peripheral was the first futuristic book he published in the 21st century, and it showed us a distant future in which some event, The Jackpot, had killed nearly everyone on Earth, leaving behind a class of ruthless oligarchs and their bootlickers; in the 2018 sequel, Agency, we’re promised a closer look at the events of The Jackpot. Between then and now is Archangel, a time-traveling, alt-history, dieselpunk story of power-mad leaders and nuclear armageddon that will be in stores on October 3.

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t’s been nearly 20 years since I first interviewed Gibson and in the intervening decades we›ve become both friends and colleagues. He was kind enough to submit to an email interview again, in advance of Archangel’s publication.

Cory Doctorow: This feels like an intermediate step between today and Agency, which is, in turn, an intermediate step on the way to The Peripheral. I know that when you first wrote The Peripheral, you didn’t really know what The Jackpot was... Is this you taking successive runs at either side of The Jackpot, trying to get up to the edge of it so you can get a better look at it?

William Gibson: It feels like that to me now, but the whole thing’s been completely unintentional.

Mike and I (Michael St. John Smith, the actor, who’s also a screenwriter) started bouncing things around after I’d finished The Peripheral, which I assumed would be a one-off, but I found myself still in the grip of the “stub” alternative timeline thing, so Archangel wound up with a similar mechanism (rules of time travel invented, as far as I know, by Sterling and Shiner). Meanwhile, Agency was conceived as a book set in 2016 San Francisco/Silicon Valley, but treating contemporary reality there as if it were a near future (which of course it feels like to me, because I’m old). But I’m also slow, so Trump got elected before I’d finished, and suddenly I had about half of a manuscript that felt like it was set in a stub, a world that never happened. Extremely weird feeling! So I had this one extra thing to be pissed off with, about Trump! But then I wondered what would happen if I considered it as exactly that, a stub, but to do so I felt I needed to hook it 18 The Near Future November 2017

up with the further future of The Peripheral, the London of the klept. Meanwhile, Archangel had been coming out from IDW, and when I went down to meet them at ComicCon, in 2016, the possibility of a Trump win naturally came up. So, through to November 8th, part me was looking at that, and the other part was No Fucking Way, and, well, you know.

For the record, in the graphic novel’s script, pre-election, the Pilot winds up where he winds up in the comic, but it’s a nice WTF moment.

CD: You›ve written screenplays and novels but not, AFAIK, comics. You›re on record as thinking that the comics previously adapted from your work were visually disappointing. You are one of the most visual writers I know, a font of extremely specific and striking visual details -- tell me what it was like to be able to collaborate with drawingtype people who could make visual things happen? How did it compare to screenwriting, how close did it come to your mind›s eye, did this scratch some long-felt itch to conjure those visuals up and make them tangible?

WG: Well, previous attempts were well-intentioned, I don’t doubt, but comics have gotten a lot more sophisticated in the meantime.

Maybe because I’m a very visual writer, I don’t actually have any specific urge to see someone else render the things I’ve already seen, myself, in mind’s eye.

That said, the process with IDW was extremely gratifying. The talent and experience of a lot of professionals, all bent toward making this thing right. And budget not an issue, just a question of what could be drawn and fit in available space. You want an atomic explosion, you’ve got it!

CD: You once told me that Neuromancer was optimistic because it only featured a couple of limited nuclear exchanges instead of the holocaust we’d all be expecting. The futures you’ve written this decade all feature much more grave catastrophes, with much higher death-tolls. Is your optimism (such as it was) waning?

WG: I think I was relatively optimistic then, and remain so, but less so. I’ve never felt that my optimism, such as it was, was particularly logical. Often it felt deliberately quixotic to me.

But I’ve also observed a tendency, over my years as an sf reader, for sf writers of a

certain age to give the After Us The Deluge speech, so I promised myself I’d try to be watchful of the onset of that, try to fend it off as best I could. I suspect that when people notice how much of the world they grew up has already ended, it’s quite natural to feel that the world is ending. Because the world one knew quite demonstrably is. But it always has been ending, that way. You can read the ancient Greeks, say, doing it at great length. When younger, though, this sounds like something one can simply choose to avoid, just as old people, to the young, appear to have made some sort of inexplicably terrible decision to become old.

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There aren’t many catastrophes in my work, in our traditional cultural sense. There’s the California quake that forms the backstory of the Bridge trilogy, and the somewhat deliberately goofy Singularity that closes it. Otherwise, the catastrophic landscapes are simply human civilization, ongoing. The Peripheral introduced something new, for me, with the idea that our cultural model of catastrophe is still largely one of a uni-causal event of relatively short duration. We are ourselves of relatively short duration as individuals, and thus do we look at the world. Is our widespread use of fossil fuels a single extended catastrophe? Did it become one at some relatively late point? Is our species itself catastrophic (see Sterling’s “Swarm”)? Would it seem so to tigers, could they consider such things, and know that we’re on the brink of bringing about their extinction? I don’t see why it wouldn’t.

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to make really edgy teens and young people? (Scott Westerfeld suggested that tomorrow’s punks might opt for acne in a post-zit world) WG: I accepted Sterling’s description of bohemias as “the Dreamtime of industrial societies” immediately, but I also took it (and still do) to imply that that might not be true for post-industrial societies. Bohemias were the product, if Sterling was right, of societies in which information was relatively unevenly distributed, specific information being what you needed in order to auto-other yourself into subculture. Roots of “hip”: to know, to be “with it”. A more universal, post-geographical availability of information seriously messes with that, because you don’t need to physically go to Montmartre or the Haight to get with it.

Mr. Baby’s club in Archangel is envisioned as a scaled-up version of what you get when Berlin’s Weimar bohemia becomes a platform for the postwar

black market, so imagine it as primarily extra-legal, but staffed in part by prewar counterculturists.

It’s interesting to consider the Pepe trolls as a subculture, because if they aren’t, why aren’t they? Yesterday a friend showed me a passage from Joshua Green’s book about Steve Bannon, Devil’s Bargain, describing René Guénon as an influence. So I checked out Guénon’s Wiki for the first time. Highly recommend it. Trippy, as we used to say! Guénon was, among other things, a convert to Islam (albeit a raging esotericist along with it, so not just any Islam) and otherwise deep into Egypt. So in the way of things internet I wound up diving his correspondence with Julius Evola, who kept him up to date on what Aleister Crowley was up to, and explained why this Jung character was even more dangerous than Freud. Both these guys, Guénon and Evola, were obviously total hipsters (in the original sense of the term). Subcul-

You want an atomic explosion, You’ve got it!

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It seems to me in retrospect that Ballard’s work had a certain arc, in its employment of catastrophe. Early on, he’d unleash catastrophes of the sort our culture recognizes as such, though with wonderfully poetic results. As he continued, however, the catastrophe became humanity. Not a world made desert, or drowned, but a world made Cannes writ large, and terrible through being the very opposite of deserted.

CD: One place where this catastrophic business wraps around to touch your visual sense is in the cyberpunk aesthetic: for decades, you›ve been frontrunning the mainstreaming of bohemian subcultures. Archangel features gorgeous, eyeball-kicky sequences in an illegal nightclub in war-torn Berlin, with lots of well-dressed weirdos (there’s also a Bowie-esque protagonist in the cast of characters). Today, it’s hard to imagine a genuinely underground culture that isn’t also something you can buy at the mall, with a few exceptions (e.g. extreme racist alt-right Pepe trolls who have to order their t-shirts off the internet or get them in a flea market). Can you imagine an uncommodifiable futuristic bohemian subculture that today’s post-cyberpunks could deploy November 2017 The Near Future 21

turalists, unmistakably. With-it dudes. Whatever “it” was.

But then I never felt I truly understood many aspects of what I’d experienced in the countercultural ‘60s until I got a prof at UBC whose central interest was the mass psychology of fascism. Guénon and Evola and, hell, Bannon, come with big deja-vu, that way. Guénon also influenced Andre Breton (doesn’t surprise me). So the Pepe trolls, however distantly, have this weird lineage, which feels countercultural to me. (Is Bannon hip to the Dark Enlightenment?)

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I don’t want to hang with whoever has the most money and spaceships.

I want to hang with whoever has the best shadows, the most exquisitely weird.... alien technology

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Subcultural “cool”, it seems to me, is inherently commodifiable. Subcultures may have pre-dated cool, but I wouldn’t bet on it. There was a countercultural boutique in Greenwich Village in the 1890s, called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the first I know of. Sold the outfit a girl needed to self-other into Village-ness (but she still needed cigarettes, too).

CD: Last question: When I first interviewed you, 20 years ago (!!), we talked about why Japan was a wellspring of cool futurity and China was (in the cyberpunk pantheon, at least), an also-ran. Now, Chinese authors are winning Hugo awards and China is projecting more heavy zaibatsu-style force into more territories (including orbit) than Japan ever dreamed of. In The Peripheral, China is a mysterious, closed technocracy that may or may not be the source of interdimensional semi-time-semi-travel. Now that you’ve written two more 22 The Near Future November 2017

books that circle The Peripheral’s future, are you homing in any more on what role China plays in this future you’re playing in?

WG: In The Peripheral, I thought of China as a much more sophisticated and advanced species of klept. So that “the” klept, as Netherton thinks of it, comes out of the jackpot controlling everything still habitable that isn’t China. Which has become some sort of super-advanced sphere of its own, with little need of dealing with outsiders. Which gave me this other, unknowable realm, a sci-fi Faerie, where impossible magic can conveniently happen without my having to invent an explanation for it. But that’s not any literal prediction for China. That’s me using China as a plot device.

What I wanted from Japan, when I started writing sf, was that it was Japan. It was wonderful for me that it was Japan during the Bubble, because that slotted perfectly into my being sick of sf futures basically being America. But that was really just another excuse for me to write about Japan. The thing that makes me nuts about Japan, as near as I’ve ever been able to express it, is the way in which all of all their culture, their stuff, seems to be fractal. You can break it down into smaller and smaller bits, and each one is still Japanese. For whatever reason, I’ve never gotten that from China. For me, Japan’s gotten steadily more interesting as that Next Big World Player thing has receded. I don’t want to hang with whoever has the most money and spaceships.

I want to hang with whoever has the best shadows, the most exquisitely weird and poetic history of being whacked with alien technology, becoming the first industrialized Asian nation, trying to take over their side of the world, getting nuked for their trouble, and inventing the Walkman. I think it’s probably something like you and Disneyland: I’m just so there. �

Film David Lynch

David Lynch The Art Life Portrait of the artist as a young and old man, by Raymond Benson

D

avid Lynch is today’s foremost surrealist. In many ways, he has taken up the mantle begun by those artists of the 1920s who attempted to present in tangible, visual forms the juxtapositions, bizarre logic, and beauty/horror of dreams. Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Germaine Dulac, René Magritte—to name a few.

Most people know Lynch from his films, but as this thoughtful and insightful documentary reveals, he is and has always been primarily a painter. Lynch began his career in the “art life” studying and practicing fine art… and he sort of fell into filmmaking along the way. Even today, despite his recent foray back into television with Twin Peaks—The Return on Showtime, Lynch spends most of his time in his home studio drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and painting.

The film is narrated by Lynch himself as he takes the audience through moments of his early life growing up first in the state of Montana, then Idaho, Washington, and finally Virginia. After high school, Lynch briefly attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but he dropped out because he wasn’t inspired. His friend Jack Fisk (future production designer on several of Lynch’s films and future wife of actress Sissy Spacek) got the artist to join him at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and that’s where things started to take off.

The documentary might be disappointing to Lynch fans in that it covers only his childhood and twenties…just up to the point where he makes Eraserhead (which took four years in the mid-seventies and was finally released in 1977). Other documentaries, such as 1997’s Pretty as a Picture, might delve into Lynch’s more well-known feature work. However, for this unique documentary, Lynch has provided never-before-seen home movies and photographs of his childhood, family, and artwork. As these biographical stories are related in chronological order, we see Lynch at work in his studio… drinking coffee, smoking, and painting. In fact, we get a very good look at a great deal of his artwork. And if you think Lynch’s movies are strange, wait until you see his paintings!

Stylistically, they are three-dimensional multimedia pieces.

A canvas might contain found objects, gobs of thick paint, wood and metal, odd figures and creatures, and lettering.

Fascinating stuff.

Lynch explains how he got the idea for a “painting that moved,” which resulted in his first film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967), and then moved on to make other surrealistic, avant-garde short films such as The Alphabet and The Grandmother. These efforts led to his moving his family in 1971 (he had gotten married in ’67 and had a child in ’68) to Los Angeles so that he could study at the AFI Conservatory.

It was there that he began his first feature film, the iconic independent horror-comedy, Eraserhead.

The takeaway from the documentary is that Lynch evolved as an artist whenever there were obstacles to overcome. He

developed a knack for taking a bad situation and turning it into something productive. We see this occurring repeatedly in his tales of journeying from childhood to becoming an adult.

The Criterion Collection presents the film in the company’s usual top-notch excellence. The video quality of the Bluray High Definition digital master is gorgeous—you can see every wrinkle of Lynch’s weathered face, as well as the fine lines of his silver-white hair. Sound—always important in a Lynch film and just as vital here—is a 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio. The package is short on supplements, though.

Along with the theatrical trailer, an interview with one of the directors, Jon Nguyen, illustrates the working process the filmmakers had with Lynch. An essay by critic Dennis Lim appears in the booklet.

At only 88 minutes, David Lynch—The Art Life is a short but worthwhile look into the mind—and dreams—of one of today’s most important visual artists. � ‘David Lynch: The Art Life’ (2016; Directed by Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, Olivia Neergaard-Holm) Criterion Blu-ray Special Edition

November 2017 The Near Future 23

Photography Science

European

Science Photo Competition

Presenting the winners...

Overall, the contest involved 40 countries, over 2,200 people, and nearly 10,000 images.

by Ivo Kruusamägi

T

he European Science Photo Competition has come to a close and the winners selected. Over 2,200 people from 40 countries participated, adding nearly 10,000 images to the Wikimedia Commons—everything from nanostructures of various materials to the vastness of space, and from portraits of scientists to videos of chemical reactions.

Many of the photos came in from Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Italy, and Germany, but per capita the leaders were Estonia, Macedonia, and Greece. 93.3% of participants had never before uploaded any images to Commons.

Urmas Tartes, a well-known Estonian entomologist and nature photographer, likes to say that a good picture broadens the horizons of human understanding. He defines the perfect photo as something what combines knowledge with emotion and what is presented in a most suitable environment. These images serve that purpose well, given that they are and will be used on Wikipedia.

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November 2017 The Near Future 25

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G

eneral Category winner: (left-top) A conehead mantis walking on a rail track somewhere in mountainous Arcadia, Southern Greece.

Photograph by Panagiotis Stavropoulos Runner-up: (previous page) Frosted bubble. Photograph by Danielarapava Microscopy Images winner: (below) Different millipedes. An animal from a Julus species on left and one from Polydesmus species on the right.

Photograph by Pr.zs.i. Runner-up: (left-bottom) Surface of butterfly feeler. Photograph by Pavel Kejzlar

November 2017 The Near Future 27

I

mage Sets winner: (this page) A Micro crystals of paracetamol in polarized light. Photographs by Radix2010 Runner-up: (next page, top left) Movement of the moon passing directly behind the Earth (lunar eclipse).

Photographs by Christina Irakleous.

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P

eople in Science winner: (bottom, right) Checking the test bench for active vibration control at the Fraunhofer Institute LBF. Photo

by Thomas Ernsting. Runner-up: (top right) Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. Lecturer Vadim Evgenyevich Privalov. Photo by Daniil Filatov. ďż˝

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32 The Near Future November 2017

CREDITS All design, layout and composition by ‘Mark Hayes Multimedia’. All content within this publication sourced from creativecommons.org. You may download, share and republish this magazine online or in print under the ‘Creative Commons Attribution’ Licence. You may not edit or shorten the text, you must attribute the design, layout and composition to ‘Mark Hayes Multimedia’ and attribute the various articles and images to the original publishers listed below. »

Pg1 ‘Water under sinusoidal vibration of 11 Hz’ photo

by Jordi Torrents from Spain., freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

»

Pg15 ‘Interview with legendary cartoonist Ralph Steadman’ by David Pescovitz originally published on boingboing.net and republished here under the ‘Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) Licence’.

»

Pg16 ‘Hubble Spies a UFO’ originally published on flicker.com by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and republished here under the ‘Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) Licence’.

»

Pg18 ‘William Gibson interviewed: Archangel, the Jackpot, and the instantly commodifiable dreamtime of industrial societies’ by Cory Doctorow originally published on boingboing.net and republished here under the ‘Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) Licence’.

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Pg4 ‘To Find Aliens, we must think of life as we don’t know it’ by Ramin Skibba originally published on aeon. co and republished here under the ‘Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives Licence’.

»

Pg8 ‘Wait, what? Split brain, when two personalities live in one body’ by Samir Elsharbaty originally published on blog.wikimedia.org and republished here under the ‘Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence’.

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Pg23 ‘Review: David Lynch – The Art Life’ by Raymond Benson originally published on cinemaretro.com and republished here under the ‘Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) Licence’.

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Pg10 ‘Feel-good Fractals’ by Florence Williams originally published on aeon.co and republished here under the ‘Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives Licence’.

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Pg24 ‘Presenting the winners of the European Science Photo Competition’ by Ivo Kruusamagi originally published on blog.wikimedia.org and republished here under the ‘Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence’. All images freely licensed under ‘CC BY-SA 4.0’.

/markhayesmultimedia ~ Email: markhayespage@yahoo.co.uk ~ Mark Hayes, Graphic Design & Web Dev. � November 2017 The Near Future 33