Dr. Fred Nadis's Cabinet of Curiosities

I recently read John Scalzi’s Ghost Brigades (2006) and Gene Wolfe’s Home Fires (2010) — two works from science fiction wizards that feature a trendy science fiction premise: the uploaded mind. The futurist website “Lifeboat Foundation” explains, “Mind uploading, sometimes referred to as nonbiological intelligence, centers around the controversial proposition that cognitive processing can be implemented on substrates other than our current neurons.” The reward is immortality—as a digitized mind leapfrogs from form to accessorized form through the centuries. The concept traces back, in part, to roboticist Hans Moravec’s Mind Children (1988) and colleague Ray Kurzweil’s books The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990) and The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999). These books predict artificial intelligence far surpassing that of the human mind. The uploaded mind, just one element in the coming revolution, makes human participation possible in what these technologists foresee as a p...

R ay Palmer was an American original. Born in Milwaukee in 1910, he was struck by a milk truck at age seven, shattering his back and forcing him to be bedridden for much of his childhood and crippled for life (he remained a hunchback). After seeing the first issue of Hugo Gernsback's landmark science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories , in 1926, he became hooked on science fiction. An early enthusiast (it was then called "scientifiction" or stf), Palmer co-edited the world's first fanzine, The Comet , with its first issue in 1930. When fans honored Hugo Gernsback as the "Father of Science Fiction" at the Worldcon--or more formally The World Science Fiction Convention--in 1952, Ray Palmer also was honored as the "Son of Science Fiction."  to read the full blog please go to the Huffington Post.

I once was the editor of a “zine” that made it through at least four issues with the spiffy title The Days of Reckoning Press . At the time I was living with a young woman, lets call her Z--,   who was my co-editor. We were on the fringes of the punk scene. That is to say, she was in the punk scene and I wasn’t. It was a few years too early to call us “slackers,” plus Z-- worked a real job in the research division of the NYPL, while I was a low-paid “journalist” for suburban newspapers.   We collected weird pamphlets and books. Z-- kindly introduced me to the writings of Charles Fort (whose wit and creativity make him transcend the crackpot category). Other treasures collected include a pamphlet about the benefits of “rebound” exercise (on small trampolines), aka "reboundology," and one I since have lost about Baltasare Forestiere, the Mole Man of Fresno, who carved out an enormous underground house in the desert of California for a bride in Italy who refused to join him...

The Space Age not only forced people to reckon with the otherworldly flavors of Pillsbury's Space Food Sticks and the orange powder drink, Tang, but also the arbitrary nature of national borders.  The Berlin Wall remained, but dogs, monkeys, and people were circling the globe.   Not just anarchists but corporations were working towards a utopian flow of ideas and goods across those pesky lines. A new space age perspective emerged. In the 1960s Buckminster Fuller started talking about "Spaceship Earth," and soon after environmentalists offered slogans and battle cries such as "Earth First!"          As early as the 1940s, SF fans had begun to talk of having the “long view,” as the space age they predicted and helped nurture took shape. Then came sightings of flying saucers, hovering over cities and onto movie screens. Children, particularly boys, added astronaut to their list of future jobs. Space, however, was expensive. Many of...

          I admire a natural philosopher who invents an idea of the universe so original and patently false that it becomes oddly persuasive. One is confronted with the issue: either this theory is insane or I am insane , and the theory makes you rather hope that you are the deranged one.  Cyrus Teed, with his notion that we all lived inside a hollow Earth was one such philosopher. Yet he met his match in the post-Sputnik era. One of the loopiest, yet most compelling theories of the universe, or at least of earthly and celestial topography, can be found in F. Amadeo Giannini's, Worlds Beyond the Poles a 1959 amplification of his earlier work, Physical Continuum .          Giannini had a very curious insight. In fact, revolutionary. As the first paragraph of his book explains, "There is no physical end to the Earth's northern and southern extent. The earth merges with land areas of the universe abo...

“The new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom…the world is all outside: it has no inside.”        --Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience.” "Your inside is out and your outside is in."           --John Lennon "Everybody's Got Something to Hide"                  It takes a bold philosopher to disagree with Ralph Waldo Emerson. A young contemporary of Emerson,  Cyrus Teed was that man. Emerson’s profound declaration that the world “has no inside”?  Nonsense.  We were there already. Teed was a rural physician with training from the Eclectic Medical College in New York, a tradition which rejected heroic chemical cures and blood-letting and favored herbal and electrical remedies. Teed also was a latter-day alchemist, thirsting after the very secrets of the universe;  and, in...