Prequels, Classics & Sequels

A BEYOND BORDERS column by David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute.

Woodcut by Ugo da Carpi, after Raphael, Archimedes, ca. 1520

Herman Melville’s 1849 novel Mardi has been described as a metaphysical sequel to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and an inscrutable prequel to his own Moby-Dick. The first comparison suggests a derivative work, and the second a subordinate one. Moby-Dick is considered the “classic” work — a term that, according to Italo Calvino in his book Why Read the Classics, is “given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans” and “the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.” In his book Transcendental Style in Film, Paul Schrader, for whom classic films are “more edifying and more permanent,” made similar remarks.

Classics stand apart from and above their contemporaries, ancestors, and descendants. When it comes to pictorial art, music, nonfiction, and certainly science, we often speak of classic works, but we are less accustomed or inclined to speak of prequels and sequels. There is a world more attuned to historical currents where special relativity would be called a prequel to general relativity, Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man would be called a sequel to his On the Origin of Species, gene editing with CRISPR a sequel to ideas in evolutionary genetics, and gene regulatory networks a sequel to cybernetics.

If a prequel simply refers to preceding work that finds itself realized in a classic work, this is surely a widespread feature — and even a requirement — of all domains of inquiry. And if a sequel is the continuation of an idea or narrative, then this might be expected to be even more common. When it comes to the reluctance to speak of prequels and sequels in scientific ideas, several skeptical possibilities suggest themselves:

1. There are so few classics in science that to speak of sequels and prequels would be a kind of hopeful thinking, like describing the plains as the foothills to the prairie.

2. Classics are sui generis and severed from both the past and future. It is better to describe previous work as “preparatory studies” and subsequent work as “inspired by.”

3. The progress of science is a collective wave, not a solitary particle, and to speak of prequels and sequels would lead to a collapse of the conceptual wave function and is therefore purely an artifact of observation.

4. There is an implicit immodesty in the idea of a prequel and a sequel that borrows gravitas both backward and forward from a focal work that does not deserve to be called a classic.

5. Every scientific work is so original that it lives in a space dense with singularities fragmenting all paths through time.

This list of extremes is rather obviously tongue-in-cheek. Considered more carefully, they can be transmuted into five more serious variations, some of which might seem to be contradictory, but which capture a few real, increasingly salient tendencies in contemporary society and in contemporary scientific institutions that reflect a shunning of history and contingency.

1. The argument in some quarters that science is, like all other pursuits, merely a matter of contemporary opinion — opinions that vary in amplitude and not in verisimilitude.

2. Research metrics, having been built around a winner-takes-all mechanism, foster the idea that only a small number of papers matter — a sort of preferential attachment version of the Carlyle theory of heroes — where the winner takes all.

3. How the justified concern with fairness and broader recognition of teamwork (a counter to point 2) can inadvertently generate group think, excluding the possibility that sometimes an idea needs solitude to be incubated before emerging into the light of day.

4. The desire to spot the patterns of influence can obscure the revolutionary nature of an idea by situating it in a period of normal science.

5. The obsession with prizes, which tend to reward those who have already been overcompensated, can narrow the mind to the synthetic reality of concepts.

Ideas are built on ideas that have been tested against reality, not against the “Like” button. Popularity is the flimsiest proxy for the truth, and long-term influence speaks a very different language than the language of influencers. Recognition of the importance of collective intelligence should not diminish the process of alchemy undertaken by single minds, whose greatest prize is to become a part of collective intelligence. Harold Bloom in his Anxiety of Influence described the complex relationship that all work has with the past and the future in terms of “revisionary ratios” or the balance of following and swerving, which recognizes how achievement is always part reaction and part revolution.

We should learn to be more comfortable with prequels and sequels, which are honestly what most of us produce most of the time. There is even the word “interquel,” which can describe the incremental fractions of progress that typify serious research work, and the optimistic idea of the “paraquel,” or magical moment, when many ideas spring into existence together.

— David Krakauer
President, Santa Fe Institute

From the Summer 2025 edition of the SFI Parallax newsletter. Subscribe for our monthly e-Parallax, or email “news at santafe.edu” to request quarterly home delivery in print.