On fate and fiction

[feotakahari]

There’s a kind of story where lots of things happen around the main character, but not much happens because of them. They just pinball around without any agency, while absorbing lessons that are meant to get them to do something. Then at the very end, they finally get a choice, and they do exactly the thing all the lessons are telling them to do. And there’s a part of me that always wants them to make the opposite choice, if only out of spite. Fight that fate!

Greg Egan has a story about a character who’s clearly supposed to be C.S. Lewis. He faces off against a Glorious Transhumanist in the Egan vein, and the whole story is about putting him in a position where he might potentially say yes to becoming a Glorious Transhumanist. In the end, he finally gets the chance to make a choice. And after everything, he still says no, because that’s not how C.S. Lewis rolls.

Comments

[raspberryrain]

Well, I am not a Glorious Transhumanist, nor do I know what that even is, nor do I know Greg Egan, but I have read a little C. S. Lewis, and that seems fair.

[feotakahari]

“Glorious Transhumanist” was just me being vaguely mocking. It’s the usual “we’re gonna use technology to live forever and create utopia” that you see from the more idealistic sci-fi writers.

[raspberryrain]

Well, Lewis had his own vague ideas about living forever in a utopia, even if his way of getting there was through religion & myth. I'm sure to him the perfection of the divine realm would seem better than the hackish attempt to build fragile immortality in this present shadow.

I'm not sure if Lewis explicitly agreed with St Anselm that the God that exists must be the best imaginable God. His writing points that way, though.