Shriekback – Every Force Evolves a Form

If there’s anything science fiction and fantasy have taught me it’s that magic forces are dangerous. Think of what happened in The Sandman when the wrong guy got hold of that ruby.

Last night as I was drifting off, I had the weirdest vision. I was in a dark cavern with a ceiling so high and broad it looked like a sky. A dark red membrane of a sky. Above that ceiling, I knew, was the “real” world.

Down from that ceiling flew a murmuration of blackbirds – or what looked like blackbirds, patterns shifting and disappearing into the dark. “This is where the ideas live before we catch them,” I thought sleepily.

Bjork – All the Modern Things

Where DO the ideas live before they take shape? Do we fill that realm with blackbirds or do we catch them and drag them into this one?

Clarke’s Law is still true in the modern age. It takes mines and factories and communication networks, but ideas involving technology do kind of seem like magic.

If you have the right math, science and materials, you can pluck computers, bombs, particle accelerators out of thin air. If you don’t look at the pollution, the illusion holds.

When a powerful thought comes through that membrane, we always seem to turn it into a way to kill lots of people. The conjurers never seem to worry. “Look what it can do! Let’s give it to the world. Whee!”

Michael Crichton used to annoy me. “There are some things man was never meant to know. Dun dun dunnnnn” seemed to be the theme of all his books. That was no fun. I wanted as many dinosaurs as I could get.

But I’ve been coming around to his point of view. People who haven’t read Destination Void have unleashed technology that comes disturbingly close to passing the Turing Test. I was afraid of nuclear war, but I’m more afraid of this. At least they didn’t put a nuke in everybody’s pocket.

The only thing that’s kept us from blowing up the world so far has been threatening to blow up the world. I don’t know how long that’s gonna hold.

Why do the war monkeys known as humans have to turn every important idea into a way to kill one another? I wish we could put more resources into answering that question.

Edgar Winter Group – Frankenstein