PROLOGUE

This month’s installment features links to a number of paywalled articles—please reach out to me if you have difficulty accessing them and would like to read them.

A couple other shoutouts!

Ryan and I recently launched a newsletter together documenting our creative endeavors as 83 Midnight, the production company we founded and produced Heat of the Summer and God’s Favorite with. The former is said to be a deeply-impactful piece about the American psychiatric system; the latter was nominated for Best Production at the 2024 New York Theatre Festival and won Best Director and Best Actor through the efforts of the brilliant Maya McCullough and Jack Russell, respectively. We’re eager to continue sharing our progress and accomplishments as a creative team. Please reach out to me if you’d like to be subscribed to that newsletter, and I can add you to the mailing list.

Ryan is also in the process of documenting the cross-country trip we took together on their blog. Eventually, there will be a play inspired by that experience; for now, I’m enjoying the trip down a transcontinental memory lane as Ryan debuts each chapter of the account.

ART

When science fiction keeps catching up to us.

Transitions are difficult for me. I have difficulty adjusting from one frame of mind to the next. What this meant for me recently was that I had a mild existential crisis recently as the winter thawed into spring.

I’ve been designing a cyberpunk setting for a tabletop game, and it had me exploring bionics, prosthetics, artificial intelligence, evolution, and the general topic of transhumanism—that is, what the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines as the “philosophical and scientific movement that advocates the use of current technologies […] to augment human capabilities and improve the human condition.”

The idea with transhumanism is that technology will make us capable of feats that would take millennia to develop, or never even occur, through biological evolution alone. This often manifests in the cyberpunk genre in the ways a desperate 99% of the population augments themselves with cybertechnology in order to make themselves more capable in their given vocation, be they a laborer with a strength-boosting exoskeleton or a knowledge worker who uses a brain implant to stimulate their cognition or a streetwise punk who folds mantis-blades into their arms to slice up oppressive corporate security forces.

Now, this all makes for compelling science fiction, but a lot of it isn’t fiction anymore. Thematically—at least where cyberpunk is involved—we do indeed live in a world where the exorbitantly wealthy hold undue political power and mass surveillance is leveraged against the civilian population—just a few resources here and here for more specifics about the latter. Technologically, well… cyberlimbs are already here—thank goodness, by the way, for the sake of people who they benefit—even if we haven’t officially attached swords to them yet. In the meantime, there are a variety of companies experimenting with brain implants in humans and Boston Dynamics revealing a new line of humanoid robots.

Please, by the way, don’t mistake my citing an article featuring a company of Elon Musk’s for my endorsing the man. Neuralink’s staff and he appear to be eschewing ethics for the sake of the man’s sci-fi fever dream—and that’s on top of his own glaring flaws.

In the setting I am designing, a race of aliens called the Ascendant visit Earth and bequeath upon humanity the Seed Technologies, challenging us to prove ourselves worthy of galactic society within a hundred years. Thinking about the aforementioned scientific discoveries, though, made me wonder what exactly it was that an extraordinarily-powerful race of aliens could possibly bequeath humans that we aren’t already on our way to inventing for ourselves. My writing a setting wherein humans have difficulty designing advanced prosthetics without alien acceleration seems almost more quaint than the idea that aliens built the pyramids.

Originally, I was going to write this section about how “Art must assert what it means to be human, as what may be considered ‘human’ could change rapidly within the next few decades.” This is certainly a pressing concern; if gene editing allows for “designer babies” which have been pre-selected for desirable traits, and brain implants allow wealthy individuals to interact with their worlds in ways other people cannot, then will it be possible that less fortunate humans will go the way of the Neanderthals? I discarded that original topic because I think it would inevitably read as too preachy, which isn’t what I want to do here. I would rather my message read as one that is in awe of—and harboring trepidation for—the possibilities of human innovation.

The following is from Steven Hawking from a lecture titled “Life in the Universe.”

So if evolution is shifting towards the cultural and the technological, and accelerating as it goes, and, doubtlessly, leaving the bottom 99% of the population some varying number of steps behind—technology follows wealth—art becomes even more important to anchor us in our shared experiences.

All the while, sci-fi becomes realistic fiction.

I might have to revisit medieval fantasy soon. Or maybe I just need to think a little bolder, and let my vision of the future be enriched by the frightening and fantastical potentials indicated by modern innovation, rather than the myopic lens of pop fiction.

CRAFT

Craft as another world

A little while back—on one of those hot chocolate walks I mentioned in last month’s missive—I had the opportunity to talk to a couple friends about tabletop roleplaying games.

This was not a normal conversation about Dungeons & Dragons.

This conversation took place between someone who trawls niche internet forums and obscure blogs—who is subscribed to at least two esoteric tabletop newsletters and a slew of tiiiiny podcasts—and a pair of people who design and publish games independently and regularly. You can find Spilled Coffee Creatives’ social media here and their online profile here, by the way.

I realized in having the conversation that we were speaking in terms which would likely be complete jargon to any outsider, technical and hyper-specific to the craft of game design. An average actual-play follower tracking a Critical Role campaign might have had difficulty parsing the nitty-gritties we mulled over regarding win conditions and the interactions between mechanics and story.

Likewise, such conversations are happening all over the world at every instant regarding subjects I could scarcely imagine, deep folds in fandoms and fields and areas of expertise that would make my head spin. Jamming with my roommates recently, a trained saxophonist and a professional jazz pianist, split my brain open as I attempted to keep up with their nuanced dialogues about music theory—and it was thrilling!

Listen, not understanding something can be awesome: I think it’s your brain picking up a signal that there’s an open door in front of you.

When a person understands something deeply, the world changes for them. There is a pocket dimension that is created when they are in the presence of another who expresses similar expertise, a world the collective may enter together and sustain through their engagement with each other around the topic of their knowledge. I’m okay with sounding highfalutin’ about my knowledge of tabletop game because I am quite comfortable knowing the vast majority of these pocket dimensions are invisible to me, and reassured by the fact that they exist for others to enjoy.

On the flip side, an intimate understanding of something may certainly not entail a love of that thing. I believe this accentuates the importance of perpetuating kindness in the world, as well; familiarity with a certain pain creates a world of it. Someone who has lost a pet, to use a more bearable example, knows a loss that only the someone else who has experienced the same or similar may understand.

Understanding is at the core of it. The more we understand, the more worlds we discover within our world—and, perhaps, the greater aggregate appreciation for our world-at-large we experience.

Euggh. I seldom mean to wax poetic. A point that originally related to craft, it turns out, was much more broadly-applicable than I anticipated. Anyhow, if you enjoy a call to action, I would encourage you to get out there and expand your world.

Seriously, start with music theory. It’s absolutely wild the science that goes into jazz.

—

Michael