Category Archives: Fiction

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Fiction Alert: “Sounding The Fall” by Jei D. Marcade at Escape Pod

  By Karen Osborne July 27, 2015 , , , ,

The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.
— Gautama Buddha

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All roads lead to the same place…

Might an artificial intelligence also look for God? What might it mean if it does? Does one have to be a “good monk” to be an effective one? What is the role of faith in restitution and atonement? What is the role of religion in society — to detach from the world, or to involve oneself in it?

If you’ve been following Sacred Earthlings for any length of time, you know that these kind of delicious questions make our world go ’round, and when they’re packaged in a short story with gorgeous, clear language, all the better. We’d like to thank author Jei D. Marcade for writing her excellent “Sounding The Fall,” episode 499 at Escape Pod, published on July 20th, 2015. The story takes place in a future society overcome with technology and noise, sealed against a toxic world and ruled by tower-bound artificial intelligences. Into this environment comes Narae, a monk in an appearingly-Buddhist monastery, who has sealed erself out of society after an AI experience some would consider to be a truly religious one, and others might… well, I’ll just let you read the story, because I don’t want to spoil a story so well-constructed.

You didn’t read that pronoun wrong — Marcade eirself uses a gender-neutral pronoun in real life, as does this story’s main character. It forces the listener to view Narae’s actions not through the lens of gender, but through the lens of a greater humanity, with no recourse to explain her doings as “female” or “male” reactions. The choice to become gender-neutral is a very interesting choice for someone so devoted to higher truths; one may say that, when searching for God, something like gender does not even matter. The fact that Narae is painted as a truly human character, with the kind of human failings we could expect from someone struggling to understand a profound and life-changing experience, is even better. This is a very personal story, one that touches on beautifully epic thoughts while keeping the focus on characters you come to care about.

Hear “Sounding The Fall” at Escape Pod now.

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photo credit: Fo Guang Shan Buddha Memorial, Taiwan via photopin (license)
photo credit: Gaden Shartse Tibetan Monks via photopin (license)

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Pope Francis, Capitalism & Sci-Fi

  By Karen Osborne July 17, 2015 , , ,

“This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable,
labourers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable.
The earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable.”
— Pope Francis

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Pope Francis visits a favela in Brazil during World Youth Day 2014

Pope Francis spent the early part of July visiting the “forgotten countries” of South America — praying at shrines, visiting slums, playing with children and speaking with prisoners.

A central message to his visit was the excoriation of capitalist culture and the condemnation of inequality. He encouraged political and economic leaders to keep the poor in sight while doing business and making policies, condemning practices that “sacrifice human lives on the altar of money and profit.” He called the relentless pursuit of money “the devil’s dung,” while asking for forgiveness for colonialist offenses the Church committed against peoples living in those countries.

In honor of the Pope’s defense of the poor, here are some reads that wrestle with the fallout from capitalism, or show societies who live in a world where scarcity is no longer an issue:

Jennifer Government by Max Barry — Capitalism run rampant. Corporations now own you to the point where you change your last name when you change your job, and corporate warfare is actual warfare.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi — In the near-apocalyptic days after peak oil, humanity is fighting against environmental collapse and blight-resistant crops are the new currency; giant agribusinesses have their own armies and control the world.

Accelerando by Charles Stross — A series of interconnected short stories shows a society speeding towards the technological singularity, and the result — as Stross says, “Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete.” Oops.

The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks — Banks’s bravura take on what a post-scarcity society would be like is mostly utopian; how do people who need nothing, people who are managed by benevolent superintelligences, deal with cultures and peoples that still have war, poverty, hunger and privation?

Star Trek: First Contact — The comedy choice, included in this list because of its meta-interest. The post-scarcity Enterprise meets the resource-strapped world after World War III, and much of the funny moments in the film have to do with characters that know only want dealing with characters that have never wanted at all.

Finally, for a real economist’s take on whether capitalism would be something that could even happen at lightspeed-or-less, read Paul Krugman’s paper, The Theory of Interstellar Trade.