One of the first MonkeyBrain Books titles was Matt Rossi's Things That Never Were, a genius collection of little gems, each of them packed with ideas, as dense as the heart of a neutron star. I think the book probably deserves the status of "cult classic." While a steady seller, it hasn't sold as much as some of our other titles (though far better than some), but it seems everyone who reads it raves about it. Myself included.

Rossi's still out there, though now in the wilds of Canada, as I understand it, and still dropping science on us, from time to time, on his livejournal. Like today, when he unzips his forehead and lets spill some genius thoughts about the importance of Superman in Earth's history and future.

Was just making a post over on Seebelow when it occured to me that one of the most interesting implications of the Morrison run on JLA was that Superman is affecting the morphic resonance of the entire human race; that by being present on Earth, the last son of Krypton has fused the Kryptonian morphogenic field to that of the Earth. We know that a morphic field is, in effect, a kind of 'conceptual web' that surrounds and infuses everything, from a housefly to a rock to a thunderstorm. The morphic field of 'rock' and the morphic field of 'mountain' would be interpolated because mountains are generally made of rocks, although one could have a mountain of ice (and in this fashion the morphic fields of 'glaciers' and 'mountains' interpolate). Borrowing a concept from David Bohm we're left with the implicate and explicate orders, the backstage of reality where all ideas and concepts exist in timeless simultaneous interpenetration. Introjecting into the explicate, the world we all live in with its time and its space, these interpenetrating ideas interact with each other and create inter-relations that then feed back into the implicate... events in the now creating interrelations that existed before they happened.

Now, as a result, Superman's existence on Earth has created an interpenetration between Krypton and Earth, between Kryptonian and Human, and this interpenetration introjects back into the implicate palimpest that underlies and supports existence. Because in the 20th century a Kryptonian would exist on Earth, at the dawn of time the morphic field for 'kryptonian' and the one for 'human' are already interpenetrated, interpolating one another, informing one another. It's possible that Kryptonians look like Humans because of this. Furthermore, it's possible that humans are becoming more like Kryptonians because one is among them, like a solution shocking into crystals because a seed crystal was dropped into the mixture. The convolutions of continuity aside, Superman's arrival on earth changes the reality set, it casts shockwaves fore and aft in time. A son of Colu would love a kryptonian in the future, so a robot spawn of Colu steals a city from Krypton in the past. A Daxamite strikes a god with his burning eyes in the future, and that selfsame Daxamite is cast into limbo to live long enough to see it.

Comes the Superman, and the world changes, and changed to herald his coming. A cop dies and God raises him up again. An orphan refuses to accept his pain and loss. An isolated island of Amazons finally chooses a champion to challenge the outside world, one carved out of clay. Train lanterns burn with emerald fire, a man outruns a bullet, a tomb opens and Order comes forth in a golden helm. A dead prince learns to fly again. Shockwaves, forward and back as the implicate order is etched with a new pattern and that pattern bleeds, and every single human being born on this little blue and green ball orbiting a yellow star is now linked inexorably to an order of being that evolved on a titanic ball of rock just shy of stellar mass orbiting a star so weak it was almost burned out.

To fight Mageddon, the Purple Ray touched our morphic potential, and what did it find? It found a world of Supermen. By coming here, the son of Jor-El changed us, and by being sent here, he changed them. And not just us and them: even down to our very worlds, our weather systems, our biospheres, everything. There is a morphogenic field for every one of those individual things, and each links to the others, and now all of those fields and super-fields are linked across the inky vacuum of space and the void of time by the simple act of an immigrant traveling from that world to this one. In the implicate order, the concepts of 'Krypton' and 'Earth' and all their attendent subconcepts interpolate and are introjected, now sisters, into the explicate. By sending his son here, Jor-El was sending a leaf cutting, a seed, an arc in microcosm.

Krypton is our future, and we are Krypton's future.