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Abstract

e guided the field’s development?Despite the crucial place of Bacon’s work in the history of contemporary thought, he’s not really a philosopher who has received much attention from theorists in the last 50 years or so. There are a few bits in Foucault here and there (and the influence of Bacon’s most famous formulation “knowledge is power” upon Foucault’s own pouvoir-savoir is kind of obvious, I suppose), but other than that, if recent philosophy mentions Francis Bacon it’s more likely the reference will be to the 20th-century painter. However, starting with Daphne Oram at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the New Atlantis does start to gain the attention of musicians working with electronics, and the first historians of electronic music.There’s this bit in the story where the Bacon’s protagonists are shown round these laboratories devoted to different disciplines — or different senses, really. There’s a “Perfume House”, where they mix up chemicals to make all kinds of different odors, a “Perspective House”, which looks at tricks of the light and lens and mirrors and things. And then there’s the “Sound House”, where they practice “all sounds and their generation.” The passage goes on to describe previously unknown instruments, techniques of sound manipulation to make sounds louder or shriller or deeper, to add echoes or to throw the voice across great distances, and so forth.For Oram, who had studied the work of Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen and Berio and so on before she set up the Radiophonic Workshop at the BBC’s studios in Maida Vale, this all sounded very much like electronic music and the kind of effects that could be achieved with magnetic tape and filters and oscillators. So she printed this bit of the text out and pinned it to the door of the Workshop when it opened in 1957, as a kind of manifesto and also, I think, as a way of asserting some kind of ownership over the place, as a kind of utopian bulwark against — ironically, considering Bacon’s own biography — the bureaucratic tendencies of the BBC. And then following Oram, all sorts of people followed suit in making this connection between electronic music and the sound houses of the New Atlantis. There are several albums named after the story that quote from that passage in the sleeve notes, quite a few books about the history of electronic music start off by quoting it (and Oram herself gave many lectures on the history of electronic music which would involve judicious use of it). When I visited the studio of Peter Zinovieff, the guy who created EMS, the first British synthesizer manufacturer, he had a framed quote from New Atlantis on the wall there.Many of these writers and composers would refer to this passage as something like an “uncanny presentiment,” as if it’s sort of a weird coincidence. But I think there’s more to it than that. Because what’s going on in this passage — and also in the second and third part of the Sylva Sylvarum, which was originally published alongside New Atlantis — is Bacon is bringing together a number of different phenomena that had previously been quite separate: namely, the theory of music, and the more practical knowledge involved in things like the production of musical instruments and an interest in echoes and things like that. Bacon called this “acoustics” (or rather the “acoustique art”), and he was really the first person to use the term in this way. And without this development, the invention of all the stuff that actually made the work of Oram and Schaeffer and Stockhausen possible is more or less unthinkable. So it’s not just an uncanny presentiment, in a way he really did lay down the conditions of possibility for electronic music to emerge.There are a lot of utopias that have been sketched out over the years, especially around the period after Atlantis. What makes Bacon’s, in particular, so enduring?New Atlantis sticks out among utopias of its time because it’s not just (or at least not just) a response to some particular historical event happening at the time (as a lot of the later 17th century utopias were, around the time of the English Civil War). And it’s not just like the dream of a more or less isolated scholar wishing there was someplace he could go to think and be quiet where that desire to think and be quiet would be respected and honored (which is sort of what Campanella’s City of the Sun is, and a few others around that time). Or rather, New Atlantis actually kind of is both of those things, but it’s also something, which feels much more modern. It’s an exercise in technological

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extrapolation. It’s like, here is a survey of the absolute cutting edge of knowledge and science that we have right now and what would happen if we pushed that just a little bit further. And this move, really, is the essence of science fiction, from Jules Verne and HG Wells to Hugo Gernsback and beyond. The basic desire that animates Francis Bacon here is the same desire that motivated the authors of 2001 and Starship Troopers and I, Robot and Star Trek and any number of other more familiar recent stories. He’s writing the future, in a historical moment when our own idea of the big, capital-F Future was just being invented. And I think today, when that kind of optimistic view of the future feels harder and harder to grasp, recovering some of that may be more important than ever.It’s interesting how you note that Bacon, in some senses, pioneered or at least advanced the state of the art for technological extrapolation, which I agree is fair to claim as a key ingredient of science or speculative fiction. That being the case, do you think Bacon helped inaugurate or influence any of the speculative fictions that followed? If so, can you expand on how? Are there any earlier scientists or inventors or thinkers we know of that were directly inspired by Bacon?More or less all of them, at least in the 17th century. New Atlantis was left unfinished when Bacon died and, after its publication, there were several more or less explicit attempts to complete or provide a sequel to it. What’s fascinating about all these sequels is that they show how plastic the original text was since most sought to make explicit what they regarded as implicit in the original tale. This was around the time of the English Civil War, so some supported the roundheads, others were staunch royalists, some even Rosicrucian — and all purported to be faithful to Bacon’s original intentions. You continue to find references to Bacon into the 19th century — there was a Latvian economist called Kārlis Balodi,s who wrote this text called The Future State, and he signed under the pen name Atlanticus as a kind of tip of the hat to Bacon. But in a way, any story which starts with a shipwreck followed by the discovery of a strange new world — which is a pretty significant chunk of golden age space opera — ultimately leads back to New Atlantis. In terms of science, the Royal Society in London was basically modeled after New Atlantis and the experiments listed in Sylva Sylvarum gave them something to do. A lot of the kind of common sense of science — empiricism, inductivism, the idea of a nature governed by rules — goes back to Bacon, as does the notion that states should use that to make technologies for the improvement of society. That’s really what Bacon spent his life arguing for and New Atlantis is a kind of dream based on what might happen if we actually did.And why doesn’t Bacon get more credit as a forefather of science fiction, an honorarium that usually goes to Mary Shelley or Edgar Allen Poe or so on?There’s a lot of stuff that we expect science fiction to do that New Atlantis doesn’t do. It’s not set in the future, for one. Nothing was then and wouldn’t be for another century or so. So that disqualifies it for some SF historians. Also, the actual plot — what plot there is — isn’t really driven forward by technology. It’s more like something we discover in the course of it. This, I think, is the definition of SF used by Brian Aldiss in the book, Billion Year Spree, and it’s why he starts with Frankenstein.Finally, what matters most about New Atlantis today?The Baconian gesture of yoking together science and technology is increasingly being questioned at the moment, from all sorts of different angles. So it makes sense to reexamine the founding texts of that gesture. More importantly, we seem to have largely stopped employing technology for the improvement of society. New inventions are not making us better people, nor giving us more leisure time, and only rarely allowing the mass of people to live longer, happier lives. Quite the reverse, for the most part. But, you know, that was kind of the whole point. There is absolutely nothing in New Atlantis — or elsewhere in Bacon’s oeuvre — about generating wealth for shareholders or hoovering up lots of IP. But that’s what most contemporary laboratories — our very own New Atlantises, if you like — actually do most of the time. Maybe we need a bit of that utopia stuff back.This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.</article></body>

The First Scientific Utopia Still Matters 400 Years Later

‘New Atlantis’, Francis Bacon’s pioneering work of proto-science fiction, has just been reissued. Here’s why it still matters.

Utopias are one of the earliest, most straightforward forms of speculative fiction. Beginning with Thomas More’s 1516 faux travelogue about the strange, egalitarian land of Utopia that gave the concept its name, telling stories whose chief aim is to describe what an ideal world might look like became an enduring art form. Yet critics don’t usually place the genesis of science fiction until the Industrial Revolution — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often cited as the starting pistol of the genre.

Which, fair enough — utopias usually took the form of a travelogue; a visitor to a new fantastic and ostensibly perfected place would record and relay his adventures to readers back home. But Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, published in 1626, was different. It featured plenty of what we’d recognize as major elements of modern science fiction; detailed technological speculation, a wide embrace of science as the key ingredient to a better future, and so on. In fact, it’s regarded as the first scientific utopia — the first major articulation of the idea that technology and science might eventually perfect our lives if only innovation were allowed to flourish and to take center stage.

This has proved time and again to be a deeply problematic notion, of course — but it’s an unquestionably influential one. It might just be one of the most influential ideas of the last few centuries. Given that, and the fact that New Atlantis was recently reissued in a handsome edition, along with selections from Bacon’s also-interesting Sylva Sylvarum by Repeater Press, it’s an ideal time to take stock of this curious work’s impact. So, I reached out to Robert Barry, the writer who offers a lengthy introduction and contextualization for the new volume, to dig into this forgotten but influential utopia.

OneZero: New Atlantis can lay a claim to being the first “scientific” utopia — a detailing of a society where the promise of technology and science will be unlocked to usher in more perfect lives for all of its citizens. Why is the book still resonant now?

Robert Barry: It’s kind of an interesting time to think about Francis Bacon and what he represented. He’s such a man of his time, in many ways — the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the end of the Tudor era and beginning of the Jacobean, after Henry VIII but before the civil war, the time of Shakespeare, Descartes, and Galileo. The beginning of modern science, but also of modern bureaucracy. In other ways, Bacon feels oddly contemporary. He was, after all, essentially a spin doctor. A courtly advisor and speechwriter, who was often much better at gaining power for other people than himself. And what writer Evgeny Morozov refers to as “technological solutionism,” this idea that for every problem, there is an app for that, some quick tech fix to brush away all of society’s ills (viz, Elon Musk’s Twitter feed) basically starts with Bacon and finds its most imaginative expression in New Atlantis.

But while Bacon’s project involved bringing together what had previously been two quite separate things — knowledge of the world and its remaking, that is science and technology or philosophy and practical magic; today we can see, in the kind of stuff that James Bridle outlines in the New Dark Age (like shopping algorithms that turn racist, flash crashes on the stock market, airplanes derailed by clear air turbulence caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the air), that science and technology are starting to slip apart again, as high speed and highly recursive computing systems drive technological systems to develop and expand in a way that is too fast and too complex for our understanding of them to keep up.

You focus your introduction on the ways that Bacon’s tract pioneered influential thinking about electronic sound and music — do you take this to be one of its key contributions? Can you briefly describe what those are, and how they’ve guided the field’s development?

Despite the crucial place of Bacon’s work in the history of contemporary thought, he’s not really a philosopher who has received much attention from theorists in the last 50 years or so. There are a few bits in Foucault here and there (and the influence of Bacon’s most famous formulation “knowledge is power” upon Foucault’s own pouvoir-savoir is kind of obvious, I suppose), but other than that, if recent philosophy mentions Francis Bacon it’s more likely the reference will be to the 20th-century painter. However, starting with Daphne Oram at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the New Atlantis does start to gain the attention of musicians working with electronics, and the first historians of electronic music.

There’s this bit in the story where the Bacon’s protagonists are shown round these laboratories devoted to different disciplines — or different senses, really. There’s a “Perfume House”, where they mix up chemicals to make all kinds of different odors, a “Perspective House”, which looks at tricks of the light and lens and mirrors and things. And then there’s the “Sound House”, where they practice “all sounds and their generation.” The passage goes on to describe previously unknown instruments, techniques of sound manipulation to make sounds louder or shriller or deeper, to add echoes or to throw the voice across great distances, and so forth.

For Oram, who had studied the work of Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen and Berio and so on before she set up the Radiophonic Workshop at the BBC’s studios in Maida Vale, this all sounded very much like electronic music and the kind of effects that could be achieved with magnetic tape and filters and oscillators. So she printed this bit of the text out and pinned it to the door of the Workshop when it opened in 1957, as a kind of manifesto and also, I think, as a way of asserting some kind of ownership over the place, as a kind of utopian bulwark against — ironically, considering Bacon’s own biography — the bureaucratic tendencies of the BBC. And then following Oram, all sorts of people followed suit in making this connection between electronic music and the sound houses of the New Atlantis. There are several albums named after the story that quote from that passage in the sleeve notes, quite a few books about the history of electronic music start off by quoting it (and Oram herself gave many lectures on the history of electronic music which would involve judicious use of it). When I visited the studio of Peter Zinovieff, the guy who created EMS, the first British synthesizer manufacturer, he had a framed quote from New Atlantis on the wall there.

Many of these writers and composers would refer to this passage as something like an “uncanny presentiment,” as if it’s sort of a weird coincidence. But I think there’s more to it than that. Because what’s going on in this passage — and also in the second and third part of the Sylva Sylvarum, which was originally published alongside New Atlantis — is Bacon is bringing together a number of different phenomena that had previously been quite separate: namely, the theory of music, and the more practical knowledge involved in things like the production of musical instruments and an interest in echoes and things like that. Bacon called this “acoustics” (or rather the “acoustique art”), and he was really the first person to use the term in this way. And without this development, the invention of all the stuff that actually made the work of Oram and Schaeffer and Stockhausen possible is more or less unthinkable. So it’s not just an uncanny presentiment, in a way he really did lay down the conditions of possibility for electronic music to emerge.

There are a lot of utopias that have been sketched out over the years, especially around the period after Atlantis. What makes Bacon’s, in particular, so enduring?

New Atlantis sticks out among utopias of its time because it’s not just (or at least not just) a response to some particular historical event happening at the time (as a lot of the later 17th century utopias were, around the time of the English Civil War). And it’s not just like the dream of a more or less isolated scholar wishing there was someplace he could go to think and be quiet where that desire to think and be quiet would be respected and honored (which is sort of what Campanella’s City of the Sun is, and a few others around that time). Or rather, New Atlantis actually kind of is both of those things, but it’s also something, which feels much more modern. It’s an exercise in technological extrapolation. It’s like, here is a survey of the absolute cutting edge of knowledge and science that we have right now and what would happen if we pushed that just a little bit further. And this move, really, is the essence of science fiction, from Jules Verne and HG Wells to Hugo Gernsback and beyond. The basic desire that animates Francis Bacon here is the same desire that motivated the authors of 2001 and Starship Troopers and I, Robot and Star Trek and any number of other more familiar recent stories. He’s writing the future, in a historical moment when our own idea of the big, capital-F Future was just being invented. And I think today, when that kind of optimistic view of the future feels harder and harder to grasp, recovering some of that may be more important than ever.

It’s interesting how you note that Bacon, in some senses, pioneered or at least advanced the state of the art for technological extrapolation, which I agree is fair to claim as a key ingredient of science or speculative fiction. That being the case, do you think Bacon helped inaugurate or influence any of the speculative fictions that followed? If so, can you expand on how? Are there any earlier scientists or inventors or thinkers we know of that were directly inspired by Bacon?

More or less all of them, at least in the 17th century. New Atlantis was left unfinished when Bacon died and, after its publication, there were several more or less explicit attempts to complete or provide a sequel to it. What’s fascinating about all these sequels is that they show how plastic the original text was since most sought to make explicit what they regarded as implicit in the original tale. This was around the time of the English Civil War, so some supported the roundheads, others were staunch royalists, some even Rosicrucian — and all purported to be faithful to Bacon’s original intentions. You continue to find references to Bacon into the 19th century — there was a Latvian economist called Kārlis Balodi,s who wrote this text called The Future State, and he signed under the pen name Atlanticus as a kind of tip of the hat to Bacon. But in a way, any story which starts with a shipwreck followed by the discovery of a strange new world — which is a pretty significant chunk of golden age space opera — ultimately leads back to New Atlantis. In terms of science, the Royal Society in London was basically modeled after New Atlantis and the experiments listed in Sylva Sylvarum gave them something to do. A lot of the kind of common sense of science — empiricism, inductivism, the idea of a nature governed by rules — goes back to Bacon, as does the notion that states should use that to make technologies for the improvement of society. That’s really what Bacon spent his life arguing for and New Atlantis is a kind of dream based on what might happen if we actually did.

And why doesn’t Bacon get more credit as a forefather of science fiction, an honorarium that usually goes to Mary Shelley or Edgar Allen Poe or so on?

There’s a lot of stuff that we expect science fiction to do that New Atlantis doesn’t do. It’s not set in the future, for one. Nothing was then and wouldn’t be for another century or so. So that disqualifies it for some SF historians. Also, the actual plot — what plot there is — isn’t really driven forward by technology. It’s more like something we discover in the course of it. This, I think, is the definition of SF used by Brian Aldiss in the book, Billion Year Spree, and it’s why he starts with Frankenstein.

Finally, what matters most about New Atlantis today?

The Baconian gesture of yoking together science and technology is increasingly being questioned at the moment, from all sorts of different angles. So it makes sense to reexamine the founding texts of that gesture. More importantly, we seem to have largely stopped employing technology for the improvement of society. New inventions are not making us better people, nor giving us more leisure time, and only rarely allowing the mass of people to live longer, happier lives. Quite the reverse, for the most part. But, you know, that was kind of the whole point. There is absolutely nothing in New Atlantis — or elsewhere in Bacon’s oeuvre — about generating wealth for shareholders or hoovering up lots of IP. But that’s what most contemporary laboratories — our very own New Atlantises, if you like — actually do most of the time. Maybe we need a bit of that utopia stuff back.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.