Paul J. McAuley by Recording Angel

Author:Recording Angel
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-05-29T18:24:37+00:00

Afterword

This story began with an invitation from Greg Bear, who asked if I would consider writing something for an anthology of original stories concerned with the central themes of SF. Naturally, I was flattered; more importantly, it forced me to consider just what the central themes of SF are. It seems to me that every SF writer has a different set, just as every writer probably has a different working definition of SF itself (which is, perhaps, why we can never agree on a definition). This story suggests that my own themes -or, if you like, obsessions — are aliens, the far future (which is to say a future in which our own time is invisibly distant), cosmology, messiahs, and what Roz Kavney has labelled Big Dumb Objects. Certainly, readers of Eternal Light or Red Dust may find echoes of the themes of those two novels in this clash between the Hindu and Christian mythologies on a Big Dumb Object orbiting a manufactured black hole beyond a Galaxy so rich in ten million years or more of human history that the orbits of every star have been altered.

It is a story that takes seriously Frank Tipler’s hypothesis, explained in detail in his The Physics of Immortality, that in the unimaginably far future the entire Universe will have been re-engineered so radically that it will have become a substrate for a collective intelligence that will be as omniscient as God. Indeed, the Universe will be God, a God of the end times rather than of creation, and we and everything that has ever lived will be recreated as a trivial but necessary exercise. The Preservers of this story are not that God, although it is possible that they are of God.

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