Arthur C. Clarke's 31-Word Sci-Fi Story, "siseneG"

Read Arthur C. Clarke's Super Short, 31-Word Sci-Fi Story, "siseneG" | Open Culture: “siseneG,” a story story — a very short story indeed — Clarke sent in to Analog magazine in 1984:

And God said: DELETE lines One to Aleph. LOAD. RUN.
And the Universe ceased to exist.
Then he pondered for a few aeons, sighed, and added: ERASE.
It never had existed.

I liked this because it does imply some interesting philosophical reflections. Of course, it is hard to really imagine a being outside of time 'pondering for a few aeons' (what could that possibly mean?). But I warmed to the idea that we could perhaps think of the universe as fundamentally code. I think that's where I see a lot of physics thinking at the moment. And then, if code, then what of "In the beginning was the word"?

The Library of Babel

What an intriguing short story. From the pen of Jorge Luis Borges. Story might be the wrong word: more an almost science-fictioney thought experiment or comment-scene which touches on and invites the reader to think about infinity and knowledge and probabilities. All very contemporary somehow. I found that it really helped me somehow to grasp inifinity -or near infinity- at more of a gut level than normally I manage and as such just to feel the edge of the intellectual vertigo of contemplating it. Kind of the literary equivalent of lying at night on the ground and looking at the stars.
The Library of Babel

The Litigation Master and the Monkey King by Ken Liu

This is a really fascinating and enjoyable -if a little challenging- read and I would like to commend it to you:
The Litigation Master and the Monkey King by Ken Liu | Lightspeed Magazine. I enjoyed the implicit examination of truth and regime and propaganda and the idea that there might be a long-game in such matters.I also enjoyed the glimpse into Chinese civilisation and the linguistic dimensions.
The background from the author's notes:

For more than 250 years, An Account of Ten Days at Yangzhou was suppressed in China by the Manchu emperors, and the Yangzhou Massacre, along with numerous other atrocities during the Manchu Conquest, was forgotten. It was only until the decade before the Revolution of 1911 that copies of the book were brought back from Japan and republished in China. The text played a small, but important, role in the fall of the Qing and the end of Imperial rule in China. I translated the excerpts used in this story.

The Day the Pope Became a Christian - A Novel

I read this a year or two back, and recently it's come back to mind. I think perhaps it might give imaginative resources for prayer in the next month? It's short, it's idealistic, but it's thought-provoking.
The Day the Pope Became a Christian - A Novel eBook: Henry Askew: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store:

To prepare himself for making revolutionary changes in the Catholic Church, a recently elected Italian pope decides to go on a retreat like Jesus did when he went alone into the desert. But instead of going into the desert, he slips away from the Vatican and travels alone to the South of France to meet his friend, the Dalai Lama. His two weeks there disguised as an ordinary tourist turn out to be a liberating experience for him. And when he returns to the Vatican, his previous insecurities are gone and he's ready to start issuing the decrees that would turn the church into what it should have been from the beginning.

Part of me really wishes that a Pope might do something John-23rd-ish. I certainly hope for a fresh aggiornamento and a retrysting with the Spirit of Vatican II. But the odds seem against it with the appointment of the electoral college that is the cardinals. But the Spirit broke through once before, I don't believe God has given up on the RCC yet. Let's pray, let's hope.

Vonnegut: how to get a degree

Apropos of checking out Kurt Vonnegut's use of science and anthropology in his science fiction, I found this amusing wee story. Vonnegut is the writer:

 I got a letter from a new dean at Chicago, who had been looking through my dossier. Under the rules of the university, he said, a published work of high quality could be substituted for a dissertation, so I was entitled to an M.A. He had shown Cat’s Cradle to the anthropology department, and they had said it was halfway decent anthropology, so they were mailing me my degree

Now this got my attention because I recently suggested to  a colleague that a possible assessment task relating to church history might be to rewrite the endings to a couple of short stories I read. They are alternative timeline stories where the writers manage to rewrite Christianity out of the picture. The task I would set would be to take the story on a bit further, take on the 'what if' of the story but develop the story in such a way that Christian faith endures in the timeline. The assessment criteria would be historical plausibility (which would rest on a good understanding of the actual history) and theological integrity in relation to the context.


The book is below and the particular stories to think on (though there are at least two others worth considering) The Wandering Christian and A Letter from the Pope.


Of course the other interesting thing is that people want to write Christianity out of history.

Kelvin 2.0 by Stephen Baxter

New Scientist asked a bunch of authors to write some micro-stories about the year 2107. Stephen Baxter (again) shows how Sci Fi can explore important existential questions about technology and 'progress'. Here's the end; raising all the pertinent questions ...
Kelvin 2.0 by Stephen Baxter - 16 September 2009 - New Scientist: "And we need your help. The suicides have started... How did you cope with imminent cosmic termination? As Darwin said of your dying sun, 'Even personal annihilation sinks in my mind into insignificance.'
And, sir, our cosmologists ask: how was it to learn that you had been so utterly wrong?"

I trust I don't have to spell out to most of my readership why it's significant.

A Case of Consilience: Short Story from Nova Scotia - Books From Scotland

It's a short story, it's scifi, it's a very interesting reflection on the translatability of the gospel (though leaving loads unexplored) and the aliens are really alien: like, they don't have a head and four limbs or even an animal physiology. A Case of Consilience: Short Story from Nova Scotia - Books From Scotland: "John Calvin said: 'All the blessings we enjoy are Divine deposits, committed to our trust on this condition, that they should be dispensed for the benefit of our neighbours.' A Presbyterian minister carries these words in his heart and makes evangelism his sacred duty, ensuring that the Word will be passed on. No matter who these neighbours might be"
Read, enjoy. Htt.