Thinking Machine

There are no swords in science fiction

I like to think of Astounding magazine, during the time while edited by John Campbell, as a bastion of science fiction. My personal preferences lean towards science fiction stories that are written by people with training in science, or at least an interest in science. However, many science fiction stories are weak on their science and some contain absurd pseudoscience and fantasy elements.

 

After about a year with Campbell editing Astounding, a companion magazine, Unknown, was launched and it could publish stories with more of a fantasy flavor. However, there were always "soft science fiction" stories in Astounding that were written by authors with no training in science.

 

Physical Weakness

how to publish in Astounding

Campbell's personal linkages to science were in the physical sciences, the hardcore domain of mathematics and equations. One path to being published in Astounding by Campbell was to include an equation in your story. Shown in the image to the left is part of a story published by Campbell that I suspect was accepted for publication only because it included a few equations.

 

When dealing with stories that touch on the domain of the life sciences, Campbell seemed to prefer pseudoscience to biology. I've previously blogged about Campbell's interest in fictional science and his enthusiasm for psionics. So, another path into Campbell's good graces and being published in Astounding was to include some kind of astounding "mind powers" in your story.

mind over matter
interior art by Vincent Napoli

The Case of John D. MacDonald

MacDonald was trained for business, but he was not a good fit for corporate America. After WWII, he became a writer. His first story in Astounding was called "Cosmetics" (February 1948). The setting for "Cosmetics" is a time in the future when each home has an "autocosmeton". The autocosmeton is even more popular than the orgasmatron because it allows you to adjust your appearance to the whims and desires of your lover.

MacDonald was careful to provide his readers with a fictional science account of how his imagined autocosmeton works. First going on the market in 1998, the autocosmeton harnessed the fantastic powers of psychic surgery and was powered by hypnosis. 

shape-shifting

I love the idea of a future in which people can use advanced technology to "shape-shift" and morph their physical appearance, but I can't take seriously a story such as "Cosmetics" in which such morphing is accomplished by "concentration of the psychic processes" and a human body can be completely rebuilt from the inside out in three hours without even a bit of residual discomfort or inflammation.

Where did MacDonald go in "Cosmetics" with his fantasy autocosmeton? According to MacDonald's vision of the future, if people could casually change their appearance then all human capacity for innovation and artistic creation would vanish: "no invention, no art, no creative thought". 

 

And, perhaps most appallingly:

The End of Eternity

"A hundred years ago we thought we could reach the stars... the sad little men of fifty or sixty who were sweating out the details in labs suddenly discovered that they could be twenty again." 

 

So now, in MacDonald's imagined future, the advance of human civilization has come to an end.

A few years later, Isaac Asimov wrote his time travel novel The End of Eternity in which a different technological advance prevented Humanity from reaching the stars. For Asimov, the roadblock was time travel technology. As long as time travel existed, humans never bothered developing interstellar space travel technology.

the Laws

I can't take Asimov's roadblock any more seriously than I do MacDonald's, but I am fascinated by the idea of futures that do not involve a technological singularity.

 

I have to wonder if Asimov was influenced in any way by MacDonald's story "Cosmetics". I also have to wonder to what extent MacDonald was influenced by Asimov. In "Cosmetics", MacDonald included the idea that the autocosmeton was carefully programmed with fail-safes that prevented it from doing harm to people, which sounds like Asimov's Laws of Robotics.

image source

Robots

Apparently the first published story by MacDonald was called "G-Robot" and I've allowed myself to imagine that in the Ekcolir Reality, the analogue of MacDonald (Joanna MacDonald) wrote the first science fiction story about positronic robots in 1936.

As described here, MacDonald published a story called "Nicky and the Tin Finger" in 1948 that included a robot. I've never read that story, but I suspect it was a kind of joke story that made no attempt to seriously consider how a robot might be built. Given the educational background of MacDonald, I'm not surprised to find jokes in his "science" fiction stories rather than serious attempts to imagine the effects of imaginary technologies on society.

Galaxy 1951

For my story called "Final Change", I imagine that that Joanna MacDonald was designed by Grean the Kac'hin so as to be the mind clone of Mary. After Joanna was taken from Earth into the Hierion Domain, she could use her telepathic link to Mary and share information from the future about hierion physics.

 

While still living on Earth, Joanna was able to write science fiction stories about positronic robots because of her telepathic link to her nanoscopic replicoid in the Hierion Domain.

Nonscience Fiction

Psionic Escape

Another example of MacDonald's "science" fiction in our Reality is the 1951 story "Common Denominator". For that story, MacDonald casually imagined a future with various advanced technologies including interstellar travel and even an alien-derived "static-clean" device that when used meant you never again had to dust your house. Another alien technology: a robotic bunny rabbit that thrilled the hunters of Earth. You could blast the bunny and then it repaired itself and you could hunt it again.

Thinking Machine Project

Isaac Asimov wrote several stories about the development of computing and robot technology including the 1945 story "Escape!" Asimov never tried to provide any details and simply told readers that "positronic brains" were the key to success in making intelligent machines. 

 

artificial intelligence

Earlier this year I commented on Frank Herbert's 1965 artificial intelligence Sci Fi story "Do I Wake or Dream?", which was a public display of floundering over the problem of how to achieve human-like artificial intelligence. 

 
Herbert gave readers a hand-wave and imagined some sort of mystical "solution" that -rather than simply allow for man-made human like machine intelligence- instead created a machine with god-like powers. Here we are in 2020 and still nobody knows how to endow a computer with a human-like mind.

 

1948 science research

In 1948 John D. MacDonald published "The Mechanical Answer". MacDonald imagined that there could be a Manahatten Project-like attempt by the military to develop a thinking machine.

Is there anything worse than the Sci Fi nerdy inventor who casually steps into his workshop and invents an intelligent robot, or interstellar space drive or a time machine? Yes, there is. When the chief administrator (in "The Mechanical Answer", Joe Kayden) of the floundering government-run project suddenly has the key insight for how to complete the technology-development project.

 

interior art by William Timmins

Lucky for Joe, he is not the first administrator of the Thinking Machine Project. He is appointed to the job after 1953, the point at which it had been discovered how to build a computer that could solve every mathematical problem. All you had to do was put the math problem on paper tape or punch cards and feed it into the super-duper Electronic Mechanical and Numerical Integrator and Calculator™. 

 

interior art by William Timmins

Then, with a bit more work, it was found how to make the super-duper calculating Machine use English. With all that "small stuff" in the past, the only remaining problem facing Joe is that the Machine is not creative; it can calculate and solve logic puzzles, but it can't be creative like humans. 

 

When he is installed as the new project director, Joe has no interest in the nuts and bolts of the Machine; he tells the technicians that he just wants to have some time to think about the problem. However, readers of "The Mechanical Answer" are never quite sure what Joe views as the real "problem". Mostly it seems to be that since he is now inside the super-secret Big Government Project he no longer gets to see his dear wife or talk to her.

image source

In 1969, Asimov published a story called "Feminine Intuition" in which he made fun of the idea that women can creatively solve hard problems using feminine intuition. I have to wonder if Asimov was influenced by "The Mechanical Answer" when he wrote "Feminine Intuition". 

 

MacDonald tells us that the key to Joe's prior success in running an automated factory has always been to explain his work-related problems to his wife (Jane; she's a housewife but she has technical training in neurology and psychology) and then take her advice about what to do. Now, even with their letters censored, Jane begins sending Joe hints about how to apply what is known about the human brain to the problem of making a thinking machine. Taking the hints, Joe sits down a reads a neurology textbook before bedtime.

Bard: Damit all!    Sharan:
We loose more rockets that way...
May 1950

Upon waking, good old Joe knows exactly how to make a creative computer by applying a few principles of biological neural networks to computer memory devices (something nobody but his wife ever thought of). After two and a half months of rewiring the computer as directed by Joe, suddenly the Machine can think like a human and answer questions posed to it in English like a self-aware genius, conveniently pre-loaded with all existing human knowledge.

The ending of "The Mechanical Answer" is very similar to what happens in Asimov's story "Escape". The Thinking Machine announces that the problem of how to travel to the stars can easily be solved with existing human knowledge. The Machine's brilliance also quickly ends the belligerent stand-off between the President of North America, the Dictator of Asia, the King of Africa and the Ruler of Europe. With military saber-rattling ended, tight security for the Thinking Machine Project is ended and Joe gets to re-unite with Jane (happy ending). 

 

I have to wonder if Asimov was influenced by "The Mechanical Answer" when he wrote his 1950 story "The Evitable Conflict" in which his computerized Machines with positronic brains also bring peace and economic stability to Earth.

 

original cover art by Herman Vestal

Sadly for us, the hard work of understanding how human brains store memories and learn continues. We are not yet to the point where we can make machines that have human-like minds.

Related Reading: the story "Noise Level" uses the same basic "solution" as does "The Mechanical Answer"

 

Next: MacDonald's 1950 story "Wine of the Dreamers"

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Fantasy Teleportation

image source

In 2013, I began thinking about how long-range teleportation might be used to shuttle Interventionist agents such as Parthney to and from Earth. Back in 2013 I mentioned "It's Such a Beautiful Day", a short story by Isaac Asimov set in a future time when teleportation is used routinely to move people across town. Assuming that teleportation technology were obtained, should there be any practical limit on the range for teleportation?

 

I've seen it claimed that the earliest use of the term "teleportation" was in 1931. The original usage was in the context of a person using magical powers to move from one place to another (psychokinesis). Other terms such as "matter transmission" have been used in the context of an imaginary scientific breakthrough and development of a working technology that could make teleportation possible.

 

image source

In 1877, Edward Mitchell wrote a silly story called "The Man without a Body" which depicted a failed matter transmission experiment during which the teleported man's head arrived at the destination but not the rest of his body. Mitchell coined the term "telepomp" to refer to his imagined battery-powered teleporter.

 

Interstellar

Last year I mentioned another Asimov story, "The Deep" from 1952. In that story, aliens use teleportation to travel over interstellar distances to Earth. In "The Man without a Body", Mitchell's telepomp was like a telephone, with a transmitter and a receiver linked by a wire carrying an electrical signal. In 1877, electrical telegraphy provided a real-world model for imaginary teleportation.

 

Star Trek "beaming"

Later, after the widespread use of radio, it became conventional to assume that matter transmission would be accomplished by "beaming" an electromagnetic signal from the teleportation transmitter to the receiver. "The Deep" was more audacious in proposing an alternative means of transmission that worked over interstellar distances at speeds greater than light speed. 

 

In the Star Trek fictional universe, the original matter transmission technique was limited to short distances and could be blocked by thick layers of dense matter, but then other "subspace" transmission methods were developed and used for longer range teleportation. "Open end" teleportation was possible without the teleported object having to be near a transmitter or a receiver.

  

Nano-scale teleportation

In the nanorealm.

I'm currently writing a story called "Hierion Writers Club" in which I make use of teleportation to and from Nanoville, a space-time bubble in the Hierion Domain where nanoscopic replicoids reside. At the start of the story, I depict Mary arriving from Earth at a "receiver" in Wendy's workshop. In part 3 of the story, I want to depict "open end" teleportation of another character arriving in Nanoville. Is there any practical limit on how precise "open end" teleportation might be? Maybe it is necessary to use aircars to move around in Nanoville because "open end" teleportation does not have enough spatial resolution. Not being a fan of fantasy, I enjoy working within practical constraints that apply to imaginary technologies.

Fantasy Teleportation

Dr. Mudge is telepathically
assaulted by Martians.
interior art by Charles Thomson

In the July 1938 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction, there was a story called "The Dangerous Dimension" by Lafayette (Ron) Hubbard. This story was apparently "designed" to please John Campbell, the magazine's editor; it contains equations, telepathy and the discovery of a "practical" means of teleportation.

Working in his home office, Dr. Mudge discovers "equation C", the key to teleportation. Equipped with the theoretical basis for telepathy, does Mudge then step into his workshop and build a functioning teleporter? No! All you need to do is look at "equation C" and then you can wish yourself to Paris or Mars or anyplace that you care to imagine. Ah, the power of mathematics!

Beam yourself up, Scotty!

In the October 1951 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, a story by Jack Vance called "The Plagian Siphon" presented one of the most "nuts and bolts" accounts of "matter transferers" from the perspective of repairman Scotty Allister. Vance imagined that various planets of the galaxy are linked together by teleporters, but these handy devices need occasional tune-ups. 

"The Plagian Siphon" features aliens and their robotic systems that have been programmed to have human-like intelligence. Vance did occasionally mention robots in other stories, but this story is the first that I have seen from Vance with a "robotic" character that plays a significant role in the plot.

 

alien robots

fixing a broken L-toggle

Scotty is teleported away from Earth and off to a distant world where robotic systems of alien design and planetary scope mine resources and send them back to master planet Plagigonstok. 

 

However, the planetary "robot" is in need of repair and the "robot" now kills any Plagian who teleports in to make repairs. Working with the "robot", Scotty is able to repair a defective "L-toggle" and soon the robot's ills have been cured.

 

in the Ekcolir Reality

Scotty returns to Earth and he realizes that his own boss, the Chief of Maintenance and Repair is a Plagian who has been stealing Earthly technology and sending it back to Plagigonstok. The Chief sent Scotty out to perform the robot repair job because previous repair missions by the Plagians themselves had all failed.

Last year I suggested that "Dodkin" in Vance's story "Dodkin's Job" may have been the first computer "hacker" ever depicted in a science fiction story. Scotty may have been among the first computer repairmen depicted in science fiction, but having been written in the early fifties, the alien computer system depicted in "The Plagian Siphon" has no microscopic components. All Scotty has to do is pull a replacement L-toggle out of a drawer and plug it into the alien computer system.

cover art by Gino D'Achille

I like to imagine that in a previous Reality, an analogue of Jack Vance (Joan) was able to write additional science fiction stories that we never received from Vance here in our Reality. At the end of "The Plagian Siphon", Scotty teleports the Plagian spy off of Earth. World Security Intelligence (WSI) has now been alerted to the problem of Plagian espionage, but I can't believe that Plagian intrigue would end with the story told in "The Plagian Siphon". I wanted a follow-up story!

 

In the Ekcolir Reality, Joan Vance wrote several stories about  technologically advanced Plegians, including "Return of the Plegians" in which they use their time travel technology to help guide the development of computer science and robotics on Earth.

 

Aliens hidden among us

image source

When Scotty realizes that his boss is an alien, he finds it hard to understand why he never noticed all of the clues including the Chief's yellow skin and the poison gas that he breathed through a tube. For his novel Star King, Vance invented another alien who could infiltrate human society and he concocted a more convincing explanation for Malagate's ability to go undetected.

interior art by
Paul Orban

In "The Evitable Conflict" (1950), Asimov had written about computerized systems called "the Machines" that took control of Earth's economy, working for the betterment of Humanity. In Asimov's imagined future, well-programmed computers carefully guided the world's economy into the future, avoiding catastrophic boom-bust cycles. 

 

It is easy for me to view Vance's "The Plagian Siphon" as a reaction to Asimov's rosy view of computerized systems. Vance's world-spanning computer system has automated repair, but the repair subsystem breaks down, leading to disaster.

Alien teleportation.

 2023 update. In 2023 I began making use of AI-generated images to make illustrations for this blog. For the image to the left, WOMBO Dream was able to use a text prompt that included, "a quantum computing artificial life form that is holding a red quantum amplifier" and produce the image that is shown to the left. You go around playing with a quantum amplifier and who know what might happen!

Related Reading: Assignment Nor'Dyren, a better Sci Fi story about a repairman

and       Matter Duplication; making copies of people

 

Next: thinking machines

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500k Pageviews

500,000 pageviews for the wikifiction blog

Back in February of 2019 I blogged about an arbitrary numerical milestone for the wikifiction blog and here I go again...

500,000
Google serves up about 125 wikifiction blog pages each day. I try to keep the Blogger settings arranged so that my own page requests are not counted. I know that some fraction of the total counted visits to this blog are my own, but I suspect that is only a small percentage.

The Blogger setting used to prevent inclusion
of my own pageviews in the stats.

The other pageviews that should not be counted are those due to the activity of spam bots. I assume that when this blog gets a higher than average number of pageviews on any given day (as often happened in 2017), many of those are not due to actual humans. However, I imagine that most of the pageviews during the past few years have been humans, most of whom performed a search of the internet and found a link to my blog.

Comments left at the wikifiction blog by spam bots.

I just searched for images using the term "wiki fiction". Three of the top four hits are images from this blog, including the banner. That reminds me that I need to perform a banner update.

It is hard for me to imagine why those three particular images were so highly favored by Google's search algorithm.

Lorn-Kru

Google's search engine is haunted. One of the alien creatures that I invented is Lorn-Kru. The oldest version of my illustration for Lorn-Kru that I can find on my computer dates from 2008. So, why should any search engine running here in 2020 label that image of Lorn-Kru as "5 days ago"?

I don't make any effort to do search engine optimization, but I do include many images in by blog posts and I suspect that a significant number of people are led to this blog when they are surfing the net and happen to find one of my imaginary book or magazine covers. Related Reading: Google Photo Albums.

Rank

search results for "hierion sedron"

Anytime when I have an image or a story on both the wikifiction blog and some other website, a Goggle web search will always list the other website first.

This blog is full of the terms hierion and sedron, but other websites that contain those terms always appear first in Google search results. I'm continually surprised that Google does not do a better job promoting Blogger blogs.

On a day-by-day basis, the wikifiction blog posts that usually get the most visits are recent ones, but one of the long-time favorite pages is Cambridge Computing, from 2013. It always bothers me that a page with only a story fragment is so popular.

list of recently-visited pages (old format)

Someday I'll have to finish writing that story. However, the first rule here at the wikifiction blog is that fun is number one. I only write because I'm having fun with a story. If finishing a story begins to feel like work then I'm going to drop it and move on to something else that seems more interesting at that moment.

I do sometimes return to an interrupted story after years have passed, but not out of some sense of duty, not with any feeling that I must finish an incomplete tale.

 

New Blogger

new format list of recently-visited pages

With the new Blogger interface, here is what the list of most-visited pages now looks like (image to the right). 

An imaginary book cover (source)
appearing in Google image search
results for "Cambridge Computing"

My best guess is that Cambridge Computing gets a steady stream of visitors because of the image shown to the left. This blog contains many imaginary book and magazine covers and they sometimes show up in Google image searches.

Imaginary Covers

a top cover image

The image shown to the right seems to be one of the imaginary book covers from this blog that is most likely to appear in internet search results.

500,000 page views

I generally end each blog post by linking to a gallery of book and magazine covers. I hope that fans of science fiction who visit this blog enjoy these cover illustrations for imaginary books and magazines (and there are a few images for imaginary movies).

Next: teleportation in 1951

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Confidence

inventing new fictional science (1950)

I've previously mentioned dianetics in passing. Earlier this year, I also mentioned John Campbell, editor of Astounding, and his interest in "psionics". In April I blogged about the Jack Vance story "The Potters of Firsk" which was published in the May 1950 issue of Astounding. As reviewed in detail here, that was the issue that included an editorial by Campbell in which he referred to science fiction story teller Lafayette (Ron) Hubbard as an engineer and described Hubbard's dianetics as a "revolutionary" "scientific thesis". Although Hubbard had been enrolled in college for a time, he never obtained an academic degree. In his editorial, Campbell optimistically referred to the soon-to-be-published book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health as a textbook*.

Dianetics: The Evolution Invention of a Science 

the "textbook" cover

I love the idea that Hubbard's 1950 "fact article" in Astounding about dianetics was actually science fiction. Look at the cover illustration in the image to the left on this page. I like to imagine that Hubbard was charmed by Vance's idea (in "The Potters of Firsk") of potters using the heat from a volcano to fire their wares. Vance's story had a dark side, with his imaginary potters cooking the bones of people into their pots. 

 

I suspect that Hubbard read Vance's "Potters" story and then created his own tale about death and volcanoes. Once he latched onto an idea, Hubbard's imagination could move in amazing directions. Sadly, we science fiction fans have apparently never gotten the complete story of the volcanoes of Xenu. The full "truth" is reserved for those who join Hubbard's church and pay big buck$ for the privilege of revelation. 😞

Scott Aaronson

There is a long tradition of people trained in the physical sciences trying their hand at "explaining" how the brain functions to create our mental experiences. One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon is on display in the book The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose. Penrose, a physicist, proposed that in order to understand the mysteries of consciousness we will first need a good theory of quantum gravity. 

 

Needless to say, no biologists working to understand consciousness have dropped their biology research in order to first create a complete and "correct" theory of quantum gravity. However, Penrose has contributed to the rise of a "quantum consciousness" cult that is no less persistent than Hubbard's church of scientology.

Fictional science in science fiction

from "To the Stars"
Related Reading: shortcut

Why did Campbell (with training in physics) ever believe that the "engineer" Hubbard could tell us something useful about "mental health"? Hubbard had constructed a simplistic "theory" of psychosomatic illness that included the type of mechanistic thinking that appeals to physical scientists. 

 

Imagine the human body as a machine that can malfunction and, in particular, picture the brain as a computer. Just think how great it would be if simply by correcting errors in our mechanical thought processes we could cure illnesses like tuberculosis! Hubbard apparently suckered Campbell into believing that evidence for such medical "thought repair cures" had been obtained in the course of his (Hubbard's) many years of painstaking "research" on the subject. Dianatics was exactly the kind of thrilling, cutting-edge "scientific" advance that Campbell wanted to be able to share with the wonder-junkie readers of Astounding magazine.

Confidence tricks or science
fiction?            image source

I believe that Hubbard was an "engineer" in the sense that he "solved Campbell" and had learned to provide Campbell with exactly what Campbell wanted most. I've previously observed that during the 1940s Campbell was likely to publish in Astounding any science fiction story (such as "To the Stars") that included a few equations. I'm sure that Hubbard told Campbell that there was "experimental" evidence to support the medical efficacy of dianetic (thought) "auditing". 

 

To Campbell's credit, when after a year had passed and no evidence was provided by Hubbard to support his claims of disease cures, Campbell stopped acting as Hubbard's shill. Campbell quickly moved on to his next pseudoscience enthusiasm. He needed to provide his readers with new thrills, not a boring "fact article" about how Hubbard's dianetics scheme had collapsed in bankruptcy.

profitable religion

Write what (and who) you know

I love Isaac Asimov's 1955 novel The End of Eternity. There are two amusing characters in that book, Senior Computer Laban Twissell and August Sennor. I suspect that both Twissell and Sennor were characters built upon Asimov's many years of experience with Campbell. Campbell was a smoker and Asimov depicted Twissell as a smoker. Asimov describes Sennor as having "leapfrog enthusiasms", moving on from one all-absorbing-interest to the next before ever finishing his work on the last one. Twissell is depicted as a scam artist, hiding his personal crimes while secretly working to engineer the entire structure of Eternity.

scientology

Jack Vance's 1958 story "Parapsyche" might also have been reacting to the confidence trick that had been pulled off by Campbell and Hubbard in 1950. Vance often mocked religious hypocrisy in his writings and by 1958, Hubbard was 5 years into expanding dianetics into his new religion, scientology. I would not be surprised if Vance was thinking about Hubbard's creation of a money-making religion when he wrote "Parapsyche".

published 1950 in Astounding

 

from the introduction by J. Winter

To Shill or Not to Shill

In 1950, Campbell was not the lone shill for Hubbard. The "fact article" by Hubbard in Astounding begins with an introduction by Joseph Winter. (There was almost a third entirely invented shill, as described here.)

I love the idea that each human contains "a machine incapable of error, working with memory storage banks of infinite capacity". For my Exode Saga, I imagine that the positronic robots of Earth faced a major challenge when they developed time travel technology. They needed a way to control the "butterfly effect".

source

Endosymbionts

I imagine that when the pek arrived on Earth two billion years ago, they impregnated our planet with zeptites. When humans evolved, they evolved as biological organisms that contained a zeptite endosymbiont. Later, when R. Nyrtia created temporal momentum, a second femtobot endosymbiont was added to the human brain as a sub-system. For each human on Earth there were corresponding replicoids in the Hierion Domain.

Here on Earth, our endosymbionts can link us to the vast quantum computational capacity of our replicoids in the Hierion Domain. The behavior of each person on Earth can be made to precisely match the behavior that was "recorded" by our replicoids in the previous Reality.

"Hierion Writers Club"

For the story that I am currently writing ("Hierion Writers Club"), in the Foundation Reality, R. Nyrtia is experimenting with the use of replicoids for a new purpose. It has been discovered that replicoids can can be given a new independent life of their own within the Hierion Domain, breaking the pre-programmed link between replicoids and humans on Earth. 

 

At first, only nanoscopic replicoids are made, but eventually "full-sized" replicoids with the normal human body size are created for use as Interventionist agents on Earth.

 

see this

Eric Russell

Hubbard could not get through his 40 page description of how he had invented his fictional science of human thought without explicitly mentioning science fiction. At the very end of his "fact article", Hubbard mentions Eric Russell's "sinister barrier". For his fiction, Russell had imagined parasitic Vitons (see the illustration to the left) who secretly control human behavior.

 

interior art
by Walt Miller

Hubbard cheerfully implies that his new-found dianetic methods will liberate Humanity from the horrible norns that insidiously disrupt the perfection of our minds. Poor Walt Miller apparently had no choice but to illustrate Hubbard's "fact article" as if it were just another science fiction story. Look at Walt's depiction of Hubbard's norns in the image to the right. The norns are shown as a type of evil puppet master. 

Part of the 1950 "fact article" in Astounding

I love Hubbard's idea that human brains have both standard memory circuits composed of neural networks AND an additional system of engrams. He imagined that the perfect information storing engrams were subcellular. For the Exode Saga, I imagine that there are nanoscopic infites, capable of holding memories and shifting them into human minds.

Part of the 1950 "fact article" in Astounding

Sadly, Hubbard was writing in the age before nanometer scale integrated circuit lithography and before it was understood how genetic information is stored in DNA molecules. For the Exode Saga, I've had to invent nanoscopic replicoids, femtobots and zeptites in order to equip humans with subcellular memory systems.

 

Part of the 1950 "fact article" in Astounding

* Footnote: I've never completely read anything written by Hubbard. I find his writings to be very painful reading. For all I know, maybe Hubbard's book on dianetics is a textbook, with a whole chapter in it about the discipline of "Chinese apuncture" and another on "healing crystals". As a biologist, I found it hard to get past the first page of Hubbard's 1950 "fact article" where after describing the perfect computer he states authoritatively that the human brain is a perfect computer. That's a great introduction to a science fiction story, but it is not science.

Related Reading. Asimov was a grandmaster of fictional science. See: psychohistory, endochronic starships and quantitative micropsychiatry

See Also: the Dean Drive

Next: fantasy teleportation

On page 66 of the Feb 1959 issue of Galaxy. Hubbard Association of Scientologists International.

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