This slightly fantastical sensibility is the designer’s legacy, a sense of story that gave cultural weight to the tailoring. (We appreciate a lovely dress; we remember a dress with a story.) And his embrace of the Gothic monstrous explored the industry’s own preconceptions of acceptable beauty, which collided frequently with his passion for the uncanny. At the end of his spring 2001 show, glass walls dropped to reveal writer Michelle Olley, naked save for a gas mask, amid a cloud of live butterflies and moths in an homage to photographer Joel-Peter Witkin’s “Sanitorium.” During “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” which recreated a Depression-era dance contest, the final model ‘died’ on the dance floor, and stayed there until after the bows (when McQueen helped carry her offstage). For his Spring 2007 collection, he sent a gown of real flowers down the runway, which fell apart as the model walked; fashion, nature, youth, and other fleeting things.
McQueen, in the exploration of these stories, designed his share of unwearable garments; among the finely-tailored blazers and carefully-draped dresses were challenging, restrictive pieces that required a body as a sacrifice as much as for a model. (This is a man who interpreted vampires via a transparent bustier filled with worms, and commissioned a metal spine-and-ribcage corset as a couture exoskeleton.) But as his runway shows garnered attention and his gowns became red-carpet staples, the more his Gothic-couture aesthetic was accepted by the mainstream.
Even if you think you haven’t seen a McQueen, you may well have. Works from McQueen’s latter collections were so aligned with current ideas about fantastic fashion—a sensibility he helped craft with a decade of conceptual shows—that his pieces sparked several onscreen homages. Look no further than Fleur’s wedding dress in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One (a near-direct copy of a piece from the Fall 2008 collection) and Queen Ravenna’s cape in The Huntsman: Winter’s War (inspired by a gold feather coat from the Fall 2010 collection—the last he designed).
McQueen wasn’t free of controversy; a designer who tried so deliberately to provoke was occasionally bound to do it. (In his spring 1997 show, he sent Black model Debra Shaw down the runway in a square shackle that hemmed in her elbows and knees; he insisted it was commentary on constrained bodies, but for obvious reasons, debate raged.) But his darkly-fantastic speculative collections, and the shows that accompanied them, are his most visible and enduring legacy. He died in 2010; the last collection he completed was “Plato’s Atlantis” (featuring the ‘armadillo boots’ Lady Gaga made infamous). The concept itself was science fiction: climate change so severe it prompts a new era of human evolution—into sea creatures. “When the waters rise,” he noted, “humanity will go back to the place from whence it came.” It was beautifully doomed—with McQueen, what else would it be?
FANDOM AND POP CULTURE
SFF fans have always been particularly enthusiastic participants in their favorite genre, often with strong and passionate opinions about what science fiction and fantasy is and should be. We aren’t just fans . . . we’re fandom. And we change, shape, and grow the genre as actively as it changes us.
Sometimes those movements are right out in the open. Other times they’re tectonic, big waves beneath the surface that only show their impacts much later—such as the fan fiction influences that pointed the way to a new kind of storytelling for two contributors. Or these movements are tangential at first, odd bits of pop culture lore, which like the Illuminati or the Voynich manuscript, slowly weave their way into science-fiction storytelling.
One thing is for certain—science fiction is culture, and culture is science fiction. (Or as Thomas M. Disch put it, science fiction is “the dreams our stuff is made of.”) This chapter explores some of those lesser known interconnections . . . and how the active, participatory nature of SFF fan culture can bring them to the surface.
The Surreal Potential of the World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript
There are a few things we know almost definitively about the Voynich manuscript. We know that it dates back to the fifteenth century and was created somewhere in Central Europe. We know it was once owned by Emperor Rudolf II of Germany (1576–1612), who reportedly purchased it for 600 gold ducats, which sounds like a lot. We also know that it is named after Wilfrid Voynich, the eccentric bookseller who acquired it in 1912.
The rest—the manuscript’s origin, its history, its meaning—are shrouded in mystery.
The manuscript combines looping, handwritten text written in an unknown and probably invented language with bizarre botanical and figurative drawings of 113 nonexistent flowers, roots, and herbs; nude females in a variety of situations; pipes, chimneys, and tubes; and astrological and cosmological charts and symbols. Voynich enthusiasts typically divide the book into four sections—herbal, astrological, pharmacological, and balneological (a word that refers to the study of therapeutic bathing, and should really be used more often). Through the manuscript’s entire history, the text has remained indecipherable, and the surreal drawings are equally enigmatic.
Likewise, the manuscript’s full history is a mystery. It is not clear who Emperor Rudolf purchased it from, though it may have been the English mathematician and alchemist John Dee (1527–1608). Possibly, Emperor Rudolph believed the manuscript to be the work of Roger Bacon (1220–1292), an English philosopher. For a time, contemporary Voynichologists also theorized that Bacon was the author, although this has since been debunked. The manuscript passed hands a few times after that. Its last known location was with Athanasius Kircher (1701–1680) in 1666. Then it disappeared from the historical record until Wilfrid Voynich obtained it from a Jesuit college near Rome in 1912.
Originally published in Finnish in 2001, Leena Krohn’s Datura appeared in English for the first time in 2013 with a publication by Cheeky Frawg Books, translated by J. Robert Tupasela and Anna Volmari. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly praised the 2013 edition with the words “aficionados of the surreal will find this a contemporary masterwork.”
All images from the Voynich manuscript are courtesy of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where the “cipher manuscript” resides under call number Beinecke MS 408.
Voynich was quite the colorful character himself. Born in 1864 Lithuania (in what was then the Russian Empire) to a Polish family, he was impressively multilingual, reportedly speaking twenty languages. He was a social revolutionary and a member of the Proletariat Party, which earned him a sentence without trial and a five-year exile to Siberia. He escaped from Siberia, bartered his way onto a boat, and made it to England, where he continued to rub shoulders with the political and intellectual counterculture and became a successful book dealer.
When a group of Jesuits decided to sell some of their library to the Vatican, Voynich traveled in secrecy to Rome and purchased some of the collection first—including the Voynich manuscript. He believed, or claimed to believe, that the manuscript was a tome of black magic, with “discoveries far in advance of twentieth-century science.”
Considering Voynich’s fascinating persona, and the fact that he once sold the British Museum a forgery, it was once hypothesized that the entire manuscript was a hoax fabricated by Voynich himself. However, carbon dating offers solid evidence that it definitely dates back to the Middle Ages. (Unless Voynich somehow obtained a large quantity of blank vellum from the early fifteenth century—implausible, but not absolutely impossible.) If it is the work of a practical jokester, the jokester in question most likely hailed from much more antiquated times.
Historians and Voynichologists have proffered dozens of theories as to the book’s original authorship, but none have been proven. Likewise, cryptographers and codebreakers have spent the past one hundred years attempting to make meaning of the book’s unknown and enigmatic language. As William Sherman writes in “Cryptographic Attempts,” an essay that accompanies Yale’s recent facsimile of the manuscript, “The quest has also exercised the minds of some of the greatest code breakers in history.” Sherman goes on to d
etail some of these attempts, including work by William F. Friedman, “who would spend several decades as the U.S. government’s top maker and breaker of codes.”
Of course, attempts to crack the code are not only the domain of army cryptographers and scholarly medievalists. There are a hundred flourishing Internet communities and discussion groups where hobbyists and obsessives hash out a million theories of varying degrees of plausibility. Every few years, someone claims to have finally “cracked the code”—only to be refuted by their fellows. One of the first of these was William Romaine Newbold, a historian of medicine and philosophy. He announced his “breakthrough” in 1921 and went on a short but intense lecture tour. By 1928 his supposed cipher had been destroyed by skeptics and critics who pointed out his biases and errors.
These kinds of breakthroughs and retractions have happened a number of times over the past century. As recently as 2017, the Times Literary Supplement, a plenty reputable source, published an article by television researcher Nicholas Gibbs, who announced with no small modesty that he had finally found the solution. He’d identified certain common abbreviations of Latin words and then—following a circuitous chain of reasoning—concluded that the Voynich manuscript is in fact “a reference book of selected remedies lifted from the standard treatises of the medieval period, an instruction manual for the health and wellbeing of the more well to do women in society, which was quite possibly tailored to a single individual.” The news spread quickly across the Internet, receiving glowing and credulous coverage on just about every pop culture blog there is, until experts weighed in with their knowledge of medieval literature. Their assessment: This makes no sense at all.
Perhaps the world’s most mysterious manuscript will never be explained; perhaps it’s better that way. We all need some mysteries, after all. As Josephine Livingstone wrote in The New Yorker, “Whether code breaker or spiritualist or amateur historian, the Voynich speculators are linked by their common interest in the past, quasi-occult mystery, and insoluble problems of authenticity. . . . This single, original manuscript encourages us to sit with the concept of truth and to remember that there are ineluctable mysteries at the bottom of things whose meanings we will never know.”
Leena Krohn, a remarkable writer of Finnish weird fiction, draws on these themes in her novel Datura, which features the Voynich manuscript as a through-line and a touchstone. The novel’s narrator works as an editor and writer for The New Anomalist, an obscure magazine that specializes in the occult and paranormal. One of the subjects she’s intended to cover is the Voynich manuscript, which she encounters for the first time with the typical bafflement: “It looked medieval and was richly illuminated: symbols, maps, circles, celestial bodies or maybe cells, it was impossible to know. Naked women with rosy cheeks bathing, and animals of unknown species, possibly frogs, salamanders, fish, cats, lions . . .” But our narrator has also begun dosing herself with the toxic seeds of the datura plant in an attempt to treat her asthma. Datura poisoning causes hallucinations, and as the story goes on, she finds herself increasingly untethered from reality.
But what is reality, anyway? That’s what the narrator begins to question—and as aficionados of the inexplicable parade through her editorial offices, the answer grows ever less clear. She says, “This is what I think I’ve learned: Reality is nothing more than a working hypothesis. It is an agreement that we don’t realize we’ve made. It’s a delusion we all see.”
If reality is a shared delusion, then perhaps the Voynich Manuscript is merely an artifact from another history’s waking dream. As the narrator’s connection to our own world grows more tenuous, it all seems like a hallucination, real and unreal. Toward the end she writes, “I wake up as if from another dream and look around myself for the first time. At times like that, all books are like the Voynich manuscript to me: ciphers, cryptographies, beyond all interpretation.”
Krohn is far from the only storyteller to be inspired by the enigma of an unreadable book. The Voynich manuscript, or documents like it, has shown up in a multitude of works, particularly speculative ones. Another popular writer who was influenced by it is novelist and historian Deborah Harkness. As a doctoral student, Harkness studied the library of John Dee, who may have been one of the earliest owners of the Voynich manuscript. She’s maintained a lifelong interest in the document, and a fascination with the mysterious and enigmatic that informs her fiction. Indeed, the narrative of her New York Times bestselling All Souls trilogy (which begins with A Discovery of Witches) hinges on the discovery of a rare manuscript.
In her introduction to the Yale facsimile, Harkness wrote of her first experience seeing the manuscript in the flesh, at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where it goes by the moniker Beineke MS 408. “Perhaps my reaction to the Voynich manuscript was shaped by the fact that my interest in it was no longer as a Dee scholar but as a novelist. I don’t know what I expected, but at first glimpse it was oddly anticlimactic: small, worn, and drab outside; cramped and confusing inside . . . At the same time, I could not stop turning the pages. . . . And yet the more minutes I spent with it the more I suspected that all the time in the world would not make the Voynich manuscript yield its secrets—at least not to me.”
SELENA CHAMBERS
Celebrity Robots of the Great Depression
The United States during the 1930s is not exactly known for its automatons, but in-between the Crash and the New Deal, four humanoid robots toured the country and became Great Depression Rock Stars. First to set the stage was Britain’s Eric the Robot, who debuted in 1929 at an exhibition of the Society of Model Engineers in London as a speaker replacement for the Duke of York. Built by Captain William Richards and Alan Refell, Eric’s appearance was like an armored knight, and activated by voice control, he rose from his bench, bowed to the audience, and gave a four-minute address while turning his head, gesturing with his hands, and emitting blue sparks from his teeth.
George Moore’s Steam Man (1893) by Georges Massias, an illustration of a steam-powered robot built by Canadian inventor and professor George Moore. The robot was life-size and exhibited widely.
After this famous premiere, Eric brought his mechanical chivalry to the United States, where he mysteriously disappeared. Richards replaced him with an improved second effort in 1930: George, whose multi-language program garnered him the reputation as an “educated gentleman” compared to “his rough-hewn awkward brother” in the press. Despite his gentle status and engineering advancements, George, too, vanished into the scrapheap of the unknown.
By 1934, audiences craved a more common man, and they got it with badboy Alpha. Also Britain-born, not much is known about this ruffian automaton with long metallic curls, other than he shot blank revolvers and cracked-wise with doe-eyed dames. Before he landed in the U.S., his reputation was preceded as a Frankenstein-like creature who shot his creator, Harry May, upon activation. Surely, this false rumor didn’t hurt ticket-sales.
Elektro, the cigarette-smoking robot. Image courtesy of the Mansfield Memorial Museum.
By the end of the thirties, the U.S. had seen many a foreign robot come and go, but none successfully captured a generation’s imagination like Elektro the Moto-Man. Built by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Mansfield, Ohio, he was the U.S.’s first homegrown humanoid. With a seven-foot-tall gold-brushed aluminum body and color-differentiating photoelectric eyes, Elektro’s stage presence seemed magical to the 1939 New York World’s Fair attendees.
Millions waited three hours to catch Elektro’s twenty-minute acts, where he walked the stage, taunted audience queries with provocative responses like “My brain is bigger than yours,” counted on his fingers, and made jokes about operator errors. The real crowd pleasers were when he smoked cigarettes and blew up balloons.
But there was no legerdemain present in Elektro’s performance, just a composition of the latest and greatest technologies. Under his golden aluminum skin was a metal skeleton containing camshafts, gears
, motors, and a bellows system for lungs. His 700 word vocabulary was provided by a 78 rpm record player and was composed of forty-eight electrical relays that controlled the eleven motors that prompted his speech and twenty-six movements—all under voice control commands transmitted via telephone relay.
While all of his predecessors had been scrapped for war or disappeared, he enjoyed a much longer presence in the public eye, although it also became diminished over time. By the 1950s, Elektro went on revival at in-store promotions for all Westinghouse departments. He even dabbled in acting, appearing as Sam Thinko in the B movie Sex Kittens Go to College, receiving stripteases from Vampira and Mamie Van Doren.
Eventually, Elektro retired at the Palisades Park in Oceanside, California and the fervor and enthusiasm he once enjoyed as “America’s first celebrity robot” only remains in the black-and-white print of old newspaper and museum docent accounts. For those who want to relive the glory of the Moto-Man, a pilgrimage can be made to Ohio’s Mansfield Memorial Museum, where Elektro’s head and torso reside in its archive.
The Historical and Literary Origins of Assassin’s Creed
Assassin’s Creed is one of the top-selling video game franchises of all time, with eleven major games in the franchise as of 2018, and many more spin-offs. There was even a 2016 movie called Assassin’s Creed.
The powerful franchise began in 2007, when the first game launched for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. But we can trace the concept’s genesis much further back . . . to an obscure novel titled Alamut, published by Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol in 1938, and its historical influences: eleventh-century Persia (today’s Iran), and real events that have been blurred by legend.
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