Engineering Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

We’re also well into the Fourth Generation of science fiction: the genre has been born, passed through adolescence, into adulthood, and is moving into a post-scarcity period of incredible richness and diversity. That impacts on everything in our field, from the diversity of the people who write science fiction to whom and about what they choose to write. We’ve also long since accepted that science fiction writers aren’t back-room nostrodamusses reading tealeaves and predicting the future. They’re people using science fiction as a tool to interrogate and extrapolate from our present for what we can learn about the human condition.

I think, the writers here who are some of our finest dreamers turned away from Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” and towards the promise embedded in the title of this book itself: the point where the practical application of science meets something without bound or end – our sense of wonder.

I’d drooled on the interdisciplinary dissertation I was meant to be assessing.

Psychoanalytic cinema theory, always such fun these post-postmodern days. Ob(Stet)Rick’s: A/OB[GYN]jection, Blood and Blocked de(Sire) in CASA[BLANK]A. I closed my eyes again, feeling ill.

Fourteen year olds are feral.)

“Tangled up in blue.”

“All the people we used to know, they’re an illusion to me now.”

It wasn’t the Rapture, and it wasn’t the Cloud of Unknowing. This was the Cloud of Knowing Too Much, the silver lining of the dark night of the soul blazing like a thousand suns, like the Buddhist ten thousand things, the unity and diversity of everything bonded into its clasp, and I stood at the middle of it all but that was also at the edge, and at every point in between. Walls of flesh, bars of bone, gates of light, opening.

“So we’re... engineering infinity?”

@jonathanstrahan . Heh.

that half-starved look that people acquire when they eat nothing but algae.

“This is how you can tell if you’re living inside a made-up story,” she said. “If your world is contrived from thought and shaped light and a few arbitrary, algorithmic principles, then odds are you are living an interesting, unlikely life. A spellbinding life. Just think of the stories that capture your imagination. Aren’t they full of important coincidences, and passion, and tragic pain, and obvious heroism? No character with a name has to wait long for something new and fascinating to happen to him.”