By then Mike had voder-vocoder circuits supplementing his read-outs, print-outs, and decision-action boxes, and could understand not only classic programming but also Loglan and English, and could accept other languages and was doing technical translating — and reading endlessly. But in giving him instructions was safer to use Loglan. If you spoke English, results might be whimsical; multi-valued nature of English gave option circuits too much leeway.

I have done some reading about Lojban and I just wanted to comment that you seem to have misunderstood a bit of how the language works. There is nothing in the language that forces you to be unambiguous, but the speaker and listener would always be completely aware of precisely where the ambiguities are. The language certainly allows "Make!" as a complete sentence - there is nothing grammatically incorrect about that at all. However the excruciatingly correct translation of a sentence consisting of just the word for "make" would actually be something like:

<unspecified> makes/made/is making <unspecified> using <unspecified>

A person or computer fluent in Lojban understands that the word for make has a "place structure" of three variables essentially, and in this case the speaker or writer has chosen to omit values for these variables either because they are unknown, unimportant, or understood from context. If I have already given you an order to make blowguns from the local bamboo equivalent and later came back to find you instead puttering around trying to design an atomic rocket, I might bark at you "Make!" - I am obviously barking at you as the one who is supposed to be doing the making, and I am expecting you to remember what it is you are supposed to be making and what I asked you to make them out of. Actually, perhaps I never even specified what you are to make them out of - you might be the weapons specialist and obviously much better suited than I to decide what the appropriate materials are, so I might have just told you to make blowguns and omitted what to use because I don't know.

Lojban allows for such ambiguities, the key is that there is a rigid logical structure within which these ambiguities exist, so the speaker and listener should both be aware of exactly what the speaker is being ambiguous about and the listener can ask for clarification on any of those pieces of information if they so choose.

So, no, a language like Lojban will probably not, in and of itself, lead to an ultra-logical, Vulcan-like race that is over-precise and excruciatingly pedantic (although it would probably be just the sort of language they would choose to use), but it might lead to a race that shakes its collective heads at other races and their frequent miscommunications.

The concept of a logical language (such as Lobjan or Speedtalk) is quite intriguing, but it might be good to let people know that a bit of a handwave is required to make it work as an actual spoken language for a culture. It's not a very drastic handwave though.

Basically, the problem is that such a language can exist as a scholarly language, but as soon as people (even the scholars that are already using it as a scholarly language) start speaking it in everyday life, the logicality of the language goes down the drain. The human brain has the tendency to mercilessly hack away from any sentence whatever information is not needed. If we know that the only material in the area that could be used for making blowguns is bamboo, we are unlikely to specify that bamboo was used in the manufacture of a given blowgun, no matter how much our Lobjan teachers scream in frustration.

However, if you are of the opinion that design-a-baby Genetic Engineering and/or Strong AI are possible, it should be easy to hardwire Billy's Concise Grammar of Lobjan into the brain of your new strain of super-logicians (Could this be the origin of the Vulcans?), or into the CPU of your Real People Personality Robot. That could make for an interesting plot: Tensions between Genetically Engineered Super-Brains who are always over-precise and pedantic and the average run of the mill Homo-Sap who can never finish.

      In their underground classroom Gail had available several types of apparatus to record and manipulate light and sound. She commenced throwing groups of figures on a screen, in flashes. "What was it, Joe?"
     "Nine-six-oh-seven-two-That was as far as I got."
     "It was up there a full thousandth of a second. Why did you get only the left hand side of the group?"
     "That's all the farther I had read."
     "Look at all of it. Don't make an effort of will; just look at it." She flashed another number.
     Joe's memory was naturally good; his intelligence was high-just how high he did not yet know. Un- convinced that the drill was useful, he relaxed and played along. Soon he was beginning to grasp a nine-digit array as a single gestalt; Gail reduced the flash time.
     "What is this magic lantern gimmick?" he inquired.
     "It's a Renshaw tachistoscope. Back to work."

     Around World War II Dr. Samuel Renshaw at the Ohio State University was proving that most people are about one-fifth efficient in using their capacities to see, hear, taste, feel and remember. His research was swallowed in the morass of communist pseudoscience that obtained after World War III, but, after his death, his findings were preserved underground…

     …Speedtalk was a structurally different speech from any the race had ever used. Long before, Ogden and Richards had shown that eight hundred and fifty words were sufficient vocabulary to express anything that could be expressed by "normal" human vocabularies, with the aid of a handful of special words — a hundred odd — for each special field, such as horse racing or ballistics. About the same time phoneticians had analyzed all human tongues into about a hundred-odd sounds, represented by the letters of a general phonetic alphabet.
     On these two propositions Speedtalk was based.
     To be sure, the phonetic alphabet was much less in number than the words in Basic English. But the letters representing sound in the phonetic alphabet were each capable of variation several different ways — length, stress, pitch, rising, falling. The more trained an ear was the larger the number of possible variations; there was no limit to variations, but, without much refinement of accepted phonetic practice, it was possible to establish a one-to-one relationship with Basic English so that one phonetic symbol was equivalent to an entire word in a "normal" language, one Speedtalk word was equal to an entire sentence. The language consequently was learned by letter units rather than by word units — but each word was spoken and listened to as a single structured gestalt.
     But Speedtalk was not "shorthand" Basic English. "Normal" languages, having their roots in days of superstition and ignorance, have in them inherently and unescapably wrong structures of mistaken ideas about the universe. One can think logically in English only by extreme effort so bad it is as a mental tool. For example, the verb "to be" in English has twenty-one distinct meanings, every single one of which is false-to-fact.
     A symbolic structure, invented instead of accepted without question, can be made similar in structure to the real world to which it refers. The structure of Speedtalk did not contain the hidden errors of English; it was structured as much like the real world as the New Men could make it. For example, it did not contain the unreal distinction between nouns and verbs found in most other languages. The world — the continuum known to science and including all human activity — does not contain "noun things" and "verb things"; it contains space-time events and relationships between them. The advantage for achieving truth, or something more nearly like truth, was similar to the advantage of keeping account books in Arabic numerals rather than Roman. (ed note: try doing long division with Roman numerals sometime)
     All other languages made scientific, multi-valued logic almost impossible to achieve; in Speedtalk it was as difficult not to be logical. Compare the pellucid Boolean logic with the obscurities of the Aristotelian logic it supplanted.
     Paradoxes are verbal, do not exist in the real world — and Speedtalk did not have such built into it. Who shaves the Spanish Barber? Answer: follow him around and see. In the syntax of Speedtalk the paradox of the Spanish Barber could not even be expressed, save as a self-evident error… (ed note: old pardox, A Spanish Barber shaves all the men in his town who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?)
     …An economical language cannot be limited to a thousand words; although almost every idea can be expressed somehow in a short vocabulary, higher orders of abstraction are convenient. For technical words Speedtalk employed an open expansion of sixty of the thousand-odd phonetic letters. They were the letters ordinarily used as numerals; by preceding a number with a letter used for no other purpose, the symbol was designated as having a word value.
     New Men numbered to the base sixty-three times four times five, a convenient, easily factored system, most economical, i.e., the symbol "100" identified the number described in English as thirty-six hundred — yet permitting quick, in-the-head translation from common notation to Speedtalk figures and vice versa.
     By using these figures, each prefaced by the indicator — a voiceless Welsh or Burmese "I" — a pool of 215,999 words (one less than the cube of sixty) were available for specialized meaning without using more than four letters including the indicator. Most of them could be pronounced as one syllable. These had not the stark simplicity of basic Speedtalk; nevertheless words such as "ichthyophagous" and "constitutionality" were thus compressed to monosyllables. Such shortcuts can best be appreciated by anyone who has heard a long speech in Cantonese translated into a short speech in English. Yet English is not the most terse of "normal" languages — and expanded Speedtalk is many times more economical than the briefest of "normal" tongues.
     By adding one more letter (sixty to the fourth power) just short of thirteen million words could be added if needed — and most of them could still be pronounced as one syllable…
     ...The ability to learn Speedtalk at all is proof of supernormal intelligence; the use of it by such intelligence renders that mind efficient. Even before World War II Alfred Korzybski had shown that human thought was performed, when done efficiently, only in symbols; the notion of "pure" thought, free of abstracted speech symbols, was merely fantasy. The brain was so constructed as to work without symbols only on the animal level; to speak of "reasoning" without symbols was to speak nonsense.
     Speedtalk did not merely speed up communication — by its structures it made thought more logical; by its economy it made thought processes enormously faster, since it takes almost as long to think a word as it does to speak it...
     ... Any man capable of learning Speedtalk had an association time at least three times as fast as an ordinary man. Speedtalk itself enabled him to manipulate symbols approximately seven times as fast as English symbols could be manipulated.

(ed note: I will mention that back in the early 1960's when I was in grade school, I was among the students who scored high enough (color code purple) on the SRA Reading Kit to be allowed some training with a weird gizmo that I now know was a tachistoscope. I am now a fast reader, and do tend to notice things that flash by quickly. However, correlation does not imply causation, so I do not know if my tachistoscope training created my speed reading, or if I was just born a fast reader and the tachistoscope did absolutely nothing.)

It bears noting that languages like Speedtalk would probably not work well because of signal-to-noise ratios. One of the reasons that languages tend to be so trigger-happy about cutting away unneeded information is so that they can make needed information multiply redundant.

Yx cxn xndxrstxnd Xnglxsh fxxrlx wxll wxth xll thx vxwxls x'xd xxt.

Y cn vn ndrstnd t frl wll wth th vwls cmpltl rmvd.

Try doing that with Speedtalk.

And it's not just "noise" that we need to be redundant against, it's stuff like inattention and the speaker being cut off.

Xorialle sighed. "Even your primitive tongue would be endurable if you used it correctly. You have complete knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and syntax now. Why not make use of it?"

"Habit, I guess," Dammy said indifferently. "Or maybe I just don't want to sound like a nance."

"I know a solution," Xorialle said grimly. "You'll learn Concensual Two, a simple form of speed-speak."

"Hold it, Doc," Dammy demurred. "You said human skills, remember? I don't want any weird alien kind of stuff pumped into my brain."

"Nonsense. C-2 is designed for interspecies communication and is as free of specialized bias as the concept of language permits. It won't warp your personality any more than a knowledge of Navajo would."

"What's it sound like?" Danny asked anxiously as his tutor settled the catalyzer in place.

Xorialle made a scraping noise with his tongue and hard palate. "That was Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. I confess it loses something in translation."

Language: The men of the Institute, who knew each other, were involuntarily developing a new set of communication symbols, a subtle and powerful thing in which every gesture had meaning and the speeding brain of the listener, without conscious effort, filled in the gaps and grasped the many-leveled meaning. It was almost too efficient, you gave your inmost self away. The man of the future would likely go naked in soul as well as in body, and Corinth wasn't sure he liked the prospect...

...Lewis was in his laboratory, waiting for him. "Late," he grunted.

"Sheila," replied Corinth.

The conversation here was rapidly becoming a new language. When your mind was of quadrupled capability, a single word, a gesture of hand, a flicker of expression, could convey more to one who knew you and your mannerisms than whole paragraphs of grammatical English.

"You're late this morning," Lewis had meant. "Have any trouble?"

"I got started late because of Sheila," Corinth had told him. "She's not taking this well at all, Nat, frankly, I'm worried about her. Only what can I do? I don't understand human psychology any more, it's changing too much and too fast. Nobody does. We're all becoming strangers to each other - to ourselves - and it's frightening." ...

---

..."Hullo, Pete," she said. The smile that twitched her mouth was tired, but it had warmth. "How've you been?"

Corinth spoke two words and made three gestures; she filled in his intention from logic and her knowledge of his old speech habits: (Oh - all right. But you - I thought you'd been co-opted by Felix to help whip his new government into shape.)

(I have,) she implied. (But I feel more at home here, and it's just as good a place to do some of my work. Who've you got on my old job, by the way?)

(Billy Saunders - ten years of age, but a sharp kid. Maybe we should get a moron, though. The physical strain may be too much for a child.)

(I doubt it. There isn't much to do now, really. You boys co-operate pretty smoothly since the change - unlike the rest of the world!)...

---

..."Wife," said Rossman with a note of gentle reproach. It could be rendered as: (I still don't see why you wouldn't tell your wife of this, and be with her tonight. It may be the last night of your lives.)

"Work, city, time," and the immemorial shrug and the wistful tone: (We both have our work to do, she at the relief center and I here at the defense hub. We haven't told the city either, you and I and the few others who know. It's best not to do so, eh?) We couldn't have evacuated them, there would have been no place for them to go and the fact of our attempting it would've been a tip-off to the enemy, an invitation to send the rockets immediately. Either we can save the city or we can't; at the moment, there's nothing anyone can do but wait and see if the defense works. (I wouldn't worry my Liebchen - she'd worry on my account and the kids' and grandchildren's. No, let it happen, one way or the other. Still I do wish we could be together now, Sarah and I, the whole family-)

We deal here with psychologists - and not merely psychologists. Let us say, rather, scientists with a psychological orientation. That is, men whose fundamental conception of scientific philosophy is pointed in an entirely different direction from all of the orientations we know. The "psychology" of scientists brought up among the axioms deduced from the observational habits of physical science has only the vaguest relationship to PSYCHOLOGY.

Which is about as far as I can go in explaining color to a blind man - with myself as blind as the audience.

The point being made is that the minds assembled understood thoroughly the workings of each other, not only by general theory but by the specific application over a long period of these theories to particular individuals. Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line - even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice....

...The Student smiled shyly, and the First Speaker responded by saying, "First, I must tell you why you are here."

They faced each other now, across the desk. Neither was speaking in any way that could be recognized as such by any man in the Galaxy who was not himself a member of the Second Foundation.

Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, be developed a method of communication - but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling.

Down- down- the results can be followed; and all the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy, until Hari Seldon, and very few men thereafter, could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located - so that each might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation - there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man.

Feet, for tens of thousands of years, had clogged and shuffled in the mud - and held down the minds which, for an equal time, had been fit for the companionship of the stars.

Grimly, Man had instinctively sought to circumvent the prison bars of ordinary speech. Semantics, symbolic logic, psychoanalysis - they had all been devices whereby speech could either be refined or by-passed...

---

...The same basic developments of mental science that had brought about the development of the Seldon Plan, thus made it also unnecessary for the First Speaker to use words in addressing the Student.

Every reaction to a stimulus, however slight, was completely indicative of all the trifling changes, of all the flickering currents that went on in another's mind. The First Speaker could not sense the emotional content of the Student's instinctively, as the Mule would have been able to do - since the Mule was a mutant with powers not ever likely to become completely comprehensible to any ordinary man, even a Second Foundationer - rather he deduced them, as the result of intensive training.

Since, however, it is inherently impossible in a society based on speech to indicate truly the method of communication of Second Foundationers among themselves, the whole matter will be hereafter ignored. The First Speaker will be represented as speaking in ordinary fashion, and if the translation is not always entirely valid, it is at least the best that can be done under the circumstances.

It will be pretended therefore, that the First Speaker did actually say, "First, I must tell you why you are here," instead of smiling just so and lifting a finger exactly thus.

• 

(ed note: Our Heroes are with the Foundation Project, established at the very rim of the Galactic Empire on the planet Terminus. The Project is led by a board of naive idealistic ivory-tower idiots under Dr. Pirenne. The civilians of Terminus are led by a pragmatic practical take-charge hero named Mayor Hardin, who is nominally under the control of the board.

The Galactic Empire is falling, and is gradually withdrawing control away from the rim. The tiny local stellar kingdoms are rising up and taking control of every planet they can grab. The little kingdom of Anacreon wants to seize control of Terminus.

Terminus and the board become alarmed and plead to the Galactic Empire for help. The Empire sends diplomat Lord Dorwin, who hangs around Terminus for about a week, giving assurances. Dorwin then travels to Anacreon and signs a treaty between Anacreon and the Galactic Empire.

The board then tells Anacreon to go away and stop threatening Terminus. Anacreon sends Terminus an angry ultimatum.

Mayor Hardin meets with the board, and carefully explains to the board that they are a bunch of naive idealistic ivory-tower idiots.)

     (Hardin said) “All right. I’m not that vitally interested. It’s just my opinion that it was your diplomatic transmission of Lord Dorwin’s valuable contribution to the situation” – he lifted the comer of his mouth in a sour half-smile – “that was the direct cause of this friendly little note (the ultimatum from Anacreon). They might have delayed longer otherwise – though I don’t think the additional time would have helped Terminus any, considering the attitude of the Board.”
     Said Yate Fulham: “And just how do you arrive at that remarkable conclusion, Mr. Mayor?”
     “In a rather simple way. It merely required the use of that much-neglected commodity – common sense. You see, there is a branch of human knowledge known as symbolic logic, which can be used to prune away all sorts of clogging deadwood that clutters up human language.”
     “What about it?” said Fulham.
     “I applied it. Among other things, I applied it to this document here. I didn’t really need to for myself because I knew what it was all about, but I think I can explain it more easily to five physical scientists by symbols rather than by words.”
     Hardin removed a few sheets of paper from the pad under his arm and spread them out. “I didn’t do this myself, by the way,” he said. “Muller Holk of the Division of Logic has his name signed to the analyses, as you can see.”
     Pirenne leaned over the table to get a better view and Hardin continued: “The message from Anacreon was a simple problem, naturally, for the men who wrote it were men of action rather than men of words. It boils down easily and straightforwardly to the unqualified statement, when in symbols is what you see, and which in words, roughly translated, is, ‘You give us what we want in a week, or we take it by force.’”
     There was silence as the five members of the Board ran down the line of symbols, and then Pirenne sat down and coughed uneasily.
     Hardin said, “No loophole, is there, Dr. Pirenne?”
     “Doesn’t seem to be.”
     “All right.” Hardin replaced the sheets. “Before you now you see a copy of the treaty between the Empire and Anacreon – a treaty, incidentally, which is signed on the Emperor’s behalf by the same Lord Dorwin who was here last week – and with it a symbolic analysis.”
     The treaty ran through five pages of fine print and the analysis was scrawled out in just under half a page.
     “As you see, gentlemen, something like ninety percent of the treaty boiled right out of the analysis as being meaningless, and what we end up with can be described in the following interesting manner:
     “Obligations of Anacreon to the Empire: None!
     “Powers of the Empire over Anacreon: None!”
     Again the five followed the reasoning anxiously, checking carefully back to the treaty, and when they were finished, Pirenne said in a worried fashion, “That seems to be correct.”
     “You admit, then, that the treaty is nothing but a declaration of total independence on the part of Anacreon and a recognition of that status by the Empire?”
     “It seems so.”
     “And do you suppose that Anacreon doesn’t realize that, and is not anxious to emphasize the position of independence – so that it would naturally tend to resent any appearance of threats from the Empire? Particularly when it is evident that the Empire is powerless to fulfill any such threats, or it would never have allowed independence.”
     “But then,” interposed Sutt, “how would Mayor Hardin account for Lord Dorwin’s assurances of Empire support? They seemed – ” He shrugged. “Well, they seemed satisfactory.”
     Hardin threw himself back in the chair. “You know, that’s the most interesting part of the whole business. I’ll admit I had thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him – but it turned out that he was actually an accomplished diplomat and a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his statements.”
     There was a flurry, and Pirenne opened his mouth in horror.
     “What of it?” demanded Hardin. “I realize it was a gross breach of hospitality and a thing no so-called gentleman would do. Also, that if his lordship had caught on, things might have been unpleasant; but he didn’t, and I have the record, and that’s that. I took that record, had it copied out and sent that to Holk for analysis, also.”
     Lundin Crast said, “And where is the analysis?”
     “That,” replied Hardin, “is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications – in short, all the goo and dribble – he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out.”
     “Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire.”
     Hardin might have placed an actively working stench bomb on the table and created no more confusion than existed after his last statement. He waited, with weary patience, for it to die down.
     “So,” he concluded, “when you sent threats – and that’s what they were – concerning Empire action to Anacreon, you merely irritated a monarch who knew better. Naturally, his ego would demand immediate action, and the ultimatum is the result – which brings me to my original statement. We have one week left and what do we do now?”

• 

You've probably never heard of Alfred Korzybski, but he was famous in the mid-20th century. He didn't just invent a whole new science, he also had a huge influence on Robert A. Heinlein and a ton of other important science fiction authors. Author Lee Konstantinou brings us the strange tale of Count Korzybski.

L. Ron Hubbard once supposedly bet Robert A. Heinlein that he could make more money by founding a religion than Heinlein could by writing a work of science fiction. Heinlein responded by writing his classic novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). Hubbard, meanwhile, created Dianetics and Scientology.

Though the story is probably false, Hubbard's religious doctrines do bear a remarkable resemblance to aspects of Heinlein's novel. Both Hubbard and Heinlein were fixated on the divergent relationship between words and things. Both assumed that language could, on the one hand, tyrannize us and, on the other, become the means of acquiring tremendous individual power.

This intellectual confluence was no coincidence. Both Golden Age science fiction writers derived some of their most strongly held views from the same source: the polymath Polish "Count," Alfred Korzybski.

Today, Korzybski is either forgotten or regarded as a crank, but at midcentury he was famous. Korzybski inspired a legion of students, and the meta-science of "General Semantics" that he created affected disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and cybernetics.

But his most powerful effect might have been on John W. Campbell's Golden Age. Indeed, Korzybski is probably the most important influence on science fiction you've never heard of.

Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Korzybski was a Polish aristocrat who came to North America near the end of World War I after being injured in the war. Trained as an engineer, he created a philosophy he called General Semantics (not to be confused with semantics as a linguistic discipline). General Semantics was part of a much larger philosophical effort, early in the twentieth century, to create a logically ideal language and a contribution to intellectual debates about the so-called "meaning of meaning."

Attempting to build on the work of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, Korzbyski tried to explain, among other things, why humans were uniquely prone to self-slaughter. He hoped, quixotically, that his meta-linguistic system might save us from our own worst tendencies.

He developed his ideas across two books, Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering (1921) and Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933), and through the Institute for General Semantics, which he founded in 1938. The core claim of General Semantics is that the world is not identical to our abstract descriptions of it. Korzybski coined the well-known slogan, "The map is not the territory," to sum up this idea. (witches using sympathetic magic by sticking pins into a voodoo doll would disagree: the map IS the territory. Which E. E. "Doc" Smith noted in passing within "Subspace Encounter")

Manhood of Humanity argued that humans are creatures that have the peculiar capacity to engage in a process called "time-binding," that is, the limitless ability to transmit and abstract knowledge across generations. Time-binding is what, Korzybski thought, distinguishes humans from other animals.

Science and Sanity incorporated the concept of time-binding into a broader theory of human cognition, which tried to explain how empirical phenomenon move through different layers of mental abstraction. Korzybski thought that language and neurology fundamentally limited human understanding, a claim that resembled the more famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Moreover, he argued, we often mistake linguistic abstractions of the world for the world itself. "The word is not the thing," he wrote.

We mistake words for things because Aristotelian concepts have conditioned our thinking. When we use the word "cat," for instance, most of us supposedly take for granted that the word "cat" wholly describes the creature under discussion. But language necessarily, Korzybski emphasized, abstracts from the empirical world. (He called this doctrine "non-allness.") The cat is never only a cat. At best, language can create an incomplete, albeit useful, map of our environment.

To defeat our Aristotelian habits of mind, to help humankind achieve what he called "sanity," Korzybski created a mental and spiritual training regime. He recommended that we achieve a "consciousness of abstracting," an awareness of our own process of abstracting the world, in order to gain a better understanding of what he called "silence on the objective level," the fundamentally non-linguistic nature of reality. Korzybski advised that we engage in a "semantic pause" when confronted with a novel stimulus, a sort of neurocognitive Time Out.

Robert A. Heinlein

• 

In June 1939, Robert A. Heinlein, and his second wife Leslyn, attended a lecture by Korzybski at a local chapter of the Institute of General Semantics in Los Angeles. The young writer was already a fan of Korzybski's ideas — and had first encountered General Semantics in Stuart Chase's The Tyranny of Words (1938). In the system of General Semantics, Heinlein found not only a usable account of how language related to empirical reality, but also a personal methodology for self-improvement. He saw General Semantics as giving him, Heinlein's biographer writes, "the fundamentals of a technology of language, which means a technology of how human beings think."

In a 1941 Worldcon talk entitled "The Discovery of the Future," Heinlein discussed his admiration for Korzybski at some length. In this talk, Heinlein suggested that the "strongest factor" in science fiction — that is, the reason SF fans love the genre — is because it allows readers to engage in "time-binding." Heinlein subtly redefines Korzybski's concept of time-binding to mean the human capacity to reconstruct the past and imagine the future via reading and writing. The very act of writing science fiction, he thought, was an example of future-oriented time-binding.

As the world consumed itself in global war, science fiction might help fans cultivate an orientation toward life that can "be used to protect [their] sanity." Heinlein called this the "scientific method," which he defined as "the ability to look at what goes on around you … listen to what you hear … observe … note facts, suspend your judgment … and make your own predictions." The 1941 talk concludes by describing Korzybski as "at least as great a man as Einstein — at least — because his field is broader."

Korzbyski's ideas also appear throughout Heinlein's fiction. Dr. Lentz, a psychiatrist character in "Blowups Happen," a short story Heinlein first published in 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction, is described as a Korzybski student. An expert in the "theory of abstraction and calculus of statement," Lentz promotes the view that "the human mind can think only in terms of symbols." The psychiatrist is brought into a nuclear power plant to relieve the tension that afflicts its workers. The story was written before any actual nuclear plants were built, and Heinlein imagined that such facilities would necessarily be highly unstable, creating unbearable stress for those who manned them.

Beyond "Blowups Happen," Heinlein mentions Korzybski by name throughout his fiction, in "Gulf" (1949), "Coventry" (1940), The Number of the Beast (1980), To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987),and other stories. Associating Korzybski's idea with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Heinlein also arguably incorporated General Semantics into his most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land.

In a fantastic extension of the thesis of linguistic relativity, the novel suggests that language might be the ultimate limiting factor to realizing our human potential. The Martian language gives humans who learn it new psychic powers. Indeed, through his exposure to Martian culture, Valentine Michael Smith becomes more than human — or, more precisely, more human than most self-described humans.

A.E. Van Vogt

• 

Perhaps the most devoted Golden Age adherent of General Semantics was the Canadian science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt. One of the most important writers of the Campbell era, van Vogt was intensely interested in meta-disciplines, that is, in universal systems that might help him make sense of reality-as-a-whole.

His desire for a total, interdisciplinary perspective on existence is already apparent in the stories that were eventually collected in The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950), in which van Vogt invented a meta-science called "Nexialism," "the science of joining in an orderly fashion the knowledge of one field of learning with that of other fields."

Van Vogt, not surprisingly, was attracted to General Semantics, which promised the universal meta-perspective that he sought. He based his Null-A trilogy directly on General Semantics. As it turned out, The World of Null-A (1948; originally The World of A) was the first modern science fiction novel published as a hardcover by a mainstream publisher. It was a bestseller and introduced Korzybski's ideas to a wide new audience.

The World of Null-A imagines a future where General Semantics has become the basis for human political and social organization. In the novel, the term "Null-A" refers to non-Aristotelian thought, that is, Korzybski's thesis that Aristotelian categories were poorly equipped for objectively capturing the complexity of non-linguistic reality. In 2560 A.D., a great computer called the Games Machine has come to rule the Earth. Created by the governing Institute for General Semantics, the Machine puts candidates through a rigorous assessment in order to select those who will be allowed to emigrate to Venus. Venus has become a semi-Utopian anarchist society, based of course on Korzybski's precepts.

The novel follows the semi-incoherent adventures of Gilbert Gosseyn (Go-Sane!). Early in the games, Gosseyn discovers that he has had a set of false memories implanted into him. Cartoonish villains eventually capture and kill him, and he reawakens in a cloned body on Venus. After returning to Earth, he discovers and must defeat a convoluted galactic conspiracy directed against the solar system and the Null-A philosophy. It's a hot mess of a novel. Korzybski read van Vogt's novel and, like lots of readers, found it compelling but also deeply confusing.

The World of Null-A's relationship to General Semantics was also not entirely clear. Like Heinlein and Hubbard, Van Vogt didn't merely reproduce Korzybski's ideas, but developed them in idiosyncratic ways. Van Vogt's novel suggests, like Stranger in a Strange Land, that one might be able to gain special mental powers — telepathy, telekinesis — through rigorous semantic training.

Damon Knight famously trashed The World of Null-A, calling van Vogt "a pygmy using a giant typewriter." Van Vogt took this criticism to heart and significantly revised the novel. Nonetheless, he wrote in the introduction to the 1970 edition of his book: "I'm making this defense of the book, and revising it, because General Semantics is a worthwhile subject, with meaningful implications, not only in 2560 A.D … but here and now." He republished the novel, in part, to further the mission of General Semantics, to which he remained devoted throughout the 1960s.

Conclusion

I've only been able to broadly sketched Korzybski's ideas and his considerable influence on science fiction. Many other Golden Age writers, such as H. Beam Piper and Reginald Bretnor (see Gilpin's Space), incorporated Korzybski into their fiction. And his influence stretches well beyond the conventional boundaries of the Golden Age.

Frank Herbert, for instance, ghostwrote a nationally syndicated column on General Semantics, under Hayakawa's byline, while writing Dune (1965). Korzybski's ideas are visible in Herbert's depiction of the Bene Gesserit's mental and physical training regime. As Roger Lockhurst argues in his book Science Fiction, Herbert's assimilation of Korzybski put him "in direct lineal descent from Campbellian SF," which Lockhurst takes as reason to challenge any simpleminded distinction between the Golden Age and the New Wave.

More broadly, the idea that the structure of language might have a profound effect on how we experience (or fail to experience) reality has a long pedigree in science fiction. Versions of this idea appear in a range of stories: in Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 (1966); in the famous Star Trek: TNG episode "Darmok" (1991); in Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life" (1998); and in China Miéville's Embassytown (2011).

All told, Korzybski deserves a more prominent place in our histories of science fiction. Once you know to look for him, you'll find the Polish count — and those he influenced — everywhere. He was an inadvertent giant of the Golden Age.

• 

General semantics is a self improvement and therapy program begun in the 1920s that seeks to regulate human mental habits and behaviors. After partial launches under the names human engineering and humanology, Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) fully launched the program as general semantics in 1933 with the publication of Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.

In Science and Sanity, general semantics is presented as both a theoretical and a practical system whose adoption can reliably alter human behavior in the direction of greater sanity. In the 1947 preface to the third edition of Science and Sanity, Korzybski wrote: "We need not blind ourselves with the old dogma that 'human nature cannot be changed', for we find that it can be changed." However, in the opinion of a majority of psychiatrists, the tenets and practices of general semantics are not an effective way of treating patients with psychological or mental illnesses. While Korzybski considered his program to be empirically based and to strictly follow the scientific method, general semantics has been described as veering into the domain of pseudoscience.

Starting around 1940, university English professor S. I. Hayakawa (1906–1992), speech professor Wendell Johnson, speech professor Irving J. Lee, and others assembled elements of general semantics into a package suitable for incorporation into mainstream communications curricula. The Institute of General Semantics, which Korzybski and co-workers founded in 1938, continues today. General semantics as a movement has waned considerably since the 1950s, although many of its ideas live on in other movements, such as neuro-linguistic programming and rational emotive behavior therapy.

Overview

• 

In the 1946 "Silent and Verbal Levels" diagram, the arrows and boxes denote ordered stages in human neuro-evaluative processing that happens in an instant. Although newer knowledge in biology has more sharply defined what the text in these 1946 boxes labels "electro-colloidal", the diagram remains, as Korzybski wrote in his last published paper in 1950, "satisfactory for our purpose of explaining briefly the most general and important points". General semantics postulates that most people "identify," or fail to differentiate the serial stages or "levels" within their own neuro-evaluative processing. "Most people," Korzybski wrote, "identify in value levels I, II, III, and IV and react as if our verbalizations about the first three levels were 'it.' Whatever we may say something 'is' obviously is not the 'something' on the silent levels."

By making it a 'mental' habit to find and keep one's bearings among the ordered stages, general semantics training seeks to sharpen internal orientation much as a GPS device may sharpen external orientation. Once trained, general semanticists affirm, a person will act, respond, and make decisions more appropriate to any given set of happenings. Although producing saliva constitutes an appropriate response when lemon juice drips onto the tongue, a person has inappropriately identified when an imagined lemon or the word "l–e–m–o–n" triggers a salivation response.

"Once we differentiate, differentiation becomes the denial of identity," Korzybski wrote in Science and Sanity. "Once we discriminate among the objective and verbal levels, we learn 'silence' on the unspeakable objective levels, and so introduce a most beneficial neurological 'delay'—engage the cortex to perform its natural function." British-American philosopher Max Black, an influential critic of general semantics, called this neurological delay the "central aim" of general semantics training, "so that in responding to verbal or nonverbal stimuli, we are aware of what it is that we are doing".

In the 21st century, the physiology underlying identification and the neurological delay is thought to involve autoassociative memory, a neural mechanism crucial to intelligence. Briefly explained, autoassociative memory retrieves previously stored representations that most closely conform to any current incoming pattern (level II in the general semantics diagram) arriving from the senses. According to the memory-prediction model for intelligence, if the stored representations resolve the arriving patterns, this constitutes "understanding", and brain activity shifts from evaluation to triggering motor responses. When the retrieved representations do not sufficiently resolve newly arrived patterns, evaluating persists, engaging higher layers of the cortex in an ongoing pursuit of resolution. The additional time required for signals to travel up and down the cortical hierarchy constitutes what general semantics calls a "beneficial neurological delay".

Abstracting and consciousness of abstracting

Identification prevents what general semantics seeks to promote: the additional cortical processing experienced as a delay. Korzybski called his remedy for identification "consciousness of abstracting." The term "abstracting" occurs ubiquitously in Science and Sanity. Korzybski's use of the term is somewhat unusual and requires study to understand his meaning. He discussed the problem of identification in terms of "confusions of orders of abstractions" and "lack of consciousness of abstracting". To be conscious of abstracting is to differentiate among the "levels" described above; levels II-IV being abstractions of level I (whatever level I "is"—all we really get are abstractions). The techniques Korzybski prescribed to help a person develop consciousness of abstracting he called "extensional devices".

Extensional devices

Satisfactory accounts of general semantics extensional devices can be found easily. This article seeks to explain briefly only the "indexing" devices. Suppose you teach in a school or university. Students enter your classroom on the first day of a new term, and, if you identify these new students to a memory association retrieved by your brain, you under-engage your powers of observation and your cortex. Indexing makes explicit a differentiating of students_{this term} from students_{prior terms}. You survey the new students, and indexing explicitly differentiates student₁ from student₂ from student₃, etc. Suppose you recognize one student—call her Anna—from a prior course in which Anna either excelled or did poorly. Again, you escape identification by your indexed awareness that Anna_{this term, this course} is different from Anna_{that term, that course}. Not identifying, you both expand and sharpen your apprehension of "students" with an awareness rooted in fresh silent-level observations.

Language as a core concern

Autoassociative memory in the memory-prediction model describes neural operations in mammalian brains generally. A special circumstance for humans arises with the introduction of language components, both as fresh stimuli and as stored representations. Language considerations figure prominently in general semantics, and three language and communications specialists who embraced general semantics, university professors and authors Hayakawa, Wendell Johnson and Neil Postman, played major roles in framing general semantics, especially for non-readers of Science and Sanity.

The science

Many recognized specialists in the knowledge areas where Korzybski claimed to have anchored general semantics—biology, epistemology, mathematics, neurology, physics, psychiatry, etc.— supported his work in his lifetime, including Cassius J. Keyser, C. B. Bridges, W. E. Ritter, P. W. Bridgman, G. E. Coghill, William Alanson White, Clarence B. Farrar, David Fairchild, and Erich Kähler. Korzybski wrote in the preface to the third edition of Science and Sanity (1947) that general semantics "turned out to be an empirical natural science." But the type of existence, if any, of universals and abstract objects is an issue of serious debate within metaphysical philosophy. So Black summed up general semantics as "some hypothetical neurology fortified with dogmatic metaphysics." And in 1952, two years after Korzybski died, American skeptic Martin Gardner wrote, "[Korzybski's] work moves into the realm of cultism and pseudo-science."

Former Institute of General Semantics executive director Steve Stockdale has compared GS to yoga. "First, I'd say that there is little if any benefit to be gained by just knowing something about general semantics. The benefits come from maintaining an awareness of the principles and attitudes that are derived from GS and applying them as they are needed. You can sort of compare general semantics to yoga in that respect... knowing about yoga is okay, but to benefit from yoga you have to do yoga." Similarly, Kenneth Burke explains Korzybski's kind of semantics contrasting it, in A Grammar of Motives, with a kind of Burkean poetry by saying "Semantics is essentially scientist, an approach to language in terms of knowledge, whereas poetic forms are kinds of action".

The major premises

• Non-Aristotelianism: While Aristotle wrote that a true definition gives the essence of the thing defined (in Greek to ti ên einai, literally "the what it was to be"), general semantics denies the existence of such an 'essence'. In this, general semantics purports to represent an evolution in human evaluative orientation. In general semantics, it is always possible to give a description of empirical facts, but such descriptions remain just that—descriptions—which necessarily leave out many aspects of the objective, microscopic, and submicroscopic events they describe. According to general semantics, language, natural or otherwise (including the language called 'mathematics') can be used to describe the taste of an orange, but one cannot give the taste of the orange using language alone. According to general semantics, the content of all knowledge is structure, so that language (in general) and science and mathematics (in particular) can provide people with a structural 'map' of empirical facts, but there can be no 'identity', only structural similarity, between the language (map) and the empirical facts as lived through and observed by people as humans-in-environments (including doctrinal and linguistic environments).
• Time binding: The human ability to pass information and knowledge from one generation to the next. Korzybski claimed this to be a unique capacity, separating people from animals. This distinctly human ability for one generation to start where a previous generation left off, is a consequence of the uniquely human ability to move to higher and higher levels of abstraction without limit. Animals may have multiple levels of abstraction, but their abstractions must stop at some finite upper limit; this is not so for humans: humans can have 'knowledge about knowledge','knowledge about knowledge about knowledge', etc., without any upper limit. Animals possess knowledge, but each generation of animals does things pretty much in the same way as the previous generation, limited by their neurology and genetic makeup. For example, at one time most human societies were hunter-gatherers, but now more advanced means of food production (growing, raising, or buying) predominate. Except for some insects (for example, ants), all animals are still hunter-gatherer species, even though many have existed longer than the human species. For this reason, animals are regarded in general semantics as space-binders, and plants, which are usually stationary, as energy-binders.
• Non-elementalism and non-additivity: The refusal to separate verbally what cannot be separated empirically, and the refusal to regard such verbal splits as evidence that the 'things' that are verbally split bear an additive relation to one another. For example, space-time cannot empirically be split into 'space' + 'time', a conscious organism (including humans) cannot be split into 'body' + 'mind', etc., therefore, people should never speak of 'space' and 'time' or 'mind' and 'body' in isolation, but always use the terms space-time or mind-body (or other organism-as-a-whole terms).
• Infinite-valued determinism: General semantics regards the problem of 'indeterminism vs. determinism' as the failure of pre-modern epistemologies to formulate the issue properly as the failure to consider or include all factors relevant to a particular prediction, and failure to adjust our languages and linguistic structures to empirical facts. General semantics resolves the issue in favor of determinism of a special kind called 'infinite-valued' determinism which always allows for the possibility that relevant 'causal' factors may be 'left out' at any given date, resulting in, if the issue is not understood at that date, 'indeterminism', which simply indicates that our ability to predict events has broken down, not that the world is 'indeterministic'. General semantics considers all human behavior (including all human decisions) as, in principle, fully determined once all relevant doctrinal and linguistic factors are included in the analysis, regarding theories of 'free will' as failing to include the doctrinal and linguistic environments as environments in the analysis of human behavior.

Connections to other disciplines

The influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, and of early operationalists and pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, is particularly clear in the foundational ideas of general semantics. Korzybski himself acknowledged many of these influences.

The concept of "silence on the objective level" — attributed to Korzybski and his insistence on consciousness of abstracting — are parallel to some of the central ideas in Zen Buddhism. Although Korzybski never acknowledged any influence from this quarter, he formulated general semantics during the same years that the first popularizations of Zen were becoming part of the intellectual currency of educated speakers of English. On the other hand, later Zen-popularizer Alan Watts was influenced by ideas from general semantics.

L. Ron Hubbard claimed to have used the theory in his creation of Dianetics and acknowledged this in the books Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, Science of Survival, and Scientology 8008.

General semantics has survived most profoundly in the cognitive therapies that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Albert Ellis (1913–2007), who developed Rational emotive behavior therapy, acknowledged influence from general semantics and delivered the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture in 1991. The Bruges (Belgium) center for Solution Focused Therapy operates under the name Korzybski Institute Training and Research Center. George Kelly, creator of personal construct psychology, was influenced by general semantics. Fritz Perls and Paul Goodman, founders of Gestalt therapy are said to have been influenced by Korzybski Wendell Johnson wrote "People in Quandaries: The Semantics of Personal Adjustment" in 1946, which stands as the first attempt to form a therapy from general semantics

Ray Solomonoff (July 25, 1926 – December 7, 2009) was influenced by Korzybski. Solomonoff was the inventor of algorithmic probability, and founder of algorithmic information theory (a.k.a. Kolmogorov complexity). Another scientist influenced by Korzybski (verbal testimony) is Paul Vitanyi (born July 21, 1944), a scientist in the theory of computation.

During the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, general semantics entered the idiom of science fiction. Notable examples include the works of A. E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A and its sequels. General semantics appear also in Robert A. Heinlein's work, especially Gulf. Bernard Wolfe drew on general semantics in his 1952 science fiction novel Limbo. Frank Herbert's novels Dune and Whipping Star are also indebted to general semantics. The ideas of general semantics became a sufficiently important part of the shared intellectual toolkit of genre science fiction to merit parody by Damon Knight and others; they have since shown a tendency to reappear in the work of more recent writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Suzette Haden Elgin and Robert Anton Wilson. In 2008, John Wright extended van Vogt's Null-A series with Null-A Continuum. William Burroughs references Korzybski's time binding principle in his essay The Electronic Revolution, and elsewhere.

Neil Postman, founder of New York University's media ecology program in 1971, edited ETC.: A Review of General Semantics from 1976 to 1986. Postman's student Lance Strate, a co-founder of the Media Ecology Association, served as executive director of the Institute of General Semantics from 2007 to 2010.

• 

(ed note: The protagonists are in charge of the first atomic power plant. If the operators make one little mistake the plant will go up in an explosion that will melt the North American continent down to bedrock. The operators are under lots of stress so they are constantly observed by psychologists. Which of course increases the stress. This is a problem.)

      King ceased pacing the floor and faced the doctor. "But there must be some solution — " he insisted.
     Silard shook his head. "It's beyond me, Superintendent. I see no solution from the standpoint of psychology."
     "No? Hmm—Doctor, who is the top man in your field?"
     "Eh?"
     "Who is the recognized number-one man in handling this sort of thing?"
     "Why, that's hard to say. Naturally, there isn't any one, leading psychiatrist in the world; we specialize too much. I know what you mean, though. You don't want the best industrial temperament psychometrician; you want the" best all-around man for psychoses non-lesional and situational. That would be Lentz."
     "Go on."
     "Well — he covers the whole field of environment adjustment. He's the man that correlated the theory of optimum tonicity with the relaxation technique that Korzybski had developed empirically. He actually worked under, Korzybski himself, when he was a young student—it's the only thing he's vain about."
     "He did? Then he must be pretty old; Korzybski died in — What year did he die?" (this story was written in 1940, story is set in the future year circa 1975, in reality Korzybski died in 1950)
     "I started to say that you must know his work in symbology—theory of abstraction and calculus of statement, all that sort of thing—because of its applications to engineering and mathematical physics."
     "That Lentz—yes, of course. But I had never thought of him as a psychiatrist."
     "No, you wouldn't, in your field. Nevertheless, we are inclined to credit him with having done as much to check and reduce the pandemic neuroses of the Crazy Years as any other man, and more than any man left alive."
     "Where is he?"
     "Why, Chicago, I suppose. At the Institute."
     "Get him here. Get him down here. Get on that visiphone and locate him. Then have Steinke call the Port of Chicago, and hire a stratocar to stand by for him. I want to see him as soon as possible—before the day is out." King sat up in his chair with the air of a man who is once more master of himself and the situation. His spirit knew that warming replenishment that comes only with reaching a decision. The harassed expression was gone.
     Silard looked dumbfounded. "But, superintendent," he expostulated, "you can't ring for Doctor Lentz as if he were a junior clerk. He's—he's Lentz."
     "Certainly—that's why I want him. But I'm not a neurotic clubwoman looking for sympathy, either. He'll come. If necessary, turn on the heat from Washington. Have the White House call him. But get him here at once. Move!" King strode out of the office.

---

(ed note: King talks with Doctor Lentz)

     King was reminded again of something that had bothered him from the time Silard had first suggested Lentz' name. "May I ask a personal question?"
     The merry eyes were undisturbed. "Go ahead."
     "I can't help but be surprised that one man should attain eminence in two such widely differing fields as psychology and mathematics. And right now I'm perfectly convinced of your ability to pass yourself off as a physicist. I don't understand it."
     The smile was more amused, without being in the least patronizing, nor offensive. "Same subject," he answered.
     "Eh? How's that — "
     "Or rather, both mathematical physics and psychology are branches of the same subject, symbology. You are a specialist; it' would not necessarily come to your attention."
     "I still don't follow you."
     "No? Man lives in a world of ideas. Any phenomenon is so complex that he cannot possibly grasp the whole of it. He abstracts certain characteristics of a given phenomenon as an idea, then represents that idea as a symbol, be it a word or a mathematical sign. Human reaction is almost entirely reaction to symbols, and only negligibly to phenomena. As a matter of fact," he continued, removing the cigarette holder from his mouth and settling into his subject, "it can be demonstrated that the human mind can think only in terms of symbols.
     "When we think, we let symbols operate on other symbols in certain set fashions—rules of logic, or rules of mathematics. If the symbols have been abstracted so that they are structurally similar to the phenomena they stand for, and if the symbol operations are similar in structure and order to the operations of phenomena in the 'real' world, we think sanely. If our logic-mathematics, or our word-symbols, have been poorly chosen, we think not sanely.
     "In mathematical physics you are concerned with making your symbology fit physical phenomena. In psychiatry I am concerned with precisely the same thing, except that I am more immediately concerned with the man who does the thinking than with the phenomena he is thinking about. But the same subject, always the same subject."

---

(ed note: Dr. Lentz concludes there is no solution to the problem of atomic plant operators cracking up mentally, short of shutting down the reactor. Because the operators are responding rationally to being responsible for an atomic reactor that could wipe out the human race in an eyeblink. But then nuclear physicist Dr. Harper announces that he has discovered how to use the plant to create atomic rocket fuel.)

     "Wait a minute." Lentz had the floor. "Doctor Harper…have you already achieved a practical rocket fuel?"
     "I said so. We've got it on hand now."
     "An escape-speed fuel?" They understood his verbal shorthand a fuel that would lift a rocket free of the earth's gravitational pull.
     "Sure. Why, you could take any of the Clipper (suborbital) rockets, refit them a trifle, and have breakfast on the moon."
     "Very well. Bear with me…" He obtained a sheet of paper from King, and commenced to write. They watched in mystified impatience. He continued briskly for some minutes, hesitating only momentarily. Presently he stopped, and spun the paper over to King. "Solve it!" he demanded.
     King studied the paper. Lentz had assigned symbols to a great number of factors, some social, some psychological, some physical, some economic. He had thrown them together into a structural relationship, using the symbols of calculus of statement. King understood the paramathematical operations indicated by the symbols, but he was not as used to them as he was to the symbols and operations of mathematical physics. He plowed through the equations, moving his lips slightly in subconscious vocalization.
     He accepted a pencil from Lentz, and completed the solution. It required several more lines, a few more equations, before they cancelled out, or rearranged themselves, into a definite answer.
     He stared at this answer while puzzlement gave way to dawning comprehension and delight.
     He looked up. "Erickson! Harper!" he rapped out. "We will take your new fuel, refit a large rocket, install the breeder pile (atomic reactor) in it, and throw it into an orbit around the earth, far out in. space. There we will use it to make more fuel, safe fuel, for use on earth, with the danger from the Big Bomb itself limited to the operators actually on watch!" (which will remove the danger of the atomic reactor exploding and making the human race extinct, and incidentally lower the stress on the operators to the point where they will stop suffering psychological breakdowns)
     There was no applause. It was not that sort of an idea; their minds were still struggling with the complex implications.
     "But Chief," Harper finally managed, "how about your retirement? We're still not going to stand for it."
     "Don't worry," King assured him. "It's all in there, implicit in those equations, you two, me, Lentz, the Board of Directors and just what we all have to do about it to accomplish it."
     "All except the matter of time," Lentz cautioned. "You'll note that elapsed time appears in your answer as an undetermined unknown."
     "Yes…yes, of course. That's the chance we have to take. Let's get busy!"

(ed note: in other words the complicated equation is an example of Psychohistory, much like as in Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy)

• 

      Had the science of semantics developed as rapidly as psychodynamics, and its implementing arts of propaganda and mob psychology, the United States might never have fallen into dictatorship, then been forced to undergo the Second Revolution (Nehemiah Scudder is elected president in 2012, and turns the US into a religious dictatorship. It is overthrown by the second revolution in early 2100). All of the scientific principles embodied in the Covenant which marked the end of the revolution were formulated as far back as the first quarter of the twentieth century.

     But the work of the pioneer semanticists, C. K. Ogden in England and Alfred Korzybski in the United States, were known to but a handful of students, whereas psychodynamics, under the impetus of repeated wars and the frenzy of high-pressure merchandising, progressed by leaps and bounds. It is true that the mathematical aspects of semantics, as developed by Albert Einstein, Eric T. Bell, and others, were well known, even popular, but the charlatans who practiced the pseudoscience of sociology resisted every effort to apply the methods of science to their monopoly.

     Semantics, “the meaning of meaning,” as Ogden expressed it, or “theory of evaluations,” as Korzybski preferred to call it, gave a method for the first time of applying the scientific viewpoint and procedure to every act of everyday life. Because semantics dealt with spoken and written words as a determining aspect of human behavior, it was at first mistakenly thought by many to be concerned only with words and of interest only to professional word manipulators, such as advertising copy writers and professors of etymology. A handful of unorthodox psychiatrists alone attempted to apply it to personal human problems, but their work was swept away by the epidemic mass psychoses that destroyed Europe and returned the United States to the Dark Ages.

     The Covenant was the first scientific social document eyer drawn up by a man, and due credit must be given to its principal author. Colonel Micah Novak, the same Novak who served as staff psychologist in the revolution. The revolutionists wished to establish in the United States the maximum personal liberty possible for every one. Given the data—the entire social matrix— how could they accomplish that, to a degree of high mathematical probability?

     First they junked all previous concepts of justice. Examined semantically, justice lias no referent— there is no observable phenomenon in the space-time-matter continuum to which one can point and say, “This is justice.” Science can deal only with that which can be observed and measured. Justice is not such a matter; it can never have the same meaning to one as to another; any “noises” said about it will only add to confusion.

     But damage, physical or economic, could be pointed to and measured. Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another, and laws were passed to anticipate such damage. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic, to some person, they declared to be legal.

     As they had abandoned the concept of justice, there could be no rational standards of punishment. Penology took its place with lycanthropy and other forgotten witchcrafts. Yet, since it was not practical to permit a probable source of danger to remain in the community, social offenders were examined and potential repeaters were given their choice of psychological readjustment, or of having society withdraw itself from them—Coventry (a large region of the United States surrounded by a force-field. Offenders who refuse psychological readjustment are put inside, to live in the dog-eat-dog environment. At any time they can request to leave Coventry and undergo psychological readjustment).

     During the formulation of the Covenant, some assumed that the socially unsane would naturally be forced to undergo hospitalization for readjustment, particularly since current psychiatry was quite competent to cure all nonlesioned psychoses and cure or alleviate lesional psychoses, but Novak set his face against this and opposed it with all the power of his strong and, subtle intellect. “Not so!” he argued. “The government must never again be permitted to tamper with the mind of any citizen without his consent, or else we set up a means of greater tyranny than we have ever experienced. Every man must be free to accept, or reject, the Covenant, even though we think him insane!”

• 

(ed note: the Cundaloans and the Skontaran had an interstellar war, and both civilizations industries were badly damaged. The Terran empire graciously offers aid. Sadly, the Cundaloans were not smart enough to beware of Earthmen bearing gifts.

On Cundaloa, the Terrans start suppressing Cundaloan culture and remaking them into the Terran model. They sneer at reports of Skontarans making do without Terran help, but keeping Skontaran culture)

      (Terran advisor lectures the Cundaloan governor Vahino) “Well, without indulging in chauvinism, I think all Cundaloans should be taught Solarian. They’ll use it at some time or other in their lives. Certainly all your scientists and technicians will have to use it professionally. The languages of Laui and Muara and the rest are beautiful, but they just aren’t suitable for scientific concepts. Why, the agglutination alone—Frankly, your philosophical books read to me like so much gibberish. Beautiful, but almost devoid of meaning. Your language lacks—precision.”
     “Aracles and Vranamaui were always regarded as models of crystal thought,” said Vahino wearily. “And I confess to not quite grasping your Kant and Russell and even Korzybski—but then, I lack training in such lines of thought. No doubt you are right. The younger generation will certainly agree with you.

---

     “And it’s not that they (the Skontarans) lack resources, natural or otherwise. It’s that, having virtually flung our offer of help back in our faces, they’ve taken themselves out of the main stream of Galactic civilization. Why, they’re even trying to develop scientific concepts and devices we knew a hundred years ago, and are getting so far off the track that I’d laugh if it weren’t so pathetic. Their language, like yours, just isn’t adapted to scientific thought, and they’re carrying chains of rusty tradition around. I’ve seen some of the spaceships they’ve designed themselves, for instance, instead of copying Solarian models, and they’re ridiculous. Half a hundred different lines of approach, trying desperately to find the main line we took long ago. Spheres, ovoids, cubes—I hear someone even thinks he can build a tetrahedral spaceship!”
     “It might just barely be possible,” mused Vahino. “The Riemannian geometry on which the interstellar drive itself is based would permit—”
     “No, no! Earth tried that sort of thing and found it didn’t work. Only a crank—and, isolated, the scientists of Skontar are becoming a race of cranks—would think so.
     “We humans were just fortunate, that’s all. Even we had a long history before a culture arose with the mentality appropriate to a scientific civilization. Before that, technological progress was almost at a standstill. Afterward, we reached the stars. Other races can do it, but first they’ll have to adopt the proper civilization, the proper mentality—and without our guidance, Skontar or any other planet isn’t likely to evolve that mentality for many centuries to come.
     “Which reminds me—” Lombard fumbled in a pocket. “I have a journal here, from one of the Skontaran philosophical societies. A certain amount of communication still does take place, you know; there’s no official embargo on either side. It’s just that Sol has given Skang up as a bad job. Anyway”—he fished out a magazine—“there’s one of their philosophers, Dyrin, who’s doing some new work on general semantics which seems to be arousing quite a furor. You read Skontaran, don’t you?”
     “Yes,” said Vahino. “I was in military intelligence during the war. Let me see—” He leafed through the journal to the article and began translating aloud:
     “The writer’s previous papers show that the principle of nonelementalism is not itself altogether a universal, but must be subject to certain psychomathematical reservations arising from consideration of the broganar—that’s a word I don’t understand—field, which couples to electronic wave-nuclei and—”
     “What is that jabberwocky?” exploded Lombard.
     “I don’t know,” said Vahino helplessly. “The Skontaran mind is as alien to me as to you.”
     “Gibberish,” said Lombard. “With the good old Skontaran to-hell-with-you dogmatism thrown in.” He threw the magazine on the little bronze brazier, and fire licked at its thin pages. “Utter nonsense, as anyone with any knowledge of general semantics, or even an atom of common sense, can see.” He smiled crookedly, a little sorrowfully and shook his head. “A race of cranks!”

---

(ed note: Skorrogan of Skontar had sabotaged efforts of Terra to aid the planet. Fifty years later, Skorrogan rubs governor Thordin nose in how this saved Skontar. )

     Other things had changed, of course. Thordin smiled wryly as he reflected just how much the Valtamate had changed in the last fifty years. It had been Dyrin’s work in general semantics, so fundamental to all the sciences, which had led to the new psychosymbological techniques of government. Skontar was an empire in name only now. It had resolved the paradox of a libertarian state with a nonelective and efficient government. All to the good, of course, and really it was what past Skontaran history had been slowly and painfully evolving toward. But the new science had speeded up the process, compressed centuries of evolution into two brief generations. As physical and biological science had accelerated beyond belief—But it was odd that the arts, music, literature had hardly changed, that handicraft survived, that the old High Naarhaym was still spoken.
     He picked up the microreader and glanced over the pages. His mind training came back to him and he arrished the material. He couldn’t handle the new techniques as easily as those of the younger generation, trained in them from birth, but it was a wonderful help to arrish, complete the integration in his subconscious, and indolate the probabilities. He wondered how he had ever survived the old days of reasoning on a purely conscious level.

---

     “You won’t find significant art, literature, music here any more—just cheap imitations of Solarian products, or else an archaistic clinging to outmoded native traditions, romantic counterfeiting of the past. You won’t find science that isn’t essentially Solarian, you won’t find machines basically different from Solarian, you’ll find fewer homes every year which can be told from human houses. The old society is dead; only a few fragments remain now. The familial bond, the very basis of native culture, is gone, and marriage relations are as casual as on Earth itself. The old feeling for the land is gone. There are hardly any tribal farms left; the young men are all coming to the cities to earn a million credits. They eat the products of Solarian-type food factories, and you can only get native cuisine in a few expensive restaurants.
     “There are no more handmade pots, no more handwoven cloths. They wear what the factories put out. There are no more bards chanting the old lays and making new ones. They look at the telescreen now. There are no more philosophers of the Araclean or Vranamauian schools, there are just second-rate commentaries on Aristotle versus Korzybski or the Russell theory of knowledge—”
     Skorrogan’s voice trailed off. Thordin said softly, after a moment, “I see what you’re getting at. Cundaloa has made itself over into the Solarian pattern.”
     “You see no nonhuman race will ever make a really successful human. The basic psychologies—metabolic rates, instincts, logical patterns, everything—are too different. One race can think in terms of another’s mentality, but never too well. You know how much trouble there’s been in translating from one language to another. And all thought is in language, and language reflects the basic patterns of thought. The most precise, rigorous, highly thought out philosophy and science of one species will never quite make sense to another race. Because they are making somewhat different abstractions from the same great basic reality.
     “I wanted to save us from becoming Sol’s spiritual dependents. Skang was backward. It had to change its ways. But—why change them into a wholly alien pattern? Why not, instead, force them rapidly along the natural path of evolution—our own path?”
     Skorrogan shrugged. “I did,” he finished quietly. “It was a tremendous gamble, but it worked. We saved our own culture. It’s ours. Forced by necessity to become scientific on our own, we developed our own approach.
     “You know the result. Dyrin’s semantics was developed—Solarian scientists would have laughed it to abortion. We developed the tetrahedral ship, which human engineers said was impossible, and now we can cross the Galaxy while an old-style craft goes from Sol to Alpha Centauri. We perfected the spacewarp, the psychosymbology of our own race—not valid for any other—the new agronomic system which preserved the freeholder who is basic to our culture—everything! In fifty years Cundaloa has been revolutionized, Skontar has revolutionized itself. There’s a universe of difference.

• 

• 

The structural differential is a physical chart or three-dimensional model illustrating the abstracting processes of the human nervous system. In one form, it appears as a pegboard with tags. Created by Alfred Korzybski, and awarded a U.S. patent on May 26, 1925, it is used as a training device in general semantics. The device is intended to show that human "knowledge" of, or acquaintance with, anything is partial—not total.

The model

The structural differential consists of three basic objects. The parabola represents a domain beyond our direct observation, the sub-microscopic, dynamic world of molecules, atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, and so on; a world known to us only inferentially from science. Korzybski described it as an 'event' in the sense of "an instantaneous cross-section of a process." Thus the 'event' or parabola represents the sub-microscopic 'stuff' that, at any given moment, constitutes an apple. In other words, the parabola represents the "external" cause of what we experience.

The disc represents the non-verbal result of our nervous systems reacting to submicroscopic "stuff", e.g., the apple that we see, hold, bite into, all on the non-verbal levels of experience. The disc represents what we experience of our surroundings versus what our surroundings actually are.

The labels [usually seven or eight are linked together in a chain, with the last one attached back to the parabola, but here we see just one] are shaped like suitcase labels, and represent the static world of words, e.g., "apple", giving imperfect accounts of dynamic reality. An object called an "apple" left in a jar for months becomes a putrid liquid (because of its underlying, dynamic, sub-microscopic structure), but the label "apple" does not change. The word "steak", at a lower verbal order, may imply "something to eat" at a higher verbal order, but in the sub-microscopic domain, a particular steak may be contaminated with poisons created by harmful bacteria that we could see only on microscopic levels. Thus the differential sets up a hierarchy of order, with the submicroscopic domain of dynamic change coming first, the relatively stable universe conveyed non-verbally by our senses coming next, and then the verbal levels. A label is what we attach to a non-verbal experience in order to identify this experience in verbal terms; when we identify an "apple", we attribute to this identification various non-verbal experiences.

The holes in the figures represent the characteristics that exist at each level. The characteristics that are abstracted to the next level are indicated by the attached strings. The strings that don't make it to the next level represent characteristics left out of our abstractions, as do the holes without strings at all. More is left out of our abstractions at each level than was there at the previous level.

The structural differential was used by Korzybski to demonstrate that human beings abstract from their environments, that these abstractions leave out many characteristics, and that verbal abstractions build on themselves indefinitely, through many orders or levels, represented by seven or eight labels (or less, or more, it is totally arbitrary how many we want to symbolize the higher levels), chained in order. The highest, most reliable abstractions at a date are made by science, he claimed (e.g., science has conveyed the nature and danger of bacteria to us), and that is why he attached the last label back to the parabola. It is science that has told us that the sub-microscopic domain exists, and in general semantics the parabola represents that domain. In general semantics, the natural order of evaluation proceeds from lower orders of abstraction to higher orders of abstraction, and back again in an endless cycle. In these cycles, we return periodically or eventually to "silence on the objective levels" (our ground) before moving on to the higher orders, i.e., before bursting into speech or theory.

General semantics

Main article: general semantics

The general semantics discipline was founded by Korzybski, who gained recognition first with the publication of Manhood of Humanity (1921) and then Science and Sanity (1933). Some of his ideas were popularized by Stuart Chase in The Tyranny of Words in 1938, and by Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa, in Language in Action in 1941 (which later became Language in Thought and Action). Also influential was the magazine ETC: A Review of General Semantics, founded in 1943. The name of the magazine, ETC, was a play on a fundamental notion of Korzybski's that names or descriptions do not exhaustively convey all of an object’s properties (the word "steak" does not convey the possibility of harmful bacteria, for instance). We can hardly refrain from describing things altogether, but we can bear in mind that we could append to any name or description the word "etc.", to indicate that the label is only a subset of the total set of possibilities. There is always more that can be said about anything. ETC magazine was founded by Hayakawa, who was a professor at San Francisco State College and member of the U.S. Senate during the Carter administration. His Language in Thought and Action, went through several editions and is concerned in part with the confusion of words with reality. Hayakawa’s work coincided with the advent of television broadcasting and contained early warnings against the dangers of mediated reality that television embodied.

A Brief Explanation of Korzybski's Structural Differential

Alfred Korzybski developed this model in the 1920's as a means to visualize the process he termed abstracting. Now Korzybski used this term to convey something quite different from the "commonly accepted" definitions for "abstract". Rather than try to give an over-simplified and misleading definition here, I encourage you to read over the following and develop your own sense of "abstracting".

• The "differential" in Structural Differential refers to an operational difference between what humans do and what animals do.
• The difference between what humans do and what animals do is that, as the diagram reflects, an animal's ability to abstract is limited; a human's ability to abstract is virtually limitless.
• Abstracting, in the context of Korzybski's model, refers to physiological-neurological activities, or processes, that occur on non-verbal levels. Put another way, abstracting is something that your body-brain-nervous-system is continually doing, without respect to whether or not you're aware of it.
• The different levels that Korzybski defines in the diagram refer to aspects of the overall process which seem to consist of clearly-differentiated orders, or types, of activity.

FIDO - "FIDO", or an animal, interacts similarly with WIGO at the Object level. However, FIDO's capacity to make inferences or related associations is finite, unlike a human's.

E - The raggedly-cut parabola represents "what is going on" (WIGO), or more correctly, "what we infer is going on", in the world around us, whether we are consciously aware or not. Each dot, or hole, stands for an aspect or characteristic of the sub-microscopic process level, or event level which comprises WIGO. O - The circle labeled "O" (for Object) represents some human's (for example, mine) interaction with WIGO. Through my sensing organs and nervous system, I 'create' sights, sounds, smells, etc., from my interacting with WIGO. The lines, or strings, which connect the Object level to the Event level represent a specific aspect or characteristic of WIGO that I can sense and experience in some non-verbal way. Those strings coming from the parabola that I can not sense (representing, for example, radio waves), hang free and do not connect at the Object level. D - The tag "D" signifies the first verbal level in the abstracting process. We can label this the "Descriptive" level, and try to remember that what I say, think, hear, etc., at this level about my WIGO-Object level experience 'should' be similar to what a good reporter would report - as close to "just the facts" as possible. I - The tags labeled "I1", etc., represent the multiple levels of Inferences I might construct from my WIGO-Object-Description level experience. These inferences will determine what meaning or significance I draw from this experience. As the diagram implies, I can generate as many inferences, beliefs, theories, judgments, conclusions, etc., as I might care to. A - The arrow ("A") from the Inference level back to the Event level suggests feedback, or circularity, and 'time'. In other words, my most meaningful inferences from prior experiences can become Event-level aspects or characteristics of what I might experience in the future.

I think it's important to remember how 'time', or order, sequence, etc., plays into this model. Each level of the abstracting occurs in a given order, i.e.:

1. Something happens (Event);
2. I sense what happens (Object);
3. I recognize what happens (Description);
4. I generate meanings for what happens; etc. (Inferences)

In addition to considering the 'time', or order, aspect of abstracting in the vertical plane of the model, we can also envision a horizontal succession of these abstracting processes, one after the other, for every moment of our lives. In this case, with successive abstracting processes, we can picture the feedback, or circularity, arrow projecting from our prior inference to our next experience:

Time1

Time2

Time3

Time4...

In terms of differentiation, we 'should' note that

1. What happens (Event) is NOT ...
2. What I sense non-verbally within my nervous system (Object), which is NOT ...
3. What I can describe verbally about my sensing (Description), which is NOT ...
4. The meaning(s) I generate based on what happened; etc. (Inferences)

Similarly, our experience/inference/meaning at Time₄ is NOT the 'same' experience/inference/meaning at Time₁.

Okay. "So what? How can I use this?"

Let's take a situation in which a friend - let's say, Emily - relates with some anger an experience she just had while driving to the store ... "somebody cut me off!" Here's an example of deconstructing her experience to emphasize the different 'levels' between what she experienced and what she evaluated.

E - What is going on? Cars, engines, tires, radios, trees, pedestrians, clouds, sun, rain, wipers ... all composed of sub-microscopic particles at a quantum level which we infer based on our latest knowledge of science ... O - Emily's eyes capture (some of the) reflected light from (some of the) images in her (limited) field of view; the light is transformed (abstracted) by her visual system into nervous system signals that travel to her brain; neurons in her brain process the electrical/chemical signals and cause her to see ... D - ... "I was driving about 25 miles per hour, maintaining perhaps 50 feet distance from the car in front of me. A dark-colored sedan driven by a middle-aged man emerged from my far right field of view. His car's speed was greater than mine. As his car came abeam mine, and then forward of it, his car appeared to accelerate and veer into the lane directly in front of my car. The following distance of my car to his was no more than 10 feet, which meant ..." I1 - ... "This rude jerk was in a hurry and cut me off when he could've just waited and merged behind me!" ... (blood pressure rising, anger mounting, fists clench the steering wheel, eyes staring at the other driver, foot pressing on the accelerator, trying to catch up, swerving over to the next lane to pass, not checking the traffic ...) "Damn it! That &%$)=!@ made me almost have a wreck!" I2 - ... "Men are such terrible and rude drivers!"

Can you see that "somebody cut me off" is NOT what happened? Can you see that Emily's hypothetical reaction to what happened is not the same as a description of what happened?

One of the powerful lessons of general semantics - illustrated by the Structural Differential and evidenced by a consciousness of this abstracting process - is that we can better train ourselves to respond conditionally to what happens to us. We humans don't have to react with a conditioned respond like Pavlov's dog, reacting to a substitute stimulus as if it were 'real' - but we often do. Our language helps confuse us, because we tend to say things like, "Ooh, it made me so mad!" We allow the 'it' - the event, the what happens, the stimulus - to determine our response. We need to remember that between the stimulus and your response, there's a YOU:

STIMULUS -----> YOU -----> RESPONSE

Time(1) -------> Time(2)-------> Time(3)

Again, 'time' is an important aspect of our conditional responses. Remember the old adage encouraging you to "count to 10" before getting mad? There's a lot of merit to be gained by practicing your ability to consciously - conditionally - delay your responses.

A Summary of "So What?" About the Structural Differential Abstracting refers to ongoing physiological-neurological processes that occur on non-verbal levels We can verbally differentiate certain phases, or levels or orders, of the abstracting process to analyze our behaviors and reactions: EVENT is not  OBJECT is not  DESCRIPTION is not  INFERENCE, etc. We can acknowledge that our abstracting occurs at different 'times' ... we should expect different results, reactions, responses, etc., from different experiences at different 'times' We have human limitations that constrain our experiences - we never experience 'all' of What Is Going On Similarly, we can never 'say all' or describe 'all' about our experiences - more could always be said: Etc. What we experience is, to some degree, a function of our past experiences (feedback, projection, etc.) What we experience is, to some degree, a function of the unique capabilities of our individual nervous systems We should therefore expect not only to 'see' things differently, we should expect to evaluate and react to 'things' differently When we delay our responses and react conditionally, we tend to behave more sanely, more rationally, more appropriate-to-the-'facts' of the situation When we react immediately, when our responses are conditioned and controlled by the stimulus (the 'thing'), we behave like Pavlov's dog and subject ourselves to control by others

You can use the Structural Differential when you want to analyze the behavior, responses, reactions, etc., of a particular individual in a specific situation. (Personally, I find this type of analysis works best when the "particular individual" happens to be my ownself.) Remember that the Structual Differential represents the process of abstracting:

1st ...

then 2nd ...

then 3rd ...

then ... etc.

Something happens ...

I sense (some of) what happens ...

I describe what my senses sense

I make meanings, inferences, beliefs, theories, judgments, etc.

The more you 'use' it to analyze your own abstracting, evaluating, inference-making, belief-generating, etc.:

• you will become more aware and conscious of your own abstracting,
• you will better differentiate between: 1) what happens; 2) what you sense of what happens; 3) what you describe of what your senses sense; and 4) what you infer from what you've described
• you will respond more conditionally to what happens in your life,
• you will experience less conditioned responses (less like Pavlov's dog),
• you will delay more of your responses, leap to fewer conclusions, snap to fewer judgments, make fewer inappropriate assumptions, etc.,
• you will (fill in your own benefit),
• etc.

• 

(ed note: the protagonists have been given a Gilpin faster-than-light propulsion system, made by the eccentric but brilliant scientist Saul Gilpin. Mount it inside a submarine and you have instant starship. The protagonists use it to make a starship they use for them and their families to escape the global police state Terra has turned into.

But a problem arises when they venture beyond fifty light-years from Terra. Everybody starts getting utterly terrifying nightmares, to the point where some are about to go insane. They figure it is because they are telepathically overhearing the cosmic thoughts of alien weakly godlike entities. They come to the conclusion that the solution is to train their minds to separate the alien thoughts from their own thoughts, at least when they are sleeping. How? Korzybski to the rescue!)

I objected “But we’re dealing with something entirely different—nightmares from outside.”

“That’s true, Janet. But we don’t know that all Senoi nightmares are born in their subconscious minds—that’s simply what they think (some of the families are of Senoi heritage, they are relatively immune to the nightmares). Isn’t it possible that some of them, at least, are telepathically inflicted, perhaps not even by their fellow Senoi? After all, the world is full of people thinking nasty thoughts. And maybe the same principle would apply, that business of confronting the content of the nightmare. Why not?”

“It makes good sense,” said Laure slowly. “From what we know so far, part of the problem is absolute identification. Janet didn’t tell us of her experience as if she’d been getting someone else’s message. It was she who didn’t know who or what she was, she who was stretched unendurably through space-time. If these Senoi actually have a technique that trains kids to recognize that they and their nightmares are separate, that the content of each nightmare is something they can face and fight, surely we can put it to good use.”

“It’d at least be worth a try,” put in Jamie; and Dan echoed him a little dubiously.

“We can get together every morning,” said Geoff, “probably with separate sessions for the kids. I know that people can be trained to remember dreams, and this implies that no matter how deeply we may sleep, there must be a residual consciousness no dream can quite submerge—we hope.”

“And maybe we can teach that consciousness to remain alert against intrusions,” Bess added, “to wake us at the first hint of anything. I’ll dig into my references and see what more I can find on the Senoi, and also other ways of handling dreams. There’s no point in messing about with conventional psychotherapy. No predictability, and about a zero batting average.”

Franz laughed. “But you talked about absolute identification, so how about Korzybski?”

Bess feigned astonishment. “Imagine this ski-bum/physicist knowing about Korzybski! Next he’ll be telling us he’s read Science and Sanity—I mean, really—and that he knows all about the Structural Differential.”

“That is correct.” He looked at her condescendingly. “I, unlike you, my love, haven’t just acquired a superficial knowledge of General Semantics from Hayakawa’s greatly simplified primer: I have read the good Count’s magnum opus twice, as he recommended, and the Structural Differential is just what we need. It looks like several pieces of pegboard hung together with strings, and with other strings dangling from it; and it teaches Korzybski’s three basics: consciousness of abstracting; awareness of structure and process on all levels; and the tremendous influence of such compulsive concepts as allness and identification, which our languages force on us. It teaches us that A is not B, that A₁ is not A₂, that A-now is not A-then.”

“I haven’t gone beyond Hayakawa either,” said Laure. “But give him credit—he does mention the gadget. And I can see that it may be of help to us—depending, of course, on how much time we can devote to it, and how we react to it as individuals.”

“Mightn’t it be especially useful with the kids?” Geoff suggested. “They’ve not had time to get as language-conditioned as the rest of us. Laure, why don’t we ask Franz to go ahead and make up a few of the things. You could, couldn’t you, Franz?”

“Sure, especially if Jamie and Tammy and a couple of the boys help me in the shop.”

“Fine,” Laure said. “Then we can start sessions almost right away.”

(ed note: As it turns out, the diverse cultural make-up of the families in the starship allow them to overcome the telepathic nightmares. It is so difficult to assemble a crew of the right mixture that for decades to come the far reaches of space beyond 50 light-years are forbidden. Crews that adapt are viewed with fear and paranoia by ordinary Terrans.)

H. Beam Piper was also influenced by Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-born father of semantics, and his Science and Sanity. In Murder in the Gunroom Piper's protagonist says, “Yes. I first read it [Science and Sanity] in the 1933 edition, back about 1936; I've been rereading it every couple of years since... [the man he is talking to, SF writer Pierre Jarrett, answers] ...I find General Semantics helpful in my work, too... I can use it in plotting a story...” Later in that novel, Piper mentions S. I. Hayakawa and shows a dedication to the principles of semantics throughout the book. Piper's concern with the clarity and objectivity of language was reflected in his straightforward prose style, which could best be described as clean and lean.

English is the result of Norman soldiers attempting to pick up Anglo-Saxon barmaids, and is no more legitimate than any of the other results.

(ed note: The novel was written in 1956. The protagonist went into suspended animation cold-sleep in 1970, and wakes up in the far futuristic year of 2000. Unsurprisingly, he finds that things have changed. Including the meaning of certain words.)

Take one word I used all in innocence. A lady present was offended and only the fact that I was a Sleeper—which I hastily explained—kept her husband from giving me a mouthful of knuckles. I won’t use the word here—oh yes, I will; why shouldn’t I? I’m using it to explain something. Don’t take my word for it that the word was in good usage when I was a kid; look it up in an old dictionary. Nobody scrawled it in chalk on sidewalks when I was a kid.

The word was “kink.”

There were other words which I still do not use properly without stopping to think. Not taboo words necessarily, just ones with changed meanings. “Host” for example—“host” used to mean the man who took your coat and put it in the bedroom; it had nothing to do with the birth rate.

(ed note: In the future of the novel, "host" means "host-mother." Which nowadays we call surrogate mother. This was first performed in the real world in 1985, about thirty years after the novel was written)

'I'll tell you,' said Vimes. A monarch's an absolute ruler, right? The head honcho—'

'Unless he's a queen,' said Carrot.

Vimes glared at him, and then nodded. 'OK, or the head honchette—'

'No, that'd only apply if she was a young woman. Queens tend to be older. She'd have to be a ... a honcharina? No, that's for very young princesses. No. Um. A honchesa, I think.'

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

The locals spoke Lingua Terra of a sort, like every descendant of the race that had gone out from the Sol system in the Third Century, but it was a barely comprehensible sort. On civilized planets, the language had been frozen unalterably in microbooks and voice tapes. But microbooks can only be read and sound tapes heard with the aid of electricity, and Tanith had lost that long ago.

She draws a breath. The wind ruffles her hair and brings me an odor of her: not female sweetness, but fear. She clenches her fists and says, “You’re crazy.”

“Wherever did you find a meaningful word like that?” I gibe; for my own pain and—to be truthful—my own fear must strike out at something, and here she stands. “Aren’t you content any longer with ‘untranquil’ or ‘disequilibrated’?”

“I got it from you,” she says defiantly, “you and your damned archaic songs. There’s another word, ‘damned.’ And how it suits you! When are you going to stop this morbidity?”

“And commit myself to a clinic and have my brain laundered nice and sanitary? Not soon, darling.” I use that last word aforethought, but she cannot know what scorn and sadness are in it for me, who know that once it could also have been a name for my girl. The official grammar and pronunciation of language is as frozen as every other aspect of our civilization, thanks to electronic recording and neuronic teaching; but meanings shift and glide about like subtle serpents.

Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun.

So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac. It's an odd thing that ever English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.

And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can't exist.

• 

      When Luke Skywalker first encounters Yoda, it’s on a swampy planet in The Empire Strikes Back. At first, Luke doesn’t realize the long-eared, wrinkly green creature is, in fact, the one he’s seeking.
     “I’m looking for someone,” Luke says.
     “Looking?” Yoda replies. “Found someone, you have, I would say, hmmm?”
     There’s a narrative effect to the way Yoda speaks. To an English speaker, anyway, the way he orders his sentences sounds vaguely riddle-like, which adds to his mystique.
     But what’s actually going on with Yoda, linguistically?

---

     First, let’s examine how Yoda doesn’t speak. Many of the world’s most-spoken languages—English, Mandarin—are built around constructions that go subject-verb-object. An example would be: Yoda grasped the lightsaber.
     Another common construction, and one you’d find more commonly among speakers of Japanese, Albanian, and many other languages, goes subject-object-verb: Yoda the lightsaber grasped. More rare is a verb-subject-object construction, but that’s how people who speak Hawaiian and some Celtic languages do it: Grasped Yoda the lightsaber.
     Even more unusual is the way Yoda famously speaks, ordering his sentences object-subject-verb, or OSV: The lightsaber Yoda grasped. Or, to use an example from an actual Yoda utterance: “Much to learn, you still have.”

---

     “This is a clever device for making him seem very alien,” said Geoff Pullum, a professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. “You have to do some work to realize that his, ‘Much to learn, you still have,’ means ‘You still have much to learn.’”
     There are other fictional examples of characters who speak like Yoda. Bowyer, from the 1996 Super Nintendo game, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, says things like, “Fun this is, yes?” and “Disturb me, you must not! Practicing I am.” But what about in the real world?
     “Surprisingly, there are a very few languages—it seems to be in single digits—that use OSV as their basic or normal order,” Pullum told me. “As far as I know, they occur only in the area of Amazonia in Brazil: they are South American Indian languages. One well-described case is a language called Nadëb.”

     Looking more closely at how Yoda speaks, it’s not always object-subject-verb, but sometimes a construction Pullum once referred to as XSV, the “X” being a stand-in for whatever chunk of the sentence goes with the verb, even if it’s not an object. So, for example: “Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is,” as Yoda says in Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Truly wonderful, in that case, is the “X.” Pullum, in a blog post in 2005, called this construction “fantastically rare” in the real world.
     “The curious feature of Yoda’s syntax that some linguists have commented on is that, although it is by no means consistent, he seems to speak as if he thinks OSV [or XSV] is normal,” Pullum told me. “In fact, he generalizes it, favoring the beginning of the sentence for various modifiers and complements that English syntax would normally leave till the end of the clause.”
     Consider for example: “When 900 years old you reach, look as good, you will not.” But then there are other facets of Yoda-speak, times when he leaves auxiliary verbs—various forms of be, do, and have—dangling, as he does in a phrase like, “Lost a planet, Master Obi-Wan has.”

     And then there are the times when Yoda speaks in regular old subject-verb-object constructions. (“A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind.”) Pullum says these inconsistencies make for an “odd mix,” though others have been less forgiving. Writing for The New Yorker in 2005, Anthony Lane had this to say of Yoda’s “screwy” syntax: “Break me a f**king give.”
     A funny line, timing-wise, but, as the linguist Mark Liberman pointed out at the time, not actually all that Yoda-esque. (“A f**king break, give me,” was one more Yoda-ish alternative offered in a blog post Liberman wrote on the subject at the time.)

     Looking more closely at Yoda, and particularly at his dialogue in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, further confused Liberman, who analyzed dozens of Yoda’s lines in the film. “A bit of empirical investigation has left me more puzzled about Yoda’s syntax than I was before,” he wrote. (Most perplexing, he said, was an example of a fronted element—the sort of clause that you might bring to the start of a sentence for emphasis—found between the subject and predicate: “That group back there, soon discovered will be.”) Liberman has said it would take a larger dataset to fully analyze Yoda-speak, but he won’t get it from the latest film (spoiler alert): Yoda’s a no-show.
     Yoda-speak gets even more confusing, to me anyway, when you try to translate it from English. In Estonian versions of the films, according to one fascinating Reddit thread about linguistics, Yoda retains the word order used in English versions. “This is grammatical in Estonian, but does make it seem as though Yoda is constantly stressing the object phrase as the main point of his statements,” according to one commenter. “This gives his speech an unusual quality.” But in Czech translations, rather than speaking in his general object-subject-verb manner, Yoda apparently speaks in subject-object-verb (like in Japanese).

     Really, though, Yoda was written for an English-speaking audience. And, as James Harbeck pointed out in an article for The Week last year, there are plenty of examples from popular literature that sound just as offbeat syntactically as Yoda, even if they're not identical in construction. There’s Walt Whitman (“Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring”), and Shakespeare (“For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered”), and whoever wrote the lyrics to “The Little Drummer Boy” (“Come, they told me, the newborn king to see”). “These sentences remind us of Yoda-style things we can do in poetry and other stylized forms,” Harbeck wrote. “And that's the thing about Yoda-speak: We understand it. It is comprehensible English because it is written by English speakers, for English speakers, using things you can do in English.”
     To appreciate Yoda, maybe it’s best to abandon one’s grammatical senses altogether—or, you know, “unlearn what you have learned.” Like the little guy says, “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

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The field of nuclear semiotics arose in 1981 when a team of engineers, anthropologists, nuclear physicists, behavioral scientists and others was convened on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy and Bechtel Corp. The goal of this "Human Interference Task Force" was to find a way to reduce the likelihood of future humans unintentionally intruding on radioactive waste isolation systems.

Specifically, the task force was to research ways to prevent future access to the planned, but stalled deep geological nuclear repository project of Yucca Mountain.

Problem

When atomic or fusion bombs are detonated in a war, or nuclear power plants are used in times of peace, an unnaturally high amount of radioactive waste is produced. This material will threaten human life and health for thousands of years. Consequently, nuclear technology necessitates the creation of a secure means of terminal storage for such materials for an unusually long time period.

Unfortunately, there is no method available to continuously provide the necessary knowledge about the location of nuclear waste over thousands of years. The culture of earlier centuries becomes incomprehensible when it is not translated into new languages every few generations. National institutions do not exist longer than a few hundred years. Even religions are not older than a few millennia and do not typically hand down scientific knowledge.

Furthermore, the necessary length of storage is disputed among specialists. One work group in Germany concluded that nuclear waste must be separated from the biosphere up to one million years – about 30,000 human generations. Earlier assumptions were based on a period of 10,000 years, which seems to be too short given the half-life of certain radioactive isotopes (e.g. Plutonium-239 at 24,000 years).

The written historical tradition of humanity, in contrast, is only about 5000 years. Warnings in cuneiform script could be interpreted by some specialists, but others, such as the writing of the Indus Valley civilization, are already illegible after a few thousand years.

Proposals

Three parts of any communication about nuclear waste must be conveyed to posterity:

1. that it is a message at all
2. that dangerous material is stored in a given location
3. information about the type of dangerous substances

Answers

To determine how to convey these three things, the "Zeitschrift für Semiotik" (Tübingen, Germany) issued a poll in 1982 and 1983 asking how a message might be communicated for a duration of 10,000 years. The poll asked the following question: "How would it be possible to inform our descendants for the next 10,000 years about the storage locations and dangers of radioactive waste?" leading to the following answers.

Thomas Sebeok

The linguist Thomas Sebeok was a member of the Bechtel working group. Building on earlier suggestions made by Alvin Weinberg and Arsen Darnay he proposed the creation of an atomic priesthood, a panel of experts where members would be replaced through nominations by a council. Similar to the Catholic church - which has preserved and authorized its message for over 2000 years — the atomic priesthood would have to preserve the knowledge about locations and dangers of radioactive waste by creating rituals and myths. The priesthood would indicate off-limits areas and the consequences of disobedience.

This approach has a number of critical problems:

1. An atomic priesthood would gain political influence based on the contingencies that it would oversee.
2. This system of information favors the creation of hierarchies.
3. The message could be split into independent parts.
4. Information about waste sites would grant power to a privileged class. People from outside this group might attempt to seize this information by force.

Stanisław Lem

Polish science-fiction author Stanisław Lem proposed the creation of artificial satellites that would transmit information from their orbit to Earth for millennia. He also described a biological coding of DNA in a mathematical sense, which would reproduce itself automatically. Information Plants would only grow near a terminal storage site and would inform humans about the dangers. The DNA of the so-called atomic flowers would contain the necessary data about both the location and its contents.

Lem acknowledged the problem with his idea that humans would be unlikely to know the meaning of atomic flowers 10,000 years later, and thus unlikely to decode their DNA in a search for information.

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Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri

French author Françoise Bastide and the Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed the breeding of so called "radiation cats" or "ray cats". Cats have a long history of cohabitation with humans, and this approach assumes that their domestication will continue indefinitely. These radiation cats would change significantly in color when they came near radioactive emissions and serve as living indicators of danger. In order to transport the message, the importance of the cats would need to be set in the collective awareness through fairy tales and myths. Those fairy tales and myths in turn could be transmitted through poetry, music and painting. The story of this original project was depicted in the 2016 short documentary "The Ray Cat Solution".

Vilmos Voigt

Vilmos Voigt from Loránd-Eötvös university (Budapest) proposed the installation of warning signs in the most important global languages in a concentric pattern around the terminal storage location. After a certain time span new signs with translations would be installed, but the old signs would not be removed. Newer signs would be posted farther away from the location, thus the warning would be understandable as languages change and it would be possible to understand the older languages through the translation.

Emil Kowalski

Physicist Emil Kowalski from Baden, Switzerland proposed that terminal storage locations be constructed in such a way that future generations could reach them only with a high technical ability. The probability of an unwanted breach would then become extremely small. Furthermore, cultures able to perform such excavations and drillings would most certainly be able to detect radioactive material and be aware of its dangers.

...it is far more natural to write Lojban with a logical writing system. ... the tengwar system inherently contains some main Lojban morphology rules, making Lojban easier to learn when it is written with tengwar.

The basics of the 24 main Tengwar are as follows:

A stem extending downwards from the hook (or as you put it, a hook on top of the stem, though it's the hooks that are the main "body" of the letter and stay at the same level) is a sound that completely cuts off the airflow, such as p, b, t, d, k, and g. In Tengwar for English, ch (as in church) and j are written like this too, even though they don't exactly fit into this category.

A stem extending upwards above the line is a sound that interrupts the airflow, but doesn't cut it off, thus creating a hissing or buzzing sound, such as f, v, th (as in thin), dh (dh as in the), sh, zh (the sound in "fusion"), or the ch in German "Bach." H, s, and z also fall into this category, but don't fit into the chart, so special characters are used.

No stem indicates sounds where the flow through the mouth is stopped, but air is allowed to escape through the nose, creating a sound like m, n, Spanish ñ, or ng (as in sing). There is a major exception to this though (see below)...

There are certain characters with a stem extending both above and below the line that I won't cover here.

A single hook indicates a sound produced with the voicebox shut off, like p, t, k, or f. But single hooks with no stem are often used to write sounds like r, w, and y, since voiceless nasal sounds are uncommon in most languages, and the lack of voiceless nasals leaves a free row.

A double hook represents sounds produced with the voicebox humming away, like b, d, g, or v.

An open hook pointing down and stem on the left represents sounds produced with the tip of the tongue between the teeth, such as t, d, n, r, and th. However, in English all of these sounds except the th and dh are pronounced with the tongue behind the teeth. If the Tengwar had been designed for English s and z (which are pronounced behind the teeth) probably would have replaced th and dh here, and special characters would have been used for th and dh. But since Tolkien's Elvish languages pronounce t, d, and n between the teeth, th and dh are the "main" characters and s and z are the special ones. These sounds are called "dentals" or "alveolars".

A closed hook pointing down and stem on the left represents a sound produced with the lips. (These are called "labials".)

An open hook pointing up and stem on the right represents (depending on the language it is being used for) either a sound produced with the tongue at the place where the gums behind the teeth meet the hard palate, such as sh, ch, or j (in this context, these sounds are called "palatals"), or else a sound produced with the back of the tongue contacting or coming close to the soft palate (such as k, g, ng, or German "ch," these sounds are called "velars").

An closed hook pointing up with the stem on the right represents either a velar (in the languages where the open, up-pointing hook represents a palatal), or else a velar followed by w (in the languages where the open, up-pointing hook represents a velar).

Marain is a synthetic language created towards the very beginning of the Culture with the specific intention of providing a means of expression which would be a culturally inclusive and as encompassingly comprehensive in its technical and representational possibilities as practically achievable — a language, in short, that would appeal to poets, pedants, engineers and programmers alike. The intention was to start with a linguistic blank sheet, yet with the accumulated knowledge of the hundreds of thousands known to those people and machines charged with the language's devising. It had, therefore, no specific links to any of the main languages spoken by the people who came together to make up the Culture as a civilisation, save those statistically likely.

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Marain's principle symbols are based around a three-by-three grid, which is itself a diagrammatic representation of a nine-digit binary number, or byte, it being intended from the start that the language could be rendered into binary code as informationally economically as possible. The number 1 would be shown as in figure 1, while the letter equivalent to our phoneme "w", the first letter in the Marain alphabet shown in the list accompanying this text, would be the binary number 100111100, or 121 in base 10. This means that there are a total of 512 possible values, or symbols, from 0 to 511 (shown in figures 2 and 3 respectively).

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The choice of the principle symbols listed here was dictated by the requirements that each symbol can be rotated and mirrored, without being mistaken for any other of the primary alphabetical symbols. The rotated versions of these are generally used to represent phonemes close to the original, unrotated sound, though others have little in common with the sound of the original, being used to stand for different vocalisations. The original idea behind this flexibility was to allow Marain accurately, and relatively simply, to reproduce any language capable of being spoken by a humanoid.

All other values of the grid are associated with symbols for numbers (in base 8), punctuation, and the more common units of measurement, physical and mathematical symbols and constants, chemical elements and so on.

While the 3×3 grid is the basis of the language's symbols and is the standard of default mode of Marain, it is only that, and there are various commonly used complications which increase the length of the byte. For the normal data transmission purposes, for example, the principle part of the byte is followed by an additional buffer bit.

Where further complexity is required the binary byte used (ignoring the buffer bit) can be expanded beyond nine; a ten-bit byte provides a further 512 symbols, and a twelve bit byte — the most commonly used value after the standard notary byte due to the relative ease of representing it as a grid and therefore a written symbol — offers a total of 4,096 symbols. The next square grid after the 3×3 gird, of course, is 4×4, offering 65,536 symbols. Larger bytes — and therefore grids — are generally used to transmit pictograms, culturally alien symbols and simple diagrams. There is no restriction in principle the length of the byte and therefore the dimensions of the grid implied; by specifying a grid of, say, a million bits to a side, a fairly detailed black and white photograph could in theory be transmitted within a Marain data stream without recourse to specialised symbols or codes, though in practise, due to the economies offered by data compression, this happens only rarely.

It should be noted that while Marain was designed to be as quintessentially clear, concise and unambiguous a language as it is within the wit of human and machine to devise — and is, like the best games, essentially very simple but offering almost infinite possibilities — experience has proved that the judicious dropping of buffer bits and the use of varying byte-lengths, usually without the relevant notification of those mathematical or other pattern, though just as often not, plus the equally unflagged, abrupt and sporadic switching to entirely alien binary codes (Morse code being a perfect example) thankfully enables the Culture Minds fully to indulge their seemingly congenital predilection of unnecessary obfuscation, wilful contrariness and the fluent generation of utter and profound confusion in others.

It should be notes that the "written" symbols in the list are only those which have become the most used. Obviously in many of the symbols there are lots of other equally plausible ways to join up the dots. So humans can use Marain to confuse their fellows, too.

     “It could have been a portrait,” Blaine suggested. He took out his pocket computer and scrawled “Church of Him” across its face, then punched for information. The box linked with the ship’s library, and information began to roll across its face.

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     Renner skipped it. “I remembered something. Have you got your pocket computer?”
     “Certainly.” She took it out to show him.
     “Please test it for me.”
     Her face a puzzled mask, Sally drew letters on the face of the flat box, wiped them, scrawled a simple problem, then a complex one that would require the ship’s computer to help. Then she called up an arbitrary personal data file from ship’s memory. “It works all right.”
     Renner’s voice was thick with sleep. “Am I crazy, or did we watch the Mode take that thing apart and put it back together again?”
     “Certainly. She did the same with your gun.”
     “But a pocket computer?” Renner stared. “You know that’s impossible, don’t you?”
     She thought it was a joke. “No, I didn’t.”
     “Well, it is. Ask Dr. Horvath.” Renner hung up and went back to sleep.
     Sally caught up with Dr. Horvath as he was turning into his cabin. She told him about the computer.
     “But those things are one big integrated circuit. We don’t even try to repair them.” Horvath muttered other things to himself.
     While Renner slept, Horvath and Sally woke the physical sciences staff. None of them got much sleep that night.

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     “I don’t remember exactly.” Sally took out her pocket computer and scrawled the symbols for information recall. The gadget hummed, then changed tone to indicate it was using the car’s radio system to communicate with the Palace data banks.

Quipus, sometimes known as khipus or talking knots, were recording devices historically used in the region of Andean South America. A quipu usually consisted of colored, spun, and plied thread or strings made from cotton or camelid fiber. For the Inca, the system aided in collecting data and keeping records, ranging from monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and military organization. The cords contained numeric and other values encoded by knots in a base ten positional system. A quipu could have only a few or up to 2,000 cords. The configuration of the quipus have also been "compared to string mops." Archaeological evidence has also shown a use of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps more sturdy, base on which the color-coordinated cords would be attached. A relatively small number have survived.

Objects that can be identified unambiguously as quipus first appear in the archaeological record in the first millennium AD. They subsequently played a key part in the administration of the Kingdom of Cusco and later Tahuantinsuyu, the empire controlled by the Incan ethnic group, flourishing across the Andes from c. 1100 to 1532 AD. As the region was subsumed under the invading Spanish Empire, the use of the quipu faded from use, to be replaced by European writing systems. However, in several villages, quipu continued to be important items for the local community, albeit for ritual rather than recording use. It is unclear as to where and how many intact quipus still exist, as many have been stored away in mausoleums, 'along with the dead.'

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At the ship’s axis they found pay dirt. Half a dozen radial corridors converged, and a tube with a ladder led up and down. There were diagrams covering four sections of wall, with labels that were tiny, detailed pictograms.

“How convenient,” said Louis. “It’s almost as if they had us in mind.”

“Languages change,” said the kzin. “These people rode the winds of relativity; their crews might be born a century apart. They would have needed such aids. We held our empire together with similar aids, before the Wars With Men. Louis, I find no weaponry section.”

“There was nothing guarding the spaceport either. Nothing obvious, anyway.” Louis’s finger traced the diagrams. “Galley, hospital, living area — we’re here in the living area. Three control centers; seems excessive.”

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The control room was small: a padded bench facing three walls of dials and switches. A touchpoint in the doorjamb caused the walls to glow yellow-white, and set the dials glowing too. They were unreadable, of course. Pictograms segregated the controls into clusters governing entertainment, spin, water, sewage, food, air.

from Jacques Mattheij:

Question for you: One HN thread caused me to wonder about this: What would a technological society look like that somehow managed to side-step the written word? Would such a thing even be possible? If not why not?

Just to keep you awake at night :)

This question caught my attention like a snagged fingernail, and it's still pulling at me: here's my first cut at an answer. I'm taking the no-writing parameter seriously as a limiting condition: what level of technological society can emerge in conditions which preclude writing—for example, if it's forbidden for religious reasons? I'm going to treat this as holy writ for purposes of this thought-experiment: rules-lawyering around the no-writing rule in the comments will be treated as Derailing and deleted, with one special sort-of-exception which I'll explain near the end because it opens up a bunch of interesting consequences.

My general rule answer is: it wouldn't be possible for human beings to develop a technological civilization—at least anything beyond roughly 17th century levels of energy utilization and mid-19th century levels of agriculture—without some form of record-keeping technology. And without writing they might never get that.

The reason is memory capacity. Yes, we can memorize lengthy texts when assisted by verse metrics as a form of mnemonic—the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Koran—but the format is error-prone, transcription is at least as time consuming as copying a mediaeval illuminated manuscript, and the "books" are high maintenance (they need food, clothing, and shelter). I don't know how many books one human being can memorize, but even if the number runs as high as two digits (which I think would require a very rare level of memory) you're then faced with the problem of what to do if one of your books gets cancer or dies of old age. So not only is copying more expensive than in a mediaeval monastery's scriptorum, but the substrate onto which "books" can be copied is extremely expensive (because we're coming at this from a pre-industrial situation where agriculture is labour-intensive because there's no copious supply of cheap energy). To put it in perspective, if one "book" can memorize five texts, then those five texts represent an entire productive human lifespan's worth of opportunity costs.

We know you can get to high-level neolithic culture (including agriculture and settlements) without writing, because our ancestors did so. I'm guessing that by using a monastery system for libraries, you could maintain stores of expertise equal to a couple of hundred (maybe as many as a thousand) "books". But studying them would require a scholar to travel to wherever the nearest current copy of a "text" lives and listen to (and memorize bits of) their recitation. Carrying on an actual academic dialog between two or more texts would be ... interesting, but likely slow, and the cost of creating a new text would be enormous (human lifespan-equivalents).

And then we run into mathematics. Assuming they figure out binary, integer arithmetic on fingers and toes gets you a long way for basic counting, multiplication, and optionally subtraction and division. But I'm not sure how they'd explore reals, let alone algebra or calculus, in a notation-free environment. I imagine tally sticks might work if our sophonts have opposable thumbs, but then we're cheating and getting into writing systems by the back door.

We might have specialist memory folks whose job is to act as temporary stores for working human calculators, but again, that's going to be a rare skill ("Quick! Memorize these six thirty digit binary numbers! Now repeat the fourth and sixth back to me!").

So I see the natural sciences stalling out around the point where they'd be getting to Newton/Liebnitz, and as for literature, oh dear. (Hey, I'd be out of one job but into another as an itinerant storyteller, with just one story to call my own, endlessly elaborating on it. I'd go nuts!)

Law and arbitration is going to be problematic. The Mediaeval Icelandic parliament is said to have started each session with a recitation of the legal code; any law that no sitting legislator could remember was deemed to have passed beyond the sunset. This is thus shown to work, after a fashion, for non-literate societies up to a mediaeval level. However, reliance on memory means that a case-law system simply can't develop, except in the sketchiest of ways. (On the third hand, though, one might expect the accounts of witnesses in such a memory-based society to be more detailed, if not more accurate, than what we've become used to.)

Economics is going to be even worse. Pace Graeber, money may have originated as a tally mechanism inside temple grain stores: you can't eat gold, so it serves as a persistent token representing so many sheaves of wheat or ewes or whatever that the temple has received on your behalf. Money represents a debt. But without hard records outside of someone's head, how do we agree on exchanges of fair value? There are possible work-arounds, such as using an impartial third party as an arbiter, or using gift-giving rather than purchase-buying, but they probably don't scale well.

As for engineering, I think they'd have to rely on models and finger-in-the-sand sketches. You can get quite a long way with that; I live on the top floor of an apartment building where about 80% of the builders would have been illiterate when they constructed it. (Admittedly without electricity, plumbing, or central heating at the time of construction, circa 1829.) You might get low-pressure walking beam steam engines, but I don't think you'd be able to build high pressure steam engines (and thereby prime movers) without being able to mess around with the ideal gas law and do heat transfer calculations—it's too dangerous (the failure mode is an explosion and your research notes are mortal), and if you build in conservative margins of error on stuff like the boiler wall thickness you'll end up with it weighing too much to be useful.

The lack of steam traction means agricultural productivity will remain geared against human and animal labour: by our standards, it's very labour-intensive indeed. I don't see the lack of writing as precluding the development of things like threshing machines—and in related industries, the Spinning Jenny and the weaving loom—but lack of motive power and recording technology may prevent more complex derivatives (such as the Jacquard card-controlled loom). Clothing is going to stay expensive for a long time here. In general devices which have hidden dependencies on high pressure engineering aren't going to be readily available: I'm guessing the sewing machine, developed in the mid-19th century, would in principle be possible but mass production of standardized steel needles and precision components would make them inaccessible.

... This is as far as the discussion got in email, before my wife came in and made a key observation: sound recording tech is something you can do entirely mechanically. Think in terms of hand-cranked wax cylinder recorder or dictaphone: such a device is functionally equivalent to writing, albeit bulky, slow to absorb (spoken narrative is about a third to half the speed of reading), and still requiring transcription costs. Wax cylinders won't last forever, but they're easy enough to re-record by someone memorizing the "text" in five minute segments and reciting from memory. And if wax isn't good enough, there were early forms of plastic (casein polymerized with formaldehyde?) that date to the early-19th century and don't require advanced chemistry which might do as a shellac alternative in mass use, if indeed shellac itself isn't available.

So, if we permit audio recording as a possibility (but not writing as such) we then have the derivative question: can a civilization develop to wax cylinder reorders in the absence of writing? (Note that this technology is not trivial: it depends on reduction gearing, probably an escapement mechanism, and some degree of precision engineering. It also almost certainly depends on your being able to deliver division of labour which is itself a question of economics and resource allocation which, under conditions of expensive information storage, is problematic.) And, if that isn't a leap too far, how much further can you bootstrap your technological civilization if you can do some audio reording? And what will such an a-literate climax society look like?

In addition to the film-specific typographic deconstructions on this site, I’m keeping track of all the times I spot classic sci-fi fonts in movies. What better way to start than with perennial sci-fi favorite, Eurostile?

Eurostile, and in particular its Bold Extended variant, has appeared in countless sci-fi settings over the years. It’s got to the point where the very presence of Eurostile Bold Extended in an opening title card says FUTURE far more effectively than an expensive effects shot:

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Indeed, Eurostile is such a quick way to establish a timeframe that whenever I see it in real life – which happens quite a lot in my adopted home of California – I assume I’ve been transported to some futuristic dystopia, where a local care center feels more like a sinister government facility for scientific experimentation:

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Eurostile is most commonly seen in its Bold Extended form, but Regular, Bold, and Regular Extended sometimes crop up as well. I’ve captured (and tried to clarify) as many as possible below.

Date / Location Positioning

When and where are we? If it’s set in Eurostile, we are in the FUTURE, and we are in the FUTURE.

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Computers and Screens

If your computer system or TV show needs some futuristic-looking text that’s easy to read in a long-shot, there’s no better choice than Eurostile Bold Extended.

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Walls and Signage

Need to write a message on your rocket, lunar base, or rover? You know the font to use.

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Wannabes

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Any More?

FUN FACT: An expanded version of this article will appear in the Typeset in the Future book, available in fall 2018. Sign up for the book’s mailing list to receive occasional updates about its design, pre-order date, and release.