One of the most notable books Patrick Gunkel ever wrote, in my opinion, is called The Future of Space: An Encyclopedic Prospect.
Unlike many of Gunkel’s books, this one may have actually been published—or at least made available—via the Hudson Institute in 1975.
In a future post, I’ll write more about Gunkel’s work with the Hudson Institute and in particular the general workflow in which this book was positioned.
Unfortunately, however, although the book is a fantastic historical artifact, Gunkel’s flaws as a writer make The Future of Space unfit for the general reader.
The publication surpasses 300 pages jam-packed with Gunkel’s single-spaced, dense text.
Many of Gunkel’s paragraphs take up almost an entire page and some even span several pages.
Gunkelian sentences abound: “The future development of space will be contingent upon various events: intrinsic and extrinsic, obvious and obscure, controllable and not, likely and unlikely, datable and not…” [over 20 more clauses like this follow].
Tempted though I am to analyze Gunkel’s comprehensive tome, it’s a task better left for historians.
Rather, I’d like to instead return to the ever-available theme of Gunkel’s use of lists and list-making—and one list in particular.
Gunkel’s Most Interesting List?
By this point you likely understand that one of Gunkel’s specialties was list-making.
It was his method of organizing his thoughts and perhaps even reality itself.
But at the time Gunkel wrote The Future of Space, he had not yet arrived at the empirical purpose of list-making within his science of ideas. The word ideonomy was not even a glimmer in his mind.
Instead, Gunkel was just doing lists because that seems to be how his brain worked.
There are many lists in The Future of Space, but the one that has most captured my attention is a one-page list called “First Extrasolian Message Received by Humans.”
It’s a list that imagines what might be contained in the first message human beings ever receive from an alien civilization.
In fact, it’s a list that likely caught NASA’s attention given that a 1978 NASA bibliographic reference specifically calls out The Future of Space as containing important information about first contact with aliens.
The list—copied below—begins in a rather bland, but reasonable manner:
Item #1 is “Greetings and salutations”
Item #2 is “Purpose of message”
Item #7 is “History of sender’s world”
But from here on out, the list gets pretty creative.
For item #10, Gunkel imagines that an alien message might include “instructions for building a responsive transmitter.”
Item #12 is “instructions for a vehicle with which to visit.”
Other items on the list include a “self-developmental program” (#19), “free entertainment, education, art” (#21), “universal newspaper: news, ads, gossip, &c.” (#26), and “typical future histories of cultures” (#32).
In my opinion, these are pretty interesting ideas.
I consider myself an old-school science fiction fan, and decently well-read, but I’m not sure I’ve ever come across a story in which the first alien message to humanity contains the alien equivalent of a global self-improvement seminar (#19) or free-to-share creative commons artwork (#21).
Meanwhile, the idea of a first-contact message containing “instructions for a vehicle in which to visit” was actually the central plot of Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, published some ten years after Gunkel’s list-making exercise.
I was warned, in college, by a very smart professor, that I should never claim someone was “the first” to do something, especially when it comes to having an idea.
It seems unlikely “instructions for a vehicle in which to visit” was an original idea when Gunkel listed it, but it’s still an interesting enough idea that one can imagine many more stories taking advantage of this precise plot-twist before it's become a well-worn cliché.
Nor Does It Stop There
As Gunkel’s list goes on, his ideas about the first alien communication received by Earthlings gets more wild and abstract.
You see, Gunkel was never satisfied with his ideas until he’d stretched them to the absolute extreme and arrived at some faint hint of universal truth or an Ouroboros-like, infinitely repeating recursion.
Items number 13 through 16 on Gunkel’s list are “Universal ethics,” “Universal aesthetics,” “Universal religion,” and “Universal culturology.”
These ideas are important to mark and understand, as they reflect Gunkel’s own deep interests and feelings.
It’s a form of wish-fulfillment for Gunkel to imagine that aliens might help humanity cut through all its parochial, narrow-minded B.S. by revealing the most general, all-encompassing, and fundamental values and meanings allowed by the universe.
Finally, toward the end of the list, item #35—in a style I have never encountered from any other writer, and to such a remarkable extent I feel these tendencies must inevitably be viewed as nothing less than going full-on Gunkel—the maestro himself returns, unavoidably, to his obsession with all possible ideas by imagining that the first message aliens send to humanity might include:
Absolutely gigantic—virtually infinite—dictionaries, encyclopedias, &c, of words, concepts, forms, all possible molecules, all possible organisms, all possible particles, all possible environments, all possible societies, all possible values, all possible histories, all possible inventions… all possible physical phenomena, all possible ideas, everything possible, quotations, biographies…
I can pretty much envision Gunkel, hunched over his typewriter in some hole-in-the-wall apartment late at night, blazing away at the keys, his desk lamp vibrating as he cycles through his cognitive framework and approaches the brink of madness before pulling himself back, transitioning from the incomprehensible notion that the first extraterrestrial message ever received by humans might contain “everything possible” to the comparatively bland notion that such a message might contain “quotations” or “biographies.”
This is where Gunkel often got stuck.
He could bring himself to edge of infinity, he could recognize the concept of infinite potential, he could logically comprehend how such potential might be realized through a Singularity-like “intelligence explosion,” but when it came to time present that idea in writing he always came away from the page beguiled.
Language always failed; Gunkel was always surprised and disappointed when it happened.
It’s almost as though Gunkel’s ability to conceptualize completeness meant, in a sort of mimetic way, that he was required to achieve that completeness in his writing, and any sense his work might be incomplete made it seem to him like a failure.
A Psychoanalytic Reading
I’m not a psychologist… I’m a writer, which is close or tangential to psychology in a certain way. I know about people. I’ve studied Gunkel extensively. And I’ve received feedback from those who knew Gunkel that I am pretty close to the mark in my understanding of his character.
So yeah, one of the reasons I like this list is because it reveals something very important about Gunkel’s psychology.
Gunkel abandoned, unfinished, dozens of projects for precisely the reason demonstrated within this list.
It’s almost like he was constantly aware of an infinite version of himself existing somewhere beyond his body, and he was perpetually frustrated by his inability to connect with it.
Gunkel never understood, or never agreed to, the notion of a scope statement.
In the context of a report about space, Gunkel couldn’t limit his predictions to a temporal barrier—"the next 50 years”—or a thematic one—“When Mars gets a self-sustaining colony, humanity becomes an interplanetary species and we can stop our report there.”
Rather, Gunkel needed to attempt writing an “Encyclopedic Prospect” about each subject he decided to tackle.
Every.
Single.
Freaking.
Time.
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