Mighty Morphin Historical Objects
			Culture and nature have never been distinctive. In the middle to late Eighteenth Century, Francis Bacon's writing about nature of men and goodness of nature, implied culture in its various forms91. In the early to middle Twentieth Century, Olaf Stapledon's fiction distributes scientific knowledge's factual agency and hypotheses amidst the blurry data of qualitative description. His Last and First Men gives a fictional evolution of the human species and defines culture and nature as forms of interdependent material life. Stapledon begins with showing that in science fiction, nature given a future becomes culture. When Hugo Gernsback coined "scientifiction" in the 1920's, novels splitting off from different genres were classified with other titles using "scien," such as "scientific romance"92. So that, several distinctions exist between writings which now fall under the category of science fiction: to a greater extent than H.G. Wells stories, Stapledon's stories are clinical proposals with not only an imaginative quality, but an adherence to the conventions of what seems plausible in fiction and real life. For each of eighteen periods of human development in Last and First Men, Stapledon gives millions of years for their evolution and he can accord this to scientific theory. Admittedly, though, the Seventh Men in the series are extraordinary because of their wings. All that can be said is that these true "avians'', (Seventh Men who's wings are not crippled by a marine salt deficiency) fly into the mouth of a volcano the way Icarus crashes into the sea in Peter Breugal's painting. The painting, as art, is the most cultural of referents, and with a concern for future events and technology, it can be interprated as science fiction, presenting to structures of everyday life93 the simple agricultural tools which conversely convert the entire foreground of the landscape into terraced land-forms for farming. The writing of E.M. Forster sometimes includes science fiction in a protest against modern machines in turn implying the future as well, although culture can be seen through or to entail nature in any of his writings. Forster's essay entitled, "Does Culture Matter?" explains how the establishment of a culture occurs through transmission of its ideas through any means of communication. Natural processes, even though we may not be able to read them, exchange comprehension for other processes which some cultural systems understand too. The science of chaos understands what in Forster is called infectious culture, as a quantifiable perhaps socio-biological natural process, playing nature. Interpreting Forster's relationship to Britain, his biographer, John Colmer suggests that national life was actually natural though it was even called national culture; for it degenerated with the rise of cities which have traditionally been opposed to everything but themselves, or to nature. The city is not the element of distinction for culture and for nature. Nor is degeneration, suggesting devolution, a Romantic return to the earth, facing away from technological signs. This natural process, degeneration, dissolves into cultural method: One looks at Max Nourdau's Degeneration of 1895, and sees the disintegration of culture... ....and nature, a disintegration that parallels how science fiction successfully naturalizes the alien (Stapledon), and how Forster has revealed the cipher of a patterned but unreadable nature.			25. Fiedler, Leslie A. Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1983. p. 144. 'Stapledon, in any case, peoples his richly swarming worlds with creatures of all three kinds. The most vividly imagined among them, however, are based on models likely to be observed by one who (like Stapledon and his wife on the rocky cliffs shere he was first moved to fantasize about man's future) looks from shore to sea to sky: starfish and hermit crabs on the beach itself; kelp and sea anemones below the surface of the water... 26. Deauman, NIcola. E. M. Forster: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. p. 97. 'To Dent, the King's friend with whom he was at this time mainly corresponding and who had given some useful advice about travelling in Italy, he wrote that the start was devilish... comprising wrong tickets unexpected arrival in Paris, sick headaches, quarreling, lost luggage. 91. Bacon, Francis. The Essays. edited by John Pitcher. New York and London: Penguin Books, 1985. p. 177. 'But let not a man trust his victory over his nature too far, for nature will lay buried a great time, an dye revive upon the occasion or temptation. Like as it was with Aesop's damsel, turned from a cat to a woman... 92. The term was eventually put into circulation in the late 1920s by Hugo Gernsback (1894-1967), who had originally coined the word 'scientifiction'. 'Science fiction' gradually replaced the term 'scientific romance', and science fiction i s quite often categorized as 'speculative fiction'. 93. (Fernand Braudel's) Breugal's painting is on the cover of the Perennial Library edition of Braudel's Civilization & Capitalism: The Structures of Everyday Life, the Limits of the possible: 15th-18th Century, Volume 1. Trans: Sian Reynolds William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd and Harper and Row Publishers, 1981.