Monday, September 28, 2009

Renaissance Fanboys

a.k.a. The Humanist Circle

Thomas More. Peter Giles. Jerome Busleiden. Guillaume Bude.
In Early Modern Europe, these were the guys too scared to talk to girls and always picked last for the falconry team. They spent most of their time indoors conjugating Latin verbs. And, like many other historical nerds, their obsessive, bookish tendencies made them powerful figures for social change and the advancement of human thought.

On the other hand, the closest they got to any action was the vicarious thrills of reading about Aeneas' voyages or Catullus' bath house shenanigans. Nerdy types, because they don't fit in in the real world, invest a lot of their time and emotion into fictional worlds. So it's really no surprise that one of the seminal texts produced by the humanist circle, Thomas More's Utopia essentially amounts to an early sci fi fanfic.

Think about it. Utopia is written in Latin--the language of scholars, a.k.a. nerds. Latin was useful for 16th century scholars because it was the international language--they could use it to communicate with people around the continent who shared their interests. Prior to its publication, More circulated Utopia among the humanist circle, getting feedback from people from Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and other distant locales, which was only possible because of their shared language.

This mode of exchanging ideas is not too different from an internet forum. These guys even came up with "usernames" fitting their personae in this scholarly circle. But instead of going by "spockluvr84" they made up wacky Latin pseudonyms such as humanist superstar Gerrit Gerritszoon's avatar "Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus." Way sexier, no?

Anyway, for this bunch, "the final frontier" was a lot closer than outer space. The new exciting territory was just across the ocean. Amerigo Vespucci et al. were sending back all kinds of reports of unknown civilizations and alternative ways of life--always attractive to nerds because, "hey, maybe I'll fit in there" (you know, like the reason modern day fanboys always want to move to Japan).

So, Sir Saint Thomas More made up a fake travelogue about the cool stuff that might be out there and, like (good) sci-fi today, it was complete with deft social commentary. Utopia adheres to the sci-fi trope of taking certain aspects of what is and stretching them to consider what may be if society continues in the same direction. In other words, Utopia is to capitalism (new-fangled in the 1510s) what The Matrix is to our contemporary dependence on computers. Add to that the fact that More's buddies mapped out his imaginary island, made up a language for it, and even wrote some poetry in "Utopian" and you have, unavoidably, the forerunners of the Buffyverse, Star Trek conventions, and Veritaserum.

More even does some pioneering into Mary Sue territory, later writing to his friends about his fantasy of himself as ruler over the Utopians. Really the only thing lacking in sci fi terms is gratuitous sexy times with unrealistically-proportioned ladies. But I'm pretty sure Thomas never got over his fear of girls to the point that he'd be into that kind of thing.