The Spine

JG Ballard talks in the "Drowned World" how travelling down the spine is travelling back in time, back through evolution to the Jurassic, Triassic, Silurian...Devonian.

An injury to the spine takes you back in time, and forward too. It renders you helpless, a simple muscle pull leaving you an occasionally twinging, shrieking child or an elderly person spilling tea or soup down themselves as they sit down. A glimpse of hopeless past, helpless future, at the mercy of carers and family - if you have any.

Why are we still so vulnerable? We should have evolved past this flimsy calciferous entity within us, one that can paralyse us if it goes wrong. Should it now have been replaced with something constructed from carbon fibre or titanium alloy? Must we be a slave to this ironically invertebrate prawn like structure within us? 

Our livelihoods and basic functionality depend on this weak, vulnerable, hopeless thing? And we have to suffer the pain when it goes wrong?

Pah. I'm getting a new one...I shall make one myself. Maybe even lego is preferable to this.

Copyright  Bloody Mulberry 05.07.14

My Own Fantastic Voyage

Discovered that the classic sci fi movie "Fantastic Voyage" is available entire on youtube at the moment, and settled down to watch it in Starbucks, the screams of young children in my ear disturbing me from my contemplation of internal butchery by a sub microscopic submarine.

I wonder what a voyage into my own body would be like; a desperate risk probably. Trips through a heart that even slowed down would occasionally thunder with anxiety, double systolic beats crushing the hull of all but a virtual internal dreadnaught. Fancy a trip to my brain, my carotid would always be tying itself in knots as my tics throw my body into convulsive, wrenching poses.

Tourettes, that would knock any submarine in my bloodstream about like you would not believe, the aquanauts would be concussed out of their minds as I sometimes feel I'm out of mine.

Get to the brain. Find the damage. Repair it. No chance. Electric impulses a-randomly firing frying the Raquel Welches trying to fix the damage. Which is a pity, maybe they could use their laser beams to activate the bit of my brain that might get me a better job.

No chance.

The Sexuality of Sci-Fi

We are the only sentient species we know about at present, in a universe where the possibilities are nearly infinite.

It is thus disappointing, if unsurprising, that we can only see things through our own tediously heterosexual and missionary position eyes. Our imaginations, when they should be alive to every possibility, are thinking only of England.

We are so boring. This young child playing with his Star Wars figures, could see all manner of fun and games involving Squid Head and a Gammorean Guard, while EV9D9 the Smash Martian torture-bot of Jabba's Palace looked on approvingly. But no, long long ago in a galaxy far far away, there was only rubbish old male to female, humanoid snogging going on. The brilliantly realised array of species that frequented the Mos Eisley cantina or Jabba's Sail Barge were about as sexual as a packet of crisps, save for the constantly ejaculating phallus that was Jabba himself, his scenes with Leia a blatant earth bound bukkake signifier.

As the Holiday Special showed us, Wookies like pornography featuring humans, rather than other Wookies, and how disturbing is it that Han Solo gets the white girl, but Chewbacca's father has a black woman served up to him as his fantasy?

Contemporaneously, H2G2's Zaphod Beeblebrox may have been sporting an extra head and three arms, but there was nothing to show that his dealings with Trillian were anything past Page 32 of the Joy of Sex.

We all know that Kirk may have been canoodling with all manner of green skinned – or more shockingly for 1968, black skinned – women in the traditional manner, but leap forward into the Next Generation, and the excitement of the final frontier was sharing screen time with Nescafe advert style sexual tension with Doctor Crusher and Captain Picard, and with Riker and Councillor Troi – another example of a mixed species relationship being portrayed in typically heterosexual penis to vagina coupling.

The First Contact movie presented us with the spectacle (cringing!) of Data getting it on with the Borg Queen, but for all his announcement that he was “Fully functional, programmed in multiple techniques” it was clear that this android to cyborg corpse coupling was going to be of a very standard format. Indeed, any alt-sex activities of the Star Trek Universe were always of the cloning, or assimilating variety.

It wasn't until Star Trek Voyager, that anything different to these standards were offered up to the viewer – Harry Kim had some form of bizarre intercourse with the ever stunning Musetta “Mansquito” Vander - “I'm not sure that was even legal” - and Kes and Neelix's long term interspecies relationship revealed some interesting little tit-bits about Ocampa sexual physiology that were very different from ours.

Still all het though. Even the radically inhuman creations of Species and Splice engaged in fairly conventional heterosexual intercourse.

The world of sci-fi literature, however, had been a bit more open to alternatives. Arthur C. Clarke's universe was hard-sci and asexual a lot of the time, aside to joky references to shipboard relationships with genetically engineered apes called Simps in “Rendezvous with Rama”. However, by the 80s, there were open references to homosexuality in the relationship between an American and Russian astronaut aboard the Leonov in 2010, the “Feys” of 2061, and butch surfing spacedudes recalibrating their sexuality in “The Songs of Distant Earth.”

Going back to the 1930s, Olav Stapledon, in “Last and First Men” actually envisaged fully realised, highly complex and rather incomprehensible successor species of man, with sub-sexes and full intercourse involving a large group of individuals, but these were a later species of man, albeit barely recognisable to us, rather than aliens.

I think it is David Bowie, who else, who actually through the vision of Nicholas Roeg, gives us an idea of what a realistic form of alien sex could be...messy, genital-less, and with no-need for penetration at all.

And indeed, for all the stress and violence it causes, higher forms of life in the universe will probably have abandoned sex. And who can blame them?

Copyright Bloody Mulberry

Schroedinger's Organ

The insides of our bodies, the slew or supremely organised mess and gore that lies inside all of us, is a Schrodinger’s cat, a blood soaked feline wreathed in nerve and sinew waiting for the knife.

For how do we ever really know our own internal structure? We never see it. Until it is X-Rayed or MRI scanned, it isn’t there and the conditions of imaging (i.e. measuring) our structure must change it – Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says so.

We can’t ever see our own heart our liver or lungs. We only have the word of others that they are there. If you were to try and take a look at your own heart, you would almost certainly kill yourself in the process.

I’d like to think, in my own case certainly, that until you take a scalpel to my rib cage, I don’t actually have any internal organs. I certainly don’t have a heart. I think that my body is actually part of the multiverse, that the eleventh dimension and all the branes it contains, is actually within this unsleek skin. My insides are not a butcher’s shop slab; they are stars, and black holes and quasars and masers.

Starlight shines, and yet, as I know for sure, there must be an awful lot of dark matter and dark energy in there too, in the cranial space where my brain is thought to be by conventional science.

It is ironic too, that the means of my escape from drudgery are contained within me, a journey into the universe! And I can never reach it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16/11/13

How to Breathe Forever

Long term deep sea divers do not breathe in  pure oxygen or air when operating at great depth - the oxygen becomes toxic at high pressure, and the nitrogen causes nitrogen narcosis. Instead, Helium is added, in a mixture known either as trimix or heliox depending on whether nitrogen is present in the mix.

This is what causes deep sea divers to have squeaky voices, and film-makers a problem if they don't want their cast to sound like chipmunks. In "Sphere" they invented some sort of "voice adaptor", whereas in The Abyss they merely ignored the issue altogether.

What the world doesn't know that in the 70s, a pioneering group of swiss led divers discovered that if you breathe pure Neon at a depth below 2000 metres, not only does it become possible to dive at great depth for an unlimited time, the inhalation of pure noble gas meant that biolgically, they had become immortal, and indeed if they switched to an Argon-Neon mix, aging was actually reversed very slightly.

Sadly this is only possible 2000 metres below sea level, and indeed the effects seem to be magnified the deeper you go. So this was immortality was only available to a very elite few, and the news of this discovery was greatly supressed. However, those in the elite diving community continued to be in the know, and since the early 1990s, greater and greater numbers of them have decided that the surface world is in such a state that they have migrated to the great depths of the abyssal plane, to join the colossal squid and oarfish in forging a new society.

In their small habitats, they glow green and blue like street signs as they live a life of oceanic contemplation while harvesting protein from sources unknown to us ignorant surface dwellers. They don't need to know about us, their society is impregnable and infinite. They will barely even care as we kill ourselves off up here. They create art out of lava flowing out of the sea bed, and smoke cigarettes made of kelp. They make an alcoholic drink out of distilled squid ink, and play chess with pieces sculpted from feathery starfish and creatures unknown to our science.

They need nothing we can offer them. I envy them.