The SFI Press, in partnership with Santa Fe Magazine, presents

Extraterritorial

Issue 002

The second issue of Extraterritorial profiles author Ted Chiang, planetary scientist Nina Lanza, and historian and author Kyle Harper.

Issue 001

The inaugural issue of Extraterritorial features interviews with Nobel Prize winner Venki Ramakrishnan, author and historian Andrea Wulf, and novelist Tom McCarthy.

About Extraterritorial

WE ARE SURROUNDED by borders and boundaries. Many of them are desirable. Laws, regulations, architecture, shelters, vaccines, and languages are all instances of enclosures that make living a social life possible. These all enable interactions by preserving the integrity of the individual.

But these same protections can grow unbearable. Or they can come to lock in elements of society or patterns of thought that we would rather abandon. There are times when we would rather ditch our familiar habitats and become extraterritorial.

In a 1958 letter to his friend Armando Bozzoli, the novelist Italo Calvino, writing about one of his characters explains, “I wanted to put forward the figure of a committed man . . . who takes a profound part in history and the development of society, but who knows he has to travel roads that are different from the ones that others take, as is the destiny of those who do not conform.”

The balance between conformity and rebellion, or perhaps obedience and opposition, is a very delicate matter. But this does not mean, as D.H. Lawrence observed, that we have to “bury so much of the delicate magic of life.” After all, a more unbuttoned relationship to challenging the status quo is what defines periods of great invention.

Extraterritorial is the Santa Fe Institute magazine that explores committed people in our community who can not help but lose themselves from time to time. Because they could only find new things by getting lost.

— David Krakauer, Editor-in-Chief, SFI Press President & William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems, Santa Fe Institute