Category: ideas

Theodora Goss noticed something about European horror, or at least Euro-monsters who were women: They didn’t speak. So she wrote her own short story, “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” “which explores the lives of female monsters such as Justine Frankenstein, Diana Hyde, and Catherine Moreau. ‘All these girl monsters have found each other and they’ve formed a club, and they live together in London,’ Goss says. ‘That’s the premise'” – and now the story is a book.

“Western readers often overlook the Muslim world’s speculative fiction. I use the term quite broadly, to capture any story that imagines the implications of real or imagined cultural or scientific advances. Some of the first forays into the genre were the utopias dreamt up during the cultural flowering of the Golden Age.”

Maybe it’s easier to say what it isn’t than what it is. “There has been a strong tradition among the genre’s commentators to reject imposters and poor substitutes: genuine essays must not be confused with stories, and formulaic school writing … and worst of all, scholarly articles.”

But weirdly, they only got there after the Catholic Church banned many Aristotelian ideas as heretical. “Among the ideas that Tempier condemned was a principle of Aristotelian thought that held that the ‘first cause’ (or, as medieval scholars would have said, God) could not have made more than one world.”

“This manuscript, never before published, is marked ‘A Lecture’ and dated ‘1966-67.’ Where and when it was delivered, or if it was delivered, is not known. The manuscript seems too long for a single lecture. … The where and when of the lecture have not been confirmed, though extant records have been thoroughly searched.”

The key, based on academic research into adult learning, is cognitive dissonance. Suzanne Cope explains.

You don’t need drugs, either, according to research – though both religion and drugs can help. “Much of our personality is made up of attitudes that are usually subconscious. We drag around buried trauma, guilt, feelings of low self-worth. In moments of ecstasy, the threshold of consciousness is lowered, people encounter these subconscious attitudes, and are able to step outside of them. They can feel a deep sense of love for themselves and others, which can heal them at a deep level. Maybe this is just an opening to the subconscious, maybe it’s a connection to a higher dimension of spirit – we don’t know.”

Primatologist Robert Sapolsky: “Humans universally make Us/Them dichotomies along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, language group, religion, age, socioeconomic status, and so on. And it’s not a pretty picture. We do so with remarkable speed and neurobiological efficiency; have complex taxonomies and classifications of ways in which we denigrate Thems; do so with a versatility that ranges from the minutest of microaggression to bloodbaths of savagery; and regularly decide what is inferior about Them based on pure emotion, followed by primitive rationalizations that we mistake for rationality. Pretty depressing. But crucially, there is room for optimism.”

“You would lean against the lockers with a faraway expression on your face and let people assume whatever they wanted. Like that you were a girly girl but could also be a tomboy. Or that back in your home town you’d been friends with a bunch of crows. And everyone assumed that if they saw a crow it probably knew you, because you had some kind of understanding with crows owing to undefined telepathic abilities that made you look troubled now and then but also really important. And if anyone wanted to track down an old friend of yours and write her an actual letter to find out if any of this was true, well, best of luck to them.”

Joe Berkowitz: “The best pun I heard during the course of writing the book was: ‘I went to go shopping for cherries and microphones the other day: bought a bing, bought a boom.'”