The current issue of Nature magazine, dated July 19, 2012, features in its Books and Arts section an article I wrote about the TV series Alphas. (Note: those links lead to a paywall required to access the story, but for those without access, Nature is pretty well stocked by libraries.) The second season of Alphas begins airing on the Syfy network in the U.S. this evening, July 23. The piece is a Q&A with the series’ new showrunner, Bruce Miller (also of such shows as Eureka and ER); I was interested in discussing with him the scientific basis for the various powers that are explored in the show, from the synaesthesia-like sensory awareness of Rachel Pirzad to the endorphin-infused strength of Bill Harkin to the ability of Gary Bell (pictured up top in the same image that accompanies the Nature piece) to sniff data from the air.
Part of the realism of Alphas has to do, simply, with the fact that the characters don’t think of themselves as superheroes; they think of themselves as misfits who are more burdened than blessed with these unusual abilities. Rooting that anxiety is the show’s writers’ attempts to only depict powers that can be extrapolated from natural sciences. Thus, there is — at least so far — no time travel or, say, long-distance teleportation. Sound, of course, is among the numerous areas of scientific study that inform Alphas. Last season there was a blind man with dolphin-like sonar powers; he was played by Star Trek’s Data, aka Brent Spiner. This season, Miller explained, there will be at least one more audio-based storyline, one in which “infrasound” — those sounds considered to be below the spectrum perceived by humans — plays a role. He told me more than appears in the Nature story but if I’d written much more, it would have given away the episode.
The Nature story is available, unfortunately behind a paywall, at nature.com. More on Alphas at syfy.com/alphas.
The new novel by Jonathan Lethem takes place in a modern Manhattan slightly askew from our own. It’s the same Epcot for aesthetes that the borough has become in the years since Mayor Rudolph Giuliani bleached Times Square and tamed crime, but there are differences, like a giant, and likely mechanical, tiger raging through midtown, and the existence of pop-cultural artifacts with no equivalent in our world, such as films that don’t appear in the IMDB listings for Marlon Brando and Werner Herzog — at least not in our parallel universe. The novel is titled Chronic City, and true to its name, it’s a marijuana-infused story of cultural paranoia. Key among those paranoids is Perkus, a walking encyclopedia of film, pop music, and politics who spends his time weaving conspiracies from stray threads of coincidence. These insights also manifest themselves in the form of “cluster” headaches, which lead him, in the following scene, to visit an acupuncturist known as Strabo:
