In Charles Cumming's story, inspired by John Buchan's old novel The 39 Steps, we follow a man, watching from above, in an omniscient satellite view.

Someone is tracking his movements through London, as well as his trips south and north across the country. At one point, for instance, our narrator wakes up on a beach, unsure of where he is or what the date might even be.

A loose piece of newspaper came cartwheeling along the sand and wrapped itself around my legs. I picked it up and looked at the date. Two days had passed since I had arrived in Edinburgh.
The newspaper was the Evening News. So I was still in Scotland.

But what are the possibilities for science fiction?

What seems immediately obvious, of course, is that the majority of the genre would be unmappable, so to speak, for no other reason than setting — the locations are all off-world or ship-bound or on the surface of some other moon, dimension, or planet. But that's exactly where part of the challenge would be.

For the moment, let's take San Francisco. You and your friends live in San Francisco and you write a whole new sequence of stories set somewhere in that peninsular city. There are trips through Chinatown and out to old, moldy houses in Outer Sunset; there are visits to gene labs and venture capital firms across the Bay; you go into empty skyscrapers at night and you find strange basements, where black machines and banks of over-heating hard drives whir quietly into the night... doing something — and that's the problem. Nobody knows, and you have to figure it out.

But then you map all this. You put your story into Google Maps, and it's like cartographically footnoting the story line.

It's not like this has never been done before, of course — but soon enough you've got a new map of your city. It's not marked by tourist sites or sites of historical importance.

It's a city re-mapped according to the science fiction that takes place within it.

Eventually, as a reader, you could even pick only those stories set along your morning bus route and read those, and only those, for two weeks; then move on to a different neighborhood; then add your own. You could have interactive urban texts, like something designed by area/code, growing and changing, like an urban sci-fi wiki made from aerial maps.

You move between chapters, between books - as if choosing the geography of your favorite stories might be, in and of itself, an act of publishing.

And then you notice the blind spots in the city, those spaces that, from a literary standpoint, have nothing occurring in them yet. So you write, and you add them to the map, or to any map - or you make a new map — or whatever. What's important is that this sub-genre of urban sci-fi maps continues to grow.

It extends far beyond San Francisco, then, to become a working database of every city and landscape on earth. You can spin around the planet and choose your sci-fi by geography. Going to Warsaw next month? Well, the following stories include a scene set in your hotel... Indeed, in your very hotel room. And you can add to them.

Even the poles of the planet are included, with their mysterious government research labs and their fissures of ice and their weird, conspiratorial plot lines waiting to happen. You can go into the cold with Dan Simmons, say, and track that ship's passage by satellite.

Or maybe all of that is a bit cheesy. Maybe that sounds too much like the origins of D&D, replayed all over again in an era of satellite mapping. Or it sounds like some bad dot-com fantasy, where handheld devices will give us access to things we've never experience before, an ability to navigate the city anew and... thus do something or other to raise a company's stock prices.

So let's pull back a bit, quickly, and restart the idea - and say: well, then, instead, let's develop a new overlay for Google Maps and populate it entirely with events from science fiction. Books, films, song lyrics.

For instance, the "unstable" streets that appear and disappear in China Miéville's short story "Reports of Certain Events in London" are suddenly available for mapping; you can follow their speculative routes, and even plan day trips around them, hiking through the nonexistent side streets of the city.

Or you go to Google Maps one day, because you're planning a trip to Japan or to San Francisco, and you click on "Satellite" view - and then on "William Gibson," a new visualization option. It's brought to you by a partnership between Putnam and Google Maps. So you click on "William Gibson" and a whole informational layer of Gibsonian detail appears. Gibson mentioned this street, and this bridge, and this hotel room - and here it is on a map for you to follow.

Within six months, you can click on "Alfred Hitchcock," "Ray Bradbury," and "H.P. Lovecraft" to see how their films and stories map out. It's the becoming-literary of Google Maps.

After all, you could do the same thing for TV and film - we're not limited to books.

This, you learn, is where the UFO was excavated in Quatermass and the Pit, or where the rage virus broke out in 28 Days Later, or where Dracula's tomb was supposedly found in the absurd film Blade: Trinity.

The Google Maps Guide to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The Google Maps Guide to the Fiction of J.G. Ballard.

In fact, I'm reminded of those awesome world maps from Judge Dredd.

Now, though, the idea is that we'd key all that stuff into Google Maps, or into Google Earth, or into whatever, and we'd add some more details - and, soon enough, you could find, say, the offshore prison from John Woo's Face/Off, perfectly located right there on the map. Or you can zoom in and follow the future four-part division of England in Rupert Thomson's under-appreciated novel Divided Kingdom. Or, for that matter, you could even map out the house and it surrounding landscape from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

It doesn't matter what you map, in other words; what matters is simply that we explore, even just casually, the literary/sci-fi potential of online mapping. Why? Because it sounds fun. And if you don't think it sounds fun, don't do it.

But everyone loves maps. How else could they get away with publishing things like The Maps of Tolkien's Middle Earth or even The Atlas of Middle Earth? Because people like maps.

Or how about dashboard navigation systems in cars? Here, Tor Books could team up with Cadillac to give you a brand new driving experience: you're in New York, driving a Cadillac, and so you hit the "Urban Sci-Fi" navigational option on the dashboard screen - and you immediately find yourself driving through the futuristic literature of New York, with key sites mapped or flagged. It's science fiction as a new template for urban tourism. You're following the action of I Am Legend, or tracing out the flood line and tidal wave from The Day After Tomorrow.

In other words, let's do for science fiction what those maps do for J.R.R. Tolkien.

Let's develop Google Maps of Sci-Fi.

Like a strange new race of Celtic gods, London's wealthiest residents, "digging dozens of feet underground," the Times reported, were busy constructing a literally subsurface world for themselves in the ancient waterproof clay of southern England.

As the Times explained, London's "super-rich," including oil barons, Indian steel tycoons, and the odd American hedge fund manager, have been "seeking permission to excavate under the garden... making space for a three-story garage with car stacker, a swimming pool, a gym and a private home cinema." At least one example of this bizarre new form of subterranean architectural eccentricity even includes a "walk-in shower with waterproof television screens and glass walls that turn opaque with the press of a button."

While doing this, of course, there's still a house to consider, sitting up there on the earth's surface - so, in an effort to prevent cave-ins, the "original house" has been "propped up on giant steel pillars." Digging machines and men in helmets, like a painting by Fernand Léger, grind away at the planet beneath.

This spelunking upper class of central London - surely something new in human history? - are even now "engaged in a multimillion-pound game of one-upmanship," the Times suggested, "as they vie with each other to dig ever bigger, wider and deeper extensions."

So I'd like to propose a slightly more interesting addiction for investor class Brits, hip-hop moguls, and easy-money Hollywood types who think cocaine is still a thrill and Courvoisier worth pursuing: Give up your alcoholism and your sports cars and your use of bad drugs from the 1980s - and start digging show caves.

Dig vast, artificial caverns that extend for miles beneath the city.

Show your friends.

"I'd like to introduce you to Komatsu earth-moving equipment," I'd say, sitting across the table from Robert Downey Jr. I'd show him a sales brochure. "For the price of one custom Ferrari, you could buy half a dozen of these things - and rip away."

Buy land outside Moab. Buy a thousand mountain acres in Colorado. Buy an estate house somewhere deep in London - and tear the basement up. Go down. Go under. Stay up all night in a haze of klieg lights, dust, and diesel fumes, drilling into the planet.

Rats will flee from you. Water mains will burst.

Now start a few side tunnels and install nice couches.

Because who cares? You're the world's first interesting celebrity. You build tunnels beneath rowhouses and drink liquid Vitamin D.

And forget your neighbors. Slash would have thrown TVs out the window and played his guitar too loud - how exciting! So you're just playing with earth-moving machines at 3am, building artificial show caves beneath the city streets. You've got dredging equipment. Pulverizers.

You could be up, listening to the irritating squeal of a mobile crusher, shredding concrete four floors below ground.

You wake up to hear that Keith Richards has been arrested - and not because he's wrecked a Rolls Royce or bought heroin, but because he's tunneled all the way to France.

Or Colin Farrell gives up sex to construct a network of manmade caverns beneath his house in outer Dublin. That's not an earthquake - it's Colin Farrell.

He's drilling again.

Colin Farrell Addicted to Mining, the newspapers report.

I'm reminded of Seymour Cray, founder of Cray supercomputers, who apparently found "his inspiration" somewhere "deep in a dirt tunnel beneath his Wisconsin home." Having eventually tunneled out toward the nearby woods, his underground adventure wasn't always free from surface incidents: "When a tree fell through the top of the tunnel several years ago," Time magazine reported in 1988, "Cray used the opening to install a periscope-equipped lookout."

For Cray, the excavation project is more than a simple diversion. "I work when I'm at home," he recently told a visiting scientist. "I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s."

Of course, Seymour Cray was no by means the first person to relieve a bit of stress through home tunneling.

Two years ago, the excellent blog Modern Mechanix looked at a man named Dr. H.G. Dyar, who had "one of the oddest hobbies in the world": he had "found health and recreation in digging an amazing series of tunnels beneath his Washington home."

Almost a quarter of a mile of tunnels has been completed, lined with concrete. The deepest passage... extends 32 feet down. Every bit of earth was removed unaided by Dr. Dyar, being carried out in pails. He found the tunnel-digging an appealing form of exercise to relieve the intense strain of his work day, which involved much close work with high-power microscopes.

Almost anti-climactically, we learn that "the idea first came to Dyar when he sought to make an underground entrance to his furnace cellar" - but, as with all things worthwhile, anywhere, he simply kept going. "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise," William Blake once wrote - and Blake wasn't even a tunneler.

Finally, there was William Lyttle, the so-called Mole Man of Hackney. Lyttle was an east London eccentric who lived in a dilapidated house on Mortimer Road. "But this is no ordinary house," the Guardian reported in August 2006.

Quoting at great length, because I love this story:

Since the early 1960s, the man who owns and lives inside the £1m Victorian property has been digging. No one knows how far the the network of burrows underneath 75-year-old William Lyttle's house stretch. But according to the council, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m (26ft) deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house.

Their surveyors estimate that the resident known locally as the Mole Man has scooped 100 cubic metres of earth from beneath the roads and houses that surround his 20-room property.

"I often used to joke that I expect him to come tunnelling up through the kitchen floor," said Marc Beishon, who lives a few yards from Mr Lyttle's house.

His wife, Joy, sees the serious side of the issue, however. "We moved in six years ago and we've been complaining to the council ever since," she said. "Until six weeks ago they had the audacity to tell us the house was structurally sound. The whole of the opposite street lost power one day after he tapped into a 450-volt cable."

Now, after 40 years of complaints, the council has admitted Mr Lyttle's quarrying has put the neighbourhood at risk. Last week it obtained a court order to temporarily evict him in order to enable engineers to fill the holes with cement, at an estimated cost of £100,000 - for which Mr Lyttle will be billed.

"There has been movement in the ground," Phillip Wilman, a council surveyor, told Thames magistrates court.

In any case, how much more interesting would the world be if, say, Eliot Spitzer's recent and mysterious financial transactions had not been directed toward sex - it's easy enough to get that, Mr. Spitzer - but toward weird and illegal machines that caused movement in the ground outside his Albany mansion? Police surveyors armed with ground-penetrating radar swarm the place - and discover several miles' worth of artificial caves in a warren of entrances and exits throughout the city. Eliot Spitzer did this, the gruff, benchpress-ready men quietly say. We've got to stop him.

But I've made my point.

What I'd like to see, at some point before I die, is a series of show caves, free and open to the public, that have been excavated and paid for by the film and music revenues of global superstars.

All the tunnels have been supervised by celebrities, who are addicted to digging. Shia LaBoeuf has a tunnel. Shakira has several. Even Bob Dole has one - but he's forgotten how to use it.

You book a flight to Hollywood, then, and you buy a Star Map - but within three hours you find yourself one hundred and sixty seven feet below ground in the most spectacular cave you've ever seen. Its stalactites have been precision-cut by CNC-milling machines, the walls shaped by computer-programmable routers. There is a vague smell of sawdust in the air, and you notice several wood boards holding up some parts of the walls. There are vaults visible in the distance, and a slight groaning sound.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for the New York Times, was there last week - and he hated the place.

Rumor has it, though, that a vast, echoless complex exists beneath Atlanta, dug by Ludacris. Its dimensions are too shocking to believe. He hangs out down there with Umberto Eco, discussing the Hollow Earth Theory and practicing rhymes.

Whenever another royalty check comes through, he digs deeper.

(Note: The final two images show the Excelsior Tunnel, and were taken by the always impressive Nick Catford of Subterranea Britannica; all rights, copyrights, and otherwise remain with him. The opening thumbnail is a South American ice cave, shot by Flickr user Tom Holub)

At one point, thinking that he might be going insane, our narrator - a kind of rogue anthropologist, uniquely attuned to the grotesque details of human existence - begins to hallucinate. On the trail of this conspiratorially strange and well-disguised cult, the man dreams of vast structures made from "exposed stonework," inside of which "great globes of luminous crystal serv[ed] as lamps." He sees "inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods" standing around in the shadows.

Later, I had visions of sweeping through cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated must have towered in the sky for thousands of feet.

There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trap-doors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril.

Everything he sees is so architectural, clouded with the air of eras long gone. In another hallucination, for instance, the man stands on the "titanic flat roof" of a massive dream-structure, from which he sees "almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two hundred feet wide... Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the gray, steamy heavens."

He even stumbles across "aberrant piles of square-cut masonry" and "dark cylindrical towers," where "fungi of inconceivable size" grow amidst "great jungles of unknown tree ferns."

It's as if the surrealist montages of Max Ernst have been combined with Le Corbusier's Ideal City.

I floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed trapdoors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung.

After all, he lets himself speculate, what is housed here, in these dream palaces where stone buildings look more like extraterrestrial coral reefs, might be the very gods this ancient religious cult once worshipped. And then things get really weird - or, as Lovecraft's narrator explains, "the real horror began." Still caught up in his dreams-cum-hallucinations, our amateur anthropologist has visions of "South Africa in 50,000 B.C.," and he sees the "ruins of incredible sunken cities" covered in coral. Amidst all of this, there are creatures with "semifluid" anatomies who have "no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores." They are almost indistinguishable from the architecture they inhabit, being "supremely natural parts of their environment."

Bizarrely, the man then predicts that an "Australian physicist... will die in 2,518 A.D," and he mentions something about the "military use of great winds."

There is even a cryptic, and absurd, reference to "a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future."

With all of these things in mind, our rogue investigator, on the trail of his ancient cult, sets off for the deserts of Australia - where the "monstrous waste" of a city made from basalt blocks "half shrouded by sand" greets him.

To make quite a long story short, he almost immediately realizes that this is the very city, here beneath the desert sands of Australia, that he's been seeing in hallucinations all these years. "What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of old," he asks himself, "in the millions of years since the time of my dreams?"

But he's scared even to think of the answer. "Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would not permit myself to think," he mutters - because beneath this ruined city in the remote Australian interior are the "secrets of the primal planet," where weird, shambling, underground forms meander through vast concentrations of architecture that aren't quite cities, they're more like hives: they are alien habitats for a form of life that humans might not ever come to grips with or understand.

In any case, he sets about exploring the place, too fascinated to resist. "Madness drove me on," he says - "sheer madness that impelled and guided me," as if archaeologists might become intoxicated with the thrill of excavation, unable to stop themselves from going further. Driven by a "hellish delusion," our narrator thus enters the underground ruins through a doorway, which he describes as a "downward aperture" into the Earth.

Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged and staggered - often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner of that demoniac gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of light through choked and crumbling, yet familiar, archways.

But it is this very weirdness that our rogue anthropologist, with his fevered dreams and inexplicable compulsions, soon realizes might lie at the distant origins of human life, something altogether alien - something forever preserved in the "vague old myths" of the religious cult that Lovecraft's narrator has been attempting to research. But I could go on and on. Lovecraft's characters are always taking misguided and badly outfitted tours through remote landscapes, hoping to find something, whether it's in Greenland or Iceland or Australia or Antarctica. They explore old Native American burial mounds in the American Midwest and they travel through untrafficked fishing villages in New England. Distant Pacific archipelagos are mentioned, as is Einsteinian relativity. Plus, there's a lot of vague and poetically misunderstood science, of which I've always been a fan. "The Shadow Out of Time" is only one such example.

Earlier on io9: Guillermo del Toro, Report To Cthulhu

(Note: The second-to-last image is from the always stimulating k-punk, and the last image is by no one less than John Coulthart, master of the extradimensionally weird. The other two are by Max Ernst.)

1) Earthquake Towers

In 2005, scientists discovered that a new skyscraper in Taiwan might be causing earthquakes. Called Taipei 101, it was temporarily the tallest building in the world, before towers like the Al Burj were anything but rumors. "At more than 500 metres," we read back then, "Taipei 101 in Taiwan is the world's tallest building. But now geologists fear that its size and weight may have transformed a stable area into one susceptible to earthquake activity."

The building is so heavy, exerting such "exceptional downward stress" on the earth beneath it, that it might have "reopened" an ancient tectonic fault. If true, this discovery "may have far-reaching implications for the construction of other buildings and man-made megastructures."

At the very least, we should ask: What would happen if we built more of them? Could we build fourteen of these things in San Francisco, in an act of long-term tectonic warfare, and destroy the whole city within a decade?

Conversely, could we build just the right number of these, at just the right spots, throughout the greater Los Angeles basin and thus nail the tectonic plates in place — weighing southern California down and zipping the San Andreas Fault up tight? It'd be seismic acupuncture, a new form of therapy against continental drift. Perhaps one gigantic tower exactly placed in outer Tokyo could make the whole Pacific Rim freeze up. That is, till a rogue group of German terrorists arrives and wreaks havoc... Directed by John McTiernan. It's geology as a military campaign, enacted through architectural design.

2) Tectonic Warfare

In the wildly under-appreciated 1985 James Bond film A View to a Kill, Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) likes to ride boats with Grace Jones and grin a lot. He likes blimps and he has blonde hair. He has a plan. He wants to blow up the San Andreas fault, cause some sort of catastrophic earthquake, and thus flood Silicon Valley. Which is just a bunch of car dealerships and seafood restaurants, in any case. But this flood will make Zorin's own microchip business go through the roof... or something. He'll then rule the planet.

Needless to say, Zorin's plan fails. Bond makes it with a geologist and the world goes back to sleep. But the central idea is worth pursuing: Could we bomb faultlines all over the earth, causing earthquakes? If not, why not? I'm reminded of a TV show I watched last weekend, about Mount St. Helens. Mount St. Helens is supposedly going to erupt any year now — but today it just sits there, sort of steaming. It's bit boring, frankly. So why don't we bomb it? Let's see what that thing is capable of! Unmanned drones from a nearby air base climb to 25,000 feet. It's 3 o'clock in the morning. They open fire. They hack the earth, in other words, applying the landscape theories of Max Zorin. Think of it as Zorinism: tectonic warfare.

3) Igneous Printheads

Inkjet printers require small, spongy reservoirs of liquid ink to operate. But there are alternatives to ink.
There is magma.

A magma chamber is a "reservoir of molten rock material beneath the earth's surface." It "is connected to the earth's surface by a vent." So what if we took control of the vent? What if we could print new landforms, selectively directing and solidifying liquid rock where we want? Could we attach a kind of igneous printhead, guiding magma into new forms? I'm thinking here of the concrete-printing machines of Behrokh Khoshnevis, or even just 3D printing. In other words, could we rapid-prototype experimental mountain forms, attaching igneous printheads to reservoirs of liquid rock and printing landscapes on the earth above?

4) Colored Magma

Could we dye these magmatic streams using metals - injecting huge amounts of copper, or iron, into a domesticated magma well, extruding colored rocks only a few days later? And could we print cathedrals with it, spraying their vaults and buttresses into place with a deep liquid mixture of green and red?

5) Slow Sculpture

In his novel Iron Council, China Miéville proposes something called slow sculpture. Miéville describes an artist who creates literally geological works of art on a time scale that exceeds any individual human life.

Huge sedimentary stones... each carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last disclosing their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths.

And what long-term geological hacks might have been left for us someday to discover?

[Note: The last two photos were taken by Paraflyer]

They Live revealed the psychological effects of late-80s Reaganism gone wild. Even Iraq War zombies have shown up on the big screen - and Cloverfield? It's the return of the repressed, the environmental effects of offshore dumping come back to tear us apart. Or something like that.

Women aren't meant to ask for divorces and move out - bad things will happen. Anthropologists should be wary of what they bring home with them; maybe they should never have left the country in the first place. After all, there are Communists everywhere. And everyone's off having a good time, doing something else, without you.

And what about The Stuff? That weird and strangely forgotten horror classic from 1985 about some sort of brain-rotting, highly addictive frozen yogurt... that turns out really to be an organism mined from the surface of the Earth by sinister retail dessert conglomerates? Edible geology. Timed perfectly for the advent of artificial sweeteners and for the arrival of frozen yogurt at your local mall, who wasn't afraid? "Are you eating it?" the film's absurd poster asked, addressing an American audience terrified less by the Cold War than by the FDA's recent approval of Aspartame. "Or is it eating you?"

More than a year ago, meanwhile, The New Yorker ran a short article about Halloween-themed haunted houses in Queens - or Brooklyn, or San Francisco, or Atlanta, I don't remember - that had been designed to provoke real fears. Not chainsaw-wielding maniacs, in other words, but tax auditors and bedroom spiders and muggers with hoods. The experience of falling from great heights. Having your in-laws round for a surprise breakfast while you're sitting on the toilet, late for work. And so on. Are you more scared of being eaten by zombies or of becoming homeless? I'm reminded of Nick Flynn's book, the unfortunately titled Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, in which Flynn, a volunteer at the local homeless shelter, finds, horrifically, that his own father has just checked in for the night.

In other words, what are we really afraid of?

The idea here is that maybe contemporary horror films only cater to one side of our world's ever-widening political divide. We've got the horrors of ecocide, of nuclear radiation, of Orwellian Christian hordes taking over the country, and robot Presidents - but what if a different sort of horror film were to come out someday in a theater near you? You're browsing Netflix in the summer of 2009 and you see Blood Rite recommended for whatever algorithmic reason. You rented something once with "blood" in the title. You have no idea, actually. But you're bored - so you click on it.

It's about gangs of AIDS-infected homosexuals kidnapping Cincinnati businessmen and forcing them to drink blood. It's directed by Jim McGreevey.

Two weeks later you see a preview for Sovereign Terrain: a lone man stands out in the desert somewhere, surrounded by undead Mexicans. There are more and more of them. He doesn't understand where they're coming from. Are they magic? They walk right through fences - and they double in number every 36 hours. What's worse, he once employed them...

Then there's the gay black couple that only adopts white boys. They watch ballet during the Super Bowl and hug quite frequently, even by normal standards. That's a lot of hugging, people mutter to themselves. That's an awful lot of hugging. Grown men shift uncomfortably in their seats. I don't like this film, they think. It's scarier than Jaws. They have their hands in front of their eyes. Women are screaming.

It gets worse.

The blacks are actually Jewish.

What's happening to this country? People literally throw popcorn at the screen. It's outrageous. We are losing control. Mexicans illegally crossing the border are just a front for an invasion by Satan - wait a minute, that was Constantine.

So what about horror for the Red States?

Sinister black athletes invade from space. Women are drawn to them.

Perhaps we've seen enough Blue State horror. Perhaps we've seen too many military coups and Fascist dystopias and suburban conformist nightmares. Perhaps we don't even know what we're afraid of anymore. Maybe we'll all live in cages, whilst endangered tree frogs rule the world. Down with these goddamn tree frogs! people scream. Humans unite!

Weird tools from the tail end of the 1800s - like Helmholtz Resonators (pictured above) and the Horizontal Kymograph - were considered by some to be a vital part of "experimental psychology," a new field whose central proposition was that psychology itself could be measured and mapped; even the most subtle reactions, on the level of conscious thought and unconscious reflex, could be predicted and repeated elsewhere, these experimentalists believed, under laboratory circumstances.

I'm reminded here of Dr. Channard, from the film Hellbound: Hellraiser II, whose mantra - "We have to see; we have to know" - became an oft-used sample in early 90s industrial music. Channard, that is, was not just a surgeon: he was an experimental psychologist.

In any case, not everyone was happy to measure the human mind - assuming such a thing exists - using instruments of brass and wood. "Many philosophers vehemently opposed the new experimental psychology," we read. "They adhered to Emmanuel [sic] Kant's view that mental events could never be captured or measured by experiment." Capturing mental events, like netting butterflies, was a task that required much more grace and skill, not brute machines - however carefully calibrated they may have been. Desktop resonators that looked like something out of a bad 19th-century stage version of Ghostbusters didn't, even then, inspire much confidence.

But let's put all these arguments aside and look at the actual objects.

The Hipp Chronoscope, for instance - a glass domed pedestal full of clockwork, gears, and dials - was adapted by legendary German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt from its original use as an astronomical instrument. After some fine-tuned tinkering, Wundt transformed it into something that could help "quantify nervous reaction times." In other words, a mechanism once meant for timing "stellar events" was retrofitted to measure the human nervous system - perhaps implying an unexpected astral cousinry between nerve endings and stars.

Then check out this auditory instrument (pictured below, left), made of "delay lines" that measure the speed and sensitivity of human hearing.

There's also the Ranschburg Memory Device and the Förster perimeter. There are aesthesiometric compasses, and there's the Einthoven String Galvanometer (pictured below, right). This latter device looks rather like a carburetor - only one you hook up to your own chest "to provide highly accurate records of heart currents."

Of course, there's also the Control Hammer apparatus, which served as "the fundamental timing device of the laboratory upon which all timing calibrations relied." Something like a musical metronome, then, ticking away in the background of the laboratory while scientists focused strange brass instruments covered in levers upon their fellow humans, the Control Hammer literally set the time and pace of these psychological experiments.

The museum's description is extraordinary: the Control Hammer was used "to generate a known and constant period of time."

However, all of these now somewhat eccentric little pieces of psychological enginery - like prosthetic testing devices for the mind - also make me think of something from David Cronenberg's old film Dead Ringers. There, amidst a variety of other things, we encounter "gynecological instruments for operating on mutant women."

These devices, specially made by a Toronto-based sculptor for a deranged and drug-addicted gynecologist, are exactly what they sound like: surgical instruments for operating on women whose bodies are somehow not right - nevermind that this "not right" status is entirely in the prescription-addled brain of our vertigo-stricken gynecologist.

The medical devices he has built, in other words, are projections of his own anatomical fears and fantasies.

What about psychological instruments, then, for treating people whose minds are somehow not right - nevermind that such a status entirely depends on whatever standards of normalcy exist at the time? After all, the very instruments pictured here, now gathering dust at a museum in Toronto, are glimpses of just such devices.

The question, then, is: What do these little wooden cases full of tuning forks and color wheels, sound pipes and timers, themselves assume about the human psychology they're meant to measure? I'm tempted to say that these were like reverse Turing machines before their time, or even early Voight-Kampff tests: mechanical devices meant to show who was human - one of us - and who was not. Call them Othering Machines, bringing down their judgments like a hammer.

When we build tools with which to test ourselves, what do the tools themselves imply?

(Elsewhere: Don't miss the Museum of the History of Reaction Time Research, a subset of the Museum of the History of Psychological Instrumentation in Montclair, New Jersey.)