Unclassified Horrors

And speaking of Balticon, several Balticons back, I mentioned to my old friend Darrell Schweitzer (looks a bit like the Emperor Palpatine but is significantly less evil), that I had been thinking of a story about the Miskatonic University Library to be called Unclassified Horrors.

I have always been fascinated by Libraries in general & by the Miskatonic University Library in particular.  This is the place where the hero/victim of a Lovecraftian story will go to check out/steal/examine furtively an obscure but dangerous tome.  This is a particularly poor idea if you can’t break yourself of the habit of reading aloud.

See for instance the unfortunate consequences experienced by Evelyn Carnahan (“I … am a Librarian!”) in the 1999 film The Mummy.  She reads from the Book of the Dead.  Aloud.  And awakens the High Priest Imhotep, whom being buried alive for the last three thousand two hundred and thirteen years has not put in a good mood.  Difficulties ensue.  And the world is saved only by the pluck & luck of a few bold adventurers.

But I digress, something that happens to me a lot in libraries.  That is actually a design goal of libraries, think of them as an early form of the Intertubes, where when you go in you are planning to swot up on topic A and find yourself well among the Z’s or even On Beyond Zebra  before you know.  They deliberately arrange the cataloging systems so that interesting volumes will tend to be right next to target volumes.

What you think of as chance is in fact as so often a sinister plot:  the very scheme intended to create the illusion of order is meant to pull you in & leave you helpless & browsing on the floor when the final gong is rung & the library scraping machine comes by to scoop up the day’s victims.  As you slowly sort yourself out of the pile of your fellow victims at the back of the library, you may wonder how this happened — yet again!

It’s the fault of the Dewey Decimal System.

One of the innovations of the Dewey Decimal system was that of positioning books on the shelves in relation to other books on similar topics.

That’s the problem right there:  we are naturally associative thinkers; this well-intentioned positioning of topics near similar topics has the effect on the inquisitive mind of those elvish lights in Mirkwood that lure Bilbo & the dwarves into the spider’s lair (name World Wide Web a coincidence, I think not).

And if that were not suspect enough, consider the ninety one entries missing from the top nine-hundred and ninety-nine.  As Rex Libris, the Kick-Ass Librarian, put it:

Have you wondered why Section 217 is missing from the Dewey Decimal Classification System? …

Section 216, good and evil, is left just hanging there, with the obvious follow-up section completely, mysteriously AWOL.

Where did it go? Why is it missing? This question has plagued people for years.

Did Nietzsche have something to do with this? Are his attempts to go beyond good & evil, to explore Section 217, what led to his almost Lovecraftian madness?

And when I brought these & similar too-dangerous-to-commit-to-print questions up to Darrell he said — like all editor/writer/booksellers he can resist anything but a chance to make money —  ah, the perfect idea for an anthology.  And thus Tales from the Miskatonic University Library was born.  Surely if we present this as fiction, we will be safe from the attentions of the things that haunt the stacks.  But of this more in a subsequent post.

Just how many universes are there, anyway?

As usual with Balticon, I came up with the title before figuring out the talk.  This year it is:

Just how many universes are there, anyway?

Why do many physicists think there may be an infinite number of universes?  What would they be like?  What might life be like in parallel universes? How might we detect them?  Could we travel between them?  And what does quantum mechanics have to do with the multiverse?