EXCERPT Although, as has already been intimated, the doctrine commands a venerable prehistory, it was Daniel Charles Barker (1952–) who first explicitly coined the term ‘Spinal Catastrophism’ in 1992. Professor of Anorganic Semiotics at MVU from the early 1990s until the millennium,2 post-Y2K Barker’s whereabouts are unknown (though unlikely rumours circulate of a voluntary exile on an island in the Sunda Strait). Barker’s corpus circulates as samizdat: redactions are common, some papers have been suppressed, and much of it has simply disappeared, so that what follows can only be a tentative reconstruction of the course of Barker’s ideas based on fragments, secondary reports, and passing allusions…