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This is something I wrote (but haven't yet posted) for my blog. I'd very much appreciate comments from the people here, as if anyone could pick this argument apart (or indeed find evidence to strengthen it) it would be the people at Barbelith. It's written for a non-fan audience, so ignore the bits that you already know:
One of the things Grant Morrison has spoken about in interviews, which comes off as Morrison being new-age wacky, is the idea of giving sentience to the DC Universe. This may not be as odd as it sounds, and Seven Soldiers may well be one of the ways in which he is planning to achieve this.
I don’t know how much, if anything, Morrison knows about network topology, but he does appear to read a lot about science and mathematics (the science in his comics is far more accurate than most, although tending to the pop-wacky end of science – he’s made good use of Bohm’s Hidden Variable hypothesis and Sheldrake’s ‘morphic resonance’ (a concept I dislike, but one that is more interesting than the usual stuff trotted out by comics writers)). If he’s read anything on the subject, I think a rather crucial piece of the Seven Soldiers puzzle, that just looks like a storytelling device, may have a more significant meaning…
Seven Soldiers is intended to revitalise seven fairly obscure DC comics characters, only two of whom – Zatanna and Mister Miracle – have any real connection to the DC universe as it stands. Each character gets a relatively large supporting cast, and the supporting casts sometimes turn up in issues of more than one miniseries. The story as a whole requires the seven of them to work as a team, but without the seven of them ever meeting.
Now, before I get on to the network topology stuff, some of you might find it rather unlikely that the stuff I’m talking about could be subtext in what are, on the surface, fairly standard superhero comics. But Morrison’s comics have a whole hidden network of symbols under the surface – many of them are designed as magical sigils, and he puts more ideas into the work for people to dig out than most writers short of Joyce. As an example, one panel description from the script to his Batman comic Arkham Asylum manages to discuss Bohm’s hypothesis, medieval church architecture, a 16th century book of folk tales and astrology (I would type out the full panel description – a fascinating insight into the man’s mind – but that would double the length of this post).
Anyway, I was recently reading Critical Mass by Philip Ball, a book on the physics of society, and he was talking about Small World Networks. Small World Networks are so called because they can very accurately model normal social networks. I once went to a party at the house of an internet friend of mine, where another friend also turned up – someone I knew from a completely different set of friends/acquaintances. During the party he started talking about the cleavage of the singer in my band, and I was quite surprised because she was a real-life friend in Manchester and these were internet friends in London, who I met through completely different social circles. This kind of situation is, in fact, rather common – as the Kevin Bacon Numbers game (and the Erdos numbers game used by mathematicians) shows.
A Small World Network is a network where you find a large number of highly-connected clumps, each of which is connected to the other clumps by only one or two members. The way in which this relates to social circles is rather obvious – most of my friends know most of my other friends, but some of them also have large groups of other friends who don’t know me or my friends.
Small World Networks turn up quite regularly in highly-connected systems, as they’re a very good compromise between, on the one hand, total connection of every node to every other node, and on the other hand, connecting every node to one or two hubs. They are, in effect, a distributed network and allow information to pass very quickly even if several elements of the network get destroyed. This is the way in which the Web works – it wasn’t designed that way, it grew up that way by a series of accidents – but this is why the Web is able to cope with the massive growth it has seen over the last decade.
More importantly to this discussion, small world networks, because of their efficiency, often turn up in biological systems. The neural connections in the brain appear to be fairly accurately modeled by small world networks, and short-term memory in particular is very well modeled by them.
Now, I already knew this, but Ball mentioned, in passing, and in connection with something else, that the Marvel universe had been studied and found to have some of the properties of such a network, but to be missing some (he claimed this shows the difference between fictional and factual networks, but I disagree with his conclusions).
Of course, after allowing this to percolate in my mind for a while, I went off and read the paper itself. The conclusion the authors come to is that the Marvel universe has many of the properties of a small-world network, but is different in two respects:
It appears that the MU is more clustered than a random network, but not as clustered as a real small-world network. In other words, if Bruce Banner knows Peter Parker, and Peter Parker knows Tony Stark, then in the real world there should be a good chance that Bruce Banner knows Tony Stark, while in the MU that chance is higher than random chance but lower than a ‘realistic’ chance.
The second thing is that the stats for the MU are very, very distorted by a couple of big names like Captain America and Spiderman (as you would expect given that those characters guest-star all over the place to boost sales).
Now, we can assume that the DCU is pretty much like the MU (although I would guess it is slightly more clustered, given the whole ‘generational’ aspect and the fairly segmented team books – but the order of magnitude would be the same). Assuming you had the stated aim, as Morrison does, of helping the DCU achieve sentience, one thing you would want to do would be to make it into a small-world network similar to the human brain. To do that, you would want to do a few things:
Make a lot of smaller characters more prominent.
Give those characters supporting casts that crossed over, so that a character who knows Agent Helligan would have a higher chance of knowing Scarface.
Give some of them connections to the main DCU (like being former members of the JLA, or fighting Darkseid, but make most of them as unconnected as possible.
And create a few extra links in odd places, like having one of them meet Etta Candy in a therapy group, or another be at the same convention as Booster Gold.
Now, does that remind you of anything? |
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