Thursday, January 9, 2014

What Is A Nexialist?

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The Nexialist Order was established on Earth in the Pre-Diasporic Era. A secular scientific and philosophical movement devoted to integrating the different streams of knowledge, the Nexialists rejected the distinctions that formed the basis of Pre-Diasporic academic disciplines, and promoted integrative and lateral thinking.

Their movement established free institutes on every continent to promote science education and creative thinking. Much of their infrastructure and capital was acquired through mergers with regional movements that had global reach and some shared goals, such as occurred with the incorporation of the Gulen movement based in West and Central Asia.

The Nexialists' ability to synthesize knowledge and draw conclusions across different disciplinary and scientific boundaries made their Order invaluable during the early Diasporic Era. The Star League's first interstellar long range exploration vessels were often crewed with hundreds of scientists representing the numerous branches and specialties of every discipline.  More often than not these crews also included at least one Nexialist to help the members of the different shipboard disciplines, lines of inquiry, thought and practice to talk to each other and arrive at common understandings and solutions to problems. The integrative skills of the Nexialist assigned to The Space Beagle saved the crew numerous times from alien enigmas and threats.

As the Nexialists journeyed further out into space, they encountered stranger and stranger things. Psionics, group minds, parallel dimensions, Nexus Points. In fact, the Nexialists became so adept at using Nexus Points that they started using them for even deeper exploration among the planes. More than once, Star League deep range exploration vessels entered new and remote star systems for the first time, only to be greeted by a Nexialist who had already arrived in the system through a gate.

Over time, Nexialists integrated all of the strange phenomena they discovered into their general world view, and developed new practices which are indistinguishable from magic. Their enemies call them spells; the Nexialists call them formulae.

7 comments:

  1. Interesting, having Vogt's nexialists evolve into wizards (of a sort). His insistence that different disciplines just xould take to each other in the stories seemed a bit overdone.

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    1. Everything works better with magic, after all, even inter-disciplinary collaboration. Which makes sense since his concept was pretty influenced by General Semantics and Dianetics anyway. :)

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    2. Yeah, I thought there was the whiff of Scientology about it.

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  2. Read the Isher books, but not this one. I'll add it to the list. Any Dorsai-types in the Empire?

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    1. I don't know to much about Gordon Dickson and the Dorsai novels (in spite of being in MN) so I am not sure what the answer would be. Most military units in the Empire tend to be religious or secular orders composed of elite forces. Many would be called Legions, but we are taking about fairly small deployments in any particular conflict (a few dozen to hundreds or thousands of soldiers as opposed to millions).

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    2. I'll read Space Beagle if you read Dorsai.

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