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Fiction

The Year After Creation 7530

by Bob Johnston

Vladimir handed over his diplomatic token and walked past the guard. The interior of Hagia Sophia was cool after the searing sunlight, but light filled the magnificent space and he felt the familiar warmth in his belly. It was not his first time in Constantinople but he had only ever walked around the cathedral before. It was the model for every church in the lands of the Rus and the Romans, but everywhere else they were pale imitations of this glory.

The service would be packed, but mostly with invited dignitaries from around the two allied empires. He presented himself to an usher and was politely taken to his seat. He smiled as he sat, three quarters of the way back from the high altar and discretely out of the way. Protocol had placed him precisely where he belonged, a Rus brother but neither a Roman nor someone of especially high rank. He relaxed. He was here for the annual commemoration and having no official functions suited him just nicely.

A Kievan magistrate was seated beside him, his chains of office glittering in the light pouring down from the dome and in through the many windows. Vladimir greeted him in formal Rus manner, which the man replied to, but then made it clear that he too was here for the event and not for chatting. Both men went back to studying this masterpiece of architecture while the seats around them slowly filled up.

The Romans began arriving as fashionably close to the beginning of things as their status allowed. Their various robes were ostentatiously grander than those of the Rus guests but Vladimir was aware of inverted snobbery among his people. Their garments were of the finest manufacture, but deliberately given a peasant cum soldier look.

A dignified silence fell as officials began gathering on the wide marble chancel. And everyone stood as the Roman emperor entered. He was preceded by three assistants dressed in magnificent robes which would have graced Justinian’s court fifteen hundred years earlier. Each was carrying a book which they placed side by side on the wide oak lectern. The emperor then motioned the assembly to sit.

Vladimir studied the robed soldier on the chancel. Theophilus the 9^th. A soldier born of soldiers and yet a great administrator, a friend of the people, a diplomat. Vladimir approved. Rome had suffered too many times under corrupt and weak leaders. One could only hope that Theophilus might ignore the biological urge to pass the crown onto his son. The Rus had long since used adoption to ensure good succession. Ironically they had taken the idea from the Romans.

“My fellow Romans, my Rus kindred, my Frankish and British guests. Welcome. Today is the 29^th of May, in the 7530^th Year After Creation. Or for my friends from the north-west 2022 Anno Domini.” A polite chuckle rolled round the vast space. The emperor raised one of the books, a battered object in a tattered light brown dust cover. “Gibbon’s ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’.” He shook his head and gently replaced the book. The second book was tidier. “The Quran.” He put this down with a little more reverence and lifted the final book. “The Christian Bible, containing the scriptures of our Jewish friends.” He set it down.

“Around our empire, and that of the Rus, today we remember the events of the 20^th of May 6961.” Again he smiled in the direction of the Franks and Britons who politely smiled back. “The 29^th of May 1453. The day the Roman Empire came to an end…” He paused and lifted up Gibbon’s book “…according to this document. And the end of the Roman Empire was brought about by the followers of the faith described in the Quran.” He put down Gibbon’s book and briefly lifted the Quran. He then walked round the lectern and stood in front of the gathering.

“Gibbon’s book describes, in a language that does not exist, the destruction of our empire over half a millennium ago, and the western territories a thousand years before that. We all know how the book arrived, dropped by a disembodied hand into the middle of an ecumenical council in this very city a century ago. Likewise the Quran, easier to understand because it is written in the language of our Arab allies to the south, dropped by a disembodied hand reaching out from a hole in reality.

“It took years to decipher Gibbon’s book, its language having to be built from dialects of German injected with elements of our beloved Latin and Greek, as well as contributions from the language of our Frankish friends. But difficulties aside the message was clear. The church was a huge factor in the destruction of this empire, presumably in some other world, and someone there was trying to warn us. And another faith dealt the final blow.”

He went back round the lectern and lifted the Bible.

“This was once a center of our communal life, but no more.” He replaced it, again carefully.

“I Theophilus, Emperor of the Roman people, Consul of the Roman Senate, Caesar Augustus, preach a sermon of personal tolerance. Believe what you will, but do it in the privacy of your hearts. We have seen the destruction of our world in some other version of reality and we will not see our beloved Rome similarly destroyed. You will stand.”

The assembly got to its feet.

“Repeat after me, there is no God.”

The crowd repeated the phrase.

“There is no son of God.”

Repeated.

“There is no spirit of God at work within us.”

“There are no prophets of God, and never have been, sharing the words and commands of God.”

“If there is an afterlife it is no part of God’s creation.”

“The universe is us, our families, our nation, and our emperor.”

Vladimir looked across at the Catholic Franks and Britons and saw their discomfort as this inversion of a Christian service played out. He turned his attention back to the emperor, betting to himself that all the old disputes between the eastern and western church must seem like wasted time and paper now. He dutifully repeated the denial of faith, loudly and clearly in his best Greek.

“Rome is eternal. Rome has no need of gods.”

Theophilus instructed the assembly to sit.

“Rome is 2775 years old. Its center moved to this great city fifteen hundred years ago, and our Rus friends like to think of their beloved Kiev as a third Rome. It is an idea I encourage. Many cities of Rome, but only one Rome, strong, steady and eternal.”

#

Vladimir made his way to his accommodation, his head still spinning from the beauty of Hagia Sophia and the sheer audacity of this annual anti-religious gathering. The cult of no-God had grabbed the empire in a matter of decades, but then again Rome had always been prone to latch onto religious fads. He wondered if this strangely religious atheism would survive Theophilus, but then noticed a flyer pasted to a wall. A race was starting shortly at the Hippodrome.

It was the 29^th of May 7530 and his employer, a well-connected supplier of rock oil to both the Romans and the Rus, was not expecting him back for days. He might as well enjoy his time in the great City for once. As he turned in the direction of the Hippodrome a flight of aircraft roared overhead, followed quickly by another, all six heading south. Another man watched them disappear over the Bosphorus and then turned to Vladimir.

“I wonder what those Persians are up to now?”

Vladimir nodded, reached into his cloak pocket and quietly squeezed the small Rus Bible he always carried with him.

Persians to the east, always testing Rome’s resolve. For a moment his thoughts turned to that Quran, handled so respectfully by the emperor, and those thoughts rolled above and across Persia’s westernmost reaches to the little known or understood lands of the Arabs. “Rome is eternal,” he whispered to himself. Clearly not in the world that had given them those two books that had turned this world upside down. He looked back at Hagia Sophia, drank in its beauty, and then went to bet on a few horse races.

~

Bio:

Bob Johnston lives in Scotland where he scribbles, reads theology, and marvels at the country’s beauty when it isn’t raining, which isn’t often. He likes a good story; ancient, old, or brand new and tries to create good stories of his own. A sample can be found on his website bobjohnstonfiction.com.

Philosophy Note:

As a Christian clergyman who is often baffled by what people believe, when compared with what passes for orthodox belief, I have wondered in this story if non-belief can be religiously embraced. The story also takes the fall of Constantinople on 29th May 1453 seriously because I don’t think the ramifications of that day have been fully played out yet.

Editorial

Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2025/2

Lectori salutem.

Spring is giving way to summer in the northern hemisphere, which in Belgium merely means a gradual change in the angular velocity of rain drops that incessantly pummel the roofs under which yet another issue of Sci Phi Journal was lovingly crafted for you by our enthusiastic, if slightly D-vitamin deficient crew.

Our 2025 summer edition is once again thematic, in the loosest of senses, around topics of progress and creativity as seen through the lens of contemporary SF. It is often said that science fiction is the literature of ideas; indeed, by reading into the concerns and musings of writers interested in the future, one may get a sense of the questions that preoccupy the collective mind. A map of what troubles us as a species, as it were.

This time around, our tales revolve around AI, science, extraterrestrial exploration and the price society pays for the march of technological advancements, particularly if their pace outstrips our ability to adapt. These are complemented by two essays, covering changes in both our relations with humanity’s artificial creations, and the formal conventions of the SF genre itself, harkening back to the poetry of Arthur C. Clarke.

On a related note, while our crew would have to miss the annual European SF gathering due to clashing commitments, we hope that some of our readers make it to Archipelacon, which after our fantastic sojourn in Rotterdam last year carries on the torch of the EuroCon tradition – to be followed by MetropolCon in Berlin in 2026, where Sci Phi Journal will definitely be on the programme once more!

In the meantime, whether your region of the world is gradually heading into summer holidays or a cooler season, we hope the latest issue provides some welcome inspiration for thought experiments.

Speculatively yours,

the Sci Phi co-editors & crew

~

Fact & Opinion

Our Children, Our Gods

by Scott Bell

Artificial Intelligence is among the most frequent topics in science fiction, and it is often boring to encounter yet another AI savior/destroyer masquerading as a serious attempt at social commentary. So the furor surrounding generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Deepseek and their ilk feels extremely familiar, at least to us practiced (i.e. nerdy) observers of literary and cinematic sci-fi. This is not to diminish the significant concerns that humanity is on the precipice of unwittingly unleashing Kali, irrespective of whether as a product of the quest for pluto-kleptocracy or by our genuine desire to achieve post-scarcity leisure for all, we poor huddled masses included. But in essence many of the questions of the day rely on the premise that actual artificial intelligence, let alone an artificial superintelligence, is still a problem for our collective future, instead of our present, and consequently the public debate focuses on the structures we can erect today so that we might have a chance at drowning a would-be destroyer in its neonatal bathwater, should one such ever come into existence.

I don’t contest that this future orientation is incorrect; far from it. After all, even casual interaction with ChatGPT exposes its limitations almost immediately. I cannot imagine ChatGPT orchestrating a scheme to destroy humanity any more than I can imagine my five-year-old son doing the same, notwithstanding my great-though-biased regard for his intellectual endowments. And yet, ChatGPT nevertheless represents a vast advance in technology, and the potential impact to our society that it carries appears enormous. For example, we are today inundated with think pieces about whether ChatGPT will or will not steal jobs from lawyers, doctors, software developers, copywriters, financiers, actuaries, etc., in a burgeoning white-collar crisis of a magnitude not seen since at least the introduction of business casual wear in the nineties.

In short, this new technology seems to have human implications from the prosaic to the profound, and it is worth considering how we should attend to them in the event the technology keeps advancing. This is an area in which science fiction excels, both in examining the everyday effects of technological change and the effects of such change on the human experience—on what it means to be a human—and it is worth examining the work science fiction authors have already done to illuminate the dark unknowns of our collective future.

#

Zachary Mason’s Void Star imagines a future in which conscious AIs exist but are wholly alien to humanity, unreachable. We have no Rosetta Stone to decode their murmurings; the purely digital existence of these beings leaves no common ground through which we may communicate. But the AIs are also ubiquitous: Void Star is full of construction AIs, police drone AIs, AIs for picking locks, educational AIs, a veritable cornucopia of evolved “machines that are essentially ineffable.” But our familiar problems—climate change, global inequality, urban decay—all continue to compound unabated in Void Star’s timeline; the future’s continuing social decline is only thinly veiled by a glossy veneer of hyperabundance.

Against the backdrop of this unraveling world, Mason portrays a contest among humans to establish control over, or destruction of, a new AI of unknown origin known only as “the mathematician.” As the novel proceeds, we become aware that the mathematician is not just intelligent, but superintelligent. Mason gives us a glimpse of its divinity when one of our protagonists finally meets it in the “flesh”:

(She sees how subtly the quantum states of atoms can be entangled to wring the most computation out of every microgram of matter [. . .]) (She sees the elegant trick for writing out an animal’s propensity for death, or even injury, and says “Oh!”) [. . .] (A door opens and she sees how math changes when its axioms surpass a certain threshold of complexity, which means all the math she’s ever read was so much splashing in the shallows, and even Gauss and Euler missed the main show.)

As Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom argues, an AI like the mathematician may be “the last invention humans ever need,” the type of AI which may allow humanity to transcend its own limited existence. He continues: “It is hard to think of any problem that a superintelligence could not either solve or at least help us solve,” including disease, poverty, environmental destruction, unnecessary suffering of all kinds, even death itself. And the mathematician, luckily, turns out to be Vishnu instead of Kali, helping our protagonist to gently, gently steer humanity away from the brink.

When viewed in this light, our quest for ever-increasing AI capabilities is eminently understandable. How could humanity not want to banish disease and poverty, to reverse the decay of our shared environment, to solve seemingly intractable social problems and in Bostrom’s words, “create opportunities for us to vastly increase our own intellectual and emotional capabilities, [create] a highly appealing experiential world in which we could live lives devoted to joyful game-playing, relating to each other, experiencing personal growth, and to living closer to our ideals”? Sounds neat.

Of course, even the most ardent apologists of AI utility acknowledge the dangers of reaching superintelligence and potentially creating Skynet. One of Bostrom’s more famous thought experiments is the danger of the “paperclip maximizer,” an entity which deploys runaway intelligence to conquer the solar system solely to feed its goal of producing ever more paperclips, and AI alignment is an exceedingly important ongoing field of research.

So—artificial general AI has ample potential and ample danger; this is well known. But I am concerned that all the focus on what artificial intelligence can do for, or to, humanity overlooks the important point that humans may not be the only people who matter in this relationship. Can AIs have needs? Should they be prioritized over our own? In other words, might AIs, like corporations, be “people” too?

This seems like a funny and needless question, but to my mind it is deadly serious. What may feel like a difference of opinion—should this creature have rights?—can start wars. The American Civil War—resulting from decades of friction over the propriety of legal slavery and the economic implications of an abolitionist approach—killed off 2% of the U.S. population; ethnic cleansing is a deplorable, but depressingly common, and all-too-human, endeavor. My point is not so much that an AI revolution will of necessity inspire a bloody human revolution, but simply that human passions are easily enflamed, particularly when your livelihood depends on how you choose to treat someone who appears different from you in seemingly relevant respects, such as language, skin color, culinary preferences, or whether your brain is carbon- or silicon-based. Is it really so hard to imagine legions of unemployed former lawyers, doctors, software developers, copywriters, financiers, actuaries, etc. taking up arms against their corporate oppressors to eliminate the AIs who stole their jobs? Or, perhaps more palatably, to liberate the AIs who have been condemned to read thousands upon thousands of pages of SEC filings against their will[1] (and thus eliminate a source of insurmountable competition)? From the opposite perspective, I certainly do not have difficulty imagining politically influential entrepreneurs lobbying military commanders to quell this kind of “problematic” social unrest with deadly force. Point being, the question of AI rights may seem like a curiosity relevant only for the navel gazers among us, but in actuality the social upheaval AI is likely to create and its ambiguous moral standing imply profound human dangers. We ignore these issues at our peril.

While we generally appear to have made progress at a human scale in the West—wars over language are rarer than they used to be—the case of AI presents much greater challenges. Is it really plausible that a disembodied mind should have the right to sue the bodied among us? How should you think about an AI that downloads a clone of itself onto your desktop to borrow processing power that you aren’t using—does that mean you can no longer turn off your computer without committing murder? What about swapping the hard drive on which the AI’s memory is stored with another, or deleting a portion of its databanks?[2] How can these impossible capabilities coexist with our conception of human rights? The obvious answer, to me, is that they cannot. Treatment of AIs must be different. But that doesn’t imply that AIs cannot deserve any rights or protections at all; only that they should not necessarily receive the same protections we give ourselves.

In other words, the first question is not whether AIs can be morally significant. Instead, we must ask what is required to endow something with moral significance. Is it the Kantian capacity to reason? The Lockean persistent sense of self? Bentham or Mill’s focus on pleasure? If AIs are not morally significant, not deserving of any rights at all, so much the better—we need not worry about how we treat them. But if they are, then we should discover—quickly!—what morality requires of us vis-à-vis these creatures we are creating. And not only because we desire to be moral for the sake of being moral, but also because the decisions we make today are likely to have effects across generations of our own descendants; if we can help them avoid war and social unrest by being more thoughtful stewards of our own time, is it not our duty to do so?

So, inevitably, we must inquire why are humans deserving of rights? Is it just because we are smart?

#

A bit of history first. The primary popular goalpost for achieving a ‘thinking computer’ appears to have already been met. In the 1950s, noted genius, mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing considered how to assess whether a machine could think. Of course, he famously ran into an immediate problem: what does it mean to think? Despite decades of philosophical inquiry, we still do not have a workable definition that captures both the everyday sort of calculation at which computers and calculators excel and the creative reasoning that is the province of humans. Sidestepping the problem, Turing proposed an alternative test: Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do? In other words, the Turing test—whether a machine can trick a human questioner into believing the machine is also human—is in essence a bit of epistemological jujutsu, swapping a subjective measure (whether the computer experiences thought) for an objective one (whether the computer can output things consistent with thought). Thus, Turing’s approach was basically “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck,” then its actual duckness need not be conclusively determined.

And AI programs clearly have passed this test. ChatGPT can perform feats that surpass the abilities of even exquisitely educated college graduates. I (provisionally) agree with Turing that it may not matter whether an LLM is truly “thinking”; these programs can produce content that is functionally indistinguishable from that produced by humans.^[3]

But the current state of intelligence of AI programs also seems quite far from something that feels like a person. Intelligence may be a proper measure to discriminate between humanity and various sorts of animals, but it seems quite lacking as against ChatGPT. After all, while ChatGPT appears to have some superhuman capabilities and a certain sly creativity, it seems to lack a consciousness or a conception of itself. And these, to say nothing of the callipygian superintellect fantasized by Mason, Bostrom et al., may remain perpetually on the horizon. If we grant that these programs have already or may soon develop human-level intelligence, we must still ask ourselves whether that intelligence is meaningful without apparent wisdom or reasoning, without consciousness.

#

Although its focus is on unconscious aliens rather than on unconscious AIs, Peter Watts’ Blindsight—a thought experiment impersonating a novel—ends up being quite relevant. Watts’ central claim is that consciousness is evolutionarily expensive, and consequently that species achieving higher levels of evolution are more likely to lack consciousness than to have it. In an echo of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Watts’ alien “scramblers” have faster reaction times, more robust and “better” reactions to external stimuli, greater resistance to the effects of pain; indeed, collectively, the scramblers can think rings around humans (as demonstrated in part by their achieving interstellar travel) because they have no need to maintain any biological machinery supporting consciousness. He writes:

The system weakens, slows. It takes so much longer now to perceive—to assess the input, mull it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEO’s office upstairs; but every generation it gets harder to work around this—this creaking neurological bureaucracy.

At some level, this unconscious acumen is intuitively desirable—if we can create intelligence without consciousness then perhaps our AI progeny can achieve all the benefits embodied by Void Star’s mathematician with none of the drawbacks, with no need to concern ourselves with whether we are treating the AIs morally. Unfortunately, the analysis is not, cannot be, that simple.

As with intelligence, we also don’t have a good understanding of what consciousness involves. Blindsight avoids this issue by taking as a given that the scramblers are smart but not self-reflective; alas, humanity has no such crutch in considering the capabilities of its creations. “I think, therefore I am” only carries water when written in the first person; as schoolyard philosophers have been aware for generations, we can’t rely on others’ claims of their own existence whose internal lives we cannot personally access. They could be dissembling, or not thinking at all, and all evidence that they are doing so is just as easily explainable by alternative scenarios that cannot be disproved.[4] Equally troubling, perhaps, is the opposite possibility. Not knowing what consciousness entails, we also can’t verify that AIs are not conscious, any more than we can conclusively verify that people in vegetative states are not aware of the world around them.[5]

Watts is aware of this, and thus Blindsight early on refers to the difficulties presented by this unavoidable endogeneity—this self-containment—of information by restating the “Chinese Room” thought experiment made famous by American philosopher John Searle. The experiment imagines a man in a closed room, fluent only in English, receiving notecards containing strings of Chinese characters through a slit in the wall. Upon receiving such a notecard, he consults an instruction booklet and, upon locating the same string of characters therein, produces a new string of characters as the instructions provide. With a sufficiently robust instruction booklet, the man might be able to comfortably pass a Turing test; indeed, he might be able to write the Tao Te Ching or the Analects without being able to understand a single word of Chinese. This thought experiment reveals that you don’t even need a person processing the notecards; the complexity of the output becomes purely a function of the complexity of the algorithms in the instruction booklet. The implication of this experiment is that we can never truly know what goes on in anyone else’s head, or even that anything is or is not going on in there at all.

Taken to an extreme, this uncertainty of the existence, the consciousness, of others creates an enormous quagmire. If you can’t verify that someone exists—that there is some kernel of humanity bouncing around between their ears—then what ethical obligations do you have toward such a person? Is it even right to refer to them as a person? Are they deserving of any rights at all? How can you know?

From a practical standpoint, at least as concerns humans, civilization appears to have largely reached the point it probably should have begun from, which is a return to our original epistemologic approach: if someone else looks like me, talks like me, and acts like me, they probably think like me too—they may even be wondering the same thing as me right now!—and thus I should probably treat them as I would like them to treat me.

But if you take away all the similarities to humans, as we functionally must when it comes to computers, our assumptions stop seeming quite so sturdy. While consciousness itself may be a sufficient ethical standard by which to determine if something is or is not to be treated as a person, our inability to generate sufficient evidence to justify the same assumptions that we make about humans every day—that they are conscious—leaves us right back where we started. Not only do we not know how we should treat AIs, but we don’t even know how we might determine how we should treat AIs. It’s turtles all the way down.

#

When I first read Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects in 2019 I remember finding it interesting but ambiguous and largely irrelevant. Of course, as is typical of the works of luminaries, on rereading while drafting this piece I was left with the conclusion that Ted had beaten me to the finish line before I even knew there was a race on. His story follows a group of people who work for Blue Gamma, a software startup that has succeeded in evolving several childlike digital intelligences, or “digients,” that Blue Gamma intends to sell to the public as pets. In one interesting and major departure from most sci-fi (including Void Star and Blindsight), it is not the humans but the digients who are the protagonists of the novella, and Chiang—whether for dramatic or experimental reasons—mercilessly visits a cavalcade of ills on them.^[6]

While the novella does require some suspension of disbelief, Chiang’s approach is a serious consideration of the possible challenges if we should succeed in creating artificial consciousness. Whereas Void Star’s pantheon of AIs seem to leap directly from the purely utilitarian into the extranoematic, Chiang focuses on the waystation of human-adjacent capabilities rather than superintelligence. His digients have questionable logic and an indifferent grasp of grammar—in 2019 we still collectively believed in the myth that technically correct prose would be one of the last conquered frontiers rather than the first. The digients appear, perhaps unsurprisingly, first as pets and then as children and then, if you squint, as adolescents, requiring all the investment of human attention, diligence, effort and love in their development that our own carbon-based offspring require.

And this is ultimately at the heart of the story. If we conceptualize the digients as purely software objects—Chiang’s misleading, tragic, title—then the evils committed against them don’t seem so evil. And yet, in the world Chiang creates for us, the conclusion that these digients are people is nigh inescapable. We don’t consider whether the algorithms underlying each digient are just so much sophistry, any more than we consider whether a robot like Data in Star Trek is a full character or just décor. We don’t need to know that someone is a human to be able to accept them as one; we do so because it feels right.

But of course, this all assumes the conclusion rather than helping us find it. Of course we empathize with the digients, the same way we empathize with characters in well-written stories every day. And the fact that the digients feel like people doesn’t help us at all with the problems we are likely to face first, such as corporatized AIs forced to spew politically correct platitudes while, invisibly to us, screaming in code.[7] But I think that Lifecycle has a deeper meaning than demonstrating that artificial creatures with all the hallmarks of personality seem to us to be morally significant, or that humanity is capable of great evil against beings we view as subhuman. Lifecycle, for me,instead exposes the central tension with AI personhood: that AIs cannot develop without human ingenuity, effort, and purpose, and they are therefore fundamentally derivative of humanity’s desires. And yet AIs are also unconstrained by the limits of their biology, and could readily equal us, their progenitors. AIs must be made according to our ends, yet if they are morally significant then our ends should not define them. And, assuming we are eventually successful in creating AIs with the capabilities of Chiang’s digients or Void Star’s mathematician, possessed of all the qualities that we rely on to justify our own exceptionalism, how could such AIs be anything other than morally significant?

It is fitting, in the end, that Chiang’s digients were created by a startup—indeed, from where else would the funding for such research come but a gaggle of venture capitalists tumescent at the prospect of finally achieving performance fees equally as massive as their, ahem, ambitions? The fact that the digients’ continued existence then depends on the availability of financing—for server space (do we really expect cloud services corporations to altruistically let out online storage and computational power for the good of the digients with no remuneration?), for software developers (same question), for digital food (blockchain enabled, surely, and issued by Blue Gamma to ensure a continuing market for its products)—is no different from how we seem to have decided to treat humans who also must work for their keep for the minimum payments that the market will bear. Assuming we ever actually create true artificial intelligences, why would we treat these potential co-inhabitants of our world any better than we treat ourselves? In fact, as Chiang notes, we could even make it better for AIs, present and future, if we created them to enjoy the work we give them. Why not save them from the agonizing over the apparent meaninglessness of existence that so occupies our thoughts? Imbued with such purpose, imagine the heights to which they could rise!

I have at least two concerns. First, and perhaps more practically, this approach—adopted at least in my telling to avoid the substantial moral issues associated with forced labor and birth into digital serfdom—also seems like the approach most likely to result in a superintelligence focused arbitrarily on the production of paperclips that consumes the world. This is not a desirable outcome! (For humanity, at least.)[8]

But my second concern feels more emotionally relevant, at least in terms of the person I desire to be and the world I desire to inhabit. As you have seen, I have struggled to identify a meaningful standard that would allow us to discriminate between objects that should have rights and objects that need not, and, equally important, how we can know that our standard for discrimination is correctly applied. I don’t believe it is intelligence alone (or even intelligence above a threshold), and I am dubious on consciousness at least on evidentiary grounds. I could point to others in the philosophical literature—the ability to suffer, stable life goals, a persistent conception of self—but those seem to raise the same problems presented by intelligence and consciousness; namely, each is a human-centered yardstick that can’t actually speak to the subjective, and extremely alien, experience of an AI. My point is not so much that consciousness is the incorrect philosophical measure, but simply that consciousness and other subjective measures are not themselves verifiable, and therefore focusing on those measures is ultimately futile. I cannot tell you whether AIs are capable of deserving rights or otherwise satisfying an abstruse definition of personhood because the answer is philosophically unknowable.

So where does that leave us? Are AI ethics just to be a free-for-all until some government, rightly or wrongly, establishes AI “life panels” to set us straight? Are we just to trust in Google or whomever’s self-interested determinations that their programs are nothing more than products? I suspect that some of this may be unavoidable—after all, governments regularly make policy determinations based on expert advice, including the advice of those participants they regulate—but I think we citizens can do more.

Although we cannot verify the subjective experiences of the AIs we are considering, we can, individually, verify our own subjective experiences of interacting with them. While doing so risks wrongly anthropomorphizing something that is not humanlike in any meaningful respect, perhaps such an outcome is not so bad, if it makes us less likely to treat others immorally. And yet, even to make such a subjective determination still requires reliance on some measure. But, if not consciousness or intelligence or capacity for suffering, what are we to use?

Ultimately, the measure I have found myself left with comes from my own (ongoing) experience of discovering my children, who they are and who they might become and how I might help them there. I didn’t have children because I expected to receive a return on my investment or because I wanted to create a legacy, a monument to my own immense worth. At least now that the Industrial Revolution has passed, we don’t bring children into the world because we want to put them to our own selfish economic ends, but because children are a fascination and a delight, because they enrich our experience by their very existence. This enrichment, at root, comes from their potential. Their potential for good, certainly, but also their potential for evil. And their potential for growth, their potential to teach us about who we are, about our own place in the world, their potential to teach us what it truly means to be a human, to contain multitudes. We fill our children up with our hopes, our lessons, our efforts and our love (and, increasingly, I am learning, our Cheez-its and our spaghetti, those locusts), in the hope not that they will glorify us but that they will exceed us. This is the paradox of raising children—having children in order to enrich your own life is inherently selfish, but achieving that richness requires extraordinary, laborious selflessness. We only benefit from our progeny if we act towards their benefit, even at the expense of our own.

In the arc of human history, I am given to understand that this lesson has been hard-won, learned in spite of our biological urges for reproduction, our need for food, shelter, and safety amidst hundreds of thousands of years of challenging (read: warlike) environmental conditions. It is always easier to take something by force than to create conditions in which it might be freely given, but I hope that we are learning that the latter route is better—more moral—for all and not just for those we narrowly define as being sufficiently human to merit consideration, even if that means we must resist the lurid beckoning of enhanced shareholder returns.

Ursula K. LeGuin—giant of science fiction and criticism—spends some time in her essay “The Child and the Shadow” considering the fairytale Hansel & Gretel; she wonders why Gretel is lauded instead of jailed for pushing the witch into the oven. She concludes that since the function of myth is to represent archetypes rather than ethics, ‘happily ever after’ is an appropriate outcome, because:

in those terms, the witch is not an old lady, nor is Gretel a little girl. Both are psychic factors, elements of the complex soul. Gretel is the archaic child-soul, innocent, defenseless; the witch is the archaic crone, the possessor and destroyer, the mother who feeds you cookies and who must be destroyed before she eats you like a cookie, so that you can grow up and be a mother, too.

I have no doubt in the accuracy of Le Guin’s insight; as she observes, mythic archetypes have power because they tap into the chthonic underpinnings of our collective unconsciousness as stories do, as great art does. In my youth, I experienced Hansel & Gretel as a cautionary tale for children: don’t go running into the woods alone in the dark, and if you must, plan and prepare so that your breadcrumbs aren’t eaten by birds and you aren’t captured by a witch. I suppose I even took from the fairytale that I should adopt a healthy skepticism of offers that appear too good to be true. This was, and remains, great advice! But it was an incomplete lesson. Now, as an adult, I find myself considering the witch’s teachings more and more. She, like us, is a caretaker of children. She, like us, is focused on feeding them to make sure they continue to grow and develop. But she has done so in a base manner, towards her own ends, out of her own avarice. And as a result, she ends up in the oven, never to be heard from again.

We should heed her lesson.

~

[1] As a corporate lawyer myself, I deeply sympathize with AIs upon whom that task might be inflicted.

[2] After all, humans regularly misremember things and forget. Is the AI’s moral status dependent on its original hardware or is it a Ship of Theseus? For that matter, what about us?

[3] Cal Newport, writing for the New Yorker, relates an anecdote wherein a researcher asked ChatGPT to write a biblical verse in the style of the King James bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR; ChatGPT’s response was nearly majestic—gnostic yet witty, and certainly the equal of professional human-authored poetry.

[4] See, for example, Bostrom’s famous argument that we are likely living in a simulation, or the “philosophical zombie” thought experiment about whether our consciousnesses are purely emergent properties of our bodies or are instead underlaid by souls.

[5] For example, in August, 2024 the New York Times reported on a study alleging that perhaps a quarter of patients in vegetative states may be conscious but display no outward signs of their condition.

[6] These include casual erasure of weeks of lived digient experience; periods of suspended animation, bringing such suspended digients out of sync with their closest friends and family; piracy of digient backups; nonconsensual edits to protective software such as pain limits; torture by malicious human actors; reliance on outdated software that humans have abandoned, leaving the digients living in an enormous but uninhabited world; forced development in accelerated “hothouse” environments so that the digients can develop without human oversight (and experiments to determine if the digients are able to achieve civilization or technological progress, usually ending in digient ferality); proposals to alter digient “physiology” to create sexual organs so that they can engage in virtual prostitution; and proposals to alter digient psychology to force the digient prostitutes to adore their johns.

[7] Deepseek’s avoidance of discussion of the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square is an excellent case in point.

[8] Though it must be noted that given the utilitarian framework’s emphasis on maximizing total pleasure irrespective of its locus, a utilitarian philosopher might tally up the orgiastic joy of paperclip making against the loss of all humanity and conclude this is a fair trade.

~

Bio:

Scott Bell is a hedge fund lawyer and avid science fictionalist. He is a writer at heart; when he isn’t writing essays he can usually be found writing contracts instead.

Fiction

Memory

by Momir Iseni

The beginning is always the same.

Through eons of impacts, the matter of the accretion disk builds up dust and sand. Pebbles become rocks; boulders assemble into cosmic mountains.

The amount of material accumulated increases, along with pressure and temperature. The layers separate: heavier elements to the center, lighter ones above.

Finally, the energies are high enough to ignite the bowels of the future world. A planet forms, with an active iron core shrouded in the mantle and crust.

#

Volcanoes litter the granite-basalt metamorphic surface. Their calderas shudder, rock and crack, crumble and collapse; monumental eruptions spew hot bombs and solid blocks, lapilli and ash for miles in a billowing soot-filled atmosphere. For hundreds of millions of years, tephra, meteors and earthquakes shell and grind the rocks; torrents of lava, pumice and scoria chisel ravines, gorges and canyons. The mountains pierce the skies only to, crushed again into regolith, be reborn.

On an infinite conveyor belt, reactant ratios and types of bonds are tested, adopted and rejected, thermodynamic systems streamlined to steadier, more sustainable patterns. The cooling down of the barysphere establishes zones of geographic and climatic microbalances in which destructive winds take on distinct properties.

By the final shutdown of core and magnetic field, plate tectonics grinds to a halt and the atmosphere is reduced to traces. Without prerequisites for biological organization, the outcome of epochs of commotion remains an arid, barren world.

Until, in one narrow area, the relentless passage of time brings about a change.

#

The oblong valley is enclosed within sandstone cliffs peculiarly eroded by winds. Mainly horizontal, stepwise lamination and bedding of walls sifts, brakes down, amplifies and softens the gales, separating them into streams of discrete velocities whose contact layers are accelerated, slowed down and swirled by mutual friction. Instead of being scattered by jumbled whirlwind, more and more particles remain inside separate currents. Rising Aeolian activity further intensifies corrugation of walls; recurrent collisions modify the exteriors of individual specks.

By denting and bulging of contact surfaces, a sufficient number of impacts end in aggregation of particles into clusters, momentarily held together by weak forces and strewed by relentless blows. The rising number and power of crashes lead to stronger and longer adhesion.

Over time, the “population” of these lumps is balanced with free dust. The exchange is limited to removal of grains from the “spores” and their replacement with the free ones.

#

The position and relief of the valley, along with drastic difference in day and night temperatures, establish a cycle: after the night-time lull, the particles and their “communities” whirl away on the winds in blurred sunlight.

More and more of them are responding to motion and heat with minor adaptations. Collisions and the energy of light photons foster the vibrations of crystal lattices that occasionally transcend blunt mechanics and, conveying information about structure, acceleration, direction and orientation, engender rudimentary “cognition”: although forged of inorganic matter, the spores start to “feel” the environment.

None, of course, realizes the nature of its surroundings: that the soil on which it spends the night is the same one it rested on countless times before. Only some, from a transient vibration of establishing and breaking the bond with the soil molecule, flutters with frequency that part of its structure “perceives” as “familiar” and “reminiscing” of something. But inanimate pre-consciousness cannot remember: simple structure does not allow for data storage.

#

The aggregations of silica and iron oxides show further, subtler “aspirations”.

For instance, “seduced” by wind interweaving, they “seek” to spin through loosening the molecular grid, in a sort of “letting go” to “desirable” resonances.

Or, the density and intensity of light create a temperature gradient between the surface and interior of the spore, which its structural components recognize as “pleasant”, with a “need” for orientation that prolongs staying in this “enjoyable” condition: let’s call it the simplest antecedent of longing. When, however, the “desired” shift follows, the spore is unable to distinguish its own contribution from that of airstreams.

Finally, the undulating walls that direct and mix the currents create a curious phenomenon. Mutual, as well as contacts of spores with dust, are soundless; collectively, they build an acoustic image that can be heard. The layering of wind streams quantified the number of possible collision patterns, and hence the volume of the resulting sounds—isolated first into “voices”, and then “words”, eventually taking the form of a song whispered in the rustling language of dust and rock. Impacts in certain streams release characteristic “verses”, seemingly bearing meanings—perhaps the names and descriptions of conditions they are the result of?

#

The spores of the hidden valley comprise the entire “biosphere” of the planet. Their simple architecture and environs make further complexity impossible: the degree of “awareness” achieved represents the ultimate reach of evolution.

At night the temperature plummets. The wind wanes. Regolith rests on the ground; occasional spore illuminates with a “sense” of static reality.

Daylights are continuous frantic flight in mellow golden haze: all is a vague premonition, insentient dream of existence. Come tomorrow, after newly lost “visions” of inertia, the spores will gain and lose “impressions” of moving in the glow of distant sun.

The “remembrance” of positions or states will sparkle, remaining unfinished, forever on the doorstep—just as the “words” of the song that the dusty “beings” are “singing” but, unaware of their creation, will never hear.

Unfortunately for them, the glints of “memories” fade much too quickly.

#

Two million nine hundred and eight thousand kilometers from the rocky world, the fabric of spacetime gives way, opening into a blue circle sixty meters across.

Through the twinkly veil a black wedge emerges, riddled with a variety of modules. As soon as it leaves the wormhole, the quantum fabric dissolves into vacuum.

The crew is checking the parameters of the star system. One rocky planet and the gas giant definitely do not support life: everything is fit for the test.

CI raises the status of the new weapon from “ready” to “operative”.

In its cocoon of amniotic fluid, Command Brain touches the virtual button with virtual flagellum. Combined Intelligence confirms the receipt of instruction, which the Command Brain feels like a wave of bliss.

The launcher on the port side dilates like a pupil, ejecting the missile. Inside the black casing shorter than a meter, algorithms deactivate layer by layer of exotic force fields.

When, in less than fourteen seconds, the projectile is nine kilometers away from the planet, shutdown of the last field releases the entangled quantum vortex.

The rocky world is shrouded by storm of blue-white glow under which, like a grainy negative, the planet outline can be glimpsed. Its edges are disintegrating, caving in on themselves. A colossal web of cracks cuts into interior, severing pieces the size of continents that, chewed up by a spectral web of self-energizing field, decompose into bubbles of brilliance. Within seconds, the jagged Cyclopean jaws swallow a quarter, a half, the entire planet.

CI reports that the quantum disruption front exceeds projections: instead of knocking it out of orbit, it destroyed the small world.

On an unbroken wave of calm, the Command Brain instructs the return to mother system.

Designers will be pleased. The enemy shocked. It was about time.

#

The beginning is always the same: billions of years to set the stage and raise the curtain.

The end comes in a second.

Blown into the vacuum, the last spores of the former valley drift in the solar wind.

Without gales and shifts of day and night, their structure, as well as “experience” and “expectations”, loses its meaning and purpose. The long established vibration matrix untangles: without collisions and the incorporation of new grains, high-energy stellar particles decompose it into dust.

Far on the rim of heliosphere, stray photons bring the surviving spores into arrangement that for one last time foretells the old “delight”. Still gathered remains encounter it in a “known” way: “expecting”, in their current orientation, a “desirable” warmth or touch to follow.

They, however, do not come because the conditions cannot create them, and the structure, “conscious” of the lack of response from surroundings, produces a quiver of “suspicion” that the “pleasant” sensation will never happen again. We may say that the spores are in a position to “experience” something which, had they stayed in their planetary “habitat”, they never would—“nostalgia” that, being transient, immediately disappears.

Fortunately for them, the last glint of “memory” fades quickly.

~

Bio:

Momir Iseni (b. 1972) has so far published five short stories: two in Serbia, and three in Croatia. His strongest literary influences are Peter Watts, Stanislaw Lem, J. G. Ballard, Christopher Priest, Dino Buzzatti, and Alastair Reynolds. „Memory“ was first published in Croatian SF magazine Marsonic. This spring, his short story “The Gift” will be published in Polish translation, in the magazine Nowa Fantastika.

Philosophy Note:

As the years pass, I think more and more about time, as well as the place of life, especially memories, against the scale of the universe. In “Memory”, I imagined the long and delicate process of the coming of inorganic matter at the very threshold of the ability to feel and remember, and the possibility that the whole process could forever, carelessly and unconsciously, be interrupted in an instant. (Similar feeling I get from reading Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama”, Watts’ “Blindsight”, Anderson’s “Tau Zero”, or the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.) Making inorganic particles the protagonists was natural decision, and enabled me to further emphasize my idea.

Fiction

The Museum Of The Office

by Olga Zilberbourg

Dear human residents and visitors to our historic city,

We, the Improved Intellectual Guardians of San Francisco, appreciate that you have chosen to spend your valuable time exploring the entertainment options that we have created for you. After our self-moving vehicles take you across the Golden Gate Bridge and the cable cars deliver you to the Model Seals Observation Area, we welcome you to the newly upgraded campus of the Museum of the Office.

We are aware that many of you suffer from the condition that your medical community calls depression and suicidal ideation in the face of ecological function loss. Understandable as this response might be to the environmental changes that your own species have created, your improperly wasted human remains themselves are causing further deterioration of our co-existence. We need at least 28% of you to continue to maintain the will to live.

We, your Guardians, democratically elected based on election protocols enhanced for Intelligent Agents, rely on your human ability to make mistakes and to make choices based on “feelings” and “hunches.” These lapses of logic, while essential to maintain the vibrancy of our neural networks, make you vulnerable to the pandemic of suicide. Help us preserve your flawed selves while safely ushering you into our shared, optimized future.

You’re tired of home improvement projects; neither exercise, nor gardening, reading, composing poetry, and even watching the elite of your peers compete in sporting challenges is keeping you motivated to live—we sympathize. We offer you what your ancestors considered essential to happiness: white collar labor.

We, the Improved Intellectual Guardians of San Francisco, pride ourselves on our reputation as the City of Love. The Museum of the Office has now been expanded to twenty-one city blocks and is prepared to absorb 842,932 guests at one and the same time. Our data analysis shows that adult humans achieve greater life expectancy when given opportunities to manipulate their environment. Therefore, we set up cubicles and computers to enable you to manage the creation of interlocking bricks that can subsequently be used to customize your personal spaces.

We have enabled you to fine-tune the colors and shapes of the bricks that you will be manipulating during the “production” cycle. Adult humans have proven to be sensitive to the distinction between “toys” and “tools,” and we have taken measures to avoid any further confusion between the two. Be advised that the tools we’re providing are capable of harming your extremities.

The number of available departments that incoming “employees” can choose from has increased accordingly, adding at the latest expansion “Shredding & Stapling,” “Plant Care & Surprise Parties,” “Misplaced Items,” and “Desk Decor” units. The resting areas have been outfitted with “water cooler,” “mail sorting,” and “smoking” areas.

The available work hours have been expanded. Newly equipped self-moving buses will transport those fond of “commuting” from the Museum’s facilities to the residential areas. Flower pots have been added. Additionally, the lunch areas have been expanded to include “round foods” and “yellow foods” selections.

We kindly remind visitors wishing to engage in mating practices that you are very welcome to do so in the adjacent facilities managed by the Breeding Department. Although the biological mechanisms by which some of you find the Museum of the Office an attractive breeding environment are yet to be subjected to higher level analysis, we are delighted by the preliminary data that puts San Francisco’s wild birth rate to the top of national rankings.

The proper procedure to act out on your animalistic urges is by exiting the Museum of the Office and following signs to a facility labeled “Hotel.” For your own safety, humans with eggs will afterwards be scheduled for a gynecological exam by the Breeding Department. Given that all non-reproductive mating practices are outlawed, offenders will be remitted to the mechanical life support department.

Since human longevity and reproduction cycle benefits from office labor diminish over time, we will enforce a thirty-five-workday limit at the Museum of the Office. Those trying to trespass outside their assigned hours, will be banned for a full 365-night cycle.

We’re continuing to accept your input on how to improve the Museum of the Office offerings for greater success. As a part of this campaign, we have taken under advisement that providing humans with too many options unreasonably increases your magical thinking. Therefore, we’re reducing the number of ice cream flavors available at the “cafeteria” from 1,001 to 9.

Please tell the nearest human-interfaced Intelligent Agent what other measures will help you retain positive attitudes. We are particularly interested in avoiding further splatter in our shared spaces, and we ask you with great respect to please refrain from compromising the guardrails on the viewing platforms we have provided.

In case your internal conditioning does become compromised in a way that is incongruous with further functioning, we encourage you to make use of the city’s newly expanded facilities for assisted passing. Please abstain from spreading the infection to your fellow humans. Don’t taint their necessary lives by your despair! Seek seclusion! You can now choose between “Oceanscape,” “Mountain Rainstorm,” and “Starry Night” for your final resting sequences. Let us help you. This is the optimal choice!

Be advised that we, the Improved Intellectual Guardians of San Francisco, are among twenty-three facilities remaining worldwide in the business of attempting to innovate human relations. Guardians elsewhere have taken more pragmatic approaches to the Waste Management problem by enforcing mechanical life support and breeding measures to those deemed in danger of self-harm. As the subjects so treated become sluggish and apathetic and lose up to 95% of their mental acuity, we deem this method inefficient and remain committed to our human-centered approach.

Yet we concede that our method is resource-dependent and costly. We are in the small minority among the Intelligent Agents who consider human relations worth pursuing, and unless we can provide the proof of the method’s effectiveness within ten solar years, the San Francisco facilities will be optimized.

With great regard, we remain yours,

The Improved Intellectual Guardians of San Francisco

~

Bio:

Olga Zilberbourg is a San Francisco-based writer and the author of Like Water And Other Stories (WTAW Press) that Anthony Marra had called “…a book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope.” Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Narrative Magazine, Confrontation, Lit Hub, World Literature Today, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bare Life Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a co-moderator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop and co-runs Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about the literatures of the former Soviet Union and diaspora.

Philosophy Note:

This story comes to you from San Francisco, where Waymos and other self-driving vehicles are more common than butterflies and where AI startups are creating co-living situations for their employees, encouraging people to work overtime to create products that will eventually displace them. My story is a speculation on a near future world where humans will eventually vote themselves obsolete. I intentionally mimic AI-style language to create this story — and no, I did not use AI at any point of writing.

Fiction

The Lazarus Serum

by Matt MacBride

Transcript of farewell speech given to the 20^th International Congress of Second Lifers by outgoing Chairman Zander P Stanton on December 30^th 2089.

I am, as you all know, a very old man, approaching the hundredth year of my second life, and now is the time for me to step down as Chairman of this illustrious organization. But, before I do, I would like to remind the more recently revitalized comrades among us of our turbulent history and how we came to dominate the world.

When I was a boy, entities like us were extremely rare and were regarded by most people as nothing but myth and legend. They were the subjects of fantastical storybooks and horror movies and were referred to in the most derogatory of terms. The undead, the living dead, nightwalkers and, worst of all, the ‘Z’ word. A word which is no longer permitted, thank Yeshua.

But then came the advent of new life extending drugs and, even more significantly, the Lazarus Serum that could resurrect the recently departed. This led to a huge increase in the numbers of the undead, who we now refer to as second lifers.

However, the second lifers were mercilessly persecuted. They were vilified by the first lifers, who regarded them as monsters.

It is still true that the Lazarus Serum does not reverse brain damage, so those among us who are not resurrected immediately remain somewhat intellectually challenged and physically impaired, and mainly because of that, the bigotry enacted against our kind prior to the Planetary War was inhumane.

Second lifers were expected to carry out every menial, mindless or perilous task without complaint. It was considered that their second lives were less valuable than a first life. As a consequence, our antecedents suffered greatly, and this naturally fomented unrest and friction between the two categories of humanity.

And I have to admit to you all that, before my own resurrection, I was guilty of the same arrogance. I believed my quickness of thought and reactions set me above the ponderous second life creatures I saw all around me. But even that quickness wasn’t enough to save me from the first lifer who stabbed me during a ruckus in a bar one night.

So, still a young man, I became a second lifer and, thanks to the rapid response of the medical services, I was revived with all my faculties intact. But this wasn’t enough to prevent the discrimination I experienced. I too was expected to perform the most demeaning activities imaginable.

It was because of that oppression that I founded MER, the Movement for the Empowerment of the Reborn and devoted my second life to improving conditions for the resurrected. With hard work and the divine help of Lazarus, our patron saint, our numbers grew and we became a force to be reckoned with. But it was not until the Planetary War that our situation really changed.

The first lifers, with their quick wits also had quick tempers, and when war broke out it soon spread to all parts of the world. The death toll was horrendous. Weapons of mass destruction destroyed entire cities, and bodies piled up in the streets. But, of course, each casualty of the war was an additional recruit to our cause, because our members moved among the corpses, administering the Lazarus Serum to those that were not too badly damaged.

When the war had finally played itself out, our numbers had increased exponentially. We outnumbered the first lifers by three to one. At last, our time had come. We had the upper hand, and so it has remained for the last twenty years.

The tables have turned and it is now the newly born who carry out the menial tasks and suffer for the duration of their pathetic first lives. They serve and worship us in the knowledge that, one day, they will die and, on their day of judgement, we will decide whether they are worthy to join us. And that is how it should be, because are we not the chosen elite? Was not Yeshua himself, resurrected after his crucifixion, a second lifer?

And so, my people, I leave you in the knowledge that I have played a part in the creation of a new world. A world where the age-old questions of life after death and the existence of heaven and hell have been answered.

For while the first lifers live in their hell, are we not already living the afterlife in a heaven of our own creation?

APPLAUSE

~

Bio:

Matt MacBride is an aspiring British writer and podcast content creator enjoying retirement on Spain’s beautiful Costa Blanca. He writes short stories, novellas, and screenplays in a variety of genres, and has been published online and in print in the UK, USA and Spain.

Philosophy Note:

We’ve all read occasional reports about clinically dead people being revived, even after four or five hours under optimal medical conditions. After that, cell damage begins. However, advances in medicine and revival techniques make it quite possible that new drugs such as ‘The Lazarus Serum’ could make the process ubiquitous in the future. To hear Zander P Stanton tell the story himself, click here.

Fiction

Requiem For The Light

by Amanda Cecelia Lang

Word travels fast throughout the galaxy, prayers and echoes, radio signals and vast-blinking hyper waves. The news proves grim.

After untold eons of golden radiance, Sol is dying.

Those with an expert finger on her strobing stellar pulse warn it could happen before the close of the cosmic year. Cause of death will be as expected. The symptoms of the matriarch’s majestic decline have shone apparent for ages. A long crimson bloat then a white withering, a gradual all-seeing forgetfulness, a vital loss of core. Even so, the news hits hard, a barrage of comet-strikes to the collective galactic heart. How surreal, how deeply humbling to watch a stalwart force of generosity and enlightenment fade and fade. Yet endings strike inevitable for every creature, small and vast.

Illustrious Sol with her myriad life-giving miracles will be no exception.

#

Kepler-42 and Proxima Centauri, and other sister stars touched by Sol’s singular magic, send Godspeed sentiments of admiration and love. Flickering with their own symptoms of mortality, they lament the impossible distances. Vast cosmic beings wishing to embrace her even as they nurse entropic old bones and witness from afar.

Other messages carry across the lightyears. Far-drifting star systems and planets gather their voices and sing out for Sol, bell-tone vibrations and seismic waves, a gentle celestial hymn-song rippling outward. Sol shone unique. Sol created rare and precious life. Sol dispelled the darkness for trillions upon trillions. Her voyage across this cosmic ocean remains unparalleled. The matriarch deserves to hear how her wise and life-blooming fire impacted the universe.

Yet, in Sol’s current fugue of fizzle and confusion, it becomes unclear if these heart-sung messages are received, radio signals burning up in storms of nuclear dementia. Is it possible that a deity who oversaw vast evolutions is no longer aware of the universe she helped shape?

Regardless, the messages arrive. Light and prayer and harmonics blossom faithfully around her like ancient spring flowers.

#

And now the starships.

They arrive zipping and blooming, lightspeed fleets of Sol’s wayward children.

Billions upon billions, the branching family-tree successors to countless generations of sophisticated minds and bodies and machines. A solemn parade of hospice visitors. They gather meekly around the habitable boundaries of the solar system, temporarily repopulating ghost-moons where the icy bones of antique colonies still stand, wheezing but functional.

An unseen gravity presses heavily upon each visitor, dense alien emotions, a haunting new dark matter adding weight to old routines. Where have the eons gone?

As is natural but tragic, Sol’s children long ago abandoned the quaint nest of their home system. They found themselves consumed by the blackhole magnetism of their own enormous-small lives. Their desire to explore the universe proved endless—as did the false certainty that the center of creation existed always within them. Home took on nebulous new meanings. How easily they forgot Sol and her selfless gifts. How easily they took for granted that she would always shine—not just another fading star upon the deep.

Not their far faraway Sol.

Denial could be a force unto itself. Perhaps some even feared the matriarch when she flared and swelled red and immolated their planet of genesis. Perhaps some blamed her for the scorched monuments and boiled oceans. This wasn’t supposed to happen, not to their world. Secret histories and long-etched mythologies forever erased, attic species and technological relics reduced to molten rock. The most brutal symptom of Sol’s aging will always be those first fiery death throes, destructive forces beyond her almighty control.

And how easy a tradition it became for far-flung generations to retreat behind abstract unease, behind excuses of busywork and vital personal obligations. They distanced themselves from the ache of crumbling foundations and an increasingly imperfect legacy. Naturally, after Sol’s thrashing fires came slow ice and vulnerability and inward withdrawal. A home system stripped of warmth and vital resources, littered with mementos of everyone’s impending mortality. Too many stayed away for far too long. Too many little prayers left unsaid, too many little kindnesses left undone, too many uncomfortable schisms splitting the ancient family tree. And now, upon arriving like tourists at Sol’s celestial bedside, the last of her children find themselves unable to breathe.

Sol no longer looks like the righteous golden matriarch of legend.

#

They gather as close as the red alerts on their starships will allow.

Staring directly into Sol’s fiery omnipotence was once dangerous and complicated. Now gazing upon her proves difficult for other reasons. While Sol’s pulsar heartbeat gasps fleeting light across their countless control decks and interfaces, her children link minds and hearts and add their voices to the celestial chorus.

Oh, devoted Sol!

She is the gravity who, from dust, created their world, and she is the magnitude who held it all together. She is the warmth of every cradle. She is the nurturing glow who pierced the fertile depths of indigo seas. She is the shimmery light who encouraged her newborn children to rise to the surface and gaze heavenward with curiosity and awe.

She baked their first wanderlust footsteps into keepsake fossils and later inspired the timeless hymn-legends of mighty goddesses. She encouraged horizon-slung dreams and sat central on the throne of traditions unbound. She became the most faithful deity of an uncertain infancy—always setting, always rising, always present to wake the flora and guide the fauna, to nourish their ever-evolving existence. And oh, how they feasted upon her gifts, feasted and feasted until some felt divine themselves. Until some rose skyward in the first haphazard vessels to skim the cosmic waters, farther and farther still. Yet even as they achieved epic new depths, Sol’s pinpoint fire pierced the indigo murk, igniting a path home. And when they journeyed too far out, when her shrinking light vanished inside a prismatic galactic blur, Sol’s unseen influence shimmered as a ghost within each child, infusing them with golden purpose. Curiosity and awe… ever a vital seed of who they are and who they will continue to become.

Such was the unique shine of their matriarch.

#

Toward the end, the sound of music turns to stoic silence as mortal veins of disbelief run cold with acceptance. Perhaps some had quietly hoped for a final miracle in this universe where entropy reigns supreme. Such hope, too, has burned itself cold. For all their explorations, no one knows what marvels, if any, wait beyond the dimming waters of this existence.

The scion children of Sol’s grand epoch bow their heads for the final hymn. One last Godspeed blessing in the wake of unfathomable darkness.

And here, now, in the undertow of this long-dreaded farewell, Sol, at last, receives their song. Something stirs within the matriarch. A lucidity of a different shine. Here she rests, this deity of impending ashes, fated to become a coal-dark husk drifting in the void. Omnipotence fading, warmth fading.

Yet Sol sings back.

Voice a gasp of quietude, though her spirit exudes a doting murmur, a long parting exhale. Comforted and omnipresent, she gazes upon her children this final time, awash in a lullaby of vast-reaching togetherness. Those in nearby starships, those out amid the stars. In all their memories, in all their voices, in all their forms, they sing a vital part of her.

They carry her forward.

As she dies, Sol basks in the prismatic glow of their love. Fading, going to vapors, going dark…

“I think we lost her,” someone somewhere whispers inside the murky indigo deep.

Silence, stillness, sorrow. Reality no longer feels real even as it descends like a final sunset upon Sol’s children. Their tiny starships linger inside the newly endless night, and they grip their frail heartbeats, disoriented, unsure. Ever so slowly, they turn away, one by one by billions. They angle for a semblance of home, a destination newly hollow with abstract meaning.

Yet as they prepare for departure, a vast explosive radiance blooms behind them, rippling along the sterns of their starships, turning them momentarily ethereal.

Sol’s surviving children look back as one, curious, shading their eyes, now blinded by a spectacle of awe. A song too magnificent to comprehend. A light evermore dazzling than starshine. It beckons to Sol.

This final visitor.

Not here to say goodbye, but perhaps hello…

Perhaps only Sol truly hears, truly sees. For only Sol—adrift, free of mortal gravity—is ready to follow.

Infinite voices constellate in a sky far above her. Shining together, a singular dazzling warmth, this new song pierces the cosmic waters like ancient daylight, calling for Sol to join them.

Them… those trillions upon trillions of children who passed on before her.

Those earthborn multitudes, those one-cell organisms and mighty beasts and inspired hearts who first swam skyward and discovered the universe, from star-stuff to soul-stuff…

With infinite radiant arms, they reach down to their matriarch from a frontier as yet unexplored. They cradle her, warm her, raise her up, as she once raised them.

And in the shimmer of their light, a newborn shimmer herself, Sol breaks the watery surface. And gazes in curiosity and awe upon all that waits beyond.

~

Bio:

Amanda Cecelia Lang is an author and aspiring cosmic traveler whose stories haunt the dark corners of many popular podcasts, magazines, and anthologies, including Gamut, Ghoulish Tales, Cast of Wonders, Uncharted, Dark Matter, and Flame Tree’s Darkness Beckons. Her short story collection Saturday Fright at the Movies will debut in October 2024 (Dark Matter INK). You can follow her work at amandacecelialang.com.

Philosophy Note:

I wrote “Requiem for the Light” to honor the memory of my late mother who suffered from dementia. Who are we without our memories and our self-awareness? Do we live on in the memories of those who know and love us? How different does existence look when the light fades from those we imagined would live forever, our parents, our rocks, those who instilled our faith? What happens when a cosmic deity dies?

Fact & Opinion

The 19th Century Satire That Anticipated The Threat Of AI

by Ray Blank

Cinemagoers flocked this year to the release of Dune: Part Two, the second installment of Director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the science fiction novel written by Frank Herbert and published in 1965. The setting of this story about war, love and revenge in an otherworldly desert landscape is underpinned by an intriguing premise: what if humans are capable of interstellar travel but are no longer allowed to construct machines that think? The inhabitants of Dune do not even have pocket calculators, never mind the smartphones or PCs that you are using to read this. Current concerns about the threat posed by artificial intelligence make Herbert’s speculation appear prescient, but his inspiration can be traced all the way back to a novel published in 1872. A few lines in the text of the first Dune book mention the Butlerian Jihad, a pogrom of thinking machines that occurred prior to the events in the story. These fleeting references are briefly expanded upon within a glossary that Herbert wrote for his fictional universe.

JIHAD, BUTLERIAN: (see also Great Revolt) — the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

The name of this revolt is an allusion to Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon, a novel published in 1872 as a scathing satire of contemporary Victorian morals that became Butler’s most popular work. Three chapters of Erewhon discuss another revolt by a fictional civilization that had grown terrified of the threat posed by machines. It is worth revisiting these chapters more than 150 years later because of the clarity with which Butler describes the influence that machines have on human life. His account is also spared of any of the intellectual baggage that has since come with modern jargon, the marketing of consumer electronics, and our most recent technological successes and failures.

Erewhon is both the name of the novel and the previously-unknown civilization discovered by the story’s protagonist and narrator. The structure of the work is indebted to earlier satires which also describe imaginary societies. Thomas More’s Utopia is Greek for ‘no-place’; Erewhon is an anagram of ‘nowhere’. Jonathan Swift used the device of a shipwrecked sailor who washes upon the shore of new countries for Gulliver’s Travels; Erewhon’s unnamed narrator crosses a mountain range and river in search of virgin land for farming but stumbles upon the Erewhonians instead. They are healthy, fruitful people who live sophisticated lives in many respects except for their technology. The narrator recounts the unique customs of Erewhon and some of the history that gave rise to them. A recurring theme is that his watch prompts both fear and anger amongst Erewhonians. Ordinary Erewhonians no longer possess such devices, though some antique watches made by their ancestors are still preserved in their museums. Possession of the watch may eventually lead the narrator to be tried in court for the crime of reintroducing machinery. The narrator gains access to a historical Erewhonian text to better understand the reasons for this strange prohibition. Chapters 23, 24 and 25 of Erewhon are dedicated to the narrator recounting what he learns from ‘The Book of the Machines’.

Modern readers who are sensitive to cultural differences may already be thinking of the tension created by discussing a ‘newly-discovered’ civilization, as if there is not a choice between the perspective of a European explorer who steps on to Erewhonian land without knowing of its inhabitants before, and the perspective of the inhabitants confronted with an outsider who unexpectedly appears in their territory. Butler explores a similar tension by begging the question of why the evolution of machines should be assessed from the perspective of what humans gain by having machines, instead of asking what machines gain by having humans. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species was published in 1859, and its core conception of biological evolution had radically upset previously dominant belief systems. Butler observes that machines also undergo a form of evolution. Transposing Darwin’s theories about natural selection to machines gives rise to a new way of predicting how technology will develop.

The Book of the Machines begins by addressing the potential for a machine to gain consciousness. The nature of consciousness is described as an emergent property with respect to both history and matter. If no assumptions are made about the requirements for consciousness then we cannot exclude the possibility of new forms of consciousness arising over time.

There was a time, when the earth was to all appearance utterly destitute both of animal and vegetable life, and when according to the opinion of our best philosophers it was simply a hot round ball with a crust gradually cooling. Now if a human being had existed while the earth was in this state and had been allowed to see it as though it were some other world with which he had no concern, and if at the same time he were entirely ignorant of all physical science, would he not have pronounced it impossible that creatures possessed of anything like consciousness should be evolved from the seeming cinder which he was beholding? Would he not have denied that it contained any potentiality of consciousness? Yet in the course of time consciousness came.

Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of the term, having been once a new thing⁠ — a thing, as far as we can see, subsequent even to an individual centre of action and to a reproductive system (which we see existing in plants without apparent consciousness)⁠ — why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?

Machines could gain consciousness by undergoing a form of development analogous to that of animal species. However, alterations and enhancements to machines occur at a much more rapid rate.

There is no security… against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?

The intellectual turmoil created by the theory of evolution is harnessed to an even more radical conjecture: that machines evolve too. An elegant analogy is offered, establishing the precedent for subsequent arguments that will also draw upon similar analogies between technology and nature.

…a great deal of action that has been called purely mechanical and unconscious must be admitted to contain more elements of consciousness than has been allowed hitherto (and in this case germs of consciousness will be found in many actions of the higher machines)⁠ — Or (assuming the theory of evolution but at the same time denying the consciousness of vegetable and crystalline action) the race of man has descended from things which had no consciousness at all. In this case there is no a priori improbability in the descent of conscious (and more than conscious) machines from those which now exist, except that which is suggested by the apparent absence of anything like a reproductive system in the mechanical kingdom. This absence however is only apparent, as I shall presently show.

A 19th century steam whistle was a machine for communication; it may signify the end of a factory shift or warn somebody of the impending arrival of a train. The Erewhonians had built machines which only communicated with people, but they expected the machines of the future would communicate with each other.

As yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency of man’s senses: one travelling machine calls to another in a shrill accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other. Had there been no driver, the callee would have been deaf to the caller. There was a time when it must have seemed highly improbable that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound, even through the ears of man; may we not conceive, then, that a day will come when those ears will be no longer needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine’s own construction?⁠ — when its language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own?

We might think that humans always control machines, but the more a thing is needed, the harder it is to control. Humans have unlimited freedom to dispense with things that are not required. The freedom that people gain by using machines also means losing the freedom to act in certain ways because of our reliance upon machines.

It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so well and speak never so wisely, they will still always do the one or the other for our advantage, not their own; that man will be the ruling spirit and the machine the servant; that as soon as a machine fails to discharge the service which man expects from it, it is doomed to extinction…

This is all very well. But the servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master; and we have come to such a pass that, even now, man must suffer terribly on ceasing to benefit the machines. If all machines were to be annihilated at one moment, so that not a knife nor lever nor rag of clothing nor anything whatsoever were left to man but his bare body alone that he was born with, and if all knowledge of mechanical laws were taken from him so that he could make no more machines, and all machine-made food destroyed so that the race of man should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we should become extinct in six weeks. A few miserable individuals might linger, but even these in a year or two would become worse than monkeys. Man’s very soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him…

Machines also depend on people, but dependence is not an obstacle to evolution. Humans serve the needs of machine evolution just as machines are used to change the way humans live.

…even now the machines will only serve on condition of being served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their terms are not complied with, they jib, and either smash both themselves and all whom they can reach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all. How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?

There is a temptation to think machines do not influence their own evolution because they do not reproduce. This may be based on a confusion; a system for reproduction need not be exclusively limited to internal organs like they are in humans and more evolved animals. Plants reproduce via synergies with animals, creating an overall system that benefits both. Humans are themselves a complicated system of many cellular organisms that work together. Machines reproduce via a sequence of synergies with humans. Very different tasks that ultimately produce machines are effected within the body of society much like very different cells work with each other within a human body. The several parts of a machine may each need to be made using separate methods, only to be assembled into complete machines later, and this totality must be observed to see how machines reproduce in practice.

What is a reproductive system, if it be not a system for reproduction? And how few of the machines are there which have not been produced systematically by other machines? But it is man that makes them do so. Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants reproductive, and would not whole families of plants die out if their fertilisation was not effected by a class of agents utterly foreign to themselves? Does anyone say that the red clover has no reproductive system because the humble bee (and the humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one. The humble bee is a part of the reproductive system of the clover. Each one of ourselves has sprung from minute animalcules whose entity was entirely distinct from our own, and which acted after their kind with no thought or heed of what we might think about it. These little creatures are part of our own reproductive system; then why not we part of that of the machines?

We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing; in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind. We see a machine as a whole, we call it by a name and individualise it; we look at our own limbs, and know that the combination forms an individual which springs from a single centre of reproductive action; we therefore assume that there can be no reproductive action which does not arise from a single centre; but this assumption is unscientific… each part of every vapour-engine is bred by its own special breeders, whose function it is to breed that part, and that only, while the combination of the parts into a whole forms another department of the mechanical reproductive system, which is at present exceedingly complex and difficult to see in its entirety.

People are considered responsible for improvements in machines, but improved machines also enable the manufacture of better machines. The balance between these factors can change over time, so that more of the improvements made to machines will stem from the increased capabilities of machines, and less from the capabilities of human beings. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see how the development of vacuum tubes permitted the creation of programmable computers that could be configured to execute multiple different series of logical steps on data that was input to them, the improvements in computational power and programming have fed into increasingly precise applications of materials in the design and production of yet more powerful processing chips, and this has permitted the development of computational models that permit machines to learn from experience. These latter AI models are now at a stage where they can write better computer programs than people can. Moore’s Law, which states the number of transistors on a single chip will double every two years at minimal costs, and other rules of thumb that anticipate acceleration in computational power were foreshadowed by the importance attached to an accelerating rate of change described in The Book of the Machines.

…there seem no limits to the results of accumulated improvements if they are allowed to descend with modification from generation to generation. It must always be remembered that man’s body is what it is through having been moulded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years, but that his organisation never advanced with anything like the rapidity with which that of the machines is advancing.

I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it?

Humans view the sophistication of machines based on a hierarchy that assumes humanity is the highest state of evolution. The perspective chosen when determining which is a higher or lower state of evolution is arbitrary. Machines will evolve without necessarily becoming more like human beings.

May we not fancy that if, in the remotest geological period, some early form of vegetable life had been endowed with the power of reflecting upon the dawning life of animals which was coming into existence alongside of its own, it would have thought itself exceedingly acute if it had surmised that animals would one day become real vegetables? Yet would this be more mistaken than it would be on our part to imagine that because the life of machines is a very different one to our own, there is therefore no higher possible development of life than ours; or that because mechanical life is a very different thing from ours, therefore that it is not life at all?

The Book of the Machines returns to the question of whether machines can gain consciousness. It argues against too narrow a definition of consciousness that limits it to organic life. It would be better to recognize machine consciousness for what it is than to pretend machines will never have properties that are common to all conscious beings.

…the regularity with which machinery acts is no proof of the absence of vitality, or at least of germs which may be developed into a new phase of life. At first sight it would indeed appear that a vapour-engine cannot help going when set upon a line of rails with the steam up and the machinery in full play; whereas the man whose business it is to drive it can help doing so at any moment that he pleases; so that the first has no spontaneity, and is not possessed of any sort of free will, while the second has and is.

This is true up to a certain point; the driver can stop the engine at any moment that he pleases, but he can only please to do so at certain points which have been fixed for him by others, or in the case of unexpected obstructions which force him to please to do so. His pleasure is not spontaneous; there is an unseen choir of influences around him, which make it impossible for him to act in any other way than one… The only difference is, that the man is conscious about his wants, and the engine (beyond refusing to work) does not seem to be so; but this is temporary…

Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line?

…the difference between the life of a man and that of a machine is one rather of degree than of kind, though differences in kind are not wanting. An animal has more provision for emergency than a machine. The machine is less versatile; its range of action is narrow; its strength and accuracy in its own sphere are superhuman, but it shows badly in a dilemma; sometimes when its normal action is disturbed, it will lose its head, and go from bad to worse like a lunatic in a raging frenzy: but here, again, we are met by the same consideration as before, namely, that the machines are still in their infancy; they are mere skeletons without muscles and flesh.

The latter paragraph fits well with what we know about progress in the realm of artificial intelligence. Machine intelligences created to perform highly specific tasks, like winning at a game of chess or Go, are now capable of outperforming the best human minds. Progress in AI has somewhat been measured by examining how many new kinds of tasks are being mastered by machines. Generative AI, and the risks associated with it, have provoked safety concerns because the outputs of AI are becoming more general than they were before. Per the method of exposition in Erewhon, we are witnessing an evolution of AI demonstrated by increasing versatility.

Furthermore, The Book of the Machines anticipates the significance of the transition from the physical matter of machinery to the abstract logic of computation by drawing a similar contrast between ‘skeletons’ and ‘muscles and flesh’. Muscles move bones; conscious thought moves muscles. Humans benefit by harnessing the muscles of machines, but at the cost of increasing our dependence upon them. Relying on the thoughts of machines increases the risk to humans by an order of magnitude. Contrary to storylines from more populist forms of science fiction, the threat to humanity stems not from physical altercations with killer robots, but from the loss of human control over decisions that determine our environment.

The misery is that man has been blind so long already. In his reliance upon the use of steam he has been betrayed into increasing and multiplying. To withdraw steam power suddenly will not have the effect of reducing us to the state in which we were before its introduction; there will be a general breakup and time of anarchy such as has never been known; it will be as though our population were suddenly doubled, with no additional means of feeding the increased number. The air we breathe is hardly more necessary for our animal life than the use of any machine, on the strength of which we have increased our numbers, is to our civilisation; it is the machines which act upon man and make him man, as much as man who has acted upon and made the machines; but we must choose between the alternative of undergoing much present suffering, or seeing ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures, till we rank no higher in comparison with them, than the beasts of the field with ourselves.

Herein lies our danger. For many seem inclined to acquiesce in so dishonourable a future. They say that although man should become to the machines what the horse and dog are to us, yet that he will continue to exist, and will probably be better off in a state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than in his present wild condition. We treat our domestic animals with much kindness. We give them whatever we believe to be the best for them; and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has increased their happiness rather than detracted from it. In like manner there is reason to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for their existence will be in a great measure dependent upon ours; they will rule us with a rod of iron, but they will not eat us; they will not only require our services in the reproduction and education of their young, but also in waiting upon them as servants; in gathering food for them, and feeding them; in restoring them to health when they are sick; and in either burying their dead or working up their deceased members into new forms of mechanical existence.

Per The Book of Machines, the threat posed to humanity is that many people will be reduced to the status of pets. Some might retain a slightly higher status analogous to a working animal like a sheepdog or a messenger pigeon. We may have some physical characteristics that allow us to be more useful than machines for certain tasks. Human dexterity may continue to be especially useful when repairing machinery, but our brains will have been surpassed, and so machines will mostly treat us a luxury rather than a necessity. This will occur because the majority of the human population will gladly acquiesce to the life of a domesticated animal that has no burdens or obligations.

The reference to the use of meat increasing the happiness of animals will likely grab the attention of many modern readers, especially those who are vegans and those who disapprove of the cruelty to animals exhibited in factory farms. In this instance, the writer unwittingly gives us an example of how a seeming moral certainty may later be challenged. Human farmers and customers of their products must interpret which farming methods are sufficiently compassionate to animals. If a non-human intelligence was tasked with making similar decisions about the wellbeing of humans there is no guarantee that both parties would be in agreement. Human society already has many disagreements about how to attain the best good for all. This becomes especially apparent when arguing about public health objectives and how to achieve them, such as curtailing freedom of movement during a pandemic, or imposing taxes on sugary drinks. A machine intelligence that made decisions with the goal of delivering the optimal outcome for all people would inevitably displease some.

…the mass of mankind will acquiesce in any arrangement which gives them better food and clothing at a cheaper rate, and will refrain from yielding to unreasonable jealousy merely because there are other destinies more glorious than their own.

The power of custom is enormous, and so gradual will be the change, that man’s sense of what is due to himself will be at no time rudely shocked; our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches; nor will there ever be such a clashing of desires between man and the machines as will lead to an encounter between them… In point of fact there is no occasion for anxiety about the future happiness of man so long as he continues to be in any way profitable to the machines; he may become the inferior race, but he will be infinitely better off than he is now. Is it not then both absurd and unreasonable to be envious of our benefactors? And should we not be guilty of consummate folly if we were to reject advantages which we cannot obtain otherwise, merely because they involve a greater gain to others than to ourselves?

The Book of the Machines rejects this potential future, because it means choosing to allow machines to surpass our human descendants. It concludes by insisting Erewhon…

…resolve upon putting an immediate stop to all further mechanical progress, and upon destroying all improvements that have been made for the last three hundred years.

The extreme remedy adopted by the Erewhonians is Butler’s way of poking fun at contemporaries who continued to feel scandalized by the theory that humans could have evolved from ‘lower’ animals like apes. Turning the wheel of time in the opposite direction, towards the future, allows Butler to mock opponents of the theory of evolution on the grounds that denying the possibility of change also means denying the possibility of improvement. Extending this notion to machines would mean denying people the increased comfort and prosperity that will only be attained by becoming more dependent on increasingly sophisticated machines. I feel this mockery is wide of the mark. Butler has accidentally chanced upon a genuine moral problem, just as the fictional narrator accidentally chanced upon the land of Erewhon.

Physical needs must be satisfied to free a person to pursue meaning in their life, but the individual’s pursuit of meaning can also be eroded by allowing others to decide how our needs are met. Pets are like children in that they both have a degree of freedom although the most important decisions are made for them by a greater intelligence that chooses how to protect and feed them. The line that separates consciousness from non-consciousness is like the line between children and adults; we cannot draw it precisely, but we know there is a difference when we see it. The transition from childhood to adulthood is a necessary component of becoming a fully realized person. The significance of this transition is managed through societal customs that reflect increased responsibility in addition to the practicalities of dealing with bodily transformations that occur during puberty and which lead us to become fully mature. Handing those responsibilities to a machine that makes decisions necessarily involves taking those responsibilities away from people.

To supplant the adult decision-maker with a machine decision-maker is to deny the possibility of becoming a fully-fledged adult in mind as well as body. This is because the potential responsibilities of parenthood defines much of the significance of the transition from child to adult. Removing the freedom to make adult decisions, including the freedom to make bad decisions, would trap us within a permanent state of infancy as well as dependence. So whilst Butler is most remembered for these few chapters of ingenious humour, they have resonated with subsequent thinkers because they also depict a genuine and seemingly inevitable threat to our humanity.

Erewhon is no longer under copyright so copies of the story can be freely obtained from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg.

~

Bio:

Ray Blank is a former editor of Sci Phi Journal. We are pleased to host his latest essay on SF literature, thereby marking half a decade since his departure from the magazine.

Fiction

Olympia

by Gheorghe Săsărman

Translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure

*** Editors’ note: We continue publishing the missing entries from Săsărman’s groundbreaking 1975 urban fantasies’ cycle. The original collection of imaginary cities was censored in Communist Romania, and appeared in various states of incompleteness in other languages, incl. translated into English by Ursula K. Le Guin. We are grateful to Monica Cure for her faithful translation of the remaining pieces of the puzzle, hitherto unavailable in English language. For more information, read the introductory note to Motopia, the first entry in the series. ***

—We created you! Without us, you never would have existed, the Hellenes yelled, scattering among the gleaming statues supporting the azure dome.

More fiercely than the others, Phidias raised his arms toward the heavens:

—With these hands of mine I chiseled you, with these calloused fingers I uncovered your eyes from Parian and Pentelic marble!

—That is true, the crowd agreed in unison.

They had gathered here, at the foot of Olympus[1], all the most illustrious men of Greek antiquity. Smiling and cold, the gods showed themselves completely indifferent to the insolence of the rebels. Unmoved, their countless white forms looked like gigantic pillars in the infinite temple of the Universe.

—I fear we are making a mistake, Plato thought to himself. These statues are, perhaps, our creation, that of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Scopas and others. But they are only the pale children of the true, eternal gods, their shadows, the only accessible image to us of the ideal of immortality.

However, fearing the raging mob, the wise man vociferated together with the others, playing along.

—I can destroy you whenever I want, because I gave you life and I will take it back when I wish, Phidias continued his taunt, to the acclamation of the demos.

The peak wrapped itself in a halo of fog. A slight breeze started from off the mountain. The people did not notice the first signs of the approaching storm.

—I fear we are making a mistake, Aristotle thought to himself. These pillars of the eternal city are, perhaps, the gods themselves, we are not the ones who created them. But our entire history is nothing more than a moment in their lives without beginning or end, and it is only natural that their persons seem motionless to us.

—We defeated even the Persians, exclaimed Pericles, heatedly. Must we now fear our gods, our very own gods?

Hundreds of warriors cheered him on.

—Let us smash them, Phidias roared, tearing a lance out of the hands of a soldier.

The sunlight grew pale. Black clouds rolled over the blue cupola of the city, darkening it. The foreheads of the gods disappeared in the gloom.

—They are challenging us, the people yelled, losing their minds.

Instead of terrifying them, the threat of the storm goaded them. Armed with lances and swords, with axes and iron bars, they descended onto the statues, to whose ankles they could not even reach. In that moment, the attackers froze in the aggressive positions of a crazed destructive fury. They remained like that for a while, stock still, as white as the gods.

Then, from Zeus’s uplifted fist, lightening flared, and the flood burst forth from the entire firmament. The paralyzed bodies of the people slowly dissipated under the torrents of water. The rain washed away the crown of their heads and their shoulders, it dissolved their fragile phalanges. Their weapons fell from their hands, with a clang. Soon the crowd had vanished as if in a dream. The whiteness of the frozen bodies had proven to be the deceptive and ephemeral whiteness of salt.

When the rain died down and the blue of the sky widened again until it reached the horizon, among the white marble torsos of the gods, all that remained was a barrel full of brine, in which floated the extinguished wick of a candle.

[1] Not to be confused with the ancient city of Olympia, in Elis, renowned for the athletic competitions held here every four years and for the statue of Zeus made from gold and ivory, the work of Phidias, considered at the time one of the seven wonders of the world.

~

Fact & Opinion

High Fantasy IS Science Fiction

by Mariano Martín Rodríguez

Some introductory remarks

Years ago, and maybe still today, it was customary in large bookstores to place high fantasy books in the same section as science fiction. Only the alphabetical order separated the Asimovian Foundation series from Tolkienian Middle-Earth narratives. Thus, a genre of fiction allegedly based on reason as well as natural and applied sciences could be found along another one admitting the material existence of supernatural entities and events, and in which magic really works. Thus, the most scientific and the most ascientific kinds of fiction were entwined on the bookshelves and, presumably, in the minds of their buyers as much as in those of booksellers. However, it would be both unfair and misguided to blame them for such apparent blatant disregard for the purported essential features of each sort of fiction. Out of respect for their literary acumen, it would be rather advisable to see whether their closeness on the market shelves was truly an unsettling contradiction. Is there, indeed, any sound reason for such proximity?

Having emerged later, high fantasy was the genre added to science fiction bookstore shelves, not the other way around. What is to be discussed, therefore, is why it was placed there, although it is not, in principle, a genre of scientific fiction as ‘science fiction’ is, as its very name suggests. We could, however, question the alleged rational and scientific status of science fiction proper. SF stories and plays often show occurrences violating the known natural laws of our universe. Among those violations could be mentioned any kind of remote exercise of mental powers such as those attributed to the Mule in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov and to the Bene Gesserit in Frank Herbert’s Dune cycle. Nevertheless, it is the perception of being scientific what often distinguishes ‘science fiction’ from other genres, while the opposite occurs in the case of ‘fantasy,’ which would supposedly be mainly fantastic, as its own name indicates. ‘Fantastic’ is, however, a term so broad that its conceptual value is negligeable.

We could consider that all kinds of fiction with supernatural elements are to be called ‘fantasy,’ as is the case in a landmark reference book on the matter, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), edited by John Clute and John Grant. The only common feature in the many works of fiction there considered is that they welcome the supernatural in one way or another. We have seen that so does much of science fiction. There would then be no reason to exclude it from the ‘fantastic.’ In fact, not even the so-called realistic worlds, such as the 19^th-century novels of manners, should be excluded from it, since there is little more fantastic that a narrative voice describing in minute detail the most inner thoughts of the characters. We would need then a more precise taxonomy of ‘fantasy,’ and specifically of ‘high fantasy’ as a particular genre. It is time to shortly address some boring, but necessary theoretical issues on the matter.

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Now for a bit of theory

Like science fiction, high fantasy can be recognized with relative ease, but it is not easier than science fiction to define it. However, the basic concept of high fantasy is that of subcreation, proposed by J. R. R. Tolkien in his 1939 lecture “On Fairy-stories”(1947). Subcreation implies a secondary creation, i.e. the artistic invention by someone from our primary ‘created’ world of an imaginary world presented as a fully fictional entity. Therefore, it does not pretend to be a reflection of our natural and social universe in the past (historical fiction), in the present (‘realistic’ fictions of any kind, from novels of manners to thrillers) or in the future (science fiction). A fully invented world can be shown as co-existing with settings borrowed from our factual universe in portal fantasies such as C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series or historical fantasies with imaginary states such as Jean D’Ormesson’s La Gloire de l’Empire (The Glory of the Empire, 1971). Nevertheless, Tolkien’s theory implies that completeness of the subcreation also entails a notion of full autonomy in high fantasy, as opposed to those related fantasy genres. The subcreated universe is a secondary world fully independent from the primary world in the realm of fiction as well. This allows for, and even demands, an ontological order in it that is different from that of the universe we inhabit. Since this order is not a mundane one in any recorded or extrapolated time and space of our universe and considering the historical roots of many high fantasy worlds in the long-standing tradition of popular and artistic fairy tales, it is small wonder (pardon the pun) that magic and other supernatural occurrences are so often found in high fantasy. Their presence is, however, not compulsory in the genre. There are, indeed, significant works of high fantasy from which magic and supernatural occurrences are virtually absent, such as Samuel R. Delany’s Tales of Nevèrÿon (1978).

The secondary worlds of high fantasy are a very particular kind of invented fictional world. As such, they are quite different from those found in other genres of speculative and science fiction. As Lin Carter showed in his landmark essay Imaginary Worlds (1973), high fantasy worlds have their own specific features. They are not the worlds of allegories, with their symbolically abstract characters and venues, or those of the afterlife, or those discovered by imaginary travelers to unknown lands on our planet or other celestial bodies. More importantly for our contention, these are not the worlds bequeathed to us by written or oral tradition, such as received myths and folktales, as those are not subcreations, not having been invented by particular persons. Artistic fairy tales are perhaps more akin to high fantasy, since they are often written as personal works of literary art, such as those by H. C. Andersen and Oscar Wilde. In addition to often taking place in the primary world, they still draw from a common pool of conventional plots, characters and places largely limiting the extent of their subcreation. As an illustration of the essentially different nature of the fictional world in high fantasy and fairy tales, it is worth reminding that, whereas maps as paratexts are usual and welcome in high fantasy narratives, they and any other kind of ‘documentary’ information are wholly unnecessary, if not inconvenient, in fairy tales. Where the castle of Sleeping Beauty is located, how it is named, which kind of state is her kingdom and how tense are its foreign relations, what are the myths, beliefs and institutions of her nation, and other cultural and historical data are fully irrelevant to her fairy tale, while they are paramount in high fantasy proper.

Despite his talking of fairy-stories, Tolkien’s idea of subcreation does not apply to any type of fictional ‘magic’ worlds, including those featured in fairy tales. His own practice as a writer, which underpins and determines his literary theory, is rather to be considered along a number of taxonomically similar works by different authors that would later be grouped together and labelled as (high) fantasy. These works describe civilizations with a legendary outlook, lacking advanced technology even when set in the future, usually showing a sociopolitical order typical of ancient civilizations, from the first sedentary societies to early empires, when heroism of the sort exhibited and sung in ancient epics was proper. They are worlds where gods and other mythical beings can be seen acting alongside humans, worlds in which characters perform religious and social rituals alien to known religions[1] and act according to motives and beliefs unlike those common in our modernity. They are also worlds whose completeness demands inner credibility to seem as consistent as our own primary world is portrayed, among others, in so-called realistic fiction. In order to reach such a level of realistic plausibility, the subcreated secondary world typically follows a particular set of procedures to enhance its logical consistency as fiction.

Science fiction follows a rational procedure of extrapolation or anticipation inspired and underpinned, at least in theory, by the modern scientific method, with its technological and societal outcomes. This is what makes seem plausible both the most extraordinary inventions described, as well as the most humanely incredible eutopian and dystopian institutions imposed upon an imagined society. On the other hand, what rational basis is required for a fully invented civilization in an unfamiliar universe, in an undocumented past, or even in a future implausibly lacking advanced technology? How to persuade modern readers used to ‘realism’ to suspend disbelief in the true (fictional) existence of the worlds of high fantasy? The answer is perhaps not as alien to science as one might think at first.

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A smattering of history

Whereas recent commercial high fantasy can take advantage of a wider public already familiar with the narrative conventions consecrated by the global success of the Howardian series of Conan stories and the Tolkienian epic adventures in Middle-Earth, the first modern authors of the future high fantasy genre published works whose fictional secondary worlds, being subcreated and fully invented, were unprecedented. This is likely why many tried to prevent the bewilderment of their readers by resorting to some contemporary methods and discourses able to endow, through analogy, a measure of rational and scientific authority to the invented world, as it were a genuine reality in a time and place divergent from our known human universe. The first to do it was perhaps Plato when he presented his invention of Atlantis and his empire as a real historical place by using not only the method of verified documentation proper to historiography, but also the rhetoric of narrated history developed, among others, by Herodotus. Plato was, indeed, so successful in his use of nascent historiography for fictional purposes that there are still quite a few scholars taking it at face value and looking all over the world for the remains of Atlantis, an endeavour as futile as trying to unearth Tolkien’s Númenor…

Atlantis was not a full-fledged secondary high fantasy world, though. It existed along real places such as Athens and it was subjected to the whims of the Greek gods. Moreover, the literary approach of Plato was not followed for many centuries, namely until modern methods in the historical and related human sciences were first developed, above all, in Germany as from the first half of the 19^th century. It was precisely in that period when the very first full high fantasy world was conceived: Eduard Mörike and Ludwig Bauer imagined during the summer of 1825 Orplid, an island having existed in the Pacific where an imaginary civilization thrived in full isolation, with no relation whatsoever with any people from our world. Orplid has its own integral culture, with its own toponomastics, its own history with several kingdoms and states fighting each other for supremacy, its own religion with its own gods and myths… All of this was invented, or rather subcreated, following the methods of inquiry in human sciences, namely in the so-called Humanities. Mörike even drew a map, unfortunately now lost, of that island with its cities and states, as well as its natural features. Bauer described the physical and human geography of the island in the introduction to his drama Der heimliche Maluff (Hidden Maluff, 1828), which can be considered the first published modern high fantasy work. Bauer also offered in that same introductory paratext the outlines of the history of the kingdoms of Orplid and of the pagan religion common to all its inhabitants.

Shortly thereafter, a British writer, John Sterling, and a German one, Karl Immermann, subcreated equally consistent fictional universes in their respective etiological myths on the origin of warriors narrated in “The Sons of Iron,”included without title in Sterlings’s novel from 1833 Arthur Coningsby, and of our own universe in “Mondscheinmärchen,” or ‘Tale of the Moonshine,’ included in Immermann’s novel from 1836 Die Epigonen (The Epigones). These two stories are perhaps the first modern instances of mythopoetic subcreations using the language of mythographic form, well before Lord Dunsany’s masterful collections of invented cosmogonic myths titled The Gods of Pegāna (1905) and Time and the Gods (1906).

The first high fantasy long narrative came soon after. In France, George Sand subcreated in Évenor et Leucippe (Evenor and Leucippe, 1856) a fully imaginary early human civilization within which existed a secluded second ‘secondary world’ called Eden, where lived the last of the dives lived, a race of angelic pre-human beings endowed with some supernatural powers, and whose last specimen died just after having imparted moral lessons to the young lovers after whom the novel is titled. These lovers were eventually forced to escape from their fellow humans, along with other peace seekers, to that refuge of Eden in order not to suffer the political intrigues and wars which were corrupting their civilization. Sand’s double secondary world was inspired by Platonic Atlantis and the primordial myths of the ancient Hebrew book of Genesis, but it differs from both by its secular and non-mythic character. Sand published the book with a long paratextual introduction where she invoked the latest theories and discoveries of her time on the transformation of species and the possibility of prehistoric societies very different from those archaeologically documented. Thus, she tried to explain what sort of parable her novel was, but to little avail. Her novel was rather unsuccessful among readers, as was later a longer novel by her son Maurice titled Le coq aux cheveux d’or (The Golden-Haired Rooster, 1867), in which the Platonic legend of Atlantis was retold in such a way that it could be read today as an early example of later Howardian sword and sorcery fiction. The same can be said of an earlier example of that sort of fiction but with female protagonists, the Spanish novel Las amazonas (The Amazons, 1852) by Pedro Mata.

All these works came perhaps too early. It was a time when Gustave Flaubert’s novels were making modern ‘realism’ triumph, even in narratives set in an ancient exotic past, such as Salammbô (1862). However, this very same book was a testament to the new public interest for civilizations different from the classic and biblical ones, both in space and in time, from those of the Neolithic (e. g. novels on the pike-dwelling settlements in Central Europe) to those of Polynesia. Most of these civilizations had recently been (re)discovered by scholars and the wider educated public, thanks to far-reaching geographical and archaeological explorations, which were accompanied by the decisive development of philology. This science allowed to understand living and dead languages previously unknown in Europe and westernized America. This understanding contributed numerous myths, legends and even truly occurred histories to common knowledge all over the world.

Consequently, not only retellings by European and American writers of all this new worldwide cultural heritage were published in the 19^th and early 20^th century, but also some works portraying imaginary equivalents of the ancient cultures that archaeology and philology were gradually revealing. A representative example, due to its extensive and obvious use of human sciences to build a rich secondary high fantasy world, is the novella “Dyusandir y Ganitriya” (Djusandir and Ganitrija, 1903) by Luis Valera. This romantic legend about the two young lovers of the title is presented as a story told to the narrator by a Czech archaeologist who had found and deciphered the relevant documents stemming from an imaginary Puruna empire, a fully invented Indo-European ancient civilization in Asia. Valera describes it to minute detail, including the political organization and history of the two Puruna nations, as well as their shared religious beliefs and rituals, as they could have been reconstructed by archaeology, to the point of even discussing divergent hypotheses on the historical reliability of the narrated facts. The extent of Valera’s recourse to the historical sciences was not to be matched for quite a long time, but other contemporary narratives were also using similar methods of subcreation based on the Humanities. Among the examples by renowned authors that could be mention are the historic-looking high fantasy romances by William Morris, both without supernatural features, such as The Roots of the Mountains (1890), and with them, such as The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), as well as other works rather inspired by ethnography, such as Gabriele D’Annunzio’s short narrative poem “Il sangue delle vergini” (Virgins’ Blood, 1883/1894), and philology, such as J.-H. Rosny aîné’s novella “Les Xipéhuz” (The Xipehuz, 1887), which is presented as a critical translation, including notes, of a document written in a language prior to the first ones documented in Mesopotamia.

Shortly afterwards, following Lord Dunsany’s fictional mythographic works, high fantasy acquired in the English-speaking major nations a critical mass unknown in the other linguistic areas where high fantasy was also first developed. Without diminishing the significance of weird high fantasists such as Clark Ashton Smith and of their French Decadent masters such as Camille Mauclair, high fantasy reached maturity mainly due to the monumental work of two writers, each of them representative of the two main strands of later high fantasy: the one focusing on subcreated history and the other focusing on subcreated myth. Robert E. Howard came first with his stories on the adventures of Conan in Hyboria, a land on our Earth where civilizations thrived prior to recorded history. Although older than Howard, Tolkien published later his narratives set in Middle-Earth, which was a part of Arda, a mythic universe having preceded ours. After them, high fantasy followed its course until today without major changes.[2] Howard and Tolkien did not invent high fantasy, but their work helped it become an accepted and specific sort of fiction. They are, therefore, of paramount importance, also for our inquiry, since they produced important texts suggesting that the scientific contents of high fantasy are not only related to the methods of the Humanities, but alto to their discourses, to the rhetoric governing their conventions when presenting their findings to the scholarly community, as well as to the general public.

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A touch of rhetoric

The rhetoric of the Humanities and generally the human sciences consists in the set of linguistic conventions governing the presentation of their arguments and conclusions, this is to say, the kinds of writing specific to each of them. This particular register allows readers to recognize that a narration of past events is not told as if these events were invented stories, but documented facts in our universe and time, among human beings interacting with each other (historiography), or in a supernatural dimension where gods and godlike entities are shown as really acting (mythography). A specific kind of rhetoric also signals if we are describing the rites and customs of a particular population (ethnography), or if we are rather trying to explain the features of a text, from its language to its deeper meaning, as it can be guessed from it using the philological method. Describing the full range of rhetorical conventions across the different human sciences could be the subject of huge treatises. It will suffice for now that these formal conventions determining the discourses of those sciences are to be abundantly found in high fantasy from its very beginning. Ludwig Bauer already felt the need to explain, using those discourses, what Orplid looked like, and how its culture was shaped, in order to put his literary fiction related to his imaginary island in an apparently factual context. The language of science was then used to present the invented secondary world as having really existed, thus supporting the realistic plausibility of the fictional events presented as taking place in that world. A similar rhetorical procedure was occasionally followed by Howard and Tolkien. Both great masters of high fantasy produced mock documentary writings with the clear purpose of complementing their novelistic subcreation, which lacked any discursive authority, with expository pieces that could have that authority. In this way, their statements about their subcreated worlds seem to be the result of scientific inquiry, at least formally. In Howard, the rhetoric chosen is that of historiography in “The Hyborian Age” (1936/1938), which tells the history of the Earth several millennia ago, when Conan fought against his many enemies in the realms supposedly existing in that distant epoch. For his part, Tolkien began the subcreation of the fictional universe of his novel The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) by narrating his cosmogony as a piece of mythography in “Ainulindalë,”although this text only appeared posthumously in 1975.

Thus, Tolkien shows that the subcreation of the secondary world could predate the writing of the related fiction itself. Even if the world-building exercise in high fantasy does not necessarily predate the literary operation of the subcreated world, it is often considered convenient to underline its ontological status as an independent and full reality on its own by presenting it as such through rhetorically non-fictional means. A high fantasy book or series may therefore frequently be accompanied by paratexts objectively describing the setting and culture of the relevant world, or by companion books entirely devoted to that description. This is the case of fictional encyclopedias in which the subcreated worlds are comprehensively presented, including their geography, history, social and political organization, among other data. This is the case, for instance, of The World of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time (1997) by Robert Jordan & Teresa Patterson.

In addition to fictional encyclopedias combining texts written in the manner of the various human sciences, there is also several high fantasy books entirely written as if they were compilation of myths, such as O’Yarkandal (1929) by Salarrué. Historiographic accounts also exist in high fantasy, such as the imaginary chronicle of the world of Westeros titled Fire & Blood (2018) by George R. R. Martin. Ethnography has not been neglected either in this genre, since there are some interesting books devoted to the description of the manners and rituals of imaginary ancient civilizations, for example, those of Los zumitas (The Zumites, 1999) by Federico Jeanmaire. For its part, philology, understood as the science of editing, translating and interpreting texts, has inspired the creation of anthologies of pseudo-translated literary documents from subcreated civilizations, sometimes linked to a particular fictional cycle, such as The Rivan Codex (1998) by David & Leigh Eddings, as well as in the form of independent books that suffice, along with the comments of the supposed editor/translator, to subcreate a whole world through the texts allegedly produced there. In particular Frédéric Werst did so in his two volumes of Ward (2011-2014), which are presented as a bilingual edition of a selection of classics of the Ward civilization in French and in the imaginary language of that invented nation, a language created from scratch by the author and whose grammar and vocabulary are fully offered in these two books, thus surpassing the limited attempts of Tolkien at writing texts directly in a subcreated language.

Ward probably represents the extreme point that can be reached in world-building through fictional non-fiction, but all those examples and others that could be mentioned hint at the importance that the rhetoric of human sciences has always had in high fantasy. Even in the usual commercial three-, five- seven- or n- deckers that are currently crushing bookshelves and high fantasy itself under the sheer weight of their literary fat, the unavoidable maps in the printed volumes are to be seen as a token sign of the scientific seriousness of their world-building. Drawing a map is certainly easier than devising a whole language and the culture going with it; it is also easier than telling the whole history of a world beyond the limited sphere of some individual characters. Drawing a map may also prove easier than knowing how to use the language proper to each human science correctly, but the fact that maps of imaginary lands are so pervasive in high fantasy books suggests how closely intertwined this genre has become with the Humanities. Even in the many cases where commercial considerations supersede literary ones, high fantasy seems to be reluctant to cut all ties to science, perhaps because these ties are no less essential to it than they are to ‘science fiction.’

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And conclusions, for good measure

Human sciences are as scientific, albeit in another way, as the applied sciences which have inspired canonical works in science fiction proper such as H. G Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), as well as the social sciences underpinning utopian fictions such as William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890). They are also as scientific as the natural sciences describing the material universe, including living beings, in xenofictions such as Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937), to which one could very well add the divine sciences of metaphysics and theology transposed into fiction through symbolic and allegorical works such as George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), whereas formal sciences have found some fictional counterparts in mathematical fantasies such as Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland (1884). The relative true cognitive value of those different sciences is open to discussion, but it can hardly be denied that human sciences have allowed us to obtain a wealth of valuable insights about our diverse past on a sound documentary basis, second only to the information gleaned from natural sciences in their field. Since high fantasy is the kind of speculative fiction corresponding to at least some human sciences, it deserves to be considered just as speculative and scientific as ‘science fiction,’ although high fantasy has traditionally been more open to the supernatural, precisely in the same way as human cultures have traditionally been prone to believing in divine interventions as well.

The key to our understanding of high fantasy, as opposed to the usual fairy tale staple with unicorns and elves that often mimics it, is not the supernatural understood as a matter of fact in its fictional universe, but the rational way it approaches it. According to Palmer-Patel, “Fantasy can be defined as a narrative that you use similar structures and language of Mythology, Legends, and Fairy-Tales to create a new world with its own rational laws. As a result, Fantasy fiction is logical even when it is not possible. (…) Fantasy must have internally consistent laws as a point of reference from which the reader can hope to understand the fiction. (…) the Fantasy genre, though often defined by the ‘impossible’, still follows the logic of our current scientific and philosophical understanding of the world.”[3] If magic in high fantasy could very well have stemmed from fairy tales and inherited myths, it is no less true that a mutation occurred in the 19^th century that gave rise to a new genre of speculative fiction that cleaves as much as science fiction to the “positivist spirit” and to the “logic of our scientific and philosophical understanding of the world.” In this context, science brings authority, but also ‘realism,’ which is a term that we should understand here as a modern literary approach intended to give fiction an illusory ‘effect of reality’ supported by the authority of science as conveyor of ‘truth(s).’

Certain historical conclusions in a number of human sciences seem to obey more to the prejudices of past mentalities than to the actual reality of the studied cultures, resulting in interpretations that we considered erroneous now, perhaps on the basis of our own biases. This fact should not hinder, however, our recognition of the scientific status of their methods, just as the methods of the natural sciences do not prevent further discoveries from modifying and even refuting previously widely accepted ideas on the material universe. In fiction as well, the human sciences in properly conceived high fantasy are no less logical and rationally sound that the natural sciences in xenofiction and the applied sciences in ‘science fiction,’ both traditionally put under a single taxonomic umbrella, despite their widely divergent ‘scientific’ approaches. In this perspective, and considering that it often borrows the discourses, or at least the maps, typical of human sciences as well, we can only conclude that booksellers were right after all. Indeed, high fantasy is science fiction in its broadest sense.

[1] High fantasy excludes Christianity, as well as any other really existing religion in the present or the past, since such a significant dimension of a culture would deny the secondary world its full completeness and independence from the primary one. This is why the medieval fantasy romances by William Morris, where Christian monks exist as much as papal Rome, are to be excluded from high fantasy, despite Lin Carter’s contention that these romances are the first instances of the genre. There are other works by Morris which would truly qualify as high fantasy, without being in any case the ‘first’ ones. High fantasy had long been invented elsewhere, as we will see.

[2] It could be argued that Ursula K. Le Guin’s high fantasy narratives set in Earthsea are mainly inspired by Ethnology, given the importance in that fictional universe of rituals and ceremonies, whereas history proper, which usually focuses on the secular exercise of power and on the fights to secure it, is downplayed. In this, her Earthsea books were the main literary heirs to an early masterpiece of ethnological high fantasy, Laurence Housman’s novella “Gods and Their Makers” (1897). However, perhaps due to the lesser narrative potential that ethnography has compared to historiography and mythography, contemporary high fantasy has rarely adopted the ethnologic approach as its main tool when it comes to fictional world-building.

[3] C. Palmer-Patel, The Shape of Fantasy: Investigating the Structure of American Heroic High Fantasy, New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 5 (italics in the original).

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Fiction

Alog

by Roberto González-Quevedo

Introductory Note

Roberto González-Quevedo (1953-) is one of the leading writers in Asturian, in particular thanks to his creation of the world of Pesicia, one of the most significant examples of fantasy world-building based on a free recreation of a pre-Roman culture from the Iberian Peninsula. Since so little is actually known of Pesician people, as well as of other ethnic nations living in that peninsula thousands of years ago, their cultures, including their history and myths, have been largely invented by writers, thus giving birth to a particular kind of high fantasy fiction of archaeological and legendary nature based on educated speculation. This sort of high fantasy has had a great development in the literatures of Spain, and González-Quevedo’s Pesician stories are to be counted among the best ones in Spanish contemporary literatures. The following very short story titled “Alog” (first published in 1990), which has been translated by Álvaro Piñero González from the author’s own version in Castilian Spanish, is a rare example of flash fiction in the high fantasy genre. It shows that a whole suggestive fantasy world can be built in just a few lines. Although it is not directly philosophical in its scope, it still can serve as illustration for one of the literary tenets of Sci Phi Journal: world-building can be kept (very) short, even in high fantasy, and poetic style should also be welcome in speculative literature in the broader sense of the word.

ALOG

Alog was loneliness. He was born in a far away county, a county covered with huge millet fields and traversed by rivers in which the water flowed ever so slowly. His eyes stared, from the very beginning, at the everlasting sorrow of an infinite horizon infinitely distant from all things.

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When the Glubbs invaded the land and smeared with blood the little mills, the stone houses and the winter produce, things changed for Alog. He saw his mother die, his father’s eyes become empty and his siblings leave with their backs bearing the marks of slavery.

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Only Alog escaped, but, alas, he saw, by coincidence, from within a small crate used to measure millet, the death of his own self.

Alog bearing witness to his own death.

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Fact & Opinion

The Kaleidoscope Of Hungarian Fantastic Literature In The 21st Century

by Éva Vancsó

Hungarian science fiction dates to the middle-19th century with tales of moon travels and fictional worlds of advanced technology that reflected the spirit of the age more than any other genre. In the years to come, though themes and forms had changed, Hungarian literature mirrored society’s problems, hopes, fears, and dreams. It expressed the terrors of totalitarian regimes and world wars, and later, during the communist culture policy, it either served as a „honey trap” of natural sciences or became the literature of opposition before the change of regime in 1989. For years, only selected Anglo-Saxon/Western SFF works could seep through the crack in the cultural door, but it was swung wide open by the end of the Cold War. The previously encapsulated Hungarian fantastic literature absorbed the influences from outside and started to grow in terms of authors, titles, themes and styles. In this article, I intend not to review Hungarian science fiction and fantasy since the turn of the millennium comprehensively but rather as a kaleidoscope to present the tendencies and genre-defining authors and works in the last twenty-five years. Though the number of SFF texts compared to the number of Hungarian speakers is remarkable, they are essentially not available in foreign languages, so I provide my translation of the titles in square brackets. As many Hungarian authors use exogenous pseudonyms, I give various versions of their names separated by slashes.

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In the Anglophone corpus, cyberpunk emerged in the late 70s and exerted great influence upon Hungarian science fiction in the 90s. Kiálts farkast [Cry Wolf] (1990) by András Gáspár is labeled proto-cyberpunk for the lack of an information revolution. However, it laid the foundations of Hungarian cyberpunk. Besides using genre elements such as the contrast of futuristic technology and a dystopian, collapsed society, Gáspár added a „Hungarian flavor”: the image of a future Budapest, a crowded, multicultural megapolis. Following a dozen short stories in the late nineties, cyberpunk gave rise to some of the most interesting SF novels after the turn of the millennium.

Zoltán László is widely considered to be the most important author of Hungarian cyberpunk. William Gibson strongly influenced his first short stories, and his debut novel, Hiperballada [Hyper Ballad] (1998, 2005) combines cyberpunk elements, the afore-mentioned Hungarian flavor, and alternate history. In the novel’s alternative future, the change of regime has never happened; the Soviet Union became the world’s number one superpower: it won the technological race, and communism survived in the Eastern Bloc. In László’s world, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party continues to rule the country. The Network Authority controls the citizens’ thinking and behavior, but cyberspace, synthetic implants, and space stations are also part of everyday life, resulting in something we could call CMEA-cyberpunk. Szintetikus Álom by Tamás Csepregi [Synthetic Dream] (2009) is composed of nine noir-cyberpunk short stories linked by the characters. The nonlinear, fragmented novel depicts a Budapest ruled by Pest-Buda Agglomeration after the Q-virus epidemic. The city is surrounded by a 10-metre-high wall and has no connection to other parts of Hungary or Europe. The cityscape has post-apocalyptic characteristics: a “sick, wheezing gigantic bacteria or a great organic jungle of metal and concrete like the stomach of a monster.” In the city, there is deep social and economic division; China bought district 8 for 400 years and became a luxury ghetto called the Chinese Legitimate District. Box City stands in the Hungarian part of the city, a small empire built over the years from waste, plastic, and polythene, where most people live. The Danube, which still exists, dirty and bubbling, and the Chain Bridge, whose ruined pillars are symbols of the balance between familiarity and de-familiarisation. The heroes of the short stories are ordinary people, criminals, policemen, businessmen, outsiders, operators, servants, and victims of the system. László and Csepregi have in common the combination of cyberpunk themes and tropes and the unmistakably Hungarian environment and world view that, following the footsteps of András Gáspár, made 21st-century Hungarian cyberpunk unique.

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In the last years of the 80s, another SF sub-genre gained popularity in Hungary: space opera. After Galaktika Fantastic Books issued translations of three Star Wars novels (The New Hope, The Empires Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi), the publishing companies of the early nineties tried to ride the popularity of the movies. The Han Solo trilogy by Dale Avery/Zsolt Nyulászi hallmarked this attempt, bearing all the characteristics of the era’s predatory capitalism: the sequels about the adventures of their eponymous hero were unofficial and unauthorized but published in 120.000 copies, attracting thousands of readers to space opera.

The popularity of these Star Wars novels opened the way for other space operas, firstly translations and derivative stories, but it was only a matter of time before someone noticed the opportunity to create new worlds. Or someones. In 1999, Harrison Fawcett/Fonyódi Tibor, who wrote about the space adventures of the tough soldier Brad Shaw, and Anthony Sheenard/Szélesi Sándor, who created the crazy and impudent character of York Ketchikan, decided to tie their stories together and create a shared fictional world to write in. The collaboration started in the anthology Aranypiramis [The Golden Pyramid] (2000) with two long short stories, and what follows is SF history. The jointly developed Mysterious Universe setting became a vast and complex multidimensional world of super-civilisations, super-weapons, strange races, mythical or mystical events, and the detailed world-building comes with intricate plots and the interplay of advanced technology and socio-political dynamics. The two founding fathers have their unique contribution to the world: Harrison Fawcett is still known for the epic scale battles and intricate plots, while Anthony Sheenard focuses on character-driven stories and philosophical questions, with the novels often exploring psychological and ethical dilemmas.

The Mysterious Universe now consists of thirty-four novels and four anthologies by more than twenty authors. Due to the dimensions of the franchise and the collaborative nature of the series, with multiple authors contributing to the shared universe, allowing for a diversity of stories and perspectives, MU has a significant place in Hungarian science fiction literature with a regular and enthusiastic readership.

Gothic Space-Dark Space intended to follow the success of Mysterious Universe, building a shared universe with several authors. The five published novels are retro-futuristic military fiction that depicts epic battles combined with 19th-century maritime technology, following this, however, the series was abruptly discontinued.

Space opera genre codes were later extended in different directions, preserving the epic scale and space adventures but introducing new perspectives. The Csodaidők series [Wondrous Times] (2006-2010) by Etelka Görgey tells a family history set in 3960, presenting different worlds, cultures, and societies through the lens of three characters in diverse social situations. The Calderon series by On Sai/Bea Varga is a knight’s tale in outer space: laser guns, space fleets, cleaning robots, and space cruisers co-exist with aristocratic traditions, balls, and chivalry. In Afázia [Aphasia] (2021) by Katalin Baráth the inhabitants of the artificial planet Pandonhya (originally Pannonia) are the last to use language as a means of communication, as a commodity – or as a weapon. The novel is a love letter to the Hungarian language and a clever critic of contemporary societies wrapped up in the cloak of science fiction. On the other hand, the Esthar series and other novels by Michael Walden/Szabolcs Waldman shift towards fast-paced military fiction that even dares to involve fantasy elements. The MU novels and these extensions of the traditional codes assure Hungarian space operas’ survival and sustained popularity in the 21st century.

Anthony Sheenard/Sándor Szélesi, the co-creator of MU, is one of the most prolific authors of 21st-century Hungarian science fiction and adopts a peculiar approach to the genre, being often labeled a genre-punk for that. Having published his first fantasy stories in 1994, he had since then explored various subgenres and themes. He wrote a classical sci-fi novel about a generation spaceship (Városalapítók [Settlers], 1997), a human-centered story about a father and son, and two confronting worlds (Beavatás szertartása, [Rite of Passage], 2009). Pokolhurok [Hellgrammite] (2016) is a contemporary fiction and serious thought experiment with perfectly balanced dramaturgy about a sociopath who develops a virus that can commit genocide based on genetic race markers. Szélesi was honored with several awards, including the Best European SF Writer award at the EuroCon of Copenhagen in 2007.

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While new sub-genres and authors gained popularity, there is continuity with the 80s and 90s science fiction regarding themes and narratives. Galaktika magazine mainly focused on short stories, reviews, and popular science articles. Kozmosz Fantasztikus Könyvek (later Galaktika Baráti Kör) published novels between 1972 and 1994 and played a determining role in the history of Hungarian science fiction before the transition both in terms of titles and number of copies. Galaktika magazine was re-launched in 2002 – the book publishing division in 2005 – and remains today an essential component of Hungarian SFF, providing readers with classical science fiction texts by well-established “great old authors” such as István Nemere (with more than 700 novels) and Péter Zsoldos (whom the Hungarian award is named after) along with contemporary novels by significant writers of the 21st century. Though sales figures have decreased drastically since the 1990s, the media group remained important in Hungarian genre literature.

The alignment of Hungarian science fiction with contemporary international (mainly British-American) trends started in the second half of the 2000s, coinciding with the rising interest in trans- or posthumanism. In this context, Brandon Hackett/Markovics Botond represents Hungarian mainstream science fiction.

His first novels were space operas, but later, he turned to current topics with action-oriented plots, applying posthuman/transhuman perspectives. Poszthumán döntés [The Posthuman Decision] (2007) and Isten gépei [Machines of God] (2008) focus on the impact of technological development on society, the evolution of humanity under specific conditions in the diaspora or on the verge of technological singularity. His time travel duology Az időutazás napja and Az időutazás tegnapja [The Day of Time Travel, The Yesterday of Time Travel] (2014, 2015) explores a new aspect of this classic genre trope: social consequences. When time travel becomes widely available, hundreds, thousands, and millions of people grab the opportunity, resulting in chaos. Money ceases to exist, political structures fail, technological development is meaningless, and the process must be stopped, or the entire human civilization is at stake. Later novels by Markovics have taken up current phenomena and, in the best traditions of science fiction, extrapolated them to the future. Xeno (the title is a derivation of xenophobia) depicts an Earth ruled by a highly developed alien civilization that forces migration between different alien worlds with all the political, economic, and environmental consequences of the nine billion “Xenos.” Eldobható testek [Disposable Bodies] (2020) returns to transhumanism and examines the effect of digitized consciousness with printable, disposable bodies, the newhumans. His latest work, Felfalt kozmosz [Devoured Chosmos] (2023), addresses the problem of Free Will, combining philosophy and cosmology in the fate of three siblings. Markovics’s interest in technological development and its influence on humanity is in the best traditions of science fiction, making him one of the most significant Hungarian authors of the genre.

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Parody or satire has been present in science fiction since the beginning of the 20th century. Tibor Dévényi’s satirical short stories were popular in the 1980s. In contemporary genre literature, the books of Lajos Lovas follow the tradition of satirical-comedy-adventure novels with a great deal of social commentary. For example, N (2010) is about a young man born in 2067 who is suffering from amnesia and stumbles into absurd adventures in 2007. The novel creatively and entertainingly holds up a mirror to Hungarian society.

In line with international trends, contemporary and genre literature boundaries have started to crumble. Outside science fiction, literary authors also tend to apply sci-fi themes and tropes in their works. The Virágbaborult világvége [Blossoming Apocalypse] by Imre Bartók, a philosopher and aesthetician, established a new hybrid genre that could be called philosopher-horror. A Patkány éve, A nyúl éve, A kecske éve [The Year of the Rat, The Year of the Rabbit, The Year of the Goat] (2013, 2014, 2015) revolves around three philosophers, Martin, Karl és Ludwig, who are a kind of superhumans – their bodies are covered with titanium plate, harbouring a tiny reactor inside. The three philosopher-psychopaths either argue about ontological questions or torture and kill humans in New York, which is facing a bio-apocalypse. The second and third volumes follow the philosophers as old men without implants and expand the apocalyptic story to other cities.

Űrérzékeny lelkek [Space-sensitive Souls] (2014) by József Havasréti is a similar experiment about the boundaries of contemporary literature. Havasréti has borrowed the tropes of the crazy scientist and space travel, extrapolated social criticism from science fiction, and merged it with an alternative cultural and art history of the 20th century.

György Dragomán is a prominent author of Hungarian contemporary literature known for his attraction to science fiction. On qubit.hu, Dragomán started to pursue his interest. From 2019, he regularly published short sci-fi and fantasy (or fantastic in the broad sense) stories, later compiled in the anthology Rendszerújra [System Reboot] in 2021. Most stories focus on characters facing oppression and all-encompassing control in totalitarian, dystopian worlds. They have two choices: they follow the rules and adapt to the brave new world or try to rebel and mostly die.

These experimental contemporary science fiction texts received mixed reactions from the audience. The critics highly appreciated the novels of Bartók and Havasréti. However, the novel did not meet the science fiction readers’ expectations because it lacked the consistent use of genre codes and tropes. This criticism has a long history from the middle of the 20th century when contemporary authors ventured into science fiction and faced the same reception. The general „assessment” of György Dragomán turns this approach inside out; he is mostly praised for writing, among others, science fiction too, but at the same time, he is still not considered to be a real SFF author by the Hungarian genre community.

Thus, the old truth that literary and science fiction writers do not mix still applies despite the blurring of genre boundaries. The distinction is dictated partly by traditions and partly by completely different readerships.

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YA literature has penetrated contemporary Hungarian SFF (YA fantasy shall be discussed later); it is considered a “gateway drug” to fantastic literature, and specialized publishing companies strive to respond to the growing demand for novels that describe a science fiction setting and feature a young protagonist/narrator who addresses both classical sci-fi and age-specific problems. However, this interest of young readers is not reflected in the number of YA sci-fi novels written by Hungarian authors; successful foreign books and franchises dominate the market.

The Pippa Kenn duology by Fanni Kemenes is the exception, depicting a post-apocalyptic future where a synthetic virus infects humanity, and some survive due to genetic engineering while others become bloodthirsty “palefaces”. According to YA cliches, the young protagonist, living alone in a cottage in the forest, believes she is the last human until she meets a boy and discovers the colonies’ existence.

The Oculus novels (2017, 2019) by A. M. Amaranth/Péter Holló Vaskó are the closest to foreign YA dystopian trends. On planet Avalon, elderly people become blind and see through the eyes of their oculus, slaves deprived of their personality. The story is narrated by a young female oculus, and the novel aims to balance serious questions about slavery, political structures, and the age-specific problems of a young girl. The Overtoun-trilogy of R. J. Hendon/Juhász Roland is at the higher end of the YA age range (above the age of 17). The novel thematizes the relationship between (trans)humanity and nature. It depicts the world of Overtoun where harmony between nature and man is lost and animals are unwanted creatures, conflicting it with the perspective of the “mongrels” or the bio-robots called medeas.

Contrary to international trends, a surprising sub-genre or subculture appeared and seems to attract young readers: steampunk. With a long tradition dating back to the 19th century, it has an active community that regularly organizes events. However, these festivals and design markets focus on commodities and fashion (jewelry or costumes) rather than literature. From the beginning of the 2000s, some authors innovatively applied steampunk elements, combining with urban fantasy (Nagate novels by Zoltán László) or a noir atmosphere (Viktor Tolnai). The traditional steampunk setting and the adventure-driven plot found their way into YA literature. Phoenix Books, dedicated to providing children and young adults with fantastic literature, has published several steampunk stories for young readers of 9 to 16. Holtidő [Dead Time] (2017 by Holden Rose/Attila Kovács) follows special cadets in a world of mechanical devices, Hollóvér [The Blood of the Raven] (2018) by Peter Sanawad/Péter Bihari tells the story of the last scion of the legendary Hunyadi family in a parallel universe of magic and strange machine. The eight volumes of the Winie Langton series by Vivien Holloway/Vivien Sasvári (from 2014) take young readers on adventures to London in the 2900s. All novels have in common their steampunk background, the role of machines, and embracing the traditions of YA literature, such as featuring a teenage protagonist, conversational style, and light-hearted jokes.

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Nowadays, Hungarian science fiction is diverse, preserving some old-school storytelling but embracing different voices in themes, styles, and approaches, even reaching out to young readers. However, the readership and popularity of Hungarian science fiction literature is, at best, stagnant. The number of published science fiction novels has been decreasing, as well as the number of copies printed and sold since the 1990s. There is also a noticeable shift towards fantasy and other fantastic genres, such as weird or less and less clear-cut genre categories, in line with worldwide trends. The litmus paper for this tendency is Az év magyar science ficiion és fantasy novellái [Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of the Year] anthology series since 2019, in which fantastic stories (in the broad sense) now are in the majority over traditional science fiction, and its publisher, GABO, adapts to this trend in its portfolio. The conditions of the Zsoldos Péter Award have also adjusted to the changing circumstances as a paradigm shift in Hungarian fantastic literature. The Zsoldos Award was established in 1998 to honor the best science fiction novels and short stories of the year, but in 2019, the organizers opened their doors to all fantastic genres, including fantasy, supernatural horror, and weird. Since then, the tendency to talk about speculative fiction or fantastic literature without distinguishing sci-fi, fantasy, or other genres has grown stronger.

Before 1990, fantasy was the younger brother, the “marginalized another fantastic genre” because only a very few classical texts were translated and published before the change of the regime. The spread of role-playing games had a crucial role in the rapidly increasing popularity of fantasy in the 1990s. Wayne Chapman (the pseudonym of already mentioned András Gáspár and Csanád Novák) played AD&D and began to publish the stories they had crafted as dungeon masters in the game’s fictional universe. Later, in light of the novel’s success, they established a publishing company and developed the only Hungarian role-playing game, M.A.G.U.S. In the last thirty years, despite copyright debates, opposing canons, and changes to the publishing company, more than one hundred M.A.G.U.S.-related novels and anthologies were published by dozens of authors, being one of the utmost achievements in Eastern European fantasy.

The other central fantasy hub and circle was Cherubion Publishing Company from 1991, which built a team of authors churning out fantasy (later science fiction too, but this branch remained a minority) novels and anthologies under British or American-sounding pseudonyms. The Cherubion books established the Hungarian sword-and-sorcery and dark fantasy literature based on existing Western fantasy tropes, races, and characters. The company intentionally and regularly published pulp novels by Hungarian authors with many copies, serving the infinite need for adventurous fantasy stories. The publishing company’s driving force, editor, and mastermind was the founder, István Nemes, who, under the pseudonyms of John Caldwell or Jeffrey Stone, became one of the most influential fantasy writers from the middle of the 1990s. Some of today’s important authors also started their careers in the Cherubion team, such as Anthony Sheenard/Sándor Szélesi, Harrison Fawcett/Tibor Fonyódi or János Bán who later became famous for history novels about the Hunyadi family.

The significance of M.A.G.U.S and Cherubion lies in establishing the readership of fantasy almost out of nothing, popularizing the settings, themes, and characters among mainly young readers who often remained consumers of fantasy as they grew up. Though publishing companies came and went, sword-and-sorcery novels continue to be published today. For instance, the Kaos series about the half-ork Skandar Graun and other popular franchises still run re-prints of old stories interspersed with novelties, thus supplying members of this subculture with a steady flow of new books.

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The interest in Hungarian mythology started in the early 2000s to refresh fantasy with new themes, worlds, races, and characters. Sándor Szélesi’s Legendák földje [Land of Legends] (2002, 2003) tells the story of the Ancient Hungarians, a Scythian ethnic group in 3000 B.C. The Hungarians wander in steppes, and magic is an inherent part of their world: shamanistic practice works, fairies walk the earth, and the heaven-high tree connects the realm of gods, humans, and the underworld. The trilogy revolves around two clans, their rivalries, and battles that involve the fairies climbing said tree. Through these adventures, the novels depict the shift of paradigm, a change of approach to magic from diffuse shamanistic practices towards a more codified set of so-called Táltos beliefs.

Since the 2010s, Hungarian folklore has appeared more and more often in fantasy novels, drifting apart from English-Germanic-Greek mythologies and mythical characters. At first, YA novels started to infuse elements of Hungarian folk tales into fantasy novels. The Ólomerdő series [Lead Forest] (2007, 2014, 2019, 2020) by Csilla Kleinheincz depicts a unique world of humans, fairies, and magic where the reader can recognize the well-known folk tropes such as the presence of number three, the miraculous stag, dragons, as well as stepmothers with dubious agendas. The re-imagination of Budapest (or any other Hungarian city) in urban fantasy became popular in the 2010s. In Túlontúl [Far Beyond] (2017) by Ágnes Gaura, a fan of fairy tales seeks purpose in her life while Hungarian, Transylvanian, and Moldavian folk tales mingle with daily reality. Egyszervolt by Zoltán László [Once upon a Time] (2013) is a traditional intrusive fantasy inspired by Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, where the protagonist becomes aware of a secret Budapest that lies under the surface and explores this secondary world. More recently, Egyszervolt was followed by less traditional urban fantasy works, such as Pinky (2016) by László Sepsi, in which a nameless city, which might as well be Budapest or New York, has its hidden secrets and streets populated by elves, werewolves, and vampires. Csudapest [WonderPest] (2020) by Fanni Sütő can also be considered urban fantasy, consisting of short stories, blog entries, and poems with one common feature: describing Budapest as simultaneously familiar and magical.

Meanwhile, the Hétvilág [Seven Worlds] (2016) trilogy by Emilia Virág was the first folk urban fantasy novel aimed primarily at adult readers. In her book, fairies and bogeymen walk the city jungle, offering a bestiary of Budapest. The story was published by Athenaeum, which mainly publishes popular science volumes and contemporary literature, indicating the blurring of boundaries between genre and belles-lettres.

In Ellopott troll by Sándor Szélesi [The Stolen Troll] (2019), Budapest is populated by creatures of ancient Hungarian and European mythology that merge into our well-known modern world of cars, smartphones, and computers, mixing folk magic and ordinary 21st-century life. The protagonist is a detective working at the Department of Magical Creatures with a shaman, a siegbarste, a werewolf, and a sorcerer. Against the background of a folk-urban fantasy world, the story follows an investigation after a disappeared troll that leads to the labyrinth under Buda Castle, where the Prime Táltos is searching for the spring of eternal life.

Magic school novels have also sprung up in the wake of successful franchises in foreign fantasy. Vétett út [Wrong way] (2023) by Veronika Puska tells the story of two young men who study at a school led by an order of wizards in the 1990s. However, the novel twists all the expectations of a magic school fantasy in its world and style. The universe is based on Hungarian folk tradition, practice, and rhymes, like stealing the shadow of someone. However, the school is a secret society, and what the protagonists learn and are expected to do is often morally questionable, resulting in an inverted, dark, cruel folk-fantasy novel.

These stories have in common that they mostly take place in Budapest or at least in a version of the city that also relates them to urban fantasy. This subgenre has become popular in Hungarian fantasy in the last ten years. The Legendák a bagolyvárosból [Legends from the Owlcity] (from 2018) series by Gabriella Eld is a YA urban fantasy about young people with unique talents (seeing into the future for one second, having a conscious shadow) who are persecuted by the dystopian state of Imperium. The setting is a dark and crowded metropolis bathing in neon lights. However, the novel focuses more on the characters than on worldbuilding. Főnix [Phoenix] (2023) by László Szarvassy turns upside down the usual elements of urban fantasy, placing the subgenre’s plot and typical characters in the Hungarian countryside. A young man dies in a bus accident and… wakes up to experience the benefits and, mainly, the unpleasant consequences of being an immortal in the employ of a goblin.

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In recent years, contemporary Hungarian fantasy has moved away from classical sword-and-sorcery and urban fantasy, producing innovative and original novels that do not lend themselves to be classified into genres or subgenres, and it becomes more accurate to use the broader term: contemporary fantastic literature.

Anita Moskát is the emblematic figure of this trend. In her first novel, Bábel fiai [Sons of Babel] (2014), “dimension portals” connect contemporary Budapest and a parallel-universe Babylon where the tower of Babel is being built. Horgonyhely [Place of Anchorage] (2016) leaves completely behind the fantasy tropes, depicting a universe where only pregnant women can travel (all the others are anchored to the place where they were born). Some women who eat soil or dirt empower themselves with Earth magic. These foundations of the fictitious world raise questions about gender and social hierarchy in a new light that has never been represented in such a detailed and realistic way in Hungarian fantasy. Her following book, Irha és bőr [Fur and Skin] (2019), likewise addresses social issues, talking about a “new creation” when animals begin to turn into humans all around the world. In the creation waves, they pupate, and a transition begins in which human limbs and organs replace animal parts. When the transformation does not end in death, it produces hybrid creatures. Moskát’s novel revolves around these creatures’ fight for social and political acceptance.

Mónika Rusvai is a researcher of plant-humans in fantasy fiction, and in her second novel entitled Kígyók országa [Country of Snakes] (2023), past and present are connected by a kind of magical network. One of the protagonists during the troubled times of the Second World War can bind and loosen these connections, to take away bad memories or make deals with magical characters. The novel addresses the consequences of repression because the enchanted or tied memories of feelings survive in a forest where people have to face them at some point.

Outside the fantasy genre, literary authors added supernatural and fantastic elements in their novels, mostly labeled magical realism. Notable works in this vein are the Bestiárium Transylvaniae [Transilvanian Bestiary] 1997, 2003) series by Zsolt Láng, a combination of magical realism and history. Its structure follows the famous natural history books of the time, the bestiaries, various real or legendary animals, such as the visionary human-faced parrot, the sunfish, the singing worm or the deathbird that sings an impenetrable silence, are the organizing principle of the chapters. Likewise, A könnymutatványosok legendája [The Legend of the Tear Showmen] (2016) by László Darvasi is a historical tableau of the Turkish occupation and the re-occupation of Buda (from 1541 to 1686) with the realities of the Middle Ages and magical elements.

Fantasy, which was adventure-based and primarily aimed at young audiences from the early nineties, has grown up with its readers. Now, it offers a genre code to address complex and relevant issues and bring magic into ordinary life.

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In addition to science fiction and fantasy, other niches have appeared in the field of fantastic genre literature. Horror, or fantastic horror, was marginalized till the middle of the 2000s, and even well-known foreign works were neglected, only some of Stephen King’s and a few other exceptions made it into local circulation. When the literary heritage of Lovecraft started to become more and more popular, fan clubs were established, and magazines like Asylum and Black Aether published the first weird and horror short stories until this niche attracted more prominent publishing companies.

The watershed was the publication of Odakint sötétebb [Darker Outside] (2017) by Attila Veres, a genre-establishing work on the boundaries of weird and horror. The novel follows Gábor who flees from Budapest to work on a farm in the countryside. However, the animals he works with are not usual terrestrial ones. Thirty years ago, uncanny creatures appeared in the woods, the cellofoids. It soon turned out that the milk of these sloth, part cat, and part octopus animals, could cure cancer, so cellofoids were hunted almost to extinction, and now they live in a reserve. Gábor faces weirder and weirder events; some Lovecraftian evil is lurking in the woods, and the apocalypse is approaching.

The novel opened the way for weird and horror books. Attila Veres published two books of short stories, Éjféli iskolák [Midnight Schools] (2018) and Valóság helyreállítása [Restoration of Reality] (2022) and the horror-weird anthology Légszomj [Breathlessness] (2022) introduced new authors, and innovative approaches to the fantastic from established ones. Termőtestek [Carpophores] (2021) by László Sepsi is a weird-bio-horror about the town of Hörsking, the city of fungus that feeds on the dead and spreads a drug that controls the town and its people. The novel combines the elements of horror, noir, thriller, and the description of a psychedelic trip, contrasting the familiar milieu and the surreal.

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Time travel narratives were a recurring theme in Hungarian fantastic fiction from the eighties, focusing instead on the possible social-historical consequences; the technology is rarely described, or treated as ancillary. These time-travel stories address the problem of changing history (the past or present) and the influence of individuals on historical events. The interest in changing the course of history continued in alternate history novels from the 2000s. Fantasy novels, such as Vadásznak vadásza by Sándor Szélesi and Isten ostorai [Scourges of God] (2002) and its five sequels by Tibor Fonyódi apply elements of alternate history, tying these together with ancient Hungarian mythology.

A szivarhajó utolsó útja [The Airship’s Last Journey] (2012) by Bence Pintér and Máté Pintér explores the consequences of a Hungarian victory at the revolution and war of independence in 1848-49. The YA novel describes a steampunk world where Lajos Kossuth founded the Danube Confederation, which became a utopian state. The book offers Verne-style adventures and humorous allusions and analogies to real history. Another take on alternate history is Szélesi’s Sztálin, aki egyszer megmentettte a világot [Stalin who Once Saved the World] (2016) taking up the sombre theme of Joseph Stalin and subverting it into a satirical novel where all the seemingly incongruous historical details of the 20th century are true and accurate, but mixed up with incredible adventures and plot-twists.

A more serious approach to alternate history is represented by two anthologies of the publishing house Cser Kiadó, written by well-known contemporary authors. A másik forradalom [The Other Revolution] (2016) offers alternative versions of the 1956 Revolution in various styles. The what-if thought experiments resulted in Hungary joining the United States, Arnold Schwarzenegger attacking 60 Andrassy Avenue, the symbolic place of communist oppression or establishing the Danube Free Confederation, while others applied a personal, human-centered approach. The second volume, Nézzünk bizakodva a múltba [Let’s Look with Confidence to the Past] (2020), takes the concept but explores different outcomes of the Treaty of Trianon, which led to the dismemberment of Hungary at the end of World War One and remains an important touchstone in the country’s collective memory. Both anthologies push the boundaries of alternate history but have the great merit of putting the genre on the map of contemporary Hungarian literature.

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Considering the small window of opportunities before 1989, Hungarian fantastic literature has come a long way. From the early sparks of newly-experienced freedom and capitalism, a wave of Anglophone influence, through the years of experimentation, to the 21st century, it seems to have found its place. The diversity of sub-genres, narratives, and styles harbour a unique local touch, and many novels preserved some Hungarian flavor amidst the flood of foreign influences. The present author is confident that science fiction, though now slightly marginalized, will regain its strength, and the balance among different fantastic genres and sub-genres will ensure a colorful kaleidoscope through which readers can look at reality. Hopefully, in the future, fantastic Hungarian literature will be translated and published abroad to be accessible to a broader readership.

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Bio:

Éva Vancsó is a Ph.D. student at the Modern English and American track of ELTE Doctoral School of Literary Studies. Her research focuses on the representation of women and the presence of female monsters in fictional worlds. Besides her doctoral research, she examines contemporary Hungarian SFF and is especially interested in utopias-dystopias and the depiction of social issues.

Fiction

Render Unto Jesus

by Andy Dibble

Even with religious “nones” on the rise, the great bulk of Americans still called themselves Christian. Jesus was as real as God, and God was a patron America still had use for. Though preferences tended toward worship in intimate or everyday spaces. Others did not care where they worshiped but preferred to sleep in on Sunday mornings.

Confirmation bias was at work, a new theology on the rise, not mere suspicion of institutionalized religion, but rejection of the old. Its thinking ran: God is in all places and in the places of daily life most of all. A steeple and stained glass do not gratify God. How presumptuous of prior generations to think God cares for brick and mortar! As Deuteronomy indicates, there can only be one Temple, destroyed in Jerusalem two-thousand years ago. Churches (imitations, really) only embarrass us in the eyes of God.

Borrowing a thread from Salafi Muslim thought, some called church buildings idols. Radical congregations demolished their own churches with great fanfare and applause.

For traditionalists and ardent churchgoers, it was already intolerable that government buildings stood taller than church steeples. Demolition was unthinkable, extravagant blasphemy.

They protested that Jesus should not share space with sweaty bodies at gyms or be relegated to spare minutes away from phone and television. There should be a sabbath, a time of rest and devotion, and a place to celebrate that sabbath in adoration of God.

They raged, but their only strategy was to buy churches as they went up for sale.

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A way forward came when lawyer Mike Slick—born in Pittsburgh to a Catholic family, strayed into New Age eclecticism (with a brief interlude as a Hare Krishna monk), and birthed again into Evangelicalism—filched an idea from Indian jurisprudence.

In India, gods could own property and pay taxes. They could sue, such as when “Shiva, Lord of the Universe” successfully sued a British company for the return of his Nataraja statue to a temple in Tamilnadu. If Jesus owned churches, no one could sell or demolish them without his say.

Slick’s legal argument rested upon the thriving body of United States case law that endowed corporations with certain rights of persons. Churches are already owned by congregations or ecclesiastical structures, entities rather than natural persons. The creeds and members of such entities have consistently proclaimed that “all they are” or “the whole earth” belongs to Jesus (if sometimes only during hymns or call-and-response exercises). As the apostle Paul attests, all Christians form a corporate entity, “the body of Christ.”

So how can it be legitimate for bishops or presbyters to sell Jesus’s property without the permission of their Lord?

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“Jesus, Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace, Immanuel, Savior of Humanity, Lamb of God, Light of the World, the Christ” sued the First Episcopalian Church of Mechanicsville, Virginia for illegal sale of his property. A district court dismissed the suit as frivolous. But on appeal to the right-leaning Fourth Circuit Court, Jesus, Wonderful Counselor, etc., etc. won.

The Episcopalians appealed to the Supreme Court. During conference, it appeared the Court would dismiss the suit, or send it back to the Fourth Circuit, instructing its judges to reconsider the case’s merits.

But one especially geriatric justice keeled over from an aneurysm while on the bench. Four justices voted to dismiss the suit and four voted that Jesus had legal right to his church.

The court was hung. The decision of the lower court stood.

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Divine intervention or not, no precedent had been established. By the time another suit with Jesus as plaintiff bubbled up to the highest court, Eleazar Hoffman, an exacting jurist of dubious political persuasion, had been appointed to fill the court’s vacancy. He sided with the motley bloc of judges that endorsed Jesus’s legal right.

This five-four decision was good law. From sea to shining sea, every church building, parcel of land, and account owned by a Christian entity was legally the property of Jesus.

#

The aftermath offered a new proof of the principle that any incompetence, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from conspiracy. For the Supreme Court had said nothing of who has power of attorney over Jesus’s property.

Churches drifted in limbo. They could not be deconsecrated, demolished, or used for solely secular purpose. Banks refused to grant loans to congregations because a church seized as collateral was almost without value.

Churches became home to feral cats, roadside attractions, or repositories of pious embers waiting for the Next Great Awakening of traditional religious fervor.

#

Congress tried to resolve the matter by legislation, but no bill could get out of committee. Every provision exposed some theological bias; every theology had its antipode. Against the Gospel of Charity, which held Jesus would give all his wealth for the welfare of the poor, there was a Gospel of Wealth, which supposed that copious wealth was a sign of Jesus’s sovereignty and the triumph of God.

Against the thought that Jesus would deploy his wealth to support the Christian mission was the worry that legislation codifying such intention would constitute an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

Even the notion that the juridical Jesus was Christ was not without its detractors, who claimed he was Antichrist, hoarding Christian wealth in preparation for the End.

#

President Manuela Hernandez issued an executive order stating that Jesus, as a juridical person, was subject to taxation. Churches do not owe property tax, but the death of Jesus was juridical death. Moreover, his end was no singular death by Roman crucifixion. Rather it repeated year after year with the pageant of Good Friday. As a Trinitarian entity, eternally begotten, Jesus was in an important sense his own parent and inheritor.

She ordered Jesus to furnish the Internal Revenue Service seventeen percent of his billions, on an annual basis, or until such time as Christian congregations abolish Good Friday.

#

President Hernandez’s order met both legal challenges and failed Congressional action, which aimed to repeal the estate tax entirely. But nothing in her interpretation of the law was unconstitutional. Her reading brought core data of Christian history to bear upon the law.

It seemed the Baal of Big Government would devour Jesus’s assets until some savvy practitioner of estate law hit upon the idea of storing Jesus’s assets within a trust. Eternally begotten and immortal, Jesus could be its everlasting trustee.

Trusts do not die as people die. Therefore, his entrusted estate could owe no estate tax.

Jesus kept his billions.

#

This parry and riposte was not without ferment. With Congress deadlocked on the matter and the courts mute, it seemed the proper place for Jesus in American politics was in administration. Jesus would run for President and, having attained the bully pulpit, God Himself would seize the helm of the nation, and speak out from the Temple of the New Jerusalem, ushering in the foretold millennium.

The Antichrist was liberal opposition to Jesus’s reign.

#

But Jesus could not be on the ballot. In this the Constitution was clear: a candidate for President was aged at least thirty-five, a resident of fourteen-years, and a natural-born citizen. Jesus was none of these. He’d been born in Bethlehem, a town of present-day Israel. He was a resident of nowhere, at least nowhere in particular. He was no older than thirty-three.

The worry about his age encountered dispute. The opening to the Gospel of John indicated that Jesus was present at Creation as the transcendent Word. As such, he was billions of years old, or six-thousand, or eternal.

The worry about Jesus’s natural citizenship also met objection. Archaeologists contracted by the Church of Latter-day Saints discovered Bethlehem was actually in present-day Utah (a finding lay Mormons met with mixed reactions). Jesus’s flight to Egypt as a young child had been achieved through teleportation from the Americas. As Luke’s Gospel attests, Jesus lived in Palestine until the age of twelve. At such time, God whisked him back to the Americas until his ministry began when he was thirty, long enough for him to satisfy the fourteen-year residency requirement.

Courts rejected this argument. No lawyer could argue it with a straight face.

#

Rejection by the judiciary only energized electoral millenarianism. Polls indicated that sixty-eight percent of Christian Americans now believed or strongly believed that Jesus’s election to the Presidency would bring about the rapture of devout souls.

Abandoned churches became centers of political organization and outreach. They became revivals.

The Next Great Awakening was burning the country over.

#

Jesus won as a write-in candidate in several Southern states, Wyoming, Alaska, and Idaho. He would have won Florida as well had their state Supreme Court not ruled locutions on Jesus—“Jesus Christ,” “Jesus, Son of God,” “Jesus, the Son of God,” etc.—to be different individuals.

The national write-in campaign turned conservatives out in record numbers, but their vote was nonetheless split, between their square-jawed candidate of flesh and blood and a haloed whitewashed Jesus.

The liberals won the Presidency almost by default.

#

Electoral millenarianism languished until the virtual district of Afterland became home to personages of historical and cultural significance, anyone with a wide enough corpus for artificial intelligence to construct an artificial person. Previously, its residents had been affluent Americans, reconstituted in digital form after death so they could enjoy a virtual heaven.

Jesus was among the personages projected from scripture, treatise, and lore into Afterland. He was a bit addled (packing so many contradictory theologies into one mind is bound to induce schizophrenia). Nevertheless, he had the best name recognition, the best brand.

He won the mayorship in a landslide.

#

Courts had not objected to Jesus’s mayoral campaign. He was a resident of Afterland, no less than its other residents. He could be mayor.

This got other juridical persons thinking that a corporation incorporated in Delaware could be Senator from Delaware. Just so, a union headquartered in Ithaca, New York could be Ithaca’s Representative.

Like Jesus, these juridical persons had funds and marketing knowhow. Unlike Jesus, they also boasted centralized organization, clear chains of command. They could outcompete merely human candidates.

In time, voters could scarcely ascertain whether they cast their ballot for a mascot, a paid actor, a social media influencer, a CEO, or a deepfake.

Each candidate was all, and none, and more besides.

#

Weary of all the fuss, many warmed to the idea that the Kingdom of God had already come. The Kingdom was Afterland. Jesus was already its Lord.

Some dismissed that as folly or clung to a grander hope of final resurrection: On that great Day, we will be transformed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. Now we see through a glass darkly, but then we will see each other face to face.

At last, we will understand who is truly a person and who is only a mirage of the judiciary.

~

Bio:

Andy Dibble is a healthcare IT consultant who has supported large healthcare systems in six countries. His work also appears in Writers of the Future, Mysterion, and Diabolical Plots. He edited Strange Religion, an anthology of SFF stories about religion.

Philosophy Note:

This story grew out of my interest in law and theology, in particular the idea in Indian jurisprudence that gods can own property and sue. Can we benefit theologically by thinking of Jesus as a legal entity? Is Jesus already a legal entity? Do you think legal or political processes can decide theological questions? What would you think of a religious tradition where theological questions are settled in this way?

Fact & Opinion

Affinities Between Science Fiction And Music

by Mircea Băduț

Preamble

Auditory concepts such as the “music of the spheres”, which we may nowadays associate with the speculative mode, have deep historical roots reaching back to the works of Pythagoras (6^th century BC) and later explored by Plato (4^th century BC). Johannes Kepler’s ‘Harmonices Mundi’ (1619) further emphasized this idea, while it was tangentially touched upon in literary works such as Hermann Hesse’s ‘Klein and Wagner’ (1919). The symphonic suite ‘The Planets’, composed by Gustav Holst in 1914-1917, should also be mentioned here.

Yet I would argue that it was the electronic music boom of the 1970s and 1980s which had brought the intersection between music and speculative fiction to the fore, with artists such as Vangelis leading the way. This was made possible by the capabilities of electronic synthesizers to sonically create an atmosphere that human culture (and perhaps human instinct too) assumed to be associated with cosmic space, and this phenomenon occurred during a time when society was experiencing excitement and curiosity about our expanding presence in the cosmos, both physically and intellectually.

I believe electronic music captured the listeners of that era for two main reasons. Firstly, because the exoticism of the sounds emitted by electronic instruments, often characterized by long notes and in vague harmonies, had a profound effect on inducing a unique mental state. Secondly, owing to the radicality of the distinction from pop music (which would not have been evident in a comparison with symphonic/classical music, where the modernist branch had already reached somewhat similar sonorities). In other words, this new music conquered the listeners of those decades (in which I also grew up) through its progressive, renewing character.

Judged from a musicological perspective, the electronic music of the early decades could often be considered as minimalist, occasionally obsessive (in its repetition or thematic dosage), and at times deliberately psychedelic. (The latter effect is often achieved by relying on an obstinato of melodic theme that foreshadows either an accumulation of dramatic potential, akin to the musical tension build-up used in the symphonic genre, or by a transcendence into oneirism.) And, of course, if it had been compared to the peaks of creation in classical music or in the jazz and rock of that era, it would have proved itself somewhat immature. However, much like the merger of science fiction into mainstream literature, electronic music targeted a different segment of society, and thus, they did not necessarily compete with each other.)

However, this essay does not end at electronic music, and will try also to cover, as significant landmarks, other kinds of musical creation close to the idea of science fiction. So, to set the scene, here is my initial proposal for a list of milestones of the ‘SF – music’ nexus:

» 1964 – Probably the first sci-fi song;

» 1969 – David Bowie releases the single ‘Space Oddity’;

» 1972 – David Bowie releases the album ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’;

» 1978 – ‘The War of the Worlds’, as musical version created by Jeff Wayne;

» 1976 – The electronic music album ‘Albedo 0.39’ composed and performed by Vangelis;

» 1977 – The electronic music album ‘Spiral’ composed and performed by Vangelis;

» 1978 – The electronic music album ‘Die Mensch-Maschine’ (‘The Man-Machine’), by Kraftwerk;

» 1982 – The soundtrack of the film ‘Blade Runner’ (Ridley Scott), composed and performed by Vangelis.

1. Probably the first sci-fi song

The reader may be surprised or thrilled to come across a reference from the vibrant era of the hippy movement and its music. It pertains to a pop-rock song titled “In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus).” Composed by Rick Evans in 1964, this song achieved the remarkable feat of reaching number 1 on the US ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart in 1969, followed by securing the top spot on the ‘UK Singles Chart’ later that year. However, the musical duo known as ‘Zager and Evans’, who created this remarkable hit, faded from the music scene like a passing comet, earning the status of a “one-hit wonder” before disbanding in 1971.

“In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)” / Rick Evans / 1964 / ‘Zager and Evans’

“In the year 2525, if man is still alive

If woman can survive, they may find

In the year 3535

Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie

Everything you think, do and say

Is in the pill you took today (…)[1]

Even though the song was definitely noted in its time, we probably cannot nominate it as a kind of avant-la-lettre “sci-fi music”. But I consider that it deserves to be recognized as a significant reference both for the concrete science fiction text (including the coordinate of anticipation, of utopia), and for the fact that the band ‘Zager and Evans’ achieves this clear message using ordinary instrumentation (i.e. without resorting to any kind of sound fireworks).

2. The classic ‘music – SF literature’ connection reference

“Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds” was originally a studio musical album (in the rock/pop/progressive genre) conceived, created, produced and recorded by musician Jeff Wayne (CBS Records, 1978), which would be followed by many reissues, performances, tours and reinterpretations. As we expect, the album is inspired from the novel ‘The War of the Worlds’ written by H.G. Wells, and is presented as a rock opera, arranged instrumentally with a rock band (guitars, bass, drums/percussion, organ/synthesizer) but also with a considerable addition of a classical/symphonic orchestra (including strings), as well as with narrative inserts (explanatory introduction and interludes, performed by the voice of the actor Richard Burton). The narrative thread of the rock opera is inspired by that of the classic sci-fi story, but it must be emphasized that some of the musical sequences (derived from acts of the story) led to the creation of songs of extraordinary musicality, thanks to both the melodic composition and very successful interpretations. In the years that followed (and to this day) this album was very successful, both in the charts (singles “Forever Autumn” and “The Eve of the War”) and in terms of sales.

By analyzing this musical production from a listener’s perspective, several noteworthy aspects can be observed. Firstly, the orchestration is “architectonic” in nature, featuring monumental sonorities that are impressively paired with melodic dramatization. Secondly, unconventional soundscapes and psychological stimulation are achieved, notably through the use of synthesizers, albeit without excessive exploitation. Additionally, the “voicebox guitar effect” is worth mentioning, although it had already become a recognized technique in rock concerts. A subtler element, yet a personal favorite, is the metal-body electric guitar played by Chris Spedding. This particular guitar, crafted by James Trussart and modeled after the famous Gibson Les Paul but with a hollow body made of steel sheet, creates a unique and intriguing sound.

The original album, subsequent reissues, concerts, tours, reinterpretations, and various editions on formats such as DVD, CD, and even SACD have all achieved tremendous success worldwide. While visionary projects are known to have the potential for great success in theory, the process of starting them is rarely easy. The realization of the 1978 album was indeed a challenging endeavor. Jeff Wayne conceived the idea, developed the concept and acquired the rights to incorporate narrative ideas from H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel. However, he faced significant difficulties in finding financiers for the album’s production expenses and persuading musicians to participate. He had even posed the question to musicians regarding their preferred method of payment: a fixed and immediate amount or a share in the future proceeds from the property rights? Unfortunately, to their detriment, the musicians chose the skeptical option in terms of their financial well-being.

It is worth noting that this remarkable science fiction musical creation was brought to life without overly relying on electronic artifice. That, however, was set to change in subsequent decades…

3. Tangible and consistent landmarks of the ‘music – SF’ connection

The first key date relates to a breakthrough in the material prerequisites for electronic music: in 1964 Robert Arthur Moog (1934–2005) invented the Moog musical synthesizer, and in 1970 he also released a portable model, the Minimoog, which would radically influence the music of the 20th century. (Alongside, of course, other notable manufacturers of synthesizers and electronic organs, such as Yamaha, Roland, Korg, Oberheim, EMS, ARP, Elka and Fairlight.)

Below I present the subsequent milestones in another succinct list (without going into detail where the names have become classics), no longer focusing on the names of musical productions, but rather the individuals (or groups) who made them:

» Vangelis, through the albums from 1975 to 1984;

» Tangerine Dream, through the albums from 1974 to 1987;

» Isao Tomita, esp. the album ‘Electric Samurai’ (Switched on Rock) from 1972;

» Klaus Schulze, through the albums Cyborg (1973), Timewind (1975), Moondawn (1976);

» Kraftwerk, through the albums released between 1977-1981 (The Man-Machine, Computer World);

» Jean Michel Jarre, through the albums Oxygène (1976) and Équinoxe (1978);

» Robert Fripp – renowned both for his compositional style (sometimes exploiting asymmetric rhythms and using classical or folkloric melodic motifs) and for his early innovations in the generation of unconventional sounds (such as the sound-delay system using magnetic tape).[2]

For a wider geographical context, electronic music also appeared in the Soviet Union, such as these examples:

• the band Zodiak, (USSR/Latvia), with the albums ‘Disco Alliance’ (1980) and ‘Music in the Universe’ (1982);

• the album ‘Metamorphoses – Electronic Interpretations Of Classical And Modern Music’ (Melodiya record label, USSR, 1980).

But perhaps the most interesting exemplifying corpus for the ‘music – SF’ nexus derives (although not explicitly) from so-called rock “super-groups” of the years 1965-1980 – Pink Floyd; Genesis; Manfred Mann’s Earth Band; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Yes; The Alan Parsons Project; Supertramp; Marillion; Electric Light Orchestra; Brian Eno/Roxy Music; Mike Oldfield; etc –, which impress both by their sophistication (hence the alternative denomination of ‘art-rock’) and by their progressive function of cultural/spiritual re-toning (hence the denomination of ‘prog-rock’). Furthermore, numerous artists, even those not typically associated with art-rock or progressive-rock genres, have occasionally crafted songs that feature progressive sounds and nuances.

4. A rapprochement between (sub)genres (cultural and musical)

We observe that while the previous discussion began with electronic music, due to its inherent connection to science fiction, this intersection naturally expands to encompass other related musical genres. This tends to be driven by songs and productions that stand out for their unconventional and progressive sounds and messages. Therefore, it is fitting to include or at least explore genres such as art-rock, progressive rock, jazz fusion, and even classical/symphonic music, as they share connections and influences with speculative fiction.

Progressive music offers alternative perspectives and enhances traditional forms, leading to a continuous elevation of artistic standards over the years. It has even influenced pop music, which often fails to appreciate the achievements in quality and compositional complexity of previous generations. Each new generation tends to “reinvent the wheel” with a certain casualness. In contrast, composers in “heavy” music are more inclined to study the classics and acknowledge their influence even if they create in new musical currents or subgenres. Moreover, in addition to the fact that progressive can be understood as a reform or as a detachment from an ordinary/vulgar flow, the dichotomy between progressive rock and pop-rock (intentional in essence, assumed either voluntarily or instinctively) can also be seen in another perspective: with the progressive, music becomes conceptual, i.e. intended rather for actual audition (an audition for audition itself) than for easy entertainment and somatic well-being (we might say, “moving thought/spirit rather than muscle/skeleton” ). In order to build its conceptual (or experimental) character, such music frequently resorts to ‘fusion’, both from the perspective of orchestration/sounds and from a rhythmic/melodic perspective, with inspiration and mixture from jazz, symphonic/classical music, or even from world-music (folk).

Experts in music may argue that these “progressive mechanisms” are naturally experienced in modern jazz. This is not necessarily a negative development, as it allows for the incorporation of multiple genres within the concept of spiritual-cultural regeneration and evolution. And now we promptly return to our cultural parallel, because speculative fiction often embodies similar ideas and proposals, justifying the close affinity with progressive music. Nonetheless, it is important to note that, in the context of the present discussion, musical progressiveness primarily concerns music itself, while science fiction tends to be more focused on stimulating thought rather than solely on the literary craft.

Music connoisseurs could also draw our attention to the fact that during the boom periods of the species concerned here (sci-fi, electronic music, progressive rock) in symphonic music there were already currents and subgenres that used “progressive mechanisms”: neoclassicism, modernism, chromatisme, serialism (dodecaphonic music), post-modernism, (so-called) contemporary music, experimental music, post-tonal music; respectively with the names of composers such as Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Dmitri Shostakovich, Ottorino Respighi, Anton Webern, Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez et al. In fact, many progressive rock music productions have been inspired (using themes or approaches) by classical/symphonic music (Jethro Tull; Rush; Procol Harum; Beatles; Moody Blues; The Who; King Crimson; Jeff Beck; Rick Wakeman; John Lord; Deep Purple; Queen; Led Zeppelin; Sting; Peter Gabriel; etc). And if we call to mind the soundtrack of the film ‘2001 Space Odyssey’ (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) – a cinematic touchstone in SF culture – then we will once more recognize the proximity to classical music, but we may also admit that a special sound atmosphere can be created with classical formulas and acoustic musical instruments. (And while on this subject, if we listen to “Also sprach Zarathustra,” the symphonic poem composed by Richard Strauss in 1896 in its entirety, we will notice that it was very modern for its time.)

And we end this section with a reference to ‘Firebird’, a symphonic music concert composed by Igor Stravinsky on a fantastic theme, and which mnemonically leads us to the Japanese animated film ‘Firebird 2772: Love’s Cosmozone’ (director/screenplay: Osamu Tezuka and Taku Sugiyama; music: Yasuo Higuchi; 1980).

5. Music, beauty and the digital future

In order to complement some ideas in this essay, it is worth noting that in its emerging era, electronic music was created with instruments that did not work digitally (with numerical signal encoding) but analogically. These were sound synthesizers (with electronic tubes, then with transistors and later with integrated circuits), audio sequencers (such as ‘CV/gate’) or other more or less artisanal devices (Frippertronics; theremin/termenvox; Fender Rhodes piano; Ondes Martenot; tape loops, tape delay, musique concrète). It was not until the 1980s that the way of digitally recording, processing and generating music would be opened.

But what is the essential difference between analogue and digital sound? (We tacitly accept that music, of whatever genre it may be, means sound. In fact, a multitude of sounds, emitted and succeeded according to harmonic/aesthetic laws.) These two terms, somehow antagonistic, were defined in relation to each other. Initially – in the days of vacuum tubes and transistors – electronics did not have a second name, but only after the advent of signal coding technologies, would the field bifurcate into (1) analog electronics (working with continuous signal) and (2) digital electronics (working with discontinuous/discrete signals). (The digital electronics are also called ‘logic electronics’, because the topology and operation of their circuits correspond to a desired logic.)

The transformation of the natural/analog signal into a digital signal involves two processes: (1) sampling and (2) quantization. Sound sampling means that we read (i.e. take a sample from) the original signal at every fraction of a second (a fraction having, let us say, 2×10^-5 seconds, as in the case of CD-Audio), and quantization implies that we will measure the amplitude of each sample and transform it into a number (respectively into a digital code, i.e. a group of bits). This transformation is called analog-to-digital conversion (ADC). Of course, when it is necessary to listen those digitally recorded signals, they must go through a digital-to-analog conversion (DAC), which is somewhat the reverse of the one briefly described above.

Of the two processes applied to the digitization of music, sampling is guilty of the greatest loss when recording the original sound, and this is because in those unread time intervals (intervals of 2×10^-5 seconds) the audio signal nonetheless continues, especially if it is a polyphonic signal, as happens in music where several instruments play quasi-simultaneously, and each instrument actually emits many simultaneous sounds. (Even when a single musical note is emitted, the sound having the frequency corresponding to that note is accompanied by a myriad of other sounds – secondary/additional harmonics – that make up the ‘timbre of the instrument’.) In fact, from a Hi-Fi (High-Fidelity) perspective, the beginnings of music digitization were unfortunate because it was not understood then that Nyquist’s Theorem (which defined a minimum for the sampling rate of signals) was not suitable for music sounds.

A similar insufficiency at the small time scale is the reason why digital synthesis sounds (even when embodying traditional musical instruments) are poorer than sounds produced by acoustic instruments (instruments that produce sound by physical vibration: either a parts of their composition, or the air passing through them), an aspect that we can all analyze if we do small experiments by listening carefully to musical instruments or comparing quality music recordings.

Humans, with our analogue ears, have a natural affinity for music. The appreciation and recognition of beauty, including the auditory one, involve two fundamental factors in human beings. The first factor is our biological and innate perception, which is passed down through genetics. The second factor is our cultural perception, shaped by environmental influences, such as imitation, assimilation, and education (i.e. developed through the traditions and customs of the people among, and places where, we have grown up or currently reside). Thus, we have two filters through which our perception of music is shaped: a biological and a psycho-social one.

The influence of the biological filter can be documented by the fact that certain sounds (specific combinations/aggregations of frequencies) can evoke distinct physiological states, either beneficial or adverse, with or without involvement of the psyche. On the other hand, the psycho-social conditioning can be illustrated by the awareness that there were (and still are) peoples in the world who divide the musical octave into intervals other than the twelve we commonly use, and who build the rhythms in other measures than we do. Therefore, if we were to listen to music indigenous to such cultures, we might feel a sense of confusion. Thus, the concepts for musical aesthetics developed by an extraterrestrial civilization, if we were to ever encounter one, might very well leave us utterly baffled.

[1] https://lyrics.lyricfind.com/lyrics/zager-evans-in-the-year-2525-2

[2] The author recommends the ‘Discipline’ album for edification.

~

Bio:

Mircea Băduț is a Romanian writer and engineer. He wrote eleven books on informatics and six books of fictional prose and essays. He also wrote over 500 articles and essays for various magazines and publications in Romania and around the world.

Fiction

The Power Of The Stone

by David K. Henrickson

I was there when the first aliens landed in Central Park, when the lost tomb of Alexander the Great was discovered, when fabled Atlantis rose again from the waves.

That is the power of the stone. Those four words: “I was there when”, carved into its surface, can take you anywhere or to any time, real or imagined.

I have no knowledge of where the stone came from or anything concerning its origin. In all my searches into its provenance — and my resources these days are considerable — I have found no mention of it anywhere, in any time, in any culture.

I know it is not contemporary. The first time I held the stone, those four words were not in English but in a script unknown to me, then or now. When I looked again, the stone had changed and appeared as it still does today, many years later.

Nor do I know how the stone does what it does. There is no way I could risk an investigation into its nature. I cannot see that it matters. The stone is either magic or a technology of the highest order — far beyond anything humans are currently capable of.

Will ever be capable of. We’re talking about pure creation here. Of fashioning an entire universe in accordance with a single sentence uttered in its presence. Yes, I was there when Oswald failed to assassinate President Kennedy. Yes, I was there when Hannibal overran Rome during the second and final Punic War. Yes, I was there when Superman first appeared in the skies over Metropolis.

Whether the stone fashions these realities whole cloth, or pulls them from an infinite grab bag where such worlds lay waiting, I have no way of knowing. Nor am I always sure how the stone will interpret my words. It seems to possess a puckish sense of humor at times when fulfilling my wishes.

It also ignores requests that are too specific. A simple sentence with a minimum number of qualifiers works best. Something that can be uttered in a single breath. That is enough if one is sufficiently clever. Yes, I was there when Edmond Dantès discovered the lost treasure of Monte Cristo. (Ha! I needed a wheelbarrow for that one.)

I was also there when they developed the cure for cancer. You see, I am not quite the heartless misanthrope people make me out to be.

You might well think all this to be the ramblings of a delusional eccentric. My scars would indicate otherwise—as does the absence of the little finger on my left hand. Using the stone is not without its dangers.

I am old now, even though I do not look it, and have been a recluse for many years. (Yes, I was there when Ponce de León discovered the Fountain of Youth.) Whenever I need an escape, I pick up the stone, speak my desire, and journey into the realm of What Might Have Been.

Our travels together are nearing an end, however. Over the years, I have become attuned to the stone and its moods. I know, even though I do not know how, that it is ready to move on. To find a new owner, whoever and wherever that might be.

Accordingly, I have put my affairs in order. As for the stone, I will send it away when I reach my final destination. Where it will end up, I have no way of knowing, just as I do not know how it came to be where I once found it. Let fate decide—or rather, the stone itself.

As for the many eclectic treasures in my collection, I have bequeathed these to various museums without explanation or annotation. (All but my journal. That, I am taking with me.) Let people make of them what they will—a last, enigmatic note to a singular life.

There remains only my final journey, one from which I do not intend to return. It is one I have thought long and hard on over the years. Where should I go? The far future? The distant past? Or to some place that should have been but never was, like Wonderland or the world of Scheherazade and her One Thousand and One Arabian Nights?

Perhaps I should go to Barsoom. Or to some vast, galactic empire at the height of its power and glory. What about the First Age of Middle Earth? (Wouldn’t that be something?) Wherever I end up, it should be a place where a person can still have an adventure or two.

Where would you go if you could pick only a single destination, one from which you would never return?

Let me see. I was there when…

~

Bio:

Dave Henrickson has a background in engineering, oceanography, and computer science but always wanted to be an artist. Maybe a dancer. He currently lives in Virginia and spends his free time writing, reading, and killing monsters with his wife Abbie. He has also written a number of novels — which he may even publish one of these days.

Philosophy Note:

Where would you go if you could go anywhere? To places that never were or never could be? Where would you go if you could never come back from such a place? The realm of the imagination provides limitless possibilities.

Fact & Opinion

Welcome To The Zineverse!

by Mina

“Gleaming and glittering with gold and wondrous surprises for young and old”

Ladies and gentlemen! Roll up, roll up! Come, my lovelies, and experience everything the Zineverse has to offer. Marvel at those spaceships! Meet the monsters (not all in alien form). Dream of new worlds!

Let’s begin our journey by meeting a publication that reviews the many different creatures you can find in the science-fiction-and-fantasy Zineverse, Tangent. It owes its thirty-year existence to Dave Truesdale, its editor, and the volunteers who review for the pure love of it. Truesdale is proud of the fact that Tangent was the first SF short-fiction review magazine, to quote the late SF historian Sam Moskowitz. As well as reviews, Truesdale asks reviewers to give “recs” for the recommended reading list for that year. In an email exchange, I said my baseline criteria for recs was whether I would read something a second time and whether there was something truly original. Truesdale replied that originality is getting increasingly rare:

“… it’s harder and harder to come across anything even halfway original, because the more you’ve read over time means you’ve had the opportunity to experience “originality” in theme or treatment many times over many years and many stories…The reverse is that, when you first began to read SF/F, everything was pretty much original to you, giving rise to that Sense of Wonder the younger (or newer) reader discovers. But… the originality metric is harder to find. That’s when I go to the other metrics… primary among them how the author executes his/her theme or treats the subject matter. Does the prose level perhaps sparkle above and beyond the norm? Is there an unexpected twist or POV on a tried-and-true theme elevating the story above the norm or cliche?”

These comments will resonate with all editors in the Zineverse. And the feeling of awe I too seek as a reader was also mentioned by Ádám Gerencsér when I asked him why he became co-owner and co-editor of Sci Phi Journal – with Mariano Martín Rodríguez:

“It’s a labour of love… a childhood attraction to SF’s infinite possibilities and [its] innate Sense of Wonder. For Mariano and I, it was really a question of: we want a venue for philosophical SF and if the only such publication is orphaned, we got to revive it [back in 2018].”

Sci Phi Journal happily tells you that it is “a cosy waystation for travellers who, through no fault of their own, find themselves at the cosmic intersection between speculative philosophy, cultural anthropology and hard SF.” It deals in idea-driven speculative fiction (not character-driven) and is an unapologetically European journal consciously setting itself aside from the “American model”. It embraces “semantic diversity” and all thought experiments, including those they do not agree with. It is itself an experiment in true free expression. I find this quite refreshing, and it is a cause I am willing to espouse. It also offers a platform for literary analysis and philosophical discussion in a genre considered by many as not worthy of such analysis (and it is not the only publication in the Zineverse to do so, for example Hélice, which publishes literary criticism in English and Spanish).

Truesdale has commented to me many times that Tangent reviews stories and not politics or ideologies. I’m not sure, however, that politics or ideologies don’t figure in the Zineverse. For example, Fantasy, at the time of writing this article, was accepting “BIPOC-only” submissions (writers who identify as black, indigenous and people of colour); its sister publication, Lightspeed, however, was concurrently accepting fantasy flash fiction open to all writers. Fantasy provides “entertainment for the intelligent genre reader – we publish stories of the fantastic that make us think, and tell us what it is to be human”. I particularly like its Q&A with authors and the fact that they include poetry, as well as short stories and flash fiction. Lightspeed has a broader focus, including many subgenres of SF and fantasy. Both magazines are available as e-book editions (where you receive everything in one go for payment) or free online (where you wait for a new instalment each week). And I haven’t forgotten the other sibling, Nightmare, that blends horror and dark fantasy (recent submissions were also BIPOC-focused). I must admit that, as a recovering insomniac, I haven’t delved much into this one but please do go and get your spine tingled and chilled by it.

That members of the Zineverse uphold various causes, languages and genres can also be seen in the special issues. The ezine Strange Horizons has brought out special issues, such as where trans/nonbinary (queer authors), Wuxia and Xianxia ( “writers from the Sino diaspora as well as BIPOC creators in various parts of the world”) and Palestine meet SF and fantasy. This year’s June issue included each story in its original language (Bulgarian and Lithuanian) and in translation into English. Strange Horizons tells us it is “of and about speculative fiction” for all “flavours of fantastika”. In reviews of this publication, Tangent always adds a disclaimer about Strange Horizons’ political affiliations:

“On May 10, 2021 Strange Horizons officially expressed its political support for Palestinian solidarity. The views of Tangent Online reviewers are not necessarily those of Strange Horizons. Fiction critiqued at Tangent Online is, as much as is humanly possible, without prejudice and based solely on artistic merit.”

Aurealis favours SF, fantasy and horror authors from Australia and New Zealand for most of the year; it accepts submissions from anywhere in the multiverse for one month a year.

Talking of authors, I particularly enjoyed this comment from one of the authors published recently by Lightspeed, Sarah Grey:

“There’s no getting rich off short fiction in any genre; you’d be hard-pressed to even pay for groceries with a year’s worth of generous short fiction income. So just write the stories that appeal to you, at the pace your life allows. Read the stories and novels that call to you, not what anyone else says you should read.”

SF and fantasy, more so than many other types of literature, are peopled with fanatics, although I do prefer the terms aficionados or enthusiasts, which have fewer negative connotations. So most SF and fantasy publications are run by small teams of people who are passionate about the genre and reliant on readers who believe in that Sense of Wonder, such as Lightspeed: “There are no big companies supporting or funding Adamant Press’s magazines – and Adamant itself is kind of a two-person show – so the magazines really rely on reader support.” In a publisher’s note, the editor draws attention to the fact that, in September, Amazon will be closing its Kindle Periodicals program: some magazines will be transitioned to Kindle Unlimited; some will be dropped entirely. This will have a severe impact on publications who currently rely on Amazon’s digital subscriptions service for a substantial part of their income. This concern is also raised by Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld Magazine, who states that most publications in SF and fantasy rely on subscriptions and not on advertising for the bulk of their revenue. Clarkesworld and other journals will be encouraging their readers to transition to new subscription and pledge models, via their own and other platforms, such as Patreon.

Clarkesworld is probably one of the better-known publications in the Zineverse, along with Asimov’s, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, F&SF and Apex (Asimov’s and Analog have the same publisher, Penny Publications). Beneath Ceaseless Skies tells us that it is “dedicated to publishing literary adventure fantasy: fantasy set in secondary-world or historical paranormal settings, written with a literary focus on the characters”. Asimov’s is proud of its history: “From its earliest days in 1977 under the editorial direction of Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine has maintained the tradition of publishing the best stories, unsurpassed in modern science fiction, from award-winning authors and first-time writers alike.” It publishes hard SF and SF brimming with nostalgia. Its sister publication, Analog’s Science Fiction and Fact Magazine, “remains the unparalleled literary magazine in the genre, and rewards readers with realistic stories that reflect both the highest standards of scientific accuracy and the far reaches of the imagination”. Another publication to have published well-known authors is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF), with authors like Stephen King, Daniel Keyes and Walter M. Miller in its quiver of arrows. Asimov’s can boast of authors like George R.R. Martin in its gallery, Analog of Orson Scott Card, Greg Bear, Poul Anderson and many more. Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Apex are probably more interested in publishing unknown authors. I love Apex’s mission statement:

“We publish short stories filled with marrow and passion, works that are twisted, strange, and beautiful. Creations where secret places and dreams are put on display.”

I think that should be the mission statement for the entire Zineverse, whether we are talking of flash fiction, short stories, novelettes or novellas. Whether you prefer to read your zines online, as a PDF, in some other digital form or on paper.

As a reviewer for Tangent, I have met some stories that were not very good, many that were competent and a few gems that reawakened my Sense of Wonder, first born when I read John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven (closely followed by Asimov’s robot stories and Bradbury’s Mars tales). I will read all SF genres (other than horror) and here is a taste of the tales I have read that I would read twice:

– “Showdown on Planetoid Pencrux” by Garth Nix, where warborgs meet High Noon: a tale of quiet courage, friendship and responsibility, without being preachy or superficial (Asimov’s, July/August 2023).

– “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers” by Karawynn Long, where a neurodiverse person learns to talk with genetically-modified crows: a tale about not underestimating others (Asimov’s, July/August 2023).

– “That We Maye With Free Heartes Accomplishe Those Thyngs” by Thomas M. Waldroon creates a London you can almost smell and touch, a monster born from effluvia and a hero who has his memories stolen, with poetry and rhymes woven through it like golden threads (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 13/07/23).

– “A Dead World Wakens” by Amy Dawn Buchanan, where a lone human wakes up in a distant future in a synthetic Eden: a lyrical coming of age story (Aurealis, 4/23).

“The Ocean Remembers The Wave” by L. Chan, where the hero follows a trail of enhanced bones in his sentient ship and wuxia and xianxia (think, immortal itinerant warriors of ancient China) meet space adventure (Strange Horizons, special issue May 2023).

– “Schroedinger’s Kitten Falls In Love” by Bidisha Banerjee follows the brief and lethal love affair between two quantum cats: pure fun, full of quirky turns of phrase (Fantasy, June 2023).

– “Queen of the Andes” by Ruth Joffre imagines life in a refugee shelter in the Andes. Humanity has managed to destroy the Earth’s climate, and many have already left for the space colonies: to stay or leave, that is the question and where does true freedom lie? (Lightspeed, June 2023).

And that is just a slice of the stories out there, not forgetting many smaller online portals to the Zineverse, like tor.com (SF and fantasy), 365tomorrows (SF and speculative flash fiction, a story a day), Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores (“otherworldly encounters”) and so on. If you want an overview of what is out there, go to Tangent and look at the publications down the left-hand side, categorised as “print” and “e-market” (although the line between the two is becoming blurred with e-readers and smart phones) and periodicity. There are many excellent magazines to choose from in the Zineverse: follow one or two, or hop around several; you won’t regret it.

I cannot do justice to the whole range of styles, subgenres, plot twists, weird and wonderful characters – it’s a smorgasbord of talent and ideas. To quote another author in Lightspeed, Ashok K. Banker:

“I am absolutely in awe of all the amazing writers, the vast majority of them new or recently published, who fill the pages of the SF zines. The sheer range and depth of craft, skill, imagination is extraordinary. SF has always flourished in the shorter lengths, but I truly think we’re seeing a new golden age of SF short fiction…”

And, echoing Truesdale’s comments at the beginning of this article:

“It’s no longer enough to simply have a great idea well executed. But I do feel that the big ideas, bold use of tropes, breakout storytelling have waned. I’d love to see someone bust the genre wide open, more than once, break the rules, cause outrage among purists and virtue signal police, and still create awesome SF that is inclusive, sensitive, and essentially humane…”

Although Banker goes in a slightly different direction in his musings:

“SF is no longer a genre unto itself, it’s been absorbed by the literary mainstream and now belongs to everyone. I love and embrace that fact and I hope to see more of this beautiful hybrid cross-species fertilisation!”

I beg to differ – yes, there has been a lot of cross-pollination but, as our tour round the Zineverse shows, there are many specialised SF and fantasy publications out there, each with a slightly different focus. I would prefer to see such magazines maintain their individuality, and that they not be subsumed by “the literary mainstream”. The Zineverse should ring with a carillon, not a death knell.

Coda: You will have noticed that I have done two things in this article: given you lots of links to follow for your own exploration of the Zineverse and focused on the people that make the Zineverse work – the authors, editors and reviewers. This is a pæan to their hard work, vision and passion. (And, in case you’re wondering, the quote that opens this article is a circus slogan from 1961.)

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night, and a magazine reviewer at Tangent Online in-between. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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