It was around 1907, I think, when the Reverend Samuel Dunmore heard the timid knock on the rectory door that was about to change his life.
His parishioners often secretly referred to Sam as “the Not Very Reverend Samuel Dunmore”, given that he was much more interested in the natural world of plants and animals than he was in the supernatural one that was meant to be his job. But he always tried his best for them, and so they loved him anyway.
On this particular morning, he opened the creaky door to discover a slight, somewhat elderly lady standing before him, looking flustered amid several heavy wooden crates. Miss Alice, as she was known, was here to inquire whether the young reverend would be willing to look after her mock turtles for her, since she felt she was getting too old for that sort of thing.
Samuel, of course, readily agreed, and that same afternoon he started to build a little cactus garden for them, down by the lake. He had always felt they were more like desert tortoises than turtles, in truth, and assumed this was how they\’d acquired the adjective, \’mock\’. Nonetheless, there was clearly quite a story behind them in some mysterious way, and behind Miss Alice, too.
As a lifelong worrier, it didn’t take Sam very long to start fretting about what would have happened to the mock turtles if Miss Alice hadn’t rescued them. He had heard her mention other strange creatures, too, now that he thought about it. Just briefly, in passing, as if she assumed everyone would understand what she was talking about. People would often nod knowingly, but none of them did understand, really; they just didn’t want to offend her.
What had become of these other creatures, he wondered? Especially since nobody apparently cared much about them in the first place, and they would easily be forgotten. Stories do fade, and their characters fade with them. Miss Alice was clearly fading too, and time might be running out. So what had actually happened to the borogroves, the boojum birds, the gryphons? Had anybody been kind to the slithy toves, or were they simply too slithy? Given that he had always felt a little misunderstood and neglected himself, Samuel decided he should try to find out.
To cut a long story and two world wars short: By the end of his long, eccentric, and slightly isolated life, Samuel\’s beloved menagerie had grown substantially, at least in his own mind. At various times the gardens had even been open to the public, not that many of them showed up. His collection included such rare creatures as the wildly mischaracterized marsh-wiggles, from Narnia, and a few of the less showy, but much easier to look after, relatives of dragons and unicorns. There may even have been a pushmi-pullyou at some point, and perhaps, as some of the older villagers of today have hinted, the odd hobbit. He built them all safe homes in the rectory gardens.
In his wealthier years, our Not Very Reverend Samuel also founded and endowed an earnest, charmingly parochial \’learned society\’ in Frampton village, where it still meets today on the last Tuesday of every month. The Society was dedicated, in its touchingly amateurish way, to the noble cause of “researching, observing, and caring for neglected creatures from children\’s fantasy stories, while there is still time.”
Here in the Twenty-first Century, in an age when antiquated books have largely given way to computer games, and even these are often discarded without a moment\’s thought for their inhabitants, I stand before you as the third and current president of this august, if slightly tattered institution: the Frampton Gurney Phantasmagorical Society.
None of this is remotely true, of course. And we don’t even have to pretend that it is, unless we particularly want to. It\’s just a vehicle; a backstory; some logic. I invented it because, as the great Spike Milligan once astutely noted, “everybody’s gotta be somewhere.”
I create artificial life: It’s a serious and complex scientific endeavor; it raises important philosophical questions. It’s definitely not just a silly video game with animals in it. But one of the most vexing problems with making artificial creatures, I’ve always found, is that they could look like anything and live anywhere. So, in order for them to come into existence at all, I somehow have to distill this infinite sea of possibilities down to just one. I have to make them look like something, and live somewhere. But like what, exactly, and where?
How I should wire up all their neurons and enzymes and genes; how to design their sensory organs and muscles; how to think clearly about what a mind is and how brains might work: these are really hard problems. I mean really hard. I’ve been working on this project for twelve years already, and on some other quite well-known artificial life forms and robots for many years before that. But at some point in this project, I had to come to a decision about what the creatures should actually look like, and why, and I needed to begin building a plausible world for them to live in.
The Not Very Reverend Samuel Dunmore never actually existed, he didn’t know Doctor Doolittle personally, and Frampton Gurney is not a tiny backwater in the West Country of England. Miss Alice certainly did exist, but as far as I know she didn’t rescue any mock turtles. Nonetheless, I’m grateful to all of them, fictional or otherwise, for giving me a workable answer to my vexing problem.
In a way, I feel as if I’ve been walking in someone like Samuel Dunmore’s footsteps. And so, let me welcome you to his nonexistent Frampton Gurney Phantasmagorical Society, to the entirely virtual gardens of the old Rectory in which it is headquartered, and to the very real phantasia, who are gradually starting to live in them. Make of all this what you will. Let’s see where the journey takes us!
*As Eccles, in the Last Goon Show of All.
