aesmael

    But as the countryside materialised around me - the purple-grey ridge of the Black Mountains to the north starkly beautiful in the dawn - I was slowly beginning to understand. This was not my world any more. Not in Herodotus, not in Seattle, not in Hamburg or Montreal or London. Not even in New York.
    In my world, there were no nymphs in trees and streams. No gods, no ghosts, no ancestral spirits. Nothing - outside our own cultures, our own laws, our own passions - existed in order to punish us or comfort us, to affirm any act of hatred or love.
    My own parents had understood this perfectly, but theirs had been the first generation to be so free of the shackles of superstition. And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child, even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.
    We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature, art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass on the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent.
    Maybe, in the West, we'd delivered the death blows to the old doctrinal religions, the old monoliths of delusion, but that victory meant nothing at all.
    Because taking their place now, everywhere, was the saccharine poison of spirituality.

    From Silver Fire, collected with Mitochondrial Eve in Luminous

I expected this to be the last one I posted but I just finished Teranesia so I think I will do one more. I've noticed his near future stories tend to be a lot more depressing than the far future ones.