Terminus Est

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 43 on February 5th, 2025)

Terminus Est (as seen on the cover of The Shadow of the Torturer, (Wolfe, 1980))

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/16530739-e0043-appendix-w-99-terminus-est

In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, some things come to and end. Join us as we look at the impact of the Appendix W on real world events through a look at one of the most iconic blades in fiction: Severian’s Terminus Est from Gene Wolfe’s 1980 novel The Shadow of the Torturer.  But much like the blade, there is much, much more hidden below the surface of this episode.


In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, some things come to an end. So too with Appendix W, as we have reached the final episode, where we take a look back at what has come before. Since the launch of this podcast, real world events have disturbingly breached through from the chaos of the warp into this reality.

We will look at the root causes of why, in this Appendix W episode, The Implausipod. Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And in this special Appendix W episode, I wanted to get to the end point of what Appendix W is all about, because since we started it, I’ve always known where the end point is going to be.

There’s a line I remember from my childhood, from the theme from Mahogany. Not the original song by Diana Ross, but a cover out of Europe. Do you know where you’re going to? When it came to Appendix W, the answer was an emphatic yes. I had a good idea at the outset where this would lead since the initial post back in 2021.

This comes with the benefit of hindsight and experience, where one can develop a good idea of the feasibility of a project at the point of inception. However, while you may have a destination in mind when you start a project, the place you may wind up at may be wildly different, or at least the path may be more circuitous than expected.

So if I didn’t discover anything new along the way, it would have been fine project, but I would have been a little disappointed. And we did uncover some new things, and that’s been fantastic. Of course, anyone familiar with that rather famous song knows the next verse starts with, did you get what you’re hoping for?

And the answer to that is, not quite. So in this penultimate episode of season one, and I say penultimate with the biggest bunny ears possible, we’ll get into the whys, wherefores, and what we learned along the way. The original endpoints of this project can be seen in some of the sections that we started with.

The descriptions of technology, the methods of travel, the aliens encountered, all overarching aesthetic elements by which we classify something as sci fi. And while we were off hunting for the origins of things, we began to weigh how much these tales had directly influenced their descendant that they had heavily inspired.

That inspiration can be seen directly in how some of those aesthetic elements were portrayed by their modern descendant, Warhammer 40, 000. But there’s more to it than just the aesthetic dimension, as the beliefs and ideologies of those authors were also embedded in the fiction they wrote as well.

Sometimes explicit, as seen in Starship Troopers or The Forever War. Sometimes more tacit or obfuscated. These beliefs were those of the post war era, in tales written by men who often served or came of age during World War II. Their science fiction reflects that era. We see large militaries and bureaucracies, hierarchies and authoritarianism.

Of the belief in the rightness of one’s cause, of being on the winning side. Sometimes this is questioned, as in Dune, and sometimes it is exaggerated to the point of satire, as in Judge Dredd. But regardless, they were common enough that the tropes and stereotypes begin to be repeated. I’m looking at you.

So, part of our original goal with Appendix W was to see how the impact of these ideologies can be traced as well. That line that follows through fiction throughout the decades. The continuous feedback loops between fiction and the real world. And this is still one of the goals. But, the real world has funny ways of moving faster than you might like, and real world events are starting to see the manifestation of these ideologies in ways that it wasn’t thought possible.

While real world events were perhaps the main reason that Appendix W wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, those real world events also offer us an opportunity to frame and focus our story, and to understand why we’ve come to the end. Terminus Est Why Terminus Est? Well, in Latin it quite literally means, It’s the end.

But it means something rather different in the context of science fiction and Warhammer 40k. In sci fi, it is one of the great swords of fiction, in a pantheon of named blades along with Stormbringer and Dragnipur and many others. Terminus Est was the sword of the executioner Severian in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun.

We mentioned it in passing when we talked about that book back in episode 24 of Appendix W. You can see an image of it from the cover of the paperback edition of the book in the thumbnail episode of the show. It is from this iconic presentation that all of its other manifestations flow, whether in Castlevania and Path of Exile, to the manga of Blade Dance, to all of the other ridiculously oversized two handed swords and daiclaves that show up in anime, D& D, and Exalted, to an appearance in Warhammer 40, 000 itself as the name of the flagship of the Death Guards we’ve covered before.

The aesthetics of Gene Wolfe’s work in the Book of the New Sun, the imagery and use of language can be seen redolent throughout the lore of 40k. That idea of a fallen humanity long in the future dealing with technology that they no longer understand is seen throughout the work. Perhaps we can best show this in how Terminus Est is introduced to the readers on page 106 of the Timescape edition from 1980.

Quote, the sword herself. I shall not bore you with a catalogue of her virtues and beauties. You would have to see her and hold her to judge her justly. Her bitter blade was an L in length, straight and square pointed, as such as swords should be. Man edge and woman edge could part a hair to within a span of the guard.

Which was of thick silver with a carven head at either end. Her grip was onyx bound with silver bands, two spans long and terminated with an opal. Art had been lavished upon her. But it is the function of art to render attractive and significant those things that without it would not be so. And so Art had nothing to give her.

The words Terminus Est had been engraved upon her blade in curious and beautiful letters. And I had learned enough of ancient languages since leaving the Atrium of Time to know that they meant, This is the line of division. End quote But Terminus Est is an unusual blade, and she holds some secrets within her.

Quote, There’s a channel in the spine of her blade, and in it runs a river of hydrogyrum, a metal heavier than iron, though it flows like water. Thus the balance is shifted towards the hands when the blade is high, but to the tip when it falls. So, light to raise, weighty to descend, as we hear so often throughout the series.

And, if this is to be the end, then there is no more fitting artifact to focus on for this episode. So let’s take a moment to look back at Appendix W through the lens of the Executioner’s Blade.

While we’ve covered an incredible amount in the previous 98 episodes of the series, I’d like to mention some of the highlights for me. Of course, whenever channels look at the influence of 40k, there is a focus on the obvious ones. Dune, Starship Troopers, and Judge Dredd. And we did touch on all those, but for me.

The delight was in finding and uncovering those hidden little gems that found their way into the lore. Star Trek isn’t generally mentioned as a direct influence on Warhammer 40, 000 in the way that those other titles are, mostly due to the more utopic view of the future that that series held, though the 40k orcs have a lot of parallels to the Klingons.

It was the revelation of the origins of the Terran Empire that surprised me the most, that Alternate universe version of Star Trek, first seen in the episode Mirror Mirror, where Spock famously wore a goatee, so you knew he was one of the baddies. The agonizers and the punishment that has become staples of both the Imperials and Dark Eldar in the Warhammer 40, 000 universe showing up there was a nice touch, and I’m glad we spent several episodes going through our deep dive on the original series.

These small influences showed up again in our very first episode, where we saw the enslavers from the Rogue Trader rulebook appear as they did on screen in an episode of Space 1999 in the episode titled Dragon’s Domain. This is sci fi with a more British feel than Star Trek, and this difference can be seen when we looked at Blake’s 7 back in episode 17.

Yeah, I know it would have worked out better if I had planned that one ahead, but I enjoyed our further look at the instrumentality in Episode 7 instead. That same instrumentality played a huge part of our review, as we spent three episodes on it throughout the series. The amount of influence that Cordwainer Smith’s writing had on Warhammer 40, 000 was perhaps understated, and he indirectly impacted Dune as well, but this gave us birth to so much of the day to day of the Imperium, the warp, the mechanicum, and the relationship they have to technology.

It was a real pleasure to share that with you. Of course, Smith’s work was a very American, West Coast view of sci fi, as was Herbert’s, and Gene Wolfe’s too, who we looked at as we reviewed each of the four books of the Book of the New Sun, and here again in this episode with the Blade, Terminus Est. All three of these series, the Instrumentality, Dune, and the New Sun, touched on the themes of the Earth in the distant future, of the dying Earth genre, though we only spent a little bit of time on Jack Vance’s work of the same name.

Deep Time appeared repeatedly as seen in Foundation series we did back in episode 50, though I’ll admit it was hard to separate the book from the TV adaptation on Apple. And here we can see some of the commonalities of the authors of the early influential science fiction as Asimov, Heinlein, Smith, and Vance all worked for the U.

S. military in various capacities during World War II. We’ll pick up on this thread in a moment. Of course, even though much of the sci fi of the quote unquote Golden Age was written by Americans following their experience in the war, there was no shortage of British influence as well. We mostly skipped over the rather obvious Tolkien influences, opting for just a quick episode there discussing how those contributions to the fantasy genre as a whole found their way to 40k through the influence of Games Workshop’s fantasy series, the original Warhammer.

This is where the works of Michael Moorcock showed up as well, back in episode 10 when we looked at Stormbringer. The sword with a trapped demon within that inspired the whole mythology of daemon weapons within Warhammer. For me personally, the biggest revelations came from my first exposure to much of the British media that I had only rarely glimpsed growing up.

As a Canadian, we tended to get overlapping coverage of both British and U. S. culture, but it was very selective, and there was some stuff I really hadn’t seen at all. So whether it was Doctor Who, or Blake’s 7, or the various comic series included as part of 2000 AD, Discovering how those filtered into Warhammer 40, 000 was fascinating, and I’m glad I got to share those with you in the multiple episodes we did.

I’m also happy we brought in some outside experts for a look at the Gundam series with an interview with veteran modelers and fans of the franchise. Even the Gundam influence on Warhammer 40, 000 didn’t really start showing up until later in the 1990s with the release of the Tau Empire, but big stompy robots were there from the beginning.

But, uh, no exploration of sci fi influences would be complete without looking at the impact of Hollywood. Perennial franchises like Star Wars, Aliens, and Terminator all showed up in various ways, and I’m glad we got to those franchises eventually. But as we mentioned in those episodes, they are widely popular and well known, so I’m also happy we waited as long as we did before taking a look at them, as the little details of the earlier, smaller titles would have been eclipsed by the giants of the genre.

However, it is in the films that we can most easily see the differences in the sci fi ideologies that are represented within the series.

And what are the ideologies that we see? Well, as with most popular culture, what we see is a reflection of our own society. Which is why we see militarism, corporatism, hierarchies, and a focus on the commodities and trade in many of the stories. Some aspects of our society seem inescapable, what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism, where it is easier to imagine a far future than a coherent end to capitalism.

Which is why, even in the far future of the Dune universe, filled with religion and medievalism, we have a monopolistic corporation like CHOAM controlling the economy behind the scenes. But the underlying ideology and our relation to it can change over time, and while this might not be stated explicitly, we can see it in the changing visual representations of pop culture.

Within sci fi, cinema, and television, we can see certain eras that are most clearly identified by their aesthetic. We start in the 60s, the clean era, where shows like Star Trek, the original series, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 both draw in inspiration from the space programs of the time. The clean lines and shiny panels everywhere, with hardly a mote of dust to be seen.

A show like Space 1999 serves as a transition piece, as the space station becomes more worn down over time, reflecting the diminishing resources of the station, and the economic malaise and uncertainty of the time, bringing us the era of grit and grime. Exemplified by the late 70s pieces of sci fi like The Star Wars and Doctor Who.

And as the 70s drew to a close, that grit turned into grease and grime, to the greasy production of shows like Alien and Ice Pirates. With steam filling the atmosphere and hiding the sets, and condensation and grease liberally applied across the surfaces. The grit was still there, of course. The recently deceased director David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune and the frenetically paced post apocalyptic Road Warrior still had much dirt and dust, but the bright future of the 60s had definitely drifted over to the dark side.

So too in the fiction. While we noted that the foundational elements of 40k consisted of a blend of British American and occasionally Japanese or European sci fi and fantasy, there was a strong showing by American writers of sci fi that focused on the deep history in the dying earth, Asimov’s foundation, Smith’s instrumentality, Vance’s dying earth, and Herbert’s dune, if we were to lay them out roughly chronologically.

But this underlying ideology has connections to U. S. military policy. As noted by Chris Hables Gray, not only has science fiction predicted many of the recent changes in war, there is a strong argument that it has influenced them to some extent. Military science fiction and military policy coexist in the same discourse system to a surprising degree, and we have sci fi as policy.

And for Gray and others, this can be seen again and again. Gray notes how H. Bruce Franklin looks at how superweapons occupy space within the American collective imagination, that space we talked about back in episode 26, Silicon Dreams. There, we were introduced to the idea of the collective imaginary with respect to virtual reality and artificial intelligence, but we find it again here too in terms of superweapons and mechanized warfare, which even Thomas Edison was talking about as early as 1915.

While the earlier sci fi had militaristic themes, as those early authors like Heinlein drew on their military backgrounds, showing us vast navies, hierarchical organizations, authoritarian systems, and War Amongst the Stars, this shifted in the 70s and 80s with the rise of the subgenre of mil sci fi. We covered some of it, from the hover tanks of David Drake’s Hammer Slammers, to the eternal wars between Man and Kzin in Larry Niven’s known space universe, to the Janissaries universe of Jerry Pournelle.

Jerry Pournelle, who passed in 2017, was a former Korean war vet who worked in the aerospace industry and entered academia, earning degrees in psychology and political science. While we didn’t cover much of his work directly, save for our discussion of orbital bombardments in the episode on Satellite Warfare and the origins of the Exterminatus in Warhammer 40k, he did collaborate with a number of other authors we looked at and was a prolific writer in the field.

However, he may be more influential on the field for his academic writing rather than his sci fi. Specifically, 1970’s The Strategy of Technology, co authored with Stefan Possony, where they argued for the demonstration of technological superiority as part of a country’s doctrine. And this was seen in the American pursuit of stealth technology, and Reagan’s SDI program, the Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars.

It could be argued that these are all elements of what Mary Kaldor calls the Baroque Arsenal, and we can see that Baroque style seeping through in the arcane elements of A Forgotten Technology in Terminus Est, and Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, in Dune, and in Warhammer 40, 000 itself. I bring up Jerry Pournelle because his political views were embedded within his work, and he recognized and acknowledged this.

He self described as being, quote, somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan, but his conservatism tended more to the isolationist view, what is now described as paleoconservatism, that was opposed to the Roosevelt New Deal, and has been supplanted by neoconservatism in the US. And like, Many of his sci fi colleagues, he worked as a consultant, an advisor, or a futurist for various organizations during the Cold War.

And this is part of our rationale for ending. It leads us into why we’re wrapping up this chapter of The Appendix W. Or speedrunning to the end at least. Since we started this project the world has gotten darker and those dark elements of our entertainment are escaping the turbulence of the warp and manifesting in our reality.

Khornate imagery and iconography adopted by troops fighting on the front lines of the Russo Ukrainian war with sayings such as Blood for the Blood God being bandied about everywhere from internet commentary to the pro wrestling forums, the brutality of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe is seeping into our public discussion, stripped of the irony and satire attached to it in the in universe materials, where every text is issued by an unreliable narrator.

The audience still realizes that, right? That it’s satire? Sometimes I question this, as dank memes in support of certain public figures as the god emperor of mankind are posted in earnest on the internet, or if Posted with an ironic wink by the commenter, perhaps taken up and spread less ironically by the followers and algorithms that lift it up to virality.

Spreadable media of the most infectious kind. Papa Nurgle would be proud. 

And of course, there’s the cosplay, which has grown in recent years to become an industry unto itself, but has also seen growth in the fandom of the adversaries in the various sci fi universes that we enjoy. While many cosplay conventions have adopted explicit rules against historically fascist or racist imagery, They are much more lenient when it comes to allegorical representations, and as we’ve mentioned throughout this episode, and series, sci fi is rife with allegory.

Elements that were clearly presented as allegorical in the original fictions were shaded in with grey during the intervening years and have been embraced by the fandoms at different points. Elements of clear satire, Starship Troopers and Judge Dredd most specifically, were taken at face value. And so, The critique they presented on the police state or militarization of fascism gets subsumed by the larger sci fi trappings of the settings.

These fandoms have become groups unto themselves, with groups like the 501st, a now international troop of cosplayers that wear stormtrooper armor and march around conventions and other events. The group that represent the baddies in Star Wars, wearing armor and helmets designed to look like skeletons and skulls, were originally patterned off of the Americans in Vietnam.

The rebels of which Luke and Leia were a part of were the Viet Cong, according to an interview George Lucas gave with director James Cameron in 2018. And the 501st is not alone in groups of bad guys that find representation within the cosplay community. But the issue is that fashionable cosplay becomes fashionable dress rehearsal, and from there it seeps into everyday life.

So too with Warhammer 40, 000. The grim darkness of the 41st millennium finds no shortage of representations of evil. From the grinding military machine of the Imperial Army, the Astra Militarum, with its Commissars and the World War I German inspired Death Korps of Krieg, To the transhuman space marines, the Adeptus Astartes draw an inspiration from the armored soldiers of Starship Troopers, the Forever War, and the Sardaukar of Dune.

We see this continue in the Judge Dredd inspired Adeptus Arbites, the space cops that police the regular population, and the Inquisitors that purge out heresy with the ferverance of the now expected Spanish Inquisition. Games Workshop has repeatedly stated that their work is satire, but how much weight do those statements carry, especially compared to the evidence of all the other material published for their universe?

In a statement made on their website in 2021, Games Workshop stated, “The Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in. Like so many aspects of Warhammer 40, 000, the Imperium of Man is satirical.

For clarity, satire is the use of humor, irony, or exaggeration, displaying people’s vices or a system of flaws for scorn, derision, and ridicule. Something doesn’t have to be wacky or laugh out loud funny to be satire. The derision is in the setting’s amplification of a tyrannical, genocidal regime turned up to eleven.

The Imperium is not an aspirational state outside of the in universe perspectives of those who are slaves to its systems. It’s a monstrous civilization, and its monstrousness is plain for all to see. That said, certain real world hate groups and adherents of historical ideologies better left in the past sometimes seek to claim intellectual properties for their own enjoyment, and to co opt them for their own agendas.”

This statement was issued as a response to someone wearing full Nazi regalia to a tournament in Spain in 2021. But it’s indicative of the larger issue, and I think we need to look forward for solutions. Games Workshop may disavow the use of their material by hate groups and claim that it is satire, but it’s not clear that some groups are getting it, or rather, that the preponderance of darkness within the universe provides cover for those who would use it for nefarious ends.

The issue is that you run the risk of being that kind of bar. Now, it’s not that I think that Warhammer 40k is irredeemable, it’s just that the Grim and Dark is just that, Grim and Dark, and that sometimes the best way to combat the dank memes is to know where they come from, to detoxify them. And I know some of the audience loves the dank, and think the dankness is their ally, but you merely adopted the dank.

I was born in it, molded by it, I didn’t see Mr. Rogers until I was already a man, and by then it was nothing to me but blinding. But I digress.

Warhammer 40, 000 Rogue Trader was originally published in 1987, and it collected its inspirations, wove them together, and wore them on its sleeve, adding more fabric to the quilt as time went on. Early editions became incorporated into the design such that the sources are forgotten, and this is what we are highlighting here, especially with the more obscure titles.

But eventually, 40k grew to be enough of an influence in its own right that it was influencing the culture that it had previously assimilated. In 2025, it’s something that needs to be stressed, that the media environment that 40k was released into was vastly different than the one that existed even 10 years later, as the 20th century drew to a close.

Some of the concurrent and subsequent influences of Warhammer 40, 000 can be seen in other media titles, titles like Aliens, which was released in 1986, or Star Trek The Next Generation, originally starting in 1987, and their subsequent introduction of the Borg as an antagonist in episodes like Q Who in May of 1989, and June and September Two Parter The Best of Both Worlds in 1990.

Big sci fi movies like Independence Day came out in 1996, Starship Trooper’s movie was released in 1997, the video game Starcraft came out in March 31st of 1998, and Terminator 2 was released in 1991, and the Star Wars prequels coming out in 1999, and all of these had subsequent influences on Warhammer 40, 000.

As we go forward with the Appendix W, and we will be going forward, we will be looking at the interplay that took place during the early 1990s, a fallow period in sci fi which allowed, or forced perhaps, 40, 000 to build on its own mythology and become the cultural icon and brand that it turned into. Why are we doing this?

Well, As I stated, partly it’s a speedrun in order to catch us up to the present as current events have forced the timeline along and we don’t want to be looking at stuff that’s so hopelessly dated that it has no impact or anything to say about what’s going on currently in our world. And from this point forward, episode 99, we’ll be looking both backwards and forwards at the various titles that influence and shape what’s going on.

This will be shaped a little bit by whatever gives me joy in the moment, but I’ll do my best to announce in advance whatever it is I’m working on so that you, the listener, can follow along. I don’t know if many podcasts have tried something like this before, or if some have but have scrapped it because it’s a bad idea, but We’ll give it a shot, because it gives me a little bit of joy to do so, and that joy is critically important.

As you may have noted, since it’s been over ten months since we last published an Appendix W episode, I’ve been struggling a little bit with that joy, with that creativity, and this has taken place over the holidays and has been through into the new year as well with the seemingly unending flood of bad news.

As you can tell by the existence of this podcast, we managed to get things moving a bit, but the first step was turning off the fire hose and following through with some steps that you can do to make constructive actions to your own media and mental health. The second step was to keep creating. I mentioned my struggle in passing towards a friend, it was pointed towards an interview with Heather Cox Richardson that she had made with the National Press Club.

The relevant bit 57 minute mark in the clip and I’ll link to it in the show notes. The gist of her advice is to behave with joy as a means of resistance. Do the things that matter to you and that you can bring to the people around you, end quote. We can meet the moment and as scholars be honest and by doing the best scholarly work we can, we contribute back to humanity.

And the Appendix W and the podcast at large are both Scholarly works; it’s stuff I studied in grad school, and I want to continue bringing that knowledge and information back to a larger public. Even though contributing back to humanity seems like a lot to ask from a blog and media channel that mostly focuses on the intersection of sci fi and technology, it is 

what we’re doing. Maybe our project is a little bit wider in scope than we initially thought. But the big takeaway, at least for me, is that moment of reflection that I like what we’re doing here and I enjoy doing the podcast, the blog, the newsletter, and YouTube, which I hope to publish more on in 2025, and the various other bits that we have going on here.

So, after a brief period of stasis, we’ll get back to the things that bring us joy and find the joy in sharing them with you as well. So let’s pick up that long, finely honed blade of Terminus Est one last time. Though, not to wield, but to return to its scabbard and look toward the future.

Thank you for joining us on this special Appendix W episode of the ImplausiPod. We’ll return next episode with the start of our series on cyberspace and examine some of what is being built around us, what this is all about. After that, we’ll be looking at the first season of and or, and we may have just a few other surprises to throw your way.

In the meantime, I’m your host, Dr. Imp plausible. You can reach me at Doctor implausible@implausipod.com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows @implausipod.com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4.

0 share alike license. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow from word of mouth of the community, so if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two. and pass it along. There’s also a buy me a coffee link on each show at Implausiapod.

com which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Over on the blog, we’ve started up a monthly newsletter. There will likely be some overlap with future podcast episodes, and newsletter subscribers can get a hint of what’s to come ahead of time, so consider signing up and I’ll leave a link in the show notes.

Until next time, take care and have fun.

Bibliography

Chris Hables Gray- “There Will Be War!”: Future War Fantasies and Militaristic Science Fiction in the 1980s. (n.d.). Retrieved September 3, 2023, from https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/64/gray.htm

Kaldor, M. (1981). The Baroque Arsenal. Hill & Wang Pub.

https://www.amc.com/blogs/george-lucas-reveals-how-star-wars-was-influenced-by-the-vietnam-war–1005548

https://fanexpohq.com/fanexpovancouver/costume-policy

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/1Xpzeld6/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not

Heather Cox Richardson interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDX0hxyYcJw

Dr Implausible’s Book Club

“Read a book!” This is more than just the catchphrase for Handy, the supervillian puppet and partner of the Human Ton in The Tick animated series (1994) (pictured to the right). Its also one of the more effective ways to spread knowledge. And while there may be an anxious pressure in the first month of 2025, that reading is a distraction or ineffective, there’s no time like the present.

“Read a book!” (Handy, 1994)

While TikTok is seeing a nice resurgence in learning with the #HillmanUniversity and #TikTokUniversity programs, here we’ll just focus on going through some critical books, one at a time. This is a expanding and evergreen project so we’ve created a page for this project over in the pages section: Dr Implausible’s Book Club and we’re also mirroring the content over on the indie version of the blog here.

This one is focused on academic content, but there are a couple concurrent and overlapping genre-specific themes that we’ll dip in and out of too. We’ve introduced both of those on the podcast, in the early days, with the Cyberpunk 101 episode, and the Introduction to Appendix W (which we mentioned here way back in… 2021? Whoa). We sorta-kinda did the Appendix W as it’s own thing, and that may still continue, but we’ll try and keep everything contained here as well, in case you don’t feel like following three separate things. For those that only interested in a specific element, the companions will help narrow that focus.

We’ll start with Technology Matters: questions to live with by David E. Nye (2006). This was a text that was used as a supplementary reading for one of the classes I taught in the past, a “sociology and ethics for engineers” type of class in the STS vein. It’s approachable, and written for a non-technical audience, which makes it especially worthwhile. As Nye mentions in the preface, these are big questions, and such big questions defy simple answers (or at least ones that are easily testable), and as such we have to come at them with some empathy. Or at least, that’s my take.

Technology Matters (Nye, 2006)

We’ll start with the basics, and check back in over the next week or so, and then publish a full post (on at least one of the platforms). Trying hard not to overcommit at the outset though. Let’s see how it goes…

Simulation Theory as Cyber-Eschatology

While reviewing some of the deep cuts on accelerationism – stuff that won’t make it onto the current episode by may well be part of a standalone ep – several things kept popping up. One of those is Kurzweil’s earlier work on the Singularity (and I do happen to have a copy of that in the depths of Dr Implausible’s Bookshelf, so we’ll dig into that a bit more later). The second is repeated reference’s back to Simulation Theory, most formally put forth by Nick Bostrom, and picked up by others since.

The two competing theories mesh quite well – they’re situated at different “sides” of the singularity, pre- and post-. Kurzweil’s “A Theory of Technological Evolution: The Law of Accelerating Returns”, presented as chapter 2 of The Singularity is Near (2005) uses various trends in computing tech to extrapolate a trend where we can achieve full brain simulation and eventually neural uploading. (The timeframes he suggested for these two events were 2013 and 2025, respectively, and while there are still a few months left in 2024, I think we’ll miss those targets.) The obvious goal here, is to reach a state where full simulation can be achieved.

On the other side of that – taking a jump through the event horizon of the technological singularity – we have the Simulation Hypothesis, where the acceleration is already assumed to have taken place, and we’re all already uploaded (or NPCs in someone else’s simulation, tbh). Bostrom was writing around the same time as Kurzweil (2003 compared to 2005), so it was floating around in the zeitgeist.

Viewed in this way, simulation theory can’t be seen as anything less that a cyber-eschatology. (Eschatology being the theological interest in the final judgement and the soul). If the drive by accelerationists is to go fast enough with the development of technology that they can outrun death by uploading their consciousness, then living in a simulation is that final goal. Eternal (virtual) life.

Hail to the new (machinic) flesh.

We’ve seen this cyber-hell before, in various forms, but nowhere near as vividly as that described in Iain M Banks’ Surface Detail (2010), the penultimate novel in his Culture series. Here, we are treated to a war in the virtual heavens (and hell), and the fate that may bestow billions if this were to be achieved.

Within the context of the novel, the souls are released, but such a fate was by no means assured. And depending on your view of the fate of humanity locked away within the creches of The Matrix (1999), one might wonder if they fate they escaped to was perhaps worse than the virtual one they were entombed within.

Hard to say. This is why it remains firmly within the idea of the “post-singularity”; there’s no way to answer the question until after that event horizon is crossed.

Perhaps.

Perhaps our collective imagination will allow us to evaluate the promises and perils of the course we’re on, before we hit the point of no return. To take a look from the side at the width of the Snake River Canyon before launching down the ramp, Evel Knievel style. And maybe, just maybe that allows us to judge whether strapping rockets to our motorcycle is really the best way to make that leap.

1970s-era accelerationism at its finest.

We’ll see if that’s the fate in store for us.

Appendix W 04: Dune

(this was originally released as Implausipod episode 30 on March 11, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14666807-e0030-appendix-w-04-dune


With the release of Dune part 2 in cinemas, we return to Appendix W with a look at Frank Herbert’s original novel from 1965. Dune has had a massive influence on the Warhammer 40000 universe in many ways, especially when looking at the original release of the Rogue Trader game in 1987, in everything from the weapons and wargear, to space travel and technology, to the organization of the Imperium itself. Join us as we look at some of those connections.


Since its release in 1965, the impact of Dune has been long and far reaching on popular culture, inspiring science fiction of all kinds, including direct adaptations for film and television, and perhaps a non zero amount of inspiration for the first Star Wars film as well. But one of its biggest impacts has been in the development of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe.

So with the release of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune part two in cinemas on March 1st, 2024, I’d like to return to a series on the podcast we call Appendix W and look at Frank Herbert’s original novel Dune from 1965 in this episode of the ImplausiPod.

Welcome to the Implauosipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. So when we first started talking about Appendix W in the early days of the podcast back in September 2022, I had posted that based on a list I had put up on the blog a year prior about what some of the foundational titles for the Warhammer 40, 000 universe is.

Now, Warhammer 40, 000 is the grimdark gothic sci fi series published by Games Workshop. The Warhammer 40, 000 universe was originally introduced in 1987 with a version they called Rogue Trader, which has become affectionately known as the Blue Book, and I think I still have my rather well used and worn copy that I picked up in the summer of 1988 on a band trip.

For the most part, Warhammer 40, 000 is a miniatures war game, though the Rogue Trader version had a lot more in common with Dungeons and Dragons, and there’s some roleplay elements in there. The intellectual property now appears in everything from video games, to action figures, to merchandise of all sorts, to web shorts, and a massive amount of fiction set in that universe.

As primarily a miniatures war game, it sits as a niche of a niche with respect to the various nerd fandoms operating at a level far below Star Wars or Star Trek, but you might’ve heard more about it recently with rumors of an Amazon Prime series and Henry Cavill, the former Superman and Witcher himself being behind the scenes on that one, or just talking about it positively on various talk shows that he’s appeared on. Other fans include people like Ed Sheeran, who’s been spotted building Warhammer model kits backstage at his concerts. By and large, despite its popularity, it’s managed to stay relatively under the radar compared to some of the other series that are out there with respect to mainstream attention, knowledge.

It is what it is. Now, the material isn’t necessarily something that’s gotten a lot of scrutiny in the past, but that’s pretty much it. Part of what we’re doing here on the Implausipod, especially with the Appendix W series, and the goal of the Appendix W series is to look at some of those sources of inspiration that got folded into the development of Warhammer 40, 000.

And for those unfamiliar, what is Warhammer 40, 000? Well, it’s a nightmare Gothic future where humanity is fallen, basically. They’re still living with high technology that they no longer totally realize how to build and maintain. They are living in the shadows of their ancestors. Humanity spread across the galaxy, across untold millions of planets, united under an emperor in the imperium of man, beset by a civil war nearly 10, 000 years in the past that tore the empire apart, and now facing foes on all sides with alien races, both ancient and new, vying with humanity for control of the galaxy. 

Humanity is maintained in this universe by a massive interstellar bureaucracy that redefines the word Byzantine. And much of humanity lives in massive hive worlds where massive cities cover the entire surface of a planet.

Ultimately, life for most of humanity in the Warhammer 40, 000 is what Hobbes would call poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It’s not solitary by any means, there’s way too many people around for that to be the case, but still. Now, as we covered earlier in our previous episodes on Appendix W, obviously Games Workshop is a British company, and there is a particular British flavor to a lot of these sources that Warhammer 40, 000 drew inspiration from.

And we’ve seen that in some of the sources that we’ve already looked at, like Space 1999. But even though Frank Herbert is an American author, Dune has had such an impact on the development of sci fi since its release, it definitely shows up as interesting an impact on Warhammer 40, 000. Now I’m going to lay out the evidence here throughout the rest of this episode.

You can take it or leave it as you see fit, but in terms of structure, what I like to lay out here is what we’ve done in previous episodes, looking at Appendix W and look at it in terms of things like the military examples within the book. Now, not all the sci fi influences that we list in Appendix W are military ones, of course, but as it’s a military war game, that’s a big part of it.

Then we’ll look at other elements of technology. And then cultural elements as well. A lot of Dune’s impact on the Warhammer 40, 000 universe expands outside of the miniatures war game itself into the larger structure of the setting. So we’ll take a brief look at those too, even though that isn’t our focus.

And then even a work like Dune didn’t appear out of nothing, ex nihilo, so we’ll look at some of the other sources that were out there that inspired Dune itself. And then I’ll wrap up the episode with a brief discussion of the future of Appendix W, so stay tuned.

Now looking at a work like Dune, you might think that the main source of inspiration is the planet Arrakis itself, with the hostile environment and the giant worms and everything. That’s actually one of the least influential elements. We do see the appearance of various, what Warhammer 40, 000 calls death worlds, planets that are very hostile to life, that as serve as recruiting grounds for various troops within the setting, including various Imperial Guard, sorry, Astra Militarum regiments, including the Talarn Desert Raiders.

But the biggest influence from Dune is the existence of the Empire and the Emperor. Within the book, the emperor is an active participant in the machinations that are taking place in the empire that they control. Whereas in Warhammer 40, 000, the Emperor is a near godlike figure that’s barely kept alive by the arcane technology of a golden throne where they’ve been placed for the last 10, 000 years since suffering a near mortal wound in combat.

In Warhammer 40, 000, the Emperor is not well, but their psychic power serves as a beacon that allows navigation throughout the rest of the galaxy for those who are attuned to it. But despite that difference, the other main takeaway from Dune is the Emperor uses his legions in order to maintain control.

Within Dune, the Emperor lends out his personal guard, the Sardaukar, to engage in the combat on behalf of the Harkonnens against the Atreides. Quoting from the glossary included at the back of the original Dune novel, the Sardaukar are, quote, the soldier fanatics of the Padishah Emperor. They were men from an environmental background of such ferocity that it killed six out of thirteen persons before the age of eleven.

Their military training emphasized ruthlessness and a near suicidal disregard for personal safety. They were taught from infancy to use cruelty as a standard weapon, weakening opponents with terror. Within Warhammer 40, 000, when the Emperor was still active, he had, of course, 20 legions of his space marines, the Adeptus Astartes, who were loyal to him.

Two of those legions became excommunicado and stricken from the records, and another nine ended up turning traitor in a civil war known as the Horus Heresy. But the tie is very deep. I mean, both of these draw on some Roman influence, obviously, but still, the linkage directly from Dune to Warhammer 40, 000 is strong, and much like the Roman Empire, both of these have the vast bureaucracy that I mentioned earlier.

Within Dune, of course, there’s the various noble houses that the Emperor is playing off against each other, like the Harkonnens and the Atreides, but there’s many more besides that. Within Warhammer 40, 000 can often be seen within the various Governors of various planets or systems who are given a large amount of latitude due to the nature of space travel and sometimes the chance that systems could go without without communications for Hundreds or thousands of years and the final major linkage would most likely be the religious one within dune It’s the role that the bene gesserit have behind the scenes with their machinations taking place over decades thousands of years.

Within Warhammer 40, 000, it’s the role of the ecclesiarchy, the imperial cult, that reveres the emperor as godlike. And as I’m saying this, I realize I’m only talking about the impact of the first Dune novel on Warhammer 40, 000, and not the series as a whole. So as we look at later books, later on, as part of Appendix W, we’ll see how some of those other linkages come into play into how Warhammer 40, 000 looked at launch and how it’s developed subsequently.

But for right now, we’ll just look at the impact that the Bene Gesserit have on the storyline within the novel. Now, despite all these deep linkages that really inform the setting, it’s with respect to the military technology that we see the influence that Dune really had on Warhammer 40, 000. Despite all the advanced technology in the book, oddly enough it’s a defensive item that comes to the forefront.

One of the conceits that we see with Dune is that a lot of the combat takes place with the Melee weapons with swords and knives. The reason for that is because of the shields. Reading again from the appendix in the back of the original Dune novel, it describes the defensive shields as, quote, The protective field produced by a Holtzman generator.

This field derives from phase one of the suspensor nullification effect. A shield will permit entry only to objects moving at slow speeds. Depending on setting, this speed ranges from six to nine centimeters per second, and can be shorted out only by a Shire sized electric field.

These are the shields that were visible in both movie adaptations early on, with the fight training between Gurney Halleck and Paul Atreides, the ones that made them both look like fighting Roblox characters in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. Within Warhammer 40, 000, we can see evidence of those with refractor fields that are widely available to various members of the Imperial forces.

These are fields that distort the image of the wearer and then bounce any of those incoming attacks into a flash of light. Within the Dune Universe these are so widely available that even common soldiery will have them, though in Warhammer 40, 000 they’re a little bit more rare, but as we said, it’s a fallen empire.

The other commonly available tool to the soldiery is that lasgun, which is described again in the appendix as a continuous wave laser projector. It’s use as a weapon is limited in a field generator shield culture because of the explosive pyrotechnics, technically subatomic fusion, created when its beam intersects a shield.

So even though they’re commonly available, they’re not widely used because hitting somebody who has wearing a shield with it is like setting off a small nuke. And within Dune, those Nukes, or atomics, remain one of the most powerful weapons available to the various houses and factions, to the extent that they’re kept under strong guard and rarely if ever used.

In fact, there’s a prescription on their use against human combatants. This is why Paul’s use of the nukes against the Mountain Range during their final assault doesn’t provoke sanctions from the other houses. Those sanctions could be as severe as planetary destruction, which in Warhammer 40, 000 would be called exterminatus, even though they’re not typically called that framed as being done by nukes. There’s a number of other weapons that show up in various ways in Dune that also make their way into the Warhammer 40, 000 universe. Everything from the sonic attacks, from the weirding modules, to the Kriss knives that are used in ritual combat. And we can see other technological elements as well, like the Fremen stillsuits, elements of that showing up in the Space Marines power armor in 40k, the look and feel of The mining machines showing up in the massive war machines of the 41st millennium, like the Baneblade or Leviathan or Capitol of Imperialis and even the Ornithopters themselves, the flapping wing flying machines that show up so prevalent in every adaptation of Dune.

All of these will appear at some point within the 41st millennium, even if they’re not present within Rogue Trader at launch in 1987. But It’s more than just the technology. It’s more than just the emperor and his legions. It’s more than just the psychic abilities, which we barely even touched on. There are two essential elements that deeply tie the Warhammer 40, 000 universe to Dune.

And those two elements are two groups of individuals with very specific sets of skills, the Mentats and the Navigators of the Spacing Guild. Now, the Mentats are basically humans trained as computers to replace the technology that was wiped out in the Butlerian Jihad in the prehistory of the Dune universe.

For those just joining us here in this episode, we covered the Butlerian Jihad in depth in depth. in the previous episode in episode 29. It was basically a pogrom against thinking machines that resulted in the destruction of all artificial intelligence, robotics, or even simple computers. Within Warhammer 40, 000, the Butlerian Jihad can be seen in the war that took place against the Men of Iron and led to the Dark Age of Technology, again in the Prehistory of that universe and while the mentats themselves aren’t as directly prevalent because obviously machines still exist. The attitude towards technology that it’s treated as a Religious element and something that’s known and understood is widely prevalent throughout the universe The final element is the Spacing Guild. Within the Dune universe the spice that’s only available on Dune – the melange – that allows for the navigators to gain prescience and to steer the ships as the Holtzman drives allow them to fold space and move them rapidly through the stars.

Over time, through their exposure to the melange, the navigators become something altogether no longer human. Whereas in the 41st millennium, the navigators are outright mutants to begin with, whose psychic abilities allow them to see the light cast by the Emperor on Terra, the Astronomicon that serves as a lighthouse to guide everybody through the shadows of the warp.

Now, both of these are mentioned in Rogue Trader in 1987, but they show up much more commonly outside the confines of the miniatures board game where much of the action takes place. They’re prevalent in the fiction and a lot of the lore surrounding the game, even though they rarely function within it, at least within the confines of the Warhammer 40, 000 game proper.

Now, the Games Workshop has leveraged the IP into a number of different realms, including the game systems like Necromunda, Battlefleet Gothic, and their various epic scale war games. So some of those elements are more common in certain other situations, but the linkage between the two, between Dune and 40k, is absolutely clear.

Now, as I said at the outset, dune had a massive influence on not just war hundred 40,000, but basically Sci-Fi in general. Since its release, it was, it spawned five sequels by Frank Herbert himself, which extended the stories and then. Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert’s son, and Kevin Anderson have done subsequent stories within the same universe.

Galactic Empire has been common throughout science fiction, especially since then, though most notably within the works of George Lucas, the Star Wars series. I believe Lucas has stated at least someplace that Dune was a partial source of inspiration, though some contest that it’s a much more than partial, and that there’s 16 points of similarity between the Dune novels and the original Star Wars film.

I think anybody reading the original novel and then watching the film may draw similar conclusions. But influence is a funny thing, and it works both ways, because just as Dune inspired numbers of works, including massive franchises like Star Wars and Forever 40, 000, Dune was in turn inspired by a number of sci fi works that were written well in advance of its publication.

There’s at least five works or series that were published before Dune came out that had elements that appear within the Dune stories. For the record, Dune was published as serials in 63 and 64, and came out as the full novel in 1965. Now, the first link, obviously, is Asimov’s Foundation, published as short stories in the 1940s, and then as novels in the early 1950s.

Here we’re dealing with the decay of an already existing galactic empire, and by using math and sociology as a form of Prescience, which is the same ability that Paul and the Bene Gesserit have, they’re able to predict the future and able to steer the outcome into a more desirable form. Does that sound familiar?

Asimov calls this psychohistory, and I’m sure if you’re watching the current TV series you’re well aware of that, but wait, there’s more. Next up is the Lensman series, written by E. E. Doc Smith, starting with Triplanetary, which was published in 1948. I mean, there’s aliens and stuff in it, but there’s a long range breathing program on certain human bloodlines in order to bring about their latent psychic abilities.

And then they’re tested, with a device called the Lens, which can cause pain to people that aren’t psychically attuned to it, which, again, sounds familiar. The third up would be the Instrumentality series, by Cordwainer Smith. Now, there’s a novel, Nostrilia, which was originally published after Dune came out, but the short stories from the series came out starting in 1955 and through the early 1960s.

In it, space travel is only made possible by a drive that can warp space, and a guild of mutated humans that are able to see the path between the stars to get humanity to where they need to be. In addition to that, the rulers of Earth are a number of noble houses. that are continually feuding amongst themselves and through various technologies are extremely long lived, almost effectively immortal.

Now we’ve touched on some of that with the instrumentality before, back in episode 18, and we will be visiting the instrumentality again, at least twice more, in Appendix W, with a look at Scanners Live in Vain and then the Instrumentality series as a whole. So if you’re interested in more on that, go check out that episode and stay tuned for more.

Now, even the fighting around the giant space harvesters has some precedent. In 1960, Keith Laumer published the first Bolo short story. In it, 300 ton tanks are controlled by sentient AIs. And the story’s about how the fighting in and around those tanks go. But of course, we know that there’s no AI in the Dune universe because of the Butlerian Jihad.

Which Herbert got from Samuel Butler, who wrote it in 1869, and then published it as a novel in 1872, which we talked about last episode and mentioned earlier. So, of course, this influences almost 90 years before Dune came out. And, of course, the granddaddy of them all is probably Edgar Rice Burroughs, Warlord of Mars.

Now apparently, according to an interview with Brian Herbert, the Dune series was originally proposed to take place on Mars, but it was decided against it because of our cultural associations that we have with the red planet. And some of this obviously comes, takes place from the tales that came before it.

Now, in addition to the sci fi influences, there’s other real world influences like the The stories of Lawrence of Arabia, as well as Frank Herbert’s own observations that he took in the sand dunes in northern Oregon, and the reclamation project that was taking place there to bring back some of the land from the desert.

So all of these and more went into the creation of Dune. Now, don’t get me wrong, Dune is an amazing creative work, and it draws all these elements and other ones together more than we mentioned. It’s unique and interesting, and that’s why it’s timeless as it is. But everybody draws influences from multiple places.

The creativity is in how it gets put together. So we will continue exploring that creativity of both the Dune series, And the Warhammer 40, 000 series in episodes to come.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausiblepod. com, which is also where you can find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 share-alike license. You may notice that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow through the word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along.

If you visit us on implausopod. com, you may notice that there’s a buy me a coffee link on each and every episode. This would just go to any hosting costs associated with the show. If you’re interested in more information on Appendix W, you can find those on the Appendix W YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube and type in Appendix W, and I’ll make sure that those are visible.

And if you’d like to follow along with us on the Appendix W reading list, I’ll leave a link to the blog post in the show notes. And join us in a month’s time as we look at Joe Haldeman’s Forever War. And between now and then, I’ll try and get the AppendixW. com website launched. And for the mainline podcast here on the ImplausiPod, please join us in a week or so for our next episode, where we have another Warhammer 40, 000 tie in.

You see, Warhammer 40, 000 is a little lost with respect to technology, and they’ll spend a lot of time looking for some elements from the dark age of technology. The STCs are standard template constructs. The plans that they put in their fabricators to chew out the advanced material of the Imperium. You could almost say that these are general purpose technologies, or GPTs.

And a different kind of GPT has been in the news a lot in the last year. So we’ll investigate this in something we call GPT squared. I hope you join us for it, I think it’ll be fantastic. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Silicon Dreams

(This was originally released as Implausipod Episode 26, on February 4, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14428351-implausipod-e0026-silicon-dreams

Silicon Dreams are those glittering visions of mythic intensity that inspire the continued development of revolutionary technologies. Listen to this episode of the Implausipod to learn more about where they come from, and how the mythic imagination has been behind the development of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and other tech innovations.


When Neuromancer appeared, it was picked up and devoured by hundreds, then thousands, of men and women who worked in or around the garages and cubicles, where what is still called new media were, fitfully, being birthed. Thousands who, on reading his description of cyberspace, thought to themselves, That’s so freaking cool!

And set about searching for any way the gold of imagination might be transmuted into silicon reality. End quote. This is by Jack Womack in the 2004 introduction to the 20th anniversary version of Neuromancer. And this episode of The Implausipod is about those silicon dreams.

Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And as we ease into 2024, we seem to be living at that intersection, as the technologies of sci fi past are being shown off every week, with new products and instruments of echanger like automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence being brought to market, and older technologies like 3D printing and drones being so commonplace that you can find them at a Costco or Target.

But this process isn’t anything new. It’s been happening for at least 35 or 40 years. And when I first began researching it, almost 20 years ago, back in 2005, I had a hunch that I might be onto something, but reality is far outpaced even my wildest imagination. And that imagination is what this episode is about, the mythic imagination that inspires the development of new technologies, whether it comes from science fiction or fantasy or other sources as well. 

So for this episode, I’ll take you back to that initial hunch and how it led me to track down the sources of those myths and what impact they had on the creation of the digital sublime and how that has impacted our current reality as well.

And with the incipient release of the Apple Vision Pro, their forthcoming AR VR headset, or whatever their marketing department is describing it as, this hunch couldn’t be more timely because my early work was on the development of virtual reality. 

Now, the hunch came about reading something else unrelated.

It was Ray Kurzweil’s work on the singularity that came out in the early 2000s. And I noted how much the work was influenced by or influenced upon, basically co creative, of the works of science fiction that were coming up in those prior 20 years. And it seemed to me that there had to be a lot of overlap between science fiction and science and the development of these new technologies.

But at the time, the literature wasn’t there yet. There was a few authors that had worked on it, notably William Bainbridge, who took a look at the early influences on the development of the space program in his 1976 book, The Spaceflight Revolution. Now, this was a sociological review of it. So he was looking at science and engineering at NASA and elsewhere through that sociological lens.

And in so doing, you noted how a revolutionary technology, like spaceflight, came around mostly theoretically before it was even attempted practically. And that theoretical drive was often influenced by, you know, the visions. In this case, we’ll go back to the mythic visions, that can be influenced by, in this case, fiction.

I mean, visionaries had long thought about traveling to the moon long before science fiction was even a genre, for everything with Jules Verne’s From Earth to the Moon from 1865 all the way up to Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon, the 1902 short film with the bullet in the eye that we all probably famously remember.

So the idea was definitely there, but the technology wasn’t ready and the science wasn’t necessarily sure either. So this is what all made it a revolutionary idea in what we might call Kuhnian terms. They needed a goal, a target, a vision of what to work towards collectively across different countries and different cultures and different political systems.

They were all still kind of building towards this shared collective vision of getting to the moon in this case as the objective. And this holds true for other technologies as well. In the 40 year retrospective on the original publication of his work titled The Spaceflight Revolution Revisited, Bainbridge notes that we’re seeing something similar with the development of the singularity, referencing Kurzweil explicitly, and that that drew from influences going back to the 50s with Arthur C. Clarke’s novel The City and the Stars. 

And we can see that thread connecting all the way through to 2023 with the developments of ChatGPT and OpenAI. So, a 70 year development timeframe from inception to manifestation to when something actually comes about and is brought forth into reality. And did we see similar timeframes with the development of rocketry from inception to landing on the moon?

Yeah. And are we seeing similar lengths with even current technologies like, again, VR or direct neural implants with Neuralink recently being in the news? And again, the answer is yes, anywhere from 40, 50, 60 years from inception to something being made manifest in the world. Now, there can be reasons for this.

Often, it can be tricky, but what drives that development over that long of a time frame? What keeps us going towards the realization of those dreams of something that will necessarily outlive those originally imagined it? And perhaps several other generations following, but still working towards that idea, that realization.

And the answer is a cultural one. This is where the role of myth comes in.

When we hear the word myth, particular associations often come to mind. We can think of mythic heroes from ages of legend, like Heracles and Thor, Zeus and Odin, and the modern retellings of those, whether they’re showing up as superheroes in Marvel and DC movies, or cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny being a stand in for Anansi or Coyote.

In fact, comic book literature as a whole is filled with the retelling of myths and legends, but also we can see it in our political discourse as well, with myths about the foundation of a country, like those in the United States, with the myth of the Promised Land, or the Founding Fathers, or Pocahontas, or any of a number of other things.

Usually you can tell by whether they’ve shown up in a Disney movie or something. And I’m not harshing specifically on Disney here, at least not for this. The idea is that these myths are the tales that we share, that we share collectively. They’re part of our common cultural understanding. And we’re gonna call this, for lack of a better term, the mythic dimension.

And this is where some of our ideas come from. And these can be ideas about how we shape our culture, how our political system is supposed to work. We’ve talked previously about the social imaginary, way back in episode 9, and this kind of continues on with that thread, or streams, we’ll kind of start changing our metaphor mid stream, for reasons to be explained next episode.

But the point being is that our innovations come from new ideas, whether that’s social innovations, political innovations, cultural, and technological, and when it’s technological innovations, they often come from elements of culture that deal with technology. In this case, science fiction. Now, that isn’t the only source and only pathway for new ideas, of course.

As Henry Petroski has mentioned, human wants have long outpaced human needs as a driver of new inventions. But when we’re talking about revolutionary ideas, radical innovations, stuff that’s new to the world, then it can be one of those primary sources. And as stated, it’s one of those things that can kind of keep the vision and drive going from generation to generation to generation.

And as an expression of our culture, literature has an important role in maintaining this drive. And in the 20th and 21st centuries, we’ve had an explosion of other cultural artifacts like film, television, photography, gaming, and the rest, and these all have a role too, but literature is going to be our primary focus.

And the role that literature takes is that of an exemplar. It points forward towards a daring imaginative goal that may not be achievable, but at least gives those who may be in a position to enact change something to aim for. As Northrop Frye notes, “the written word recreates the past in the present and gives us not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned up hallucination.”

This is from 1981. And it’s in this role that fiction finds itself as a part of literature, as a creator of the prophecies that contradict the conventional wisdom. It allows us to take all these opportunities and use them to drive towards the future. And building on what Northrop Frye said, the Canadian author John Ralston Saul elaborates, he says: “Fiction often reveals to us a greater understanding of our own society as it functions today.”

In other words, great fiction can be true for its time, as well as somehow timeless and true for our time. So this is the role that fiction plays, providing a goal, something timeless and transcendent and intense, something that we can work towards as if it was a dream. And this is what brings us to the development of these new and emerging technologies.

And I do want to stress that we’re looking at multiple technologies here. It isn’t restricted to just one thing. As Canadian academic Vincent Mosco pointed out in his book The Digital Sublime, there’s been similar cycles of mythic inspiration for previous radical technologies like the telegraph, electricity, radio, and television.

And as we noted in our Postcard from Earth episode, this can apply to cinema as well, what Andre Bazin was talking about with regard to the myth of total cinema. What these all link back to is what Perry Miller calls the idea of a technological sublime. An American historian of technology, David E. Nye, goes further into the exploration of this in his own work.

What the technological sublime is is that mythic feeling that we feel when we encounter new technology, the one that strikes right through to our emotions. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be anything electronic, it can be something like witnessing the Hoover Dam, or the first experience of air travel.

But honestly, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, and light switches can all conjure that experience as well, especially if you’ve never experienced it before. To return to Arthur C. Clarke, who we mentioned earlier, that old adage that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic holds true, and this is how we have to understand the enduring appeal and pursuit in development of a new technology, VR.

As the Apple Vision Pro launches, there’s no killer app for it. The business case for it is limited and tenuous at best. The use seems forced, often within the Apple ecosystem, and we don’t know what the enduring appeal of it is. Now, it may be that its time has finally come, with other developers like Meta and Valve both producing products within that market.

And this may create enough interest in it for not just a standard to emerge, but also user demand to match up with the available supply. And this is largely the challenge, to make reality match our dreams. Now, the myths of VR largely come from science fiction within the 70s and 80s, so there was contemporaneous development within the technological sphere as well.

Now, there are authors who have gone into great depths about the history of VR, circa 1990. I’d refer the audience to both Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality and Michael Heim’s The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality from 91 and 93, respectively. But when it comes to cultural representations, there have been versions of virtual reality going back for decades.

In 1973, there was a short film version of the Ray Bradbury short story The Veldt. which was originally written in 1950. It was marketed as educational programming, and so the contents of that were burned into my brain when it was shown at school. It took my little eight year old brain a little while to understand what those lines were eating in the final frames of that one.

And you can follow a stream through from that one to their first appearance at the Holodeck on Star Trek The Next Generation in 1988, and then every subsequent appearance thereof. And somewhere in between we had the original Tron from Disney. But the visual representations were few and far between. The main source of representations of virtual reality was science fiction.

While we had early versions of computer use, like John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider from 1975, which would still be recognizable to a modern audience, but with its gated communities, urban decay, and computer viruses and identity theft, the first major representation of virtual would be Vernor Vinge’s True Names from 1981.

Now, both Shockwave Rider and True Names had something in common, that they were gobbled up by the people working in computer engineering at the time. Whether it was on campus or within specific firms, the reports are that both those titles were ones that were held in high regard by computing enthusiasts in the 70s and early part of the 80s.

As Katie Hafner and Michael Lyon note in their book Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, “Bruner became a cult figure as the book swept through the worldwide community of science fiction readers. It had a strong influence on an emerging American computer underground, a loose affiliation of phone freaks, computer hackers in places like Silicon Valley and Cambridge, who appeared simultaneously with the development of the personal computer.”

And six years later, this was still going on when True Names was published. As James Frenkel notes, quote, “When True Names was written, it was considered visionary, and was read by some of those who have had a great deal to do with shaping the internet to date.” And while I admit that his mention is problematic now, writing in the afterword to True Names, Marvin Minsky, the co founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, writes, and I quote, 

“In real life, You often have to deal with things you don’t completely understand. You drive a car, not knowing how its engine works. You ride as passenger in someone else’s car, not knowing how that driver works. And strangest of all, you sometimes drive yourself to work, not knowing how you work yourself. To me, the import of True Names, that it is about how we cope with things we don’t understand.

But, how do we ever understand anything in the first place? Almost always, I think, by using analogies in one way or another, to pretend that each alien thing we see resembles something we already know.” end quote. 

So it’s here in the early 80s where computer scientists and developers are being influenced by the science fiction texts, and you’ll note that I’ve hardly even mentioned the words cyberpunk or cyberspace up to this point in time.

We’ve covered cyberpunk in depth way back in episode 3, and honestly, we will continue to do so in the future. But the influences for the current implementations of virtual reality, which mostly draw from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, whether it’s Meta’ slash Facebook’s pursuit of creating the metaverse, or whether it’s Apple Vision Pro Wearer’s inadvertently becoming the gargoyles from Snow Crash, conducting OSINT at every opportunity, whether inadvertently or not.

But the point is that these ideas of how virtual reality might be achieved, what it would look like, and how it would be incorporated into our daily lives, were prevalent long before the development of the tech actually enabled its use on a regular basis. The vision of the technology of what it could be is what drove the development and subsequent adoption as the users could see themselves incorporating those technologies into their own lives in ways similar to what they saw within the books.

The reason why is that those ideas sparked the mythic imagination as we noted earlier. As Mosco mentions, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre concludes that “myths are neither true nor false but living or dead”, and the myths of virtual reality are still very much alive. All the attempts to bring them about in the real world, and the unsuccessful attempts at that, haven’t managed to kill the myth or kill the dream.

To quote Mosco a little bit further here: “A myth is alive if it continues to give meaning to human life, if it continues to represent some important part of the collective mentality of a given age, and if it continues to render socially and intellectually tolerable what would otherwise be experienced as incoherence.

To understand a myth involves more than proving it to be false. It means Figuring out why the myth exists, why it is so important to people, what it means, and what it tells us about people’s hopes and dreams.” 

So what does it mean if we’re continually pursuing these dreams of being someplace else, not on this earth, of having different jobs, of having different lives, having a different society that we live in?

And what does it mean when those dreams are pursued by the very richest among us? For those who, to quote a James Bond film would say “the world is not enough”, we can understand what the silicon dreams might mean to the average citizen, the regular users, or even to the developers to bring about something “freaking cool”.

But what does it mean to the technocrats and the industrialists and the billionaires? Why are they so dogged in their pursuit of something that has no killer app? Stick with us as we dig deeper into this in future episodes of The Implausipod.

Thank you for joining us once again here on the Implausipod. I’ve been your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com for any questions, comments, or concerns. The show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license. All research, writing, editing, mixing, and music is done by me, Dr.

Implausible. Join us soon for The Old Man and the River, as we’ll look further at the impacts of pop culture on the development of technology. And then I think we’ll be returning back to Appendix W for a couple episodes before the release of Dune II. I hope you join us for that. Stay tuned, take care, and have fun.

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Brunner, J. (1975). The Shockwave Rider. Harper and Row.

Frenkel, J. (Ed.). (2001). True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier. TOR.

Frye, N., & Lee, A. A. (2007). The great code: The Bible and literature. Penguin Canada.

Hafner, K., & Lyon, M. (1996). Where Wizards Stay up late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon and Schuster.

Mosco, V. (2005). The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (1 edition). The MIT Press.

Ray Bradbury (Director). (1973, September 16). The Veldt. http://archive.org/details/the-veldt

Rheingold, H. (1991). Virtual Reality. Summit Books.

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Womack, J. (2004). Some Dark Holler (pp. 355–371). Ace Books.