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.

From Diaspora by Greg Egan

    I do not think this is an example of particularly beautiful writing but it does relate well to how I sometimes feel and so here it is. This, here, is roughly the extent of my social life, at least until I find some manner of paid employment. So please forgive me if I chatter incessantly.

    Egan is one of my favourite science fiction writers (he seems to think the world works the way I think it works so maybe I am biased) and one of the hardest out there, so consider yourself warned. I know I could never write in that mode. It sure is fun to read though. If anyone would like to try a sample of Egan's writing, here is The Moral Virologist (the link was found through the author's own website so don't worry, it's not stealing to read).. The first time I read that one I had to put the book down and get my breath back. It is one of the few he wrote in which the protagonist is not an atheist
    He also scores points with me for not using lesbians as his token homosexual characters (as so many male writers do). Actually, so far as I can tell he does not have token homosexual characters at all - character sexuality only seems to come into play where it is relevant to the story and he still has a fraction approximately matching real life. Treatment of sex (as with everything else) in Egan's stories could probably be best described as utterly unromantic.
    Speculation on the future of sex and gender forms part of his novels Distress, Diaspora and Schild's Ladder and it was from those I learned of the gender-neutral pronoun Ve (ve/ver/vis/vis/verself), which he may or may not have invented (must try to find out). I expect to use it over the alternatives, if only because it was the first I was exposed to.

    Now if you will excuse me, having attempted to recontextualise the above quote to create new meaning I have taken a step on the dark path to becoming my own sworn enemy and must now commit ritual suicide.

    Farewell, cruel world.