EXCERPT Barker is only the most recent to have mapped Spinal Catastrophism. Others had journeyed this landscape before him, in fact and in fiction. Indeed, the troupe of eccentric sources from whom Barker drew his inspiration hailed as much from the speculative worlds of science fiction as from the sciences of cryptanalysis, astrobiology, and signaletics. And foremost among these visionaries is J.G. Ballard (1930–2009), whom Barker cites, approvingly, as having lucidly preempted the ideas of ‘DNA as a transorganic memory-bank and the spine as a fossil record’…