A.R. Davis's Blog, page 9
July 1, 2014
Religion in Sci-Fi
HyperionDan Simmons’ Hyperion is overflowing with religion and philosophy, so much so that it would take a much more detailed examination of the concepts to do it justice, but here are some of my favorite quotes.
From the Priest’s Tale:
“Forged in Jesuit logic and tempered in the cold bath of science, I nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession of the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the mindless whirl of Dervish posession, the puppet-dance ritual of Tarot, and the almost erotic surrender of seance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic trance. I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis - the God of Abraham.”
“The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.”
... the need for faith ... “as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.”
From the Soldier’s Tale:
“He also announced that interpretation of the Koran since the Shi’ites’ seedship days had definitely shown that the God of Islam would neither condone nor allow the slaughter of the innocent, no matter how many jihads were proclaimed by tinhorn heretics like the New Prophet.”
From the Poet’s Tale:
“According to the Shrike Cult gospel that the indigenies started, the Shrike is the Lord of Pain and the Angel of Final Atonement, come from a place beyond time to announce the end of the human race.”
From the Scholar’s Tale:
“In fact, the idea that it was the obedience of Abraham which allowed him to become the father of all the tribes of Israel was precisely what drove sol into fits of fury.”
From the Detective’s Tale:
“I don’t understand the exact purpose of the Keats Project or the other Old Earth analogs, but I suspect that it is part of a Technocore project going back at least seven standard centuries to realize the Ultimate Intelligence.” They (machine intelligences) are trying to build God!
“Norbert Wiener wrote: ‘Can God play a significant game with his own creature?’” Now this is a question that applies to my own new book, Schroedinger’s Cheshire Cats. As does the following, “... which would allow them to predict ... everything. To handle every variable of space, time, and history as a quantum of manageable information.”
From the Priest’s Tale:
“Forged in Jesuit logic and tempered in the cold bath of science, I nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession of the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the mindless whirl of Dervish posession, the puppet-dance ritual of Tarot, and the almost erotic surrender of seance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic trance. I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis - the God of Abraham.”
“The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.”
... the need for faith ... “as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.”
From the Soldier’s Tale:
“He also announced that interpretation of the Koran since the Shi’ites’ seedship days had definitely shown that the God of Islam would neither condone nor allow the slaughter of the innocent, no matter how many jihads were proclaimed by tinhorn heretics like the New Prophet.”
From the Poet’s Tale:
“According to the Shrike Cult gospel that the indigenies started, the Shrike is the Lord of Pain and the Angel of Final Atonement, come from a place beyond time to announce the end of the human race.”
From the Scholar’s Tale:
“In fact, the idea that it was the obedience of Abraham which allowed him to become the father of all the tribes of Israel was precisely what drove sol into fits of fury.”
From the Detective’s Tale:
“I don’t understand the exact purpose of the Keats Project or the other Old Earth analogs, but I suspect that it is part of a Technocore project going back at least seven standard centuries to realize the Ultimate Intelligence.” They (machine intelligences) are trying to build God!
“Norbert Wiener wrote: ‘Can God play a significant game with his own creature?’” Now this is a question that applies to my own new book, Schroedinger’s Cheshire Cats. As does the following, “... which would allow them to predict ... everything. To handle every variable of space, time, and history as a quantum of manageable information.”
August 24, 2012
Religion In Sci-fi
8/23/12 The Man In The High Castle, Philip K. Dick, 1962. Wow! Spectacular! Super dense, but all the threads tie back together. Amazing. It seems to be about racial and social stereotypes, especially the Japanese/Asian and German/Aryan types. But the main characters reveal deep inner realms. The action is commonplace and calm for quite a while, but all of a sudden much more major events explode. The book within a book concept is simply cute at first, and then reality unravels. I just realized that characteristic is like the I Ching prophecies he uses ... cool!
Within this book are many religious references and themes, and I am sure a re-reading would uncover even more, but here are a few I found especially interesting.
P113 ... A character mentions a book, Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West, an advice columnist who “receives heartache problems constantly is driven mad by the pain and has the delusion he is J. Christ ... strange view about suffering ... meaning of pain for no reason, problem which all religions cope with ...”
P164 ... “Hexagram Fifty-one! God appears in the sign of the Arousing. Thunder and lightning.” This leads into an important scene.
p201 ... After Mr. Tagomi kills the two intruders, his Buddhist background is extremely upset. Baynes thought, “Another frame of reference which might help him would be the Doctrine of Original Sin.”
p230 ... Mr. Tagomi’s visionary reaction to the jewelry includes mention of “in the Bardo Thodol afterlife existence” and p233 ... “St. Paul’s incisive word choice ... seen through glass darkly not a metaphor” ...
P237 ... His anger at the German official leads him to say ... “ancient divine, Goodman C. Mather. Deals, I am told, with guilt and hell-fire, et. al.” ... “Repent!”
Within this book are many religious references and themes, and I am sure a re-reading would uncover even more, but here are a few I found especially interesting.
P113 ... A character mentions a book, Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West, an advice columnist who “receives heartache problems constantly is driven mad by the pain and has the delusion he is J. Christ ... strange view about suffering ... meaning of pain for no reason, problem which all religions cope with ...”
P164 ... “Hexagram Fifty-one! God appears in the sign of the Arousing. Thunder and lightning.” This leads into an important scene.
p201 ... After Mr. Tagomi kills the two intruders, his Buddhist background is extremely upset. Baynes thought, “Another frame of reference which might help him would be the Doctrine of Original Sin.”
p230 ... Mr. Tagomi’s visionary reaction to the jewelry includes mention of “in the Bardo Thodol afterlife existence” and p233 ... “St. Paul’s incisive word choice ... seen through glass darkly not a metaphor” ...
P237 ... His anger at the German official leads him to say ... “ancient divine, Goodman C. Mather. Deals, I am told, with guilt and hell-fire, et. al.” ... “Repent!”
July 10, 2012
Mathematics in Sci-Fi
7/7/12 This Alien Shore, C. S. Friedman, 1998. A space opera with an interesting premise; when humans first went to the stars the technology mutated them. This terrified those left on earth, and they shut off contact, leaving the first explorers stranded. When the mutated humans, Variants, developed an interstellar civilization, with presumably different technology, they returned to connect Earth into the civilization. The story within this setting focuses on a young girl who is forced to flee powerful forces that chase her through the galaxy. Heavy on computer programming technology and hackers, no mathematics except for a few nice quotes.
“... the fractal dance of each cloud formation, the infinite mathematical complexity which bonded each moment to the next ...” “(music is) a mathematical perfection whose mere shadow inspires symphonies ...” “... the first tenet of chaos theory – infinitesimally small input can alter infinitely large systems ...”
“... the fractal dance of each cloud formation, the infinite mathematical complexity which bonded each moment to the next ...” “(music is) a mathematical perfection whose mere shadow inspires symphonies ...” “... the first tenet of chaos theory – infinitesimally small input can alter infinitely large systems ...”
June 24, 2012
Religion in SciFi
6/23/12 The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks, 2004. Every nook and cranny of the galaxy is full of life, but this story deals mostly with a human scholar of Dwellers, the life forms that populate gas giants. His quest is to search for a possibly mythical text, The Algebraist, which is “all about mathematics, navigation as a metaphor, duty, love, longing, honour, long voyages home ... that sort of stuff.” Banks’ writing style is as dense and detailed as befits such a complex universe. His sentences extend to paragraphs, his lists can’t stop at two or three examples but invariably explode to ten or twelve descriptors. There is sex, there is violence, there is politics, there is humor, but don’t let the title fool you, there is no Algebra! The scatterings of religion are more interesting.
The religion of the current rulers of the galaxy is called, The Truth. “It arose from the belief that what appeared to be real life must in fact – according to some piously invoked statistical certitudes – be a simulation being run within some prodigious computational substrate in a greater and more encompassing reality beyond.” We’ve all heard this before, but Banks adds something interesting. “... once a sufficient proportion of the people within the simulation came to acknowledge that it was a simulation, the value of the simulation to those that had set it up would disappear and the whole thing would collapse.” Then the subjects of the experiment would know what was going on and invalidate the experiment, or if they were in a game they would have won and deserve a reward, if they were being punished then they should be forgiven. He claims that The Truth would be the ultimate religion, encompassing all the others. It also was not species specific, not the work of an individual or a prophet, not even a religion if you want to consider its philosophical nature.
However, like much of the other fascinating detail of this book, The Truth doesn’t seem to be central to the story. It appears again, within a larger philosophical discursion, as the hero contemplates whether to go on after disaster has struck. “But did that mean that the urge to live was the result of some sort of illusion?” Also, when burial ceremonies for a companion are required, “Amongst some aHumans there is a saying that we come from and go to nothing, a lack like shadow that throws the sum of life into bright relief. And with the rHumans, something about dust to ashes.” But The Truth isn’t a motivator for the main character, who agrees with the statement, “Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in utmost suspicion.”
Probably there is much more philosophy and religion hidden among the clouds of this “gas giant” of a novel than I have mentioned here. I’ll have to do another “delve”.
The religion of the current rulers of the galaxy is called, The Truth. “It arose from the belief that what appeared to be real life must in fact – according to some piously invoked statistical certitudes – be a simulation being run within some prodigious computational substrate in a greater and more encompassing reality beyond.” We’ve all heard this before, but Banks adds something interesting. “... once a sufficient proportion of the people within the simulation came to acknowledge that it was a simulation, the value of the simulation to those that had set it up would disappear and the whole thing would collapse.” Then the subjects of the experiment would know what was going on and invalidate the experiment, or if they were in a game they would have won and deserve a reward, if they were being punished then they should be forgiven. He claims that The Truth would be the ultimate religion, encompassing all the others. It also was not species specific, not the work of an individual or a prophet, not even a religion if you want to consider its philosophical nature.
However, like much of the other fascinating detail of this book, The Truth doesn’t seem to be central to the story. It appears again, within a larger philosophical discursion, as the hero contemplates whether to go on after disaster has struck. “But did that mean that the urge to live was the result of some sort of illusion?” Also, when burial ceremonies for a companion are required, “Amongst some aHumans there is a saying that we come from and go to nothing, a lack like shadow that throws the sum of life into bright relief. And with the rHumans, something about dust to ashes.” But The Truth isn’t a motivator for the main character, who agrees with the statement, “Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in utmost suspicion.”
Probably there is much more philosophy and religion hidden among the clouds of this “gas giant” of a novel than I have mentioned here. I’ll have to do another “delve”.
Mathematics in SciFi
6/23/12 The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks, 2004. Every nook and cranny of the galaxy is full of life, but this story deals mostly with a human scholar of Dwellers, the life forms that populate gas giants. His quest is to search for a possibly mythical text, The Algebraist, which is “all about mathematics, navigation as a metaphor, duty, love, longing, honour, long voyages home ... that sort of stuff.” Banks’ writing style is as dense and detailed as befits such a complex universe. His sentences extend to paragraphs, his lists can’t stop at two or three examples but invariably explode to ten or twelve descriptors. There is sex, there is violence, there is politics, there is humor, but don’t let the title fool you, there is no Algebra!
However, there are a few scatterings of mathematics; “by any algebra of justice under any sun”, “Lagrange point”, “an algorithm for elegance”, “fractally spiraled”, “and some algebra ciphered into the base code”.
“It looked like algebra.” What does algebra look like? Especially an alien algebra?
I liked a couple of lines that could get the reader to refresh his basics. “the number of genuine galaxy-spanning wars didn’t make it to double figures. In base eight!” And if they had, how many would there be? :-) “7.35 x 10^8 seconds ago” I almost started to calculate that, but then he said, “about twenty years earlier.” “I suspect good luck will be necessary, if not sufficient.”
The holy grail of the plot is “some extra set of coordinates, or even a single mathematical operation, a transform, which, when applied to any given set of coordinates in the original list, somehow magically derived the exact position”
However, there are a few scatterings of mathematics; “by any algebra of justice under any sun”, “Lagrange point”, “an algorithm for elegance”, “fractally spiraled”, “and some algebra ciphered into the base code”.
“It looked like algebra.” What does algebra look like? Especially an alien algebra?
I liked a couple of lines that could get the reader to refresh his basics. “the number of genuine galaxy-spanning wars didn’t make it to double figures. In base eight!” And if they had, how many would there be? :-) “7.35 x 10^8 seconds ago” I almost started to calculate that, but then he said, “about twenty years earlier.” “I suspect good luck will be necessary, if not sufficient.”
The holy grail of the plot is “some extra set of coordinates, or even a single mathematical operation, a transform, which, when applied to any given set of coordinates in the original list, somehow magically derived the exact position”
June 11, 2012
Religion In Sci-Fi
6/11/12 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick, 1968. Wow! Got to get the rest of these. Much deeper than the action movie Blade Runnner. He invents his own religion, Mercerism, and the empathy box. The bounty hunter actually sees Mercer and is “saved” from one of the androids. Then, he experiences Mercer’s suffering climbing the mountain in Oregon. I shouldn’t say much more without spoiling it. Of course, one of the main questions is, “Do you think androids have souls?”
June 8, 2012
Mathematics in Sci-fi
6/6/12 Divergence, Tony Ballantyne, 2007. It started slowly with too many characters, but then zoomed off into the depths of the story with all its philosophical issues and amazing details. The ending, as was to be expected, verged on the psychedelic symbolic images of 2001 the movie, but did not go over that abyss. Too many great ideas were contained in the processing space of this trilogy to mention them all but a few of my favorites were: “... so what if your mind is a TM? You are greater than the sum of your parts.”; the dark plants being fixed in space by the observation of an intelligence; the n-string game and Schroedinger’s Cat’s Cradle; “There are different levels of programming languages, so why not one specifically for the soul?”
A you would expect from an author who taught math and IT, these books are full of mathematical references. Although the story is built mostly on computer science and artificial intelligence, it mentions stellated icosahedrons and dodecahedrons, the Sierpinski Gasket and the Mandelbrot set, the golden ratio, Riemannian transforms, and Hilbert space. It even includes the formula for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle! One of the characters sails off in a spaceship called the Fourier Transform, on which the classical mathematical impossibilities are no longer impossible: creating a formal way for determining a proof, finding an even number that is not the difference of two primes, having a recursive set for everything, a solution for an NP complete problem, and all the other NP problems tumbling into P.
A you would expect from an author who taught math and IT, these books are full of mathematical references. Although the story is built mostly on computer science and artificial intelligence, it mentions stellated icosahedrons and dodecahedrons, the Sierpinski Gasket and the Mandelbrot set, the golden ratio, Riemannian transforms, and Hilbert space. It even includes the formula for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle! One of the characters sails off in a spaceship called the Fourier Transform, on which the classical mathematical impossibilities are no longer impossible: creating a formal way for determining a proof, finding an even number that is not the difference of two primes, having a recursive set for everything, a solution for an NP complete problem, and all the other NP problems tumbling into P.
July 8, 2011
Conversations
My writing themes are utopian, metaphysical, mathematical, hard sci-fi. It deals with philosophy, politics and religion and I hope it will cause my readers to consider some new ideas. Anyone interested in talking about such topics as related to sci-fi?
