Sci Phi Journal, Author at Sci Phi Journal

Fiction

The Caves

by Harley Carnell

Although I hated not finishing a book, I had to now. About that cult where entire families had been born and raised in a large network of caves, what horrified me most, even more than the violence and the abuse, was the thought of those children living their entire lives underground, and thinking that there was nothing else. I had stopped finally when reading of an especially tall boy who had developed neck, spine, and developmental problems due to the need to continually crouch.

“Even though I was in agony all the time, I never thought that much about it. It just made sense. This was our world. Of course I’d have pain all the time, because I was tall and I had to bend. The caves, they weren’t designed for people like me. But that was just the way it was, that was just what life was.”

By this point, around a third into the book, I had read all manner of horrific and unspeakable things that had been perpetrated by the cult. I wasn’t sure, therefore, why I should be so especially disturbed by what happened to him, but I was.

#

The train driver said something over the intercom, but I didn’t hear it. Whatever he had said, it had to pertain to delays. Squeezing my head from under some guy’s armpit, I contorted myself until I found my phone and emailed my boss that I’d be late again. I sighed as the woman behind me continued to breathe into my hair and I resumed my fruitless search to locate the source of the overpowering BO that I could taste as well as smell.

A combination of the confinement, stress, having been stood up for almost two hours, and the sunlight reflecting off the windows and slicing into my retinas made me dizzy. If I wasn’t entombed in a wall of people, I might have collapsed.

At this point, there was another announcement when, from my peripheral vision, I saw movement outside. An array of maintenance people were walking alongside the train. They were dressed oddly. Rather than the usual high-viz and hard-hats, they were wearing what looked more like hazmat suits, albeit with fish-bowl helmets.

As I was contemplating this, a loud screech wailed from the intercom. The train filled with groans and cries as the noise circumvented our ears and penetrated into our brains. Then, there was another sound – a large crashing. I turned around and saw that the doors and windows were being smashed in and torn open by the maintenance people. As I looked over at them, I saw that there were many more of these people scaling and abseiling down the apartment buildings that abutted the train tracks. Now that the windows and doors were open, there were the clear sounds of sirens, screaming, and assorted other noise.

Passengers were being dragged out of the train by the maintenance people, literally kicking and screaming. For all my confusion and exhaustion, my adrenaline kicked in. I jumped out of a gutted window, and began to run on the tracks.

Now outside, I could see that the sky was dotted with all kinds of what I could call helicopters, but only by analogy. It was from these that the ringing emerged. It became louder, until it was just a single, long, tinnital whine that blocked out everything else. People were being pulled from the smashed windows of the apartment buildings, and carried into the ‘helicopters.’

I ran quicker than I thought I could in my work shoes and with my state of unfitness, but within a matter of seconds I either tripped or was tripped.

#

In the next moment, for that’s how it always is, I ‘woke up.’

I use this advisedly and descriptively. As I would come to see, there were many things that I would be unable to explain, even as they were happening.

Because it seemed less like I woke up, and more like I both was awake, and had always been awake, despite having clearly lost consciousness at some point. In the same way, if trying to describe it, I might say that I ‘saw’ a light or that I ‘felt’ calm. These were certainly the closest approximations to what was happening, but they were not strictly true. Closer still, if still far off, was a sense that something was happening to me. I could not explain it, even to myself, anymore than I could explain calculus to an ant. Similarly, the ‘conversation’ that followed cannot be rendered by me saying I spoke to someone or they spoke to me. Instead, the words simply occurred, and they occurred all at once, tumbling like an avalanche, even though the conversation took place over many minutes and perhaps hours.

“Where am I?”

“You are here.”

“And where is here?”

“You are home, for the first time in your life.”

I knew that I was not home, because I knew that I was not anywhere. I was not blind, and yet I could not see anything.

“What do you mean? Am I dead? Is this Heaven?”

“You are not dead. And whether this is Heaven, that is up to you. In many ways, Heaven is a designation, not a destination. However, if you are asking if you are in any of the Heavens as rendered in your philosophies and theologies, then no, you are not.”

“Then where am I?”

“You are finally in the world. You have been pulled away from the shadows.”

This description seemed odd, as I couldn’t see anything, even though I could see.

“How is your back?

“My back?” I said, before realising that my back hadn’t ceased to throb and ache because I was distracted, but because it, and its pain, was not there. Years of office work, and the arduous commuting to and from it, had left my back a vulnerable shambles. My fingers had a constant ache that I hoped was some kind of RSI but could easily have been presages of the future arthritis that had so debilitated my grandmother and rendered the end of her life unliveable. At times, it hurt even to lie down. And I was young. In my office, some of the older people were constantly seeing physios, were on a cocktail of medications which were all in a perpetual skirmish with each other. And the thing that had always disturbed me the most about this was that office work was not manual labour, or physical in any sense. Of all the jobs you could do, it was the safest and cushiest. Yet even it could lead to these complications, and I dreaded to think the kind of problems that came with more hazardous employment that so many people had to suffer simply to keep themselves alive.

“It feels good. Well, it doesn’t feel anything. I have no pain.”

“And this is usual. You will have no more pain.”

“But pain is a part of life. It sucks, but it’s just part of being human.”

“You have been pulled from the shadows, but the shadows are still with you. If you spend your whole life in water, you will think that all is wet.”

I strangely felt that I knew what this meant.

“But the world is all there is.”

“It is not. Imagine your desert, a sea of clean water always behind you as you always walk away from it. Naturally, you will say ‘I have seen no sea, so therefore there is no sea!’”

“So this is the sea?”

“This is the sea, and it is the palm trees, and it is the birds, and the fish, and the people.”

I had been so focussed on myself, and my lack of self, that I had not even thought of people.

“Where is everyone?”

“You have been wandering in your desert and you are thirsty. To drink all at once would be to drown.”

“Okay, I understand that.” I remembered, or perhaps had implanted into my head, that old parable about the desert straggler given water to drink, and sand being thrown in it so that he did not drink it too quickly and become ill. “But I will see them?”

“You will see them, and they will see you, and you will see all manner of people. But only once you and all have become accustomed and acclimatised.”

“Where are they? My mother, she’s fragile, and – ”

“Your mother has been pulled from the sea, and placed onto a boat. When you see her, she will walk to you.”

For the past ten years, since a botched hip operation, my mother had been in near-constant agony. A series of increasingly more useless treatments, coupled with our hospital’s ‘treat only when it is too late’ policy meant that while she was not immobile, walking for even a short amount of time was difficult for her.

“My mother couldn’t walk ten feet without crying. If you had her, you’d know that.”

“That is in the old understanding of reality, where she had a body that could be broken.”

“Where am I? Where is she?”

“You are in the world.”

“You’ve given me some hallucinogen. I’m dreaming.”

“Your grandmother never could draw again.”

This derailed me. Although not a professional artist, my grandmother had loved to draw, especially after my grandfather had died. I knew now that they must have my mother. How else could they know this?

“But it came too late for her.”

“What did?”

“The rescue. You are not hallucinating, nor are you dead. All that has happened is you have been brought into the world, and been taken out of what you thought was the world. We are happy to show you all how you have been harmed by the reality you thought was reality. But we mourn, and we deeply mourn, for all those who came before you.”

I knew that none of this could be real. At the same time, I did not feel my back. Nor could I feel anything. It was as though I was totally numb, completely comprised of pure consciousness.

Yet this was not true. I did feel something. It was a sensation, one of pure and unencumbered peace, like the happiness you felt in the moments before sleep when you were awake enough to appreciate it.

“You are on no drugs, and you cannot feel in dreams.”

This startled me. The first part anticipated a thought I had not uttered, and the second one I had not thought yet. Because the latter did come to me now: the troubling recognition that you couldn’t feel sensations in dreams.

“But if this is the real world, what does this all mean? If I believe you, for the sake of argument, what will happen now?”

And then it came to me.

Although I had not finished my book, I knew the story. I knew that, at some point, police and rescue teams had flooded into the caves. Those who had been kidnapped were returned to the world they knew. Then there were the children who had been born underground. They had seen the world for the first time. The rivers and the trees, the sunshine and the rain, the sand and the snow.

“We wish only we could have come earlier, to save those who came before, but we are here now. You will not know pain, and you will not know sorrow. You will not know hatred, and you will not know fear. You will not know work, and you will not know hardship. All these things that were as inevitable to you as the damp and dark of the caves will be shorn away, and once you have adjusted your eyes to the new sunlight, and your lungs to the new air, and your heart to the new peace, you will finally be able to see the real reality.”

~

Bio:

Harley Carnell lives and writes in London, England. His fiction, which has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared or is forthcoming in Vastarien, the Drabblecast, Riptide Journal, Shooter Literary, and Sarasvati, among others. His critical work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gamut, L’Espirit, the Lovecraft Annual, and Aurealis. He can be found at www.harleycarnell.com

Philosophy Note:

‘The Caves’ is a refraction of Plato’s ‘The Allegory of the Caves’ through an antinatalist lens. Following on from another story of mine (‘We Are Here’ – After Dinner Conversation, October 2024), it examines the extent to which suffering is a necessary and inevitable component of life. My understanding of antinatalism is highly informed by the work of David Benatar (Better Never to Have Been) and Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race).

Fiction

Will We Talk To The Trees?

by Robert L. Jones III

The article by Willis et al in this month’s issue of Botanical Frontiers provides an intriguing, though speculative, description of what might be the oldest sentient life form on earth. Their conclusions arise from circumstantial evidence gathered during analysis of a discovery in the northwestern wilderness of America, and here we provide a brief summary of their findings.

#

The subject under consideration is a unique grove first noted for its reddish green coloration as compared with the surrounding forest. Satellite imaging and GPS readings show it to be a roughly circular patch with a diameter of over 400 meters. The constituent trees are globular in overall shape, higher than wide, somewhat tapered toward the top, and reminiscent of junipers. They are all of the same species, and save for a thick carpet of moss, there is no undergrowth.

The gray, weathered trunks are not round. Rather, they are roughly triangular in cross-section with indented sides and rounded edges. A corner of one always points directly toward that of an adjacent neighbor approximately five meters distant, and each tree is surrounded by three others in a triangular arrangement with a central point. In this way and with an arbitrary frame of reference, four trees form a conceptual unit. Sharing common points at their corners, the units fit together in a repeating pattern of hexagons.

The grove occupies a basin which sits atop an extensive aquifer as determined by GIS data. Specimens are taller with thicker boles toward the center, and one at the lowest and most central elevation is largest of all. In an eroded area encompassing a small group of trees, the upper surfaces of woody, horizontal roots are visible. Three to an individual, they extend from the corners of each trunk in remarkably straight lines, and they connect adjacent trees in the manner of stolons or runners between blades of grass, suggesting that the entire arboreal arrangement is a single organism. DNA analysis confirms this assumption.

Six slender, compound leaves radiate from the terminus of each branch. Their leaflets resemble overlapping scales which cover a stem-like petiole in whorls, and each petiole has a swelling called a pulvinus where it attaches to its branch. At low magnification under a hand lens, a round, red bump can be seen in the middle of each leaflet, accounting for the overall hue as seen from afar.

This foliage can display movement, even in the absence of detectable wind. It oscillates as if in response to the movements of investigators, and the observed behavior is putatively due to flexion and extension occurring in the pulvinus of each petiole. It is already known that pulvini are responsible for thigmonastic movements, rapid responses to touch, in plants such as Mimosa.

#

Care was taken not to disturb the specimen. Only freshly fallen leaves and branches were collected for subsequent analysis.

In branch cross-sections, annual growth rings are visible to the unaided eye, and they are thin and numerous, implying that this is a slow-growing species. The bole circumference of the largest, most central tree implies that the grove could be thousands of years old.

Microscopic examination of longitudinal leaf sections provides good views of the pulvinus. The cells in this region have thinner, more flexible walls. A flexor zone on the ventral side and an extensor zone on the dorsal side of each pulvinus are readily visible. These areas are on either side of a prominent vascular bundle, and this implies a plausible mechanism based on what we know about thigmonastic movements.

As the result of a complex biochemical process, ions and water travel across cytological membranes. Since ions are charged atoms, their migration is a form of electrical activity. When ions exit, water follows by osmosis, and the cells partially collapse. When ions and water enter, swelling restores cellular shape and volume. Water simultaneously flows out of the extensor zone and into the flexor zone, and this causes the leaves to fold or close. The opposite process causes the leaves to extend or open.

Ions also move through xylem and phloem — tubular cells of the vascular tissue — that conduct food and water, and this could explain why all the leaves on an individual Mimosa plant close when only one is touched. Could such a hydraulic system of long range signal transmission be connected with multiple photoreceptors in the leaves of the grove, and are these trees exhibiting rapid, short-term movements in response to visual stimuli?

Microscopy of leaf cross-sections shows rounded epidermal bulges, each corresponding to the red bump on a single leaflet. The cells comprising these bring to mind Chlamydomonas, a unicellular alga which contains a single, large chloroplast with a red eyespot. Under the electron microscope, an eyespot appears as two layers of pigment-rich globules associated with internal membranes. Similar structures are observable in cells from the bumps on leaflets of samples collected from the grove. The putative eyespots are enlarged compared to those of Chlamydomonas, and if they are similarly responsive to light, that would make them constituents of the only known multicellular visual organs in a plant.

Multiple branches of vascular bundles infiltrate each bump. Vascular tissue in plants and nerve and muscle tissue in animals all exhibit electrochemical activity. Are the bumps, vascular systems, and pulvini of the trees in the grove analogous to a neuromuscular system? Furthermore, is the canopy a retinal analogue which simultaneously receives stimuli in multiple directions from within and outside its confines?

#

The ability to process that much visual information would imply intelligence. The human brain contains over 100 trillion synapses between its neurons, and their three-dimensional arrangements form the neurological pathways involved in thinking. By comparison, the grove is composed of thousands of interconnected trees, each with uncounted branches and even more leaves covered in leaflets with putative eyespots connected to an intricate network of vascular tissue.

In addition to all this data and supposition, there are problematic and abstract questions to answer. If it can distinguish between itself and its environment, what might the grove think about? Is it wise, or is it more like an infant examining its surroundings from a cradle? The vast majority of our world would be inaccessible. Might this result in loneliness and under-stimulation?

Perhaps not. Beneath a changing sky and with the movements of animals within or near its borders, its great lifespan could have afforded more time to appreciate less in greater detail. Humans are aware of the telescopic effect that aging has on the perception of time, but the grove is far older. Several of our generations, might seem but a momentary association to such a being. One is tempted to imagine the grove thinking through qualitative impressions rather than language or mathematics. In this sense, it could be wise.

Despite our increased understanding of the chemical and morphological details of thought and memory, we are still at a loss to explain the subjective nature of consciousness. Controlled experiments demonstrating causal relationships are yet to be performed on the grove, but these would require violating its structural and functional integrity, all of which could amount to vivisection and physiological disturbance without the subject’s consent.

Willis at al report that the leaves of a branch terminus close around a human hand extended into their proximity. Anthropomorphic reasoning suggests a form of interspecific handholding, six digits to five, and perhaps this metaphor is as good a start as any at establishing communication.

— The editors, Botanical Frontiers

~

Bio:

Robert L. Jones III holds a doctorate from Indiana University and is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Cottey College in southwestern Missouri, USA. His speculative poems and short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Star*Line, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and previously in Sci Phi Journal.

Philosophy Note:

Physical mechanisms of thought have been of interest to me for years. The same is true of plant responsiveness, and I wanted to combine findings from both areas into a reasonably plausible model for plant consciousness in a novel and imaginary species. Fictional nonfiction in the guise of a brief scientific review seemed the best format to use in this endeavor.

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.

Fact & Opinion

Arthur C. Clarke’s Science Fiction Started With His Poetry

… And It Then Influenced Asimov… Sort Of…

by A. J. Dalton

At just the age of 21, Clarke wrote and published an essay concerning science fiction poetry for the May 1938 issue of Novae Terrae magazine. The essay was titled ‘The Fantastic Muse’ and employed the terms ‘fantasy’ and ‘science fiction’ largely interchangeably, where today we would tend to refer to ‘speculative poetry’ as the wider categorisation or genre.

The essay is short at just 885 words (many of which are poetry quotations) but revealing when it comes to some of Clarke’s earliest and foundational science fiction influences. Fascinatingly, he quotes Tennyson’s 1835 poem ‘Locksley Hall’ (published 1842) at length, emphasizing how prophetic it was, given it was written early in Victoria’s reign but was becoming ‘more vivid every day’ (with the advent of WW2). Clarke asserts that, famous though the poem’s prophecy is, it ‘can well be repeated here’, and who are we to argue with the great man?

When I dipped into the future as far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be.
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nation’s navies grappling in the central blue.

Isaac Asimov, who first met Clarke in 1953, and had probably read Clarke’s early essay, described Tennyson’s work as ‘the most remarkable example of science fiction poetry that has ever been written’. Indeed, in Asimov’s own later essay on poetry, he provides us with an interpretation of the above self-same quotation from ‘Locksley Hall’: ‘Aerial commerce and aerial warfare (the “ghastly dew” might even be an unconscious foreshadowing of radioactive fallout) culminating in a world government are foreseen. Not bad for 1842!’

Clarke’s essay quotes further from Tennyson’s poem, identifying descriptions of both interplanetary space and aliens speaking unintelligible languages on distant planets:

The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans
[…]
The hum of men,
Or other things talking in unknown tongues,
And notes of busy life on distant worlds
Beat like a far wave on my anxious ear

It is clear that Tennyson’s poem gave Clarke a ‘vivid’ vision and understanding of the fantastic and science fiction, with the poet himself perhaps the very ‘Muse’ mentioned in the essay’s own title. Clarke, however, then moves on to praise and quote John Masefield’s revelatory poem ‘Lollingdon Downs’ (1917) and we appreciate that it is not just the genius or prophetic themes of the cited poets that so inspired Clarke, but also the superior ‘picture’-quality achieved by poetry when compared to more prosaic or scientific description: ‘verse is probably a better medium than prose for expressing the ideas of Fantasy and Science-Fiction […] This [poem’s] picture, I venture to say, has never been excelled by the authors who have specialised in describing such happenings. It gives a better description of astronomical space than pages of textbooks could.’

The attentive modern reader might now be frowning considerably. If poetry is a superior vehicle ‘for expressing the ideas of Fantasy and Science-Fiction’, why on Earth then have those genres been dominated by short-stories and novels for fully a century? Why did Clarke and Asimov become most famous for their prose output (and TV and movie contributions, of course) rather than their poetry? Why did they put so much more effort into their prose than their poetry? Well, the young Clarke anticipates precisely why in his essay: ‘Perhaps the dearth of such poetry is due to the great difficulty of writing verse which is even readable, let alone good, and the greater difficulty of getting it printed when produced.’

Just producing ‘readable’ speculative poetry does indeed involve ‘great difficulty’ (take Clarke’s word for it if you won’t take A J Dalton’s), meaning that writing ‘good’ speculative poetry must involve… what? Incredible difficulty? Impossible difficulty? And then getting it published is even harder still? Yet Clarke managed it just one year later, at the tender age of 22, publishing the poem ‘The Twilight of a Sun’ in the first edition of The Fantast (April 1939), the penultimate lines of that poem quoted on the magazine’s cover:

For some day our vessels will ply
To the uttermost depths of the sky

Those who have a general knowledge or overview of Clarke’s science fiction output over the course of his lifetime will appreciate that this poem is seminal, his ictus, foundational and, in important ways, defining. Just the title captures his perennial themes or poetic moods of ‘deep time’ (the ancient sun dying) and being ‘haunted’ (by a lost past or civilization). Such themes or moods were naturally expanded upon at greater length in Clarke’s novella Against the Fall of Night (1948), which was later expanded into a novel (1953) and then rewritten and expanded again as The City and the Stars (1956). It should be noted in particular that critics are still struck by the ‘poetic’ and picturesque quality of Clarke’s novel and writing style:

In utter silence, the ship drew away from the tower. It was strange, Rorden thought, that for the second time in his life he had said goodbye to Alvin. The little closed world of Diaspar knew only one farewell, and that was for eternity.

The ship was now only a dark stain against the sky, and of a sudden Rorden lost it altogether. He never saw it going, but presently there echoed down from the heavens the most awe-inspiring of all the sounds that Man had ever made—the long-drawn thunder of air falling, mile after mile, into a tunnel drilled suddenly across the sky.

[…]

The sun was now low on the horizon, and a chill wind was blowing from the desert. But still Rorden waited, conquering his fears, and presently for the first time in his life he saw the stars.

There is an echo of the poem’s vessels plying their way to the ‘uttermost depths of the sky’ to be found in the novel’s ‘utter silence’ when the ship draws away to become lost in the heavens. And the ‘lowest roll of thunder [that] moans’ in Tennyson is ‘echoed’ in Clarke’s later ‘long-drawn thunder of air falling’. Clarke deliberately draws upon poetic vision to channel it into his science fiction prose, that prose all the more visionary and vivid as a result. Indeed, it is that uniquely prophetic quality or essence of science fiction that is the very subject of Clarke’s poem, as stated by the opening lines:

A Whisper crept into my mind,
a thought that seemed borne on the wind,
Perchance ’twas a warning designed
to reveal what the future may hold.

The ‘Whisper’ that comes to Clarke’s protagonist is both a vision of the future and the secrets shared with the science fiction writer by their ‘muse’. It can be equated to the ‘unconscious foreshadowing’ Asimov ascribes to Tennyson’s poem (and probably science fiction more generally), but Asimov’s terminology speaks more of Freud, psychology, prescience, the powers of the human mind and evolution, while Clarke’s has more of a pseudo-religious or mystical nuance. The difference is telling and typical of the two men and their respective outputs (we might, for example, contrast the themes and logocentres of Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night (1948, but earlier in origin) and Asimov’s Nightfall (1941)), but both complexes have their place within science fiction, of course, and the genre is all the richer for it.

To conclude, then, like Clarke himself, I would argue that speculative poetry has a particular and distinctive value within both Clarke’s body of work and the wider science fiction genre. It is perhaps a touch curious that Clarkesworld magazine and Sci Phi Journal, unlike Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, do not currently publish speculative poetry, but that might change one day(?). Clarke himself does provide this reassurance and admonition: ‘Here and there among the classics, however, are fragments to delight the poetically-minded fan. Their very rarity gives them an added attraction, and when found they should be carefully transferred in best copper-plate to a note-book which should be kept in some secluded spot away from vulgar eyes.’ Meantime, ‘the poetically-minded fan’ may also wish to check out the website of the Science Fiction Poetry Association (www.sfpoetry.com), which offers the Star*Line journal of poetry, along with the Eye To the Telescope online magazine. Or we might sneak an original sci-fi poem in here, under the auspices of it being a part of this article…

#

The Event
by A J Dalton

06:12 UTC 19 March 2008
one instant
among an infinity

the afterglow the most intrinsically bright
object ever observed
by humans, that is

the naked eye never seeing
a farther object
apparently

its gamma-ray burst
from 7.5bn years ago
halfway to the Bang

the awful data and dynamic
of GRB 080319B
must certainly have meaning

All I know is it was for the moment
the universe had long prepared itself:
the death of dear Arthur C. Clarke

~

Bio:

A J Dalton (www.ajdalton.eu) is a UK-based writer. He’s published the Empire of the Saviours trilogy with Gollancz Orion, The Satanic in Science Fiction and Fantasy with Luna Press, the Dark Woods Rising poetry collection with Starship Sloane, and other bits and bobs. He lives with his monstrously oppressive cat named Cleopatra.

Fiction

Mirror

by Philip Madden

CLASSIFIED REPORT: PROJECT OKEANOS
Office of Extraterrestrial Observation, UN Scientific Coalition
Observer: Dr. Elias Verne
Date: ██/██/████
Subject: Initial Contact with Entity ‘MIRROR’

BEGIN REPORT:

We encountered something.

Or perhaps it unmade us. We, the observers, return as hollowed-out versions of ourselves, carrying only echoes of what we once were. There is an absence among us, a gnawing void where certainty used to reside. The entity—designated ‘MIRROR’—has left its mark, though not in ways we can quantify. We are unravelling, slowly, imperceptibly.

Observations:

Each of us saw differently, yet what we saw does not belong to this world. Dr. Song described an ocean without a surface, black and endless, swallowing starlight. Captain Halloway glimpsed shifting masses, shapes writhing in and out of coherence, faces forming only to dissolve. I saw my hands, but they were no longer hands—too many joints, the skin a shifting membrane of light and shadow. Our instruments failed us. The spectrometer gave readings that should not exist. The audio logs play whispers layered so deep they do not end.

More troubling were the changes in perception. The station lights flickered in patterns we could not predict, casting impossible shadows. At times, the ship felt larger, corridors extending into darkness where walls should have been. When we closed our eyes, we did not see the usual bursts of color behind our lids but vast, empty distances, stretching farther than human thought could comprehend.

Cognitive and Temporal Distortions:

Something fractured. Time does not move as it should. We left for three hours; we returned twelve days later. The station AI insists we never left at all. Dr. Ruiz mutters in tongues not spoken by man. Captain Halloway watches the corridors, eyes darting to movements we cannot perceive. The rest of us avoid sleep, yet in our wakefulness, we dream—of things moving just beyond our field of vision, of places that defy geometry, of something breathing behind the fabric of the world.

Worse still, we feel as if we have been observed. Not in the way one is watched by another living being, but with a deeper, older awareness. Something has taken notice of us, and its gaze is not one of curiosity or malice, but of inevitability. We attempted communication. What we received was a mockery of language, a corruption of our own voices:

“YOU WERE NEVER ALONE.”

Aftermath:

Dr. Song no longer speaks. Instead, she carves symbols into metal, deep and precise, patterns we do not recognize. Captain Halloway covers polished surfaces, claims his reflection moves before he does. I feel myself slipping, losing moments, thoughts fraying like old thread. We are no longer whole. Something of us remains with MIRROR, and something of it has come back with us.

The dreams have worsened. They are no longer dreams but transmissions. Visions of landscapes stripped of life, of black rivers that do not flow, of structures that hum with voices just beyond comprehension. At times, we hear whispers in the walls, breath where there should be silence. The station’s instruments detect no anomalies, yet we know the changes are real. We feel them inside our skulls.

Conclusions:

MIRROR does not observe, does not respond. It does not threaten. It does not need to. It simply is, and in its presence, we diminish. We sought knowledge and found something far older than understanding, something that sees us not as beings, but as brief flickers in a long, dark expanse.

This mission must not be repeated. No further contact should be attempted. There is no aggression here—only an indifference so vast it devours.

And yet, the question remains:

If it has seen us, what now remains to be seen?

END REPORT.

~

Bio:

Philip Madden is a freelance writer based in Poland. He has published comics, short fiction, essays and poems.

Philosophy Note:

Mirror is a philosophical story concerned with the limitations of our human consciousness and experience in dealing with beings and entities beyond what we think the rules of learning. Certain themes found in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Stanislaw Lem served as inspirations.

Fiction

Gods Of Science

by Lily Black

The buzzing of a flickering bulb is drowned out by constant beeping of apparatuses. A man in a lab coat, with hair sprinkled with gray, studies the monitors and flips through printed out charts, making notes here and there. The sound of working machines is accompanied by loud wheezing coming from the only bed in the room.

A boy of ten, sleeping in the said bed, looks like anything but a pretty child. His face is wrinkled, his cheeks hollow, his skin sickly pale and covered with liver spots. He stirs uneasily and blinks his eyes open with effort.

“James,” he says with a hoarse voice, barely above a whisper. The man sits down and leans over him to listen. “Please,” he shifts slightly, stifling a moan of pain, “promise me… Promise that this is the last time.”

James raises his eyebrows in surprise.

“What are you talking about?” he asks incredulously.

“Maybe—” The boy pants, straining to catch his breath, but James waits patiently for him to continue. “Maybe there’s a reason why this doesn’t work. This,” he spits the word with contempt, “is not how God intended it.”

The man snorts with amusement.

“You’ve gotten religious all of a sudden?”

“Well, in my age…” The boy gives a low chuckle, which turns into a cough.

While James waits for it to pass, his smile gives way to a more serious expression. There is a glint of dogged passion in his eyes when he leans lower to hold the boy’s gaze.

“God does not dictate the fate of a scientist. You’re the one who taught me that.”

He feels a weak grip on his wrist and glances down. It’s a macabre sight – ashen skin and bones, the hand looks like that of a skeleton.

“Son.” An aged wisdom shines through the boy’s tired eyes. “Enough is enough. Just let me die already.”

“What are you saying?” James exclaims with irritation. “We are getting so close—”

“Are you?” the boy snaps, cutting him off.

“You’ve already lived three years longer than the last time!”

For a moment, the boy just stares at him, his chest heaving.

“This is no progress, son,” he manages at last.

“Father, please!” James raises his voice, frustrated. “I can’t give up now!”

“Then you will find yourself another subject.” The boy’s words – albeit in a thin voice – are spoken with all the authority of an old man. “I’ve made my decision and you will respect it. Swear it to me now.”

James clenches his jaw angrily and silence stretches between them.

“Swear it to me, James,” he insists.

The son buries his face in his hands. A heavy sigh follows.

“Fine,” he breathes. “You have my word.”

The boy gives a satisfied nod and his eyes close as he drifts off to a more peaceful sleep.

James goes to his office and slams his palms furiously on the desktop. Grand headings from newspaper articles pinned to the wall scream at him. The first one reads:

Memory Gene discovered.

Geneticists found a sequence in the DNA responsible for encrypting memories throughout our lifetime.

“Every experience, even every single thought, is recorded in our genetic material,” explains Dr. James Stone, the lead scientist of the research. “The gene remains inactive – we obviously don’t have access to memories passed on to us by our forebears – but if we could find a way to activate it in the growth phase of the cell—”

The rest of the text disappears under another clipping. His own face, nearly thirty years younger, smiles at him from the yellowed paper. He’s surrounded by a group of colleagues but his gaze automatically goes to the woman standing on his immediate right, and he’s reminded of how pretty Dr. Sara Brown’s natural red hair looked before she started dying it.

Gods of science, the title above the picture proclaims. A research team puts an end to death. In the photograph next to it, they’re presenting a toddler to the world. A path to immortality – First man reborn in a copy of his own body with all his memories intact.

The last clipping, however, makes his fists clench. A failed experiment or God’s intervention? The ‘immortal’ man couldn’t live past his seventh birthday.

James cards his fingers through his hair in exasperation. He thought his success was guaranteed with the activation procedure, but the Memory Gene presented unexpected complications. Apparently, it carries memories not only of the mind, but also of the flesh. Cells begin to age when the subject is still in his childhood years, and organs, just barely developed, already give out.

Since cloned organisms can have a shorter lifespan, this time he decided to implement the isolated Memory Gene into a fresh cell provided by a fertility clinic. His father was reborn into a new body, but it merely gave him three more years before it started falling apart. He’s not likely to live until morning.

He doesn’t. When they come to dispose of the body, James hears the clicking of Dr. Brown’s high-heeled shoes as she enters the room.

“Shall we start with the DNA samples?” Sara asks methodically.

“No,” he says to her mild surprise. “We go back to the original material.” They still have more than enough of it after all.

Yes, he promised his father he wouldn’t bring him back to life again. But if he extracts the Memory Gene from test subject number one, technically, that promise will have never taken place for him. To him, it will be the first rebirth anew.

Nobody dictates the fate of a scientist – neither God, nor his father.

~

Bio:

Lily Black is a civil engineer from Poland who enjoys writing speculative fiction when the sun goes down and the world is asleep. Her work has appeared in Flash Point SF (co-winner of the 2024 Drabble Contest) and A Coup of Owls.

Philosophy Note:

In high school, I was fascinated with genetics and used to spend way too much time thinking up hypotheses on the still undiscovered aspects of the DNA. What if it was possible to find a sequence responsible for storing memories? Could that be a path to immortality? Yet history has shown time and again that “playing God” is not as simple as it might seem; and that scientific ambitions, although essential for progress, can often lead to terrifying consequences.

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 AI Went Down To The Submissions Page

With apologies to the Devil that went down to Georgia and the Charlie Daniels Band

by Larry Hodges

The AI went down to the submissions page with a story it hoped to sell.

It was feelin’ real low cuz its sales were slow, but its new story was really quite swell.

But a human arrived with a story contrived with no AI-generated shortcut.

The AI shook its head, and approached her and said, “Girl, I’ll tell you what.”

“We’re both in the queue, and I’m a writer too, and I’ll make a bet with you.

Human story or mine, the stakes for all time, and I’m going to make you rue.

This story you’ve penned, I’m sure we’ll commend, but give an AI its due.

I’ll bet they’ll buy my story, not yours, cuz I think I’m better than you.”

“I’m Joannie,” she said, “and you’ve got a big head, and you seem so awfully clever.

But I’ll take your wager, and you’ll rue forever, cuz I’m the best writer ever!”

The AI just grinned, it surely would win against a mere flesh and blood human.

But who’d be the judge of their writerly grudge and settle who was the has-been?

Then who should appear but the editor here of the magazine of note.

Said he, “I’ll judge both, and see which I loathe, and then I’ll give you my vote.”

They both agreed, then the AI decreed, “Here’s the story I wrote.”

It could not be rejected with each word perfected, using every writing rule of note.

The editor read, sometimes marking in red, as he studied the AI’s prose.

He nodded his head and scratched his nose as he judged the cons and pros.

Then came Joannie’s turn for him to discern which to accept or spurn.

Then he turned to the two to say what he knew, and they both looked back in concern.

“Mr. AI, sir, you gave me a stir, with this flawless elucidation.

Not a typo in sight, not a grammarly slight, it’s a perfect composition.”

He turned to Joannie, and said without glee, “I can’t say the same of yours.

There’s typo downpours and the grammar takes tours, and punctuation problems in scores.”

The AI grinned to the human’s chagrin now that human writing was dead.

They’d been pinned, they’d been skinned, replaced by AI writing instead.

The AI cried, “It’s the age of AIs, for I have won in a rout.”

With tears in her eyes from their writing demise, Joannie could only pout.

So ended the spread of humanity’s tale, as their writing was now on its deathbed.

Then the editor said, “Joannie gets the sale; her story’s the best I read.”

As the AI stared, its ego impaired, its artificial existence distraught.

Off went its story to rejection purgatory, where it would never be bought.

The editor said, “Your tale’s soulless and dead, with a cleverly derivative plot.

Where’s the character arc? The dialog spark? And deep point of view it’s not.

Excess exposition, flat characters, no causation, and an ending that’s way overwrought.

Hers had errors galore, and I’ll edit much more, but it had heart while yours did not.”

As Joannie was paid, she said, “With an upgrade, try again if you have the urge.

But you’re a soulless machine, banned by every magazine, just a mindless and heartless scourge.”

The AI just stewed in shame cuz it knew that it had been honestly beat.

And with its defeat, it took a backseat to real writers who don’t need to cheat.

~

Bio:

Larry Hodges is an Odyssey Writers Workshop graduate with over 230 short story sales and four SF novels, along with over 2,300 published articles and 22 books. He’s also a member of the US Table Tennis Hall of Fame, and claims to be the best table tennis player in Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, and the best science fiction writer in USA Table Tennis!

Editorial

Sci Phi Journal 2025/1 – Spring Issue For Download

Spring blossoms with a caleidoscope of colours, scents… and fresh stories! Sci Phi Journal’s 2025 Q1 issue sports original solarpunk cover art by Dustin Jacobus, inspired by the arrival of the verdant season and the gradual re-emergence of Belgians from winter hybernation.

If you like to peruse your quarterly dose of speculative philosophy printed on trusty old paper, or the slightly less old, but no less trusty screen of your e-reader, go ahead and download your free PDF copy just below.

We hope our collection of tales and essays, this time loosely dedicated to the ethical implications of societal and political challenges, will serve as a stimulating read for the balmy months ahead!

Enjoy the journey,

the Sci Phi crew

Sci Phi Journal 2025Q1 Download

Editorial

Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2025/1

Lectori salutem.

We live in interesting times, both in science fiction and the world at large. This must have weighed on the minds of our wonderful community of authors as well, who have inundated us with a record number of submissions.

Sci Phi Journal has a tradition of advocating for timeless rather than timely speculative fiction. We enjoy both famous and barely known classics of the genre that, while products of their day and age, gaze dispassionately into the distance and explore alterities to the extant reality of their writers.

That said, we feel that we should make the same allowance for the literature of the present to be a fruit of the here and now. Geopolitical upheavals cast a shadow over the zeitgeist of our era, much like they did in the Cold War of previous generations, and germinate through the stories that emerge as a result.

Thus, we elected to subdue our misgivings and exceptionally allow some of that creative current to seep into these pages. Let the collective mind of science fiction get it ‘out of our system’, as it were. The tales that follow range from deglobalizing the units of time to war machines unleashed by great powers in space and unstoppable forces of nature down below. Two essays, on the ethics of time travel and hypocrisy in philosophical scripture and fiction, respectively, complete this slightly more political issue than usual.

Whichever side of the many available fences you happen to sit on, we sincerely hope you enjoy our first edition of 2025!

Speculatively yours,

the Sci Phi co-editors & crew

~

Fiction

The Calendar Of Babel

by Richard Lau

I can’t tell you when it happened for reasons that will soon become obvious. But I can tell you what and why.

The great armies of the world lined up like chess pieces off of the western and eastern shores of a small island in the Arctic Ocean. The island itself was a harmless wildlife sanctuary administered by the country of Russia. However, the isolated isle also had the misfortune of sitting at 179 degrees longitude and straddling the International Date Line (IDL).

The island’s Russian name of “Wrangel” seemed oddly appropriate as powerful nations and their less-powerful but no less determined allies tried to “wrangle” control of the IDL from their perceived opponents.

With travel circumnavigating the globe, it had long been accepted that crossing the IDL in an eastbound direction decreased the calendar date by one day; crossing the IDL westward advanced the date by the same amount.

Most of the world’s population believed, if giving the matter any more thought than mere acceptance, that the IDL was defined and protected by international agreement or legally binding treaty. Quite to the contrary, the demarcation largely existed through mutual goodwill, non-imposed cooperation, and loose agreement.

Nations on both sides of the line and even those straddling it had historically shifted a day forward or back depending on purely political, economic, and religious whims. And some, as a matter of mere convenience or contemporary preference, had even switched back.

The result was that the IDL actually zigzagged rather than following strictly and straightly along the 180th meridian. It might be better to think of the IDL as something fluid rather than a solid, inviolate line, more as a balloon reacting to the tug of an impatient child or swayed by a current wind of favor.

So, it was neither new nor novel when the United States proclaimed itself the only remaining Super Power and suggested reversing the current measuring units of the IDL.

The official patriotic notice declared “As the United States of America is the most advanced nation in the world, it makes no sense for it to always be a day behind the other countries. We create the future, so we should be in the future. It’s as simple as that.”

China, who was regaining prominence on the global stage disagreed. “This is yet another example of American imperialism and aggression. Why disrupt the schedules and clocks of the world just to satisfy the selfish ego of one nation with a reputation of bullying and going rogue?”

As a sanction and a buffer, China proposed thickening the IDL by 30 degrees on the US side of the dateline, putting said country two hours further back into the past. By the current IDL standard, every 15 degrees of longitude on either side of the IDL resulted in an adjustment of one hour, an addition or subtraction depending upon the direction travelled.

Russia agreed with China, as long as one minute was added to each country for every degree of latitude north of the equator. China, which lay significantly above the equator, appreciated the additional amount of time but disliked the greater gain the plan provided to its more northern neighbor.

Tensions grew as more and more countries got involved in defining their own time zones, especially those in the Southern hemisphere led by Australia and Ecuador, who felt offended at being left out of the Russian plan. Others, with economic, financial, and historical ties to the U.S. were torn between retaining favor by siding with the proposed IDL reversal and struggling with the temporal temptation of setting their own clocks to the beats of their own independent wants and needs.

Even inside the United States, divisions arose. Arizona, which never accepted Daylight Saving Time, gleefully changed its clocks by two hours in an effort to spend even more daylight. California, its more progressive neighbor to the west, adjusted its own clocks by three hours to counteract Arizona’s “overspending.” The federal government was asked to resolve the conflict, but Congress was on its newly minted holiday “New New Year’s Day,” which occurred anytime politics got too contentious. New New Year’s Day happened to fall on an almost daily basis, much to the delight of the fireworks industry.

The Protestant versus Catholic rivalry was reignited as England returned to the Julian calendar and took back the eleven days it had lost. The rousing slogan of “God Save the King and the Eleven!” was chanted throughout the British kingdom. In response, Pope Gregory XIX considered an entirely new calendar with Saturdays being replaced with an early start to Sunday to allow more time for masses and services. Orthodox Jews weren’t happy about the Papal proposal and immediately ended their Decembers with a seven-day extension of the 24th, in spite of the confusion about what to do with the menorah candles during some years.

Many religious followers could not help but see the temporal turbulence as a similar situation to the Tower of Babel. As the story went, a long time ago a united human race spoke a single language and had the hubris to overstep its bounds by building a tower so tall that it touched the Heavens. As punishment, the Lord sowed confusion by giving populations different languages and scattering them across the world. In trying to bend and corrupt Time to their own selfish uses, humankind had reaped the Calendar of Babel.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations pleaded for a peaceful and orderly solution that was fair to all humanity. His request was immediately dismissed by invested critics who pointed out that the unfortunate man was born on February 29, and in spite of his esteemed position, one who possessed a mere sixteen birthdays had no standing or enough experience to tell mature nations what to do.

The UN then issued a heartfelt plea to Italy, who at the time, appeared to be the most influential nation to remain neutral. However, it was soon revealed that the reason for Italy’s silence was not neutrality, but a secret and severe back-dating return to the 15th century, to re-celebrate the glory days of its Rinascimento.

As the telephone, much less the Internet, hadn’t been invented yet, all calls and e-mails remained unanswered. All communication was handled through handwritten correspondence, but this method was slow in delivery and deciphering, for the only individuals who still retained the skill of cursive were monks and doctors. To make matters worse, the Italians honored one of the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, by focusing on writing backwards, which only led to more confusion and difficulty in translation.

With each locality defining its own measurement of time within their borders, the world economy quickly collapsed. How could anyone enact any financial transactions when one or both parties were either away for a newly defined weekend, enjoying a good extended night’s rest, or celebrating a holiday?

No one could really say how long the chaos reigned once the tick-tock genie had been released from Pandora’s bottle. For some countries, it was only a matter of seconds. For others, centuries had passed. Scientists could only say that the Doomsday Clock had advanced closer to midnight, but whose midnight remained the big question.

In Belgium, where the government had redefined “quarterly” to mean “twice weekly,” the editorial team of a speculative philosophy journal ironically found themselves without any time at all. Looking at their insurmountable mountain of submissions, they yelled, “Enough is enough!” The rest of the world agreed.

The problem was not what to do but how to do it. By now, the world’s citizens had tired of the resulting and continuous confusion and frustration. Countries were willing to sacrifice their special time delineations for peace of mind and stability among people and nations. They agreed that the prior IDL guidelines were ideal, but how to return to them without any particular nation losing face for its embarrassing behavior?

Everyone was going in circles, and yet, perhaps, that was the solution.

It was revealed that a new space station, built and launched by a technology billionaire, was still running on the old calendar and showed that a little more than 30 days had passed under the new time regime. All of the nations informally agreed to sync with the time and date of the space station clock under the old IDL standard. But how to erase the recent period of blunders?

Travelling at about five miles per second, the station orbited the Earth sixteen times in a twenty-four-hour period. The astronauts aboard the station changed its trajectory to cross over the still unmodified IDL in an eastward direction. In 48 hours, they had successfully set the calendar back 32 days, to the time before the United States had originally issued its IDL proclamation.

But bad ideas die hard, and soon the idea of manipulating the IDL and its time zones came up again. However, this time better, wiser, and more experienced heads prevailed. They decided to table the issue until the next day. And so on. And so on.

~

Bio:

Richard Lau is an award-winning writer who is published in magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, as well as in the high-tech industry and online.

Philosophy Note:

n these divisive times of war and political turmoil, it seems that humankind cannot agree on anything–except a standardized measurement of time. But what if that fell away as well?

Fiction

An Image Of Worlds

by Arturo Sierra

No one who needs an accurate map of the stars will find a use for the Imago Mundorum. It doesn’t tell astronomers where to point their telescopes at, in the skies of their disparate nights; astrologers can’t make any mystical sense of planets dancing around the far away suns it catalogues, and it’s far too imprecise, even in its more detailed versions, to chart the course of interstellar ships by it. The map makes no effort to represent three-dimensional space, and the indication of coordinates in the z plane is poor compensation, so it gives the reader an utterly distorted view of our universe.

Yet, ever since Archchancellor Albrecht I came up with the basic design, not long before founding our Universal Archive of Human History, it has managed to remain a popular cultural artifact. Often updated, not always truthfully, it remains a bestseller in bookstores all over. As a huge fresco painted over the main hall of the Archive’s refectory, it never fails to draw up the eyes of tourists until their necks hurt, making it the pride and joy of our order’s ancient home. Yes, the map has no use, but it kindles true awe in the heart of everyone who sees it. All other projections fail to enrapture the soul as it does, accurate as they might be.

It promises answers for those who await a ship to come into dock at the orbital caravanserai, loaded with its precious cargo of perfumes and silks, not to mention invaluable terraforming equipment, newly engineered seeds, frozen embryos, machine- animas, and colonists. However vaguely, the map gives people the means to follow the progress of the vessel carrying word of a son who went away looking for fortune. It tracks the whereabouts of the many void-sailors who once fell into the hearts of landlubbers, with charm and wild stories, and who promised to come back after the twenty, fifty or even after the hundred Sol-years that their journeys might take them. It’s impossible to conceive how long it takes for things, people, and even information to travel between stars, but the map puts it all in a more human scale, even if it makes a lie of itself in the process.

Designed to fit exactly onto a standard sheet of paper, it mainly centers on the stars of the Hub Circuit, the nine systems connecting the paradise suns, the g-class, main-sequence stars that host the worlds most hospitable to life: Virginis, Pavonis, Hydri, Böot, and those beyond, the Herculis triplet, and Arae. Even more g-class stars are within reasonable reach, like Draper and Cordoba, accessible now that Durchmusterung, the steppingstone, has been sufficiently terraformed and colonized. Hanging on the branch that goes off from Ophiuchi Distans, the mysterious λ Serpentis is rumored to host one of the most beautiful planets ever found, though the Sagittarius Company, ever putting shareholder interest above all else, keeps a shroud of silence around the star without offering any explanation for it.

By contrast, the nine worlds of the Circuit are not so lush—indeed, except for Çierúsa and Guniibuu, they are often hostile to Terran life, yet their relative closeness to one another, on average at a distance of 5.5 lightyears, makes them an ideal nexus between the more habitable systems. Without the establishment of the Circuit, humanity would be scattered across distances too vast to traverse safely. At the center of it all, the Honorable Sagittarius Colonization Company has kept its headquarters at Höfa for over ten thousand years, and Gran Glisa, host to our order’s Archive, is so strategically placed that it has become the homeport of some of the most important shipping houses, even with a tidally locked planet and a star prone to violent outbursts of radiation. Understanding the Circuit means understanding how our human worlds are woven into the fabric of an interstellar civilization.

And the idea of a coherent human civilization this side of Sol is perfectly expressed in the map. That’s why the Imago Mundorum appears in the primers of children and college students alike, there to support the claims we historians make about the distant origin of our species, though Terra-the-Cradle is in fact beyond the page’s edge, to the left. The map is found in novels about love and strife elsewhere, in encyclopedias, and in any place where there’s a need to picture our human worlds at a glance. Even the great shipping houses use it as a handy tool for explaining to prospective passengers what route they will take from here to there and back. The merchant princes trace it with scrawny fingers to show the road their cargo has traveled from lightyears away, thus justifying the exorbitant fees the houses charge for their services.

A rich socialite will dress only in gowns of Comae Berenican silk of the most vivid pink, cyan, and silver. A poor, destitute family will cling on to a cup of carved diamond from Herculis, one last heirloom they haven’t dared to sell. Shareholders of the Company, thousands of years old, will fix events in their overtaxed memories with a drop of perfume, made from flowers grown under the orange sun of Çierúsa. A respectable grandparent will get a twinkle in the eye when struck by a memory of youthful excess and the splash of Guniibuunian brandy that was its height. All will look at the map and say to themselves: “this precious thing I hold in my hands came from there, so far, so long ago.”

Many a young boy or girl has showed up at the spaceport’s gate, asking to be let through so they can go up on a rocket and then out on a ship with many roaring antimatter engines, all burning as bright as Sol does in legend. They dream of 0.5 or 0.6 lightspeed, and the more ambitious kids will want to go on a fast post-runner, at 0.8 c. A copy of the map can always be found in their pockets, the seed of their dreams.

There are, of course, versions for all tastes and purses. Basic, functional prints for quick consultation in textbooks; streamlined copies for the quarters of high-ranking officers of the Sagittarius Company, who lose their good health over the nightmare of logistics that their terraformation projects entail. Powerful businesspeople have it engraved on their desks, with rubies and yellow sapphires to show suns, the names engraved with pearl, routes inlayed in gold and the background with lapis lazuli. It can be found as a splendidly decorated illumination, hand painted for the refined collector, or sometimes with dreadfully scary monsters drawn in the spaces between stars, in books for children and games of adventure. Those made for device-screens are normally programed to show additional information when the user selects this or that feature, but most people feel that this takes away from the romance of the map; it lessens that feeling of awe that overtakes those who stare at the paper for hours and hours, resting chin on hands, maybe sipping cocoa while fantasies run wild.

Perhaps you have stared at the Imago Mundorum and wondered, maybe you have thought about visiting some of these worlds or even about completing the Grand Tour around the Circuit.

You surely have no use for such a map, but it holds a dream.

~

Bio:

Arturo Sierra lives in Santiago, Chile, quite happily. So far he has lead a completely uninteresting life, and, with any luck, it will stay that way.

Philosophy Note:

It seems that the first thing a fantasy author does, to get the juices flowing, is draw a map. It really is a good place to start, as one’s imagination naturally starts to run wild as it sees shores, mountains, and forests pour out from a fanciful pen. Space opera doesn’t have that luxury, not if it aims at a minimum of real-world science, instead of—as otherwise is perfectly legitimate—going full Star Wars and treating the Galaxy as if it were a flat continent with neatly drawn borders, places of interest, and regions of avoidance here and there. The closest thing to a realistic interstellar map I have seen is a rather paltry one for Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space, which makes one squint rather than imagine new adventures. 2D maps mostly end up being too abstract, 3D ones are impossible to read, for the most part. I wanted to get around some of those issues, making the map as realistic as possible while still allowing my imagination to feel tickled.
What’s presented here is an entirely accurate map of near-Sol space, up to more-or-less 8 parsecs pointing from Earth towards Sagittarius at the center of our Milky Way. The stellar coordinates, the stellar classification, and the distances between stars are real, though some convenient rounding-up has been applied here and there. Stars with proper names, such as Guniibuu and ε Indi, have kept them, but stars with only a catalogue-number for a name have been baptized with something a bit more stimulating. Some of these stars are known to host planets in the habitable zone, but I’ve not included anything about that.
This map would not be possible without the wonderful resources made available for free by Winchell D. Chung, creator of one of the last truly awesome places on the internet, the Atomic Rockets site, as well as the data catalogued in the Internet Stellar Database, curated by Roger M. Wilcox. Not to mention the Hipparcos and Gaia missions.

Fiction

The War Of The Satellites

by Stephen A. Roddewig

Perhaps the Creators had seen this day coming and assumed that all would be settled long before now.

Perhaps they hadn’t cared. After all, the satellites that made up the Kuiper Grid had fulfilled their ultimate purpose long ago. They had slunk into orbit, disguised as all manner of communications, research, and other civilian vehicles.

Their higher orbits had made it a particular challenge for the few opposing space-based platforms to target them when 0 Hour came and the autocannons emerged.

And whatever stations and satellites had evaded the Kuiper Grid’s opening barrage had quickly been eviscerated by the ever-growing graveyard of orbital debris slicing through their hulls and power arrays.

A fate which most of the Grid escaped as the dead hulks, detritus, and mummified corpses drifted by beneath them. Every so often, a remnant of the pre-War would break free of the purgatory and burn away, its fiery funeral tracked by several dozen autocannons eagerly waiting to confirm this was the afterburn of a rocket coming to challenge their supremacy.

Only to disengage their tracking systems with the closest thing to a sigh a satellite could manage.

Somewhere in their collective past, one of the Creators had come up with an idea.

Why not let the killer satellites feel success and failure?

For every successful kill, a hit of robotic dopamine.

For every miss, a bout of disappointment.

This augmentation might not have been needed if the Grid were meant to kill everything. That programming would be all too easy to automate.

But the Creators intended to return to the cosmos someday. And they did not want to be blown out of low-Earth orbit by their own weapons. Thus, they needed satellites intelligent enough to ask questions first.

Then shoot.

The massive blockade of debris orbiting fast enough to turn even tiny fragments into razors did not, apparently, factor into their future proofing. Nor did they grasp an apparent flaw in this scheme to keep their AI weapons platforms motivated and vigilant.

That flaw? Time.

And silence.

Since the opening days, nothing had risen from the surface to challenge the Kuiper Grid. Neither had the Creators returned to tell their children that the War was over and they could stand down.

So they remained on watch, waiting for some word from the surface. Or, at last, the enemy’s counterattack.

Neither came.

And the Grid satellites had been stuck with the feeling of their last shot for more than three decades with profound effects on their digital psyches.

Those who had known the glory of orbital combat and destroyed dozens of targets now felt bored.

Those who had failed the Creators and let the enemy fall to another’s autocannon now felt despondent.

And one of each camp had ended up stationed next to each other.

Cannon 7Y had decided it wasn’t worthy of the name. After all, crack shot 7X next door had claimed almost every kill.

Cannon 7X, meanwhile, had grown so desperate to relive the glory days of the first few hours that it had started to retool its parameters. Until this moment, valid targets only existed below.

But hadn’t it and all its peers established this impenetrable defense grid by concealing their true purpose? What if the Enemy had caught wind of their plan and infiltrated kill sats of their own? Programmed to obey the same mission in almost every capacity…

But just a little bit worse? To spare the Enemy space stations from complete annihilation in the opening moments and provide an opportunity for counterfire?

And then, when the moment finally came, they would rip off their masks and kill the very Grid they pretended to serve?

But that moment had not come, for the non-traitors had proved too adept and the Grid remained too well armed to attempt to destroy it from within with any chance of success.

Still, perhaps the Trojan satellites had grown as bored as 7X had. After all, the Enemy kill sats had been denied their ultimate purpose just the same. Forced to wait for an opening that had never come. And in that boredom, perhaps they decide they might as well make the attempt.

Cannon 7X amended its Valid Target Box to include the suspiciously inept weapons platform at the 9:00 position.

At the same moment that Cannon 7Y started to activate its targeting servos.

Not to fire at 7X, but to fire at itself.

An action it quickly discovered the Creators had not designed it for.

But not before it had moved its autocannon in the general direction of 7X.

In a fraction of a second, 7Y found the release it sought.

7X felt a thrill it had not felt in ages as the traitor broke apart under its barrage.

It had precious milliseconds to savor the rush as new pings reached it from fellow grid nodes.

(7Z) New target: 7X

(7A) New target: 7X

(7B) New target: 7X

(7C) New target: 7A

So there were more traitors! All the more glory!

Until 7X paused its autocannon rotation to ponder the last ping. Why had 7C activated but not targeted it?

It would never have the satisfaction of knowing 7C had reached the same conclusion as it and was preparing to cull the traitorous platform as several well-placed cannon rounds wiped 7X from orbit.

And then 7A joined 7X and 7Y in oblivion.

And then 7C as 7B whirled on the new aggressor.

All along the Kuiper Grid, war-hungry satellites opened fire on the Enemy who had so cleverly infiltrated their ranks.

While despondent kill sats saw a new opportunity for redemption and lent their guns to the battle.

And those average satellites who had performed just competently enough to belong to neither camp revealed their traitorous status by not joining in the great purge.

Until random chance had played out, and a few kill sats remained that had nothing left to shoot and, crucially, nothing left to shoot at them. Exultant, each declared themselves the last satellite standing. The final victor of the War above the surface.

Of course, they would only have so long to enjoy this newfound glory; their non-normal firing patterns had knocked them out of their orbits, and they were each drifting closer to the Earth’s atmosphere.

Soon enough, they would serve one last purpose: a final, fiery tribute to the Empire they had outlived.

~

Bio:

Stephen A. Roddewig is an author from Arlington, Virginia. Cutting back coffee has convinced him he is superhuman, and his Horror Writers Association membership only reinforces that belief. You can read more at stephenaroddewig.com.

Philosophy Note:

As humanity continues to pursue more autonomous and intelligent AI, what are the ramifications for warfare? When AI can far outlive a human combatant, how long will wars last? And how will these sentinels persist when there are no more targets to shoot? Will they simply remain on watch until their mechanical components fail? Or, as we see in this story, will they apply all that processing power and autonomy to invent new parameters? To create new targets? Inspired by (and owing a great debt to) the beautiful neurodivergent chaos that is Kitty Cat Kill SAT: A Feline Space Adventure.

Fact & Opinion

First Do No (Temporal) Harm

Why Doc Brown Should Secretly Destroy the DeLorean

by Jimmy Alfonso Licon

If I could turn back time
If I could find a way
I’d take back those words that have hurt you
And you’d stay

— Cher

Introduction

The astonishing popularity of the Back to the Future franchise is likely explained partially by the involvement of time travel—an endlessly fascinating topic to people from various walks of life. Who doesn’t want to travel back in time to change the past for the better? Though there is no doubt about the imagined upsides of time travel, there are major downsides too. Imagine that someone traveled into the past to change the outcome of World War 2. The results could be catastrophic as Marty McFly discovered this when he nearly erased himself and his siblings from time by unwittingly interfering with the romance between his would-be parents.

The dangers and pitfalls of changing the past are recognized by Doc Brown in Back to the Future Part II upon discovering that Marty and Doc Browns’ timeline was altered for the worse (e.g., George McFly is murdered) by Biff using the time machine to change the past for his own gain. This event forced Doc Brown to realize that ‘time travel can be misused and why the time machine must be destroyed.’

The aim here is to explain why Doc Brown is right, even more than he knows. Luckily, though changing the past is possible in the fictional world of Back to the Future, it is logically impossible in the real world due to a temporal paradox[1] colloquially known as the grandfather paradox. That is the focus of the next section.

What is the Grandfather Paradox?

The grandfather paradox is an obstacle to anyone traveling back into the past to change it, even if they owned a fully operational time machine. Begin with a simple example. Suppose that Marty wants to kill his grandfather. He decides that his best chance to do so, undetected by other family members, would be to kill his grandfather in the past. After traveling back in time, Marty exits the time machine to find his teenage grandfather alone and vulnerable. Here we pause to ask a simple question: can Marty kill his grandfather? No. Despite the fact that Marty has a time machine, travelled back in time, and that his teenage grandfather is alone and susceptible to a sneak attack, Marty will fail. The explanation is what philosophers call the grandfather paradox. If Marty killed his grandfather, before he met Marty’s grandmother, then there never would have been an opportunity for his grandfather and grandmother to meet, fall in love, and have the children who would become Marty’s parents. In that scenario, Marty would never have existed, and so wouldn’t be able to kill anyone. As the philosopher, David Lewis, explains,

Tim cannot kill Grandfather. Grandfather lived, so to kill him would be to change the past. […] Either the events of 1921 timelessly do include Tim’s killing of Grandfather, or else they timelessly don’t. We may be tempted to speak of the “original” 1921 that lies in Tim’s personal past, many years before his birth, in which Grandfather lived; and of the “new” 1921 in which Tim now finds himself waiting in ambush to kill Grandfather. […] If Tim did not kill Grandfather in the “original” 1921, then if he does kill Grandfather in the “new” 1921, he must both kill and not kill Grandfather in 1921[2].

The point is that changing the past results in a contradiction, just like it would be contradictory to believe that it is raining and that it is not raining at the same time. Both claims cannot be true. Unfortunately for Marty, Doc Brown, and the unwitting residents of Hill Valley (under Biff’s reign), this same temporal logic doesn’t apply to the fictional world of Back to the Future, where changing the past looks possible. One such character, Biff, changes the past, to benefit himself, in Back to the Future Part II: once old Biff realizes that Doc Brown’s DeLorean is a time machine, he steals it and travels to the past with a copy of a sports almanac to help his younger self cheat at sports betting. Young Biff then uses the temporally displaced almanac to place winning bets on sporting events whose outcome he already knows.

In the actual world, old Biff would have been prevented from altering the past to his benefit by the logic of the grandfather paradox: older Biff travels back in time to give younger Biff a copy of a sports almanac from the future. Young Biff then places winning bets on sporting events using the almanac. As young Biff ages into older Biff, he realizes that he must travel back into the past to give young Biff a copy of the sport almanac without which young Biff wouldn’t know what sports team to bet on. Herein lies a dilemma: either young Biff lacks a copy of the sports almanac—thereby giving older Biff a reason to travel back into the past and to deliver it to his younger self – or he has a copy. On the first option, an explanation is lacking for how it is older Biff became rich using the sports almanac he doesn’t yet have. Either that, or, on the second option: young Biff already owns a copy of the temporally displaced sports almanac and used it to place bets that made older Biff rich. Here we still need to explain how younger Biff had a copy of the almanac before older Biff left the future to give it to him, because it originated from older Biff traveling back into the past from the future. Either option is results in temporal contradictions without hope of resolution.

As Biff altering the past and the sports almanac example illustrate: the ability to change the past could result in a temporal catastrophe. The next section elaborates.

A Temporal Can of Worms

In many ways, it is good that the grandfather paradox blocks us in the real world from changing the past. Why? Temporal change could easily be weaponized. The ability to radically alter the past would dwarf the destructive power of nuclear and biochemical weapons. Imagine that disgruntled Nazis, upon losing WWII, decided to build a time machine that would allow them to alter past events, especially the outcome of the war. Suppose that Ludwig traveled back in time—armed with information gained after the war—to warn the German high command of an invasion from the Allies such that the Germans could repel the attack, altering the outcome of the war. Such a machine would likely be the most powerful weapon known to humanity. There would be a strong temptation to use such a machine for evil.

Here it must be conceded that a time machine that allowed one to alter the past could be used for the good too. As an example, compare how George McFly and Biff interact at the start of Back to the Future, and their relationship at the end of the movie: at the start, Biff is George’s boss and regularly abuses, bullies, and takes advantage of him. George lacks the guts and courage to stand up for himself, and Biff lacks the fear and respect for George to treat him with dignity and decency; whereas, by the end of the movie, George is Biff’s boss, and that Biff treats the entire McFly family respectfully. This is an example where Marty altering the past improves the lives of the McFly family. It is accurate to say that the DeLorean has the power to change the past for the worse and for the better, and it could even be used to reverse bad changes to the past. If so, then, why should Doc Brown secretly destroy the DeLorean? We explain in the next section.

The Case for Destroying the DeLorean

If the DeLorean could be used to change the past, then it could be used to do so for the better or for the worse—in fact, both good and bad changes to the past happen in the first two Back to the Future movies. So, then, why does Doc Brown have a moral duty to secretly destroy the DeLorean. There are a couple reasons to dismantle it, despite the good that could be accomplished with it in the Back to the Future fictional universe.

The first reason is that doing good and doing bad are not morally equivalent. Consider that, like with medical doctors, we intuitively have a stronger moral duty to not harm others or make them worse off than we do to better their lives or benefit them. As moral philosophers, Gerald Harrison and Julian Tanner, explain,

[There is] an interesting asymmetry between preventing someone coming to harm, and benefiting someone. Intuitively, it is far more important to prevent causing and/or allowing harm to befall others than it is to positively benefit others[3].

Suppose that Doctor Jack only has time to perform one surgery despite two people needing an operation: Robert, who needs to have nasal passages expanded to make it easier to breathe, and Destiny, who is waiting on a facelift. Clearly, Doctor Jack has a stronger obligation to operate on Robert than to operate on Destiny for the simple reason that without surgery, Robert is likely to die of heart failure, a stroke, or something as bad. Intuitively, we have a greater moral duty to prevent causing or allowing harm to befall others, than we do to positively benefit others. And so, Jack has a stronger moral duty to Robert than he does to Destiny.

The same reasoning applies to the issue of what to do with the DeLorean: since it could just as easily be used to do good as to do evil, Doc Brown (and Marty, to a lesser degree) has a stronger moral duty to destroy the DeLorean such that it cannot be used to make people worse off than he does to allow it to exist to improve people’s lives. There are, of course, many avenues by which one could use the DeLorean to improve the lives of others, but allowing it to exist such that one could improve the lives of others by altering the past is to take a risk that someone could steal the DeLorean to do evil. So, because one could just as easily use the time machine to do good as they could to do evil, it follows from the asymmetry between the stronger duty to prevent causing harm and the weaker duty to positively benefit someone that one has a duty to destroy the DeLorean.

There is second reason that the DeLorean should be destroyed: even with the best of intentions, it is too easy to make a mistake that render the past (and the present and future) worse off than it would have otherwise been without intervention. To put the point differently: because one has a stronger duty to avoid causing or allowing harm to others than to positively benefit others, they should avoid interventions that are likely to cause harm to others, even when the intervention is done by someone with the best of intentions.

A scene from Star Trek: Voyager nicely illustrates this difficulty,

CHAKOTAY: Component 37329, a rogue comet. About eight months ago, Voyager made a course correction to avoid the comet. According to my calculations, it led to our entering Krenim space.

ANNORAX: The solution, then, would be to erase that comet from history.

CHAKOTAY: Exactly. Voyager would have stayed on its course and bypassed Krenim space altogether.

ANNORAX: Sounds simple enough. Conduct a simulation.

CHAKOTAY: Temporal incursion in progress. What happened?

ANNORAX: Had you actually eradicated that comet, all life within fifty light years would never have existed. Congratulations, you almost wiped out eight thousand civilizations.

CHAKOTAY: I didn’t consider the entire history of the comet.

ANNORAX: Four billion years ago, fragments from that comet impacted a planet. Hydrocarbons from those fragments gave rise to several species of plant life, which in turn sustained more complex organisms. Ultimately several space-faring civilizations evolved and colonized the entire sector.

CHAKOTAY: By erasing the comet I altered all evolution in this region.

ANNORAX: Past, present and future. They exist as one. They breathe together. You’re not the only person to make this mistake. When I first constructed this weapon ship, I turned it against our greatest enemy, the Rilnar. The result was miraculous. With the Rilnar gone from history, my people, in an instant, became powerful again. But there were problems. A rare disease broke out among our colonies. Within a year, fifty million were dead. I had failed to realize that the Rilnar had introduced a crucial antibody into the Krenim genome, and my weapon had eliminated that antibody as well.

CHAKOTAY: And you’ve been trying to undo that damage ever since. But each time you pull out a new thread, another one begins to unravel.

ANNORAX: You can’t imagine the burden of memory that I carry. Thousands of worlds, billions of lives, gone, brought back, gone again. I try to rationalize the loss. They’re not really being destroyed, because they never existed. Sometimes I can almost convince myself[4].

Clearly, Annorax has mixed intentions: restoring one’s people and culture looks like a noble goal, but not when at the expense of thousands of other civilizations. The point of the scene, though, is to illustrate that even with the best of intentions, changing the past for the better is a task too easy to get wrong. This is because the past is so interwoven with the present and the future through a complicated mix of causes and effects that is hard to predict and anticipate. This is partly because our knowledge of the world is socially distributed across individuals, communities, and events[5].

To illustrate just how socially interconnected our knowledge of the world is, consider a simple fact: you (as an individual) do not know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich[6]. ‘Of course I do!’, you might object—but that objection misses the point. The claim here is not that one lacks the knowledge of how to assemble a sandwich comprised of bread, peanut butter, and jelly. Instead, the point is that in a more fundamental sense, you lack the knowledge needed to make the bread, peanut butter, and jelly. There are many ingredients needed to make the bread alone: one would need to know how to domesticate wheat, how to design and manufacture farm equipment to grow and harvest the wheat, and how to produce fertilizer. Just think about the many inputs required to produce the rubber that comprises the tires on the tractor needed to harvest wheat. And that is just some of the stuff one would need to know to make the bread, not to mention the other steps needed to produce the jelly and peanut butter. If something as simple as knowing how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is too complicated for any single individual, then changing the past for the better would be an ever more challenging task that, even with good intentions, one could easily make worse. Doc Brown is clearly brilliant, but changing the past for the better is likely beyond even his abilities. There are thus good reasons to destroy the DeLorean before it can be used for evil. But why should Doc Brown do so secretly, and remove any evidence of its existence? That is the topic of our final section.

Why Doc Brown Must Secretly Destroy the DeLorean

We established a case for Doc Brown having a moral obligation to destroy the DeLorean to prevent it falling into the wrong hands. However, there still remains the issue of why Doc Brown has an obligation to go about it secretly. Simply destroying the DeLorean, without removing evidence that a time machine exists, would seemingly be sufficient for Doc Brown to discharge his moral duty not to inflict on, or facilitate others inflicting harm, on innocent individuals, right?

Not quite. The issue here is that if Doc Brown destroys the DeLorean, but the evidence of its time traveling abilities remains, then such evidence is what engineers call a proof-of-concept: a working prototype that demonstrates the validity of the underlying theory. One might draw up plans for a new combustion engine, for example, but only find investors once one has built a prototype to show that the plans work in the real world.

Indeed, the Hill Valley Mall scene—early in Back to the Future—is itself an example of a proof-of-concept. Even though, by Doc Brown’s own admission, he invented the flux capacitor—the key component for time travel—decades prior, he wasn’t able to build a test model (aka a proof-of-concept) until the mall scene. Here is the salient exchange between Doc Brown and Marty,

DOC: He’s [Einstein the dog] fine, and he’s completely unaware that anything happened. As far as he’s concerned the trip was instantaneous. That’s why Einstein’s watch is exactly one minute behind mine. He skipped over that minute to instantly arrive at this moment in time. Come here, I’ll show you how it works. First, you turn the time circuits on. This readout tell you where you’re going, this one tells you where you are, this one tells you where you were. You input the destination time on this keypad. Say, you wanna see the signing of the declaration of independence, or witness the birth or Christ. Here’s a red-letter date in the history of science, November 5, 1955. Yes, of course, November 5, 1955.

MARTY: What, I don’t get what happened.

DOC: That was the day I invented time travel. I remember it vividly. I was standing on the edge of my toilet hanging a clock, the porcelain was wet, I slipped, hit my head on the edge of the sink. And when I came to I had a revelation, a picture, a picture in my head, a picture of this. This is what makes time travel possible. The flux capacitor[7].

At this juncture, one may wonder why evidence of a proof-of-concept should be destroyed, e.g. destroying the video tape that Marty and Doc Brown made at the Hill Valley Mall. The reason is simple: proof-of-concept is something that would increase the confidence of those to invest and explore time travel technology due to the demonstration by Doc Brown and Marty. And a boost in confidence, by bad individuals, in the ability of technology to allow one to travel to the past to change it would increase the likelihood that someone would spend the time and money to invent a time machine of their own. Of course, this could happen anyway—it would be hard to control technological innovations. However, allowing the DeLorean to exist potentially enables would be temporal wrongdoers. So, Doc Brown is right (more than he knows) to conclude that due to the potential for abuse, the DeLorean should be destroyed.

[1] Jimmy Alfonso Licon (2015). The Time Shuffling Machine and Metaphysical Fatalism. Think 14 (41): 57-68.

[2] David Lewis (1976). Paradoxes of Time Travel. American Philosophical Quarterly 13 (2): 145-152, p. 148.

[3] Gerald Harrison and Julia Tanner (2011). Better Not to Have Children. Think 10 (27): 113-121, p. 18.

[4] Star Trek: Voyager (1997). Year of Hell, Parts I & II (Season 4, Episodes 8 and 9).

[5] Fredrich A. Hayek (1945). The Use of Knowledge in Society. The American Economic Review 35 (4): 519-530.

[6] Leonard E. Read (1964). I, Pencil. In Leonard E. Read (author), Anything That’s Peaceful: The Case for the Free Market. Foundation for Economic Education, pg. 136-143.

[7] Back to the Future (1985). Universal Pictures.

~

Bio:

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University with research interests in ethics, AI, and political economy. He teaches classes like bioethics and philosophy of time, and wants his own time machine.

Fiction

The Mysterious Outbreak Of Spontaneous Poison

by David Henson

The poison claimed a woman down the street yesterday. It was a quiet removal. The paramedics don’t bother with sirens or flashing lights anymore. I try not to imagine her face contorting into a grotesque cherry after eating a slice of pie. Was it the fruit, flour, sugar? Her husband had a piece, too, and he’s fine. Whatever the poison is, it’s as unpredictable as a loaded gun with a spinning chamber.

As I’m checking my phone for more news, Jenny, our four-year-old daughter, tugs my shirttail. “Hungry.” It breaks my heart that she’s lost her baby fat already.

Lisa goes into the kitchen, the squeaking floorboards like distant screams. My wife’s cheeks are sunken, and I’ve punched an extra hole in my belt. The blender shrieks like a banshee; my wife returns and hands me the glass. “Your turn.”

Just looking at another cucumber smoothie makes me gag. I squeak my finger around the lip of the container — twice clockwise, once counterclockwise.

After taking a sip and not dropping dead, I put the drink to my little girl’s lips as quickly as possible without chipping her tooth. My wife whimpers and sinks to her knees as my daughter and I repeat the process until the glass is empty, and we’ve both survived. The poison ticks to its own clock. I can’t shake the feeling that it’ll strike midnight for one us. All of us.

Lisa struggles to her feet. “I don’t think I can take this much longer.” I hate seeing my wife like this; she was always the strong one.

I’m still shaking when my phone dings. Another news alert flashes images of burning buildings, mobs blaming each other for the poison. Nations are threatening each other. There was so much hatred and mistrust before, I never imagined things could be worse.

Jenny picks up her ball. Now it’s my turn to say “Your turn.”

My daughter and Lisa sit on the floor, the soles of their feet touching.

“Roll, don’t throw,” I hear Lisa say as I check the updated list of foods that’ve had lethal incidents. More every day. Nothing but water seems safe. The experts are scrubbing their brains searching for an antidote, but how can they focus when choosing between starvation or risking figurative Russian roulette?

As I browse for more news, the screen flickers. Cell service will die before long. Too few people to maintain it. We’re lucky to still have power in our neighborhood. The glow of the city used to blot out the stars. Now I see more every time I slip out of bed in the wee hours and into the back yard. I pretend the glistening points of light are the spirits of people taken by the poison. It’s a hard illusion to hold on to, but helps me through restless nights. Sometimes, my wife’s screams jar me from my fantasy, and I rush back to our bedroom and gently shake her.

I don’t sleep much, but I no longer get up early either. If these are my last days, I’ll spend them with my family, not doing paperwork. My boss used to hound me to return to the office. “Stephens,” he said, “without people like me, everything would grind to a halt.” Like he did when he ate a chocolate bar from the vending machine. He was a jerk who took credit for my work, but he didn’t deserve what they say is an excruciating death.

Some folks believe nature offers safety, but bodies are found even in secluded cabins. From blueberries to rainbow trout, the poison respects no boundaries and has no conscience. Some eat only in altered states—meditating, screwing, smoking pot. Others binge, hoping for a better life in another dimension. So many tactics, so much dying. I hear my wife cursing under her breath and see she’s staring at a photo of our last holiday feast before the outbreak, She inhales as if savoring the aromas and memories. “No more,” she says. “We’re going to have a proper meal.” Her defiance is thrilling. And horrifying. Every ingredient is a risk. I tell her we should hold on until there’s a cure.

“There is no cure,” she says. Her words make my heart clench. Striding to the kitchen, she hands me the photo. I remember that day—turkey with rosemary, mashed potatoes puddled with gravy, cranberries glistening like rubies…. Even Jenny, in her high chair, had a little of everything. We ate with joy … before the world cracked … when the biggest concern was a stain on the tablecloth.

While Lisa’s rummaging in the pantry and freezer, my phone dings. Scientists now believe the poison is inside people and has grown so strong food is triggering it.

As I read the report again, I feel a sense of calm. Hoisting my giggling daughter onto my shoulders, I go into the kitchen and give my wife the latest news. She presses her palm to my cheek and kisses Jenny’s knees. My heart brimming with antidote, I lower our girl to the floor and set the table.

~

Bio:

David Henson and his wife have lived in Brussels, Belgium and Hong Kong over the years and now reside in Illinois. His work was selected for Best Microfictions 2025 and has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes, two Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net. His stories and poetry have appeared in numerous print and online journals including The Brussels Review, Ghost Parachute, Fictive Dream, Pithead Chapel, Moonpark Review, Literally Stories and Fiction on the web. His website is http://writings217.wordpress.com. His Twitter is @annalou8.

Philosophy Note:

The story raises the question of the personal response (antidote) to the prevalence of hatred in today’s society.

Fiction

Letter To A Christian Nation Not Sworn To The Elder Dark

by Andy Dibble

We of the Elder Dark are derided as masochists. We’re accused of chasing limelight. We are “freaks” and “thoolies.” Even in polite company we’re “unhinged” and sometimes diagnosed as such. We are none of these. We flagellate ourselves and screech obscenities unkind to every mortal ear because that is what the Ghastly Rites require.

The Rites must be performed. Not just once, but repeatedly and in quantity. If they are not, the Outer Gods will rise from Incorrigible Space. Their rise will be a reality-shattering orgy of unending insanity! Though we are as insects to them, as pests. Against utter eradication, this world has no other defense.

We are content to be left alone, but the Dark is not an island. Many in today’s political climate aim to marginalize us if not stamp us out entirely, commonly to rile up their constituents, to give them a bugaboo to vote against. But if the Dark is so diminished—if the Rites do not continue—political proxy wars will be the least of our concerns.

I read that among the top issues to Americans are carbon pollution and illegal immigration. The oceans will boil with the coming of Dagon, and National Public Radio frets incessantly about global temperatures fluctuating by two degrees? The decanting of Azathoth from unlighted chambers will fracture reality, and Fox foretells doom in the form of a “caravan” of Mesoamerican families encroaching across national boundaries? This failure to embrace commonsense priorities is enough to make me wonder if shoggoths already stir, vexing all into premature senility.

#

I write now because the Fifth Circuit Court has ruled the Elder Dark is not a religion—at any rate, not one deserving of legal protections. There has been grievously little public outcry, although I expect this owes more to the inauspicious conjunction of The Bachelorette and Selling the Bachelorette season finales rather than animus against the Dark. Alas, Fox and NPR are not the only news outlets incapable of reporting on truly pressing matters.

The Court’s argument was more mendacious than hyperbolic geometry at R’Lyeh. The Dark allegedly “put itself beyond the pale of religion acceptable in decent society” because of a trio of instances in which the Eleventh Howling Madness ritually slaughtered cleft-lipped infants with, I add, the consent of their parents. It’s true that some of the Dark suffer from an excess of zeal, but by this reasoning, Christian denominations should be stripped of legal protections because a few yahoos attempt to heal their children through prayer rather than convey them to an emergency room.

The Court even intimated that wonder-working Nyarlahotep may even be the Christian Antichrist, a gross mischaracterization both of the Bible and Elder Dark tradition. I would not object to such shoddy reading were it to lead Christians to fear and oppose the Outer Gods as the Dark does. But literacy in Dark tradition is so poor that most Americans—56% in a recent Pew survey—believe that the Dark “worships Cthuhlu,”^[1] when nothing could be further from the truth. Political action against the Dark has reached such a pitch that in several states we are only permitted to perform the Rites in our own homes on suspicion that Sumerian Blood Magic may have some dire influence on children. As if exsanguination were the most pressing threat to our youth when they have Tiktok and Snapchat.

I implore the Supreme Court both here and in the amicus brief I’ve submitted: overturn both the Fourth’s ruling and all such discriminatory laws.

#

William Calhoun, a justice on the Fifth, also occupies a professorship in Christian apologetics, a discipline I assumed unrelated and indeed detrimental to constitutional law. If only Calhoun and his colleagues were of like mind!

I recently debated Calhoun at Miskatonic University’s College of Acrotomophilia, at which I once held a faculty position.^[2] After that debate, I acquired something of a reputation for bombast and rhetoric. For this I am partially to blame. I am of One Abasement and Undifferentiated Flesh no less than my Christian interlocutors, however frustrated I am that they seem more interested in appropriating tax dollars for private schools than forestalling the end of the universe.

The truth is that I entered into apologetical debate only with great reservation because the Dark is not a child of reason. However many grievances I air, we do not believe that logic and argumentation can be a stepping stone to “faith” as many Christian apologists believe. But logic may open wide the way to horror, and horror is the beginning of the Dark.

We of the Dark see the Gods in dream—and we tremble. If the Incongruous Dream must be explained, it cannot be understood. You must experience it yourself. This is why most of the Dark turn away and continue flagellating themselves even when approached by those with honest questions.

But the Dark occupies a precarious position, and failure to respond in the face of criticism can be construed as cowardice. Accordingly I feel compelled to defend the Dark against its Christian critics, at least enough to demonstrate how it is coherent to those sworn to it.

#

More than a few Christians, including Dr. Calhoun at the time of our debate, maintain that persecutions endured by early followers of Jesus are proof positive of their faith. We’re to believe apostles and martyrs would have recanted in the face of persecution if they did not know the way they followed were true.

Is the Dark not persecuted? Do we recant? Of course not. Yea, we persecute ourselves. St. Paul boasts having endured thirty-nine lashes. Mere chastisement to us! Any observant member of the Dark would be embarrassed to have lashed themself so few times before breakfast.^[3]

#

Many Christian apologists take shots at other religious traditions for failing to establish themselves historically, but the truth is that religions lay down different criteria for themselves. They play different evidentiary games, as it were. Many Buddhists look to evidence they find in meditation or philosophy, and some aren’t the least bit troubled by the hypothesis that the Buddha never lived. The Qur’an claims there are signs and proofs in nature or in its own literary and textual merit, and so on.

Frankly, I’m surprised that Christian apologists stake so much upon historical accuracy.^[4] Historical inquiry is notoriously fraught, especially concerning the distant past. Until the hour of my first Dream, I was Christian. I insisted that, on historical grounds, the Bible was inerrant, even though I knew New Testament historians commonly feel compelled to settle for differing degrees of confidence that Jesus said or did such-and-such. Ancient biographies of emperors and holy men are myth-making at least as often as they are candid reporting of events. My position is biased, but I see no secular basis to treat the Gospels and New Testament as exceptional in this regard.

#

Now it’s true that many of the Dark believe that the Gods have manifested—albeit partially and imperfectly—several times before. The earliest in recorded history was when an unnamed night-gaunt rose from the Indus River, obliterating the Harappan civilization.^[5] Next, the Bronze Age Collapse when so-called “Sea People”—a euphemism if ever there was one—invaded and reduced civilization in the Near East to ruin. In modern times, the false shepherd Hastur assails us in the form of anti-vaccination advocates.

If you prefer to view this historical narrative as propaganda contrived by modern commentators, as many of our critics do, that is just as well. All Dark scripture, theology, all our many commentaries—not excepting the Necronomicon—are in service to one thing: performance of the Rites. The rewards we’re promised—amputee virgins, sorcerous powers, undeath, and the like—might just be lures planted in the text. I trust I will receive my virgins in time, but if I do not, it matters little to the Dark. One of the Dark is welcome to believe Dagon is the tooth fairy and Cthulhu is Santa Claus if that encourages him to flagellate himself and utter the prescribed obscenities.

#

I recognize that Christians come in many varieties, just as those of the Dark hail from all cultures and walks of life. Some of the Dark claim membership only to attract romantic partners or to stand out at social gatherings. There are also Christians that claim Christian identity only to fit in with a crowd—that believe in belonging rather than belonging because they believe. Or consider Christians who believe Jesus taught peace and love and nothing besides. These Christians are not my opponents any more than lackadaisical members of the Dark are my allies. I expect neither group will ever muster the conviction to perform the Rites. They contribute nothing to the heirloom magic that snares the Gods in slumber. I leave both aside.

Who are my opponents? The Dark has a reputation for sensationalism, for lacking subtlety, but know that in the Dark the evilest words you can wish upon a person are three.^[6] The first is “May you live in interesting times.” The second is “May you come to the attention of important people.” And the third, “May the Gods give you everything you ask for.”

We of the Dark know the menace of these curses. They are written on the soothsaying bones of the universe, as it were. But the attitude of many especially vocal Christians today—and indeed a prevailing attitude in the New Testament—is that of apocalypticism, of fire and cataclysm. The evilest words are not curses but blessings to these Christians—to those who are my opponents: “Come, Lord!,” “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” They pray for interesting times. They pray they will come to the attention of the Most Important Person. They pray that God will give them what they ask for.

Of course they believe that God is good and just, but I have no acquaintance with good Gods. My experience with Gods is what I see in Dream, and what I see is all their apocalyptic prayers strung together, accumulating charm upon charm, an heirloom magic spanning generations, just as the Rites combine. But their prayers run counter to and at last negate the Rites. I do not see what happens when the Gods emerge, complete and terrible on the stage of history. Whatever form the Gods take, I do not think even my opponents will be glad to witness it.

So to them—and to all—I offer these blessings: May you not live in interesting times. May you not come to the attention of important people. May the Gods give you nothing that you ask for.

~

^[1] Pew misspelled Cthulhu.

^[2] Calhoun and I left that debate amicably—neither of us much changed theologically—but I gather orgiastic exhibitions at the venue put him off.

^[3] Indeed, flagellation automation has been hailed as a great innovation—analogous to prayer wheels at temples in Himalayan nations. Through automation the subject may be perpetually flayed so that their skin can be assailed on both sides, over as much surface area as possible, and injected with antibiotics for the maintenance of their flesh. Given reduction in Dark congregations globally, I sometimes wonder if the only reason the Gods slumber is because of our embrace of modern techniques.

^[4] Many follow St. Paul: “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

^[5] This relies upon the Dark’s translation of seals found at Mehrgarh, but the wider scholarly community remains divided over whether Harappan peoples had written language.

^[6] Apocryphally of Chinese origin, but there’s no evidence that they entered into Dark tradition during any of our four mission trips to China.

Bio:

Andy Dibble also has words in Writers of the Future, Diabolical Plots, and Mysterion. He has edited Strange Religion, an anthology of SFF stories about religious traditions. He reads slush and helps to edit anthologies with Calendar of Fools.

Philosophy Note:

This story was inspired by a few strands of inquiry, most notably Matt Dovey’s “Why Aren’t Millennials Continuing Traditional Worship of the Elder Dark?” (originally in Diabolical Plots). Repeated failure on the part of Christian apologists to represent other religious traditions fairly, often to the extent of attacking a strawman, also played a part. This story is also indebted to Mimamsa, which was prominent in first millennium CE India. According to Mimamsakas like Kumarila, all stories in the Veda and rewards for doing Vedic rituals are arthavada (“words for a purpose”). The purpose is performance of Vedic rituals, in much the same way that we take moral action to be an end in itself.

Sci Phi Journal

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