Science fiction and spirituality: Red Desert

Many months ago I talked about the role of religion and spirituality in the mediafranchise of Battlestar Galactica. From this topic I would like to introduce the role of religion in my Mars series “Red Desert”.

In reality the link with Battlestar Galactica comes from a small anecdote, which concerns the origin of the names of the two NASA missions appearing in the story: Isis and Hera. The first simply comes from a goddess of ancient Egypt (and here we are already in the religious theme). Being an egyptophile, I like to put these elements in my stories. The second mission takes its name once again from a goddess, i.e. the wife of Zeus. By choosing this name, however, since I am a nerd, instead of going to look for a list of Greek-Roman deities, I decided to have a look to those of Battlestar Galactica! Moreover, the choice then fell on Hera, not so much because it is a goddess, but because it is a character in the saga (Hera Agathon). Only later I found out that, within the religion of Battlestar Galactica, Isis and Hera are considered as sister deities, moreover (and I didn’t remember it) the two names are given to the character I mentioned at different times of the series.

But let’s talk about those which are actually religious elements in “Red Desert”.

The most obvious is undoubtedly the inclusion in the story of a Muslim character (Hassan), while our protagonist, Anna, is characterised by an ill-concealed intolerance towards men of Middle Eastern origin. Although her prejudice has personal origins (his father is Middle Eastern), it has as sole discriminating element its religious aspect, because the only thing that differentiates the two characters is their religion, since they belong to the same ethnic group. However, the inclusion of this subplot serves two purposes.

The first is to create conflict between the two characters, which causes the mistrust and doubts of Anna against Hassan. Anna, however, far from terrestrial conventions realises that her prejudices don’t have a rational basis and will see them slowly be removed by Hassan. Despite this, she still fails to get rid of them, or at least this process is expected to take place slowly throughout story.

The second purpose of this topic, however, is to make the reader identify in the characters, promoting the suspension of disbelief. This is possible because, given the current events, in the Western world there is an ambivalence of feelings against Islam and Muslims: suspicion but also curiosity. This ambivalence is even greater in Anna. The Islam is her cultural identity, which was denied to her, and Hassan is the only one from whom she can draw it.

Hence her contempt and at the same time interest for him.

The character of Anna, moreover, by her own admission has no faith, but she is also intrigued by the concept of faith, because she sees it as something that hypothetically could give meaning to her uncertain existence. Anna is a very unconfident woman in front of events and choices; she feels she needs a fixed point in her life. Her weakness stems from the need to show the world that the very fact she was born was not a mistake. In this psychological condition, amplified by the events she is experiencing, she looks to Hassan’s faith with curiosity mixed with suspicion.

This topic, which is the relationship of Anna with Islam and faith in general, is already introduced in “Point of No Return” and analysed in “People of Mars”, but you find it again in “Invisible Enemy” and “Back Home”.

In these last two books emerge, however, two other topics that have to do with religion.

One of these is the theme of the couple that we see in the community of Ophir. Each person in this community has a companion; it can be a husband or a wife, but also a brother or sister, in the case of children. The importance of the couple is particularly analysed in “Back Home” and, speaking about this theme, I admit that once again I took inspiration from ancient Egypt. Here the couple formed by Pharaoh and his Great Royal Wife had a very important role in both political and religious scopes. It was essential that the Two Lands were ruled by a couple and not a single person. These couples had a reason to exist that was more ritual than personal. In this context it was not unusual that the Great Royal Wife was a sister or a daughter of Pharaoh, without this necessarily implying any relationship of a sexual nature between the two (there were secondary wives for this purpose). Often the Pharaoh was too young and so his Wife ruled the country. Or the widowed Wife appointed the new Pharaoh. The important thing is that in one way or another there must be two of them to get the favour of the gods.

This topic, namely the need to be in two, is also found in “Red Desert” and is an important subplot of “Back Home”.

There is also a final topic, but, even if I should simply mention it, it would become a big spoiler for those who have not yet read the third book. In itself it is not religious, but spiritual. It regards the consciousness, whose religious counterpart is nothing more than the soul, but in the story it is dealt with in an almost scientific fashion. Among other things, it is a very common theme in science fiction, both classical and contemporary one. I cannot say any more, but those who have read “Invisible Enemy” have certainly understood what I mean.

Science fiction and spirituality: post-physical life, part #3

And here is the last post dedicated to the representation of post-physical life in science fiction. In the first post I introduced the topic and gave a few examples of the so-called soft and intermediate approaches (click here to read the post), in the second post I focused on the hard approach and in particular on cyberpunk (read post here), in this third post, instead, I present two books in which, in different ways, there is also the return of the digitized consciousness seen in the hard approach towards a physical life.

The examples that I’m offering aren’t famous novels, but two books by self-publishers.

The Alpha Centauri Project (Thinking Worlds) by Marco Santini is a novel available as e-book (free). It describes a future where there is a conflict between a type of humanity in the flesh and another one which lives in the net, i.e. derived from the digitization of the consciousness of the dead. The two humanities are able to interact with each other both through the virtual reality and the physical world. The digitized, in fact, may temporarily download into androids and experience once again a physical life. This gives to the latter a greater freedom, except for the fact that they depend on the existence of a physical unit that makes the net work.

The future imagined by Santini is very intriguing and sometimes disturbing. In this regard, I invite you to read my review of the book.

Amantarra (book 1 of the trilogy entitled The Ascension of Valheel) by Richard J. Galloway is a novel that deals with the subject of the digitization of consciousness from a completely different point of view: that of an alien race.

The Bruwnan existed for half the age of the universe and, after reaching the maximum possible evolution in the physical form, decide to leave their bodies back and go to a post-physical life. Their digitized consciousness lives for billions of years in a virtual city, Valheel, built inside a sphere. The process of digital copying causes the simultaneous death of the body. But Valheel is not in our space-time, it exists in a sort of alternate reality and in order to remain active it draws energy from biomass which is located in the planets where the Bruwnan have instilled life.

Some of them, Amantarra and her father Artullus, realise that for millions of years the population of Valheel is decreasing, which shouldn’t happen because the digitized consciousness does not die. Something that dwells in the virtual reality is deleting them. The search for a solution takes Amantarra to Earth at the time of primitive men, through the centuries, until the 70s of the twentieth century, where she interacts with some boys at a high school in England. Also in this story you can see the return from post-physical to physical life with the ability to download the consciousness into a living shell or into a real human being with special abilities (a kind of hybrid).

You can read my review of this book as well.

"Amantarra" is available in e-book for just 99 cents on Amazon and other retailers.

In general, post-physical life always involves a transition from living/organic matter to something that is non-material (the ascended spirit, the ghost of the Jedi, and so on) or that dwells in inorganic matter (server). Even if the digitized consciousness is a software and therefore immaterial, however, it is always something measurable and requires external energy to survive.

Speaking, however, about metaphors of the immortality of the soul, in the context of science fiction there is room for its representation without the passage above. This is observed in all those stories where consciousness moves, by means of more or less scientific methods, from living matter to other living matter, which may also be different, by means of an organic/biological process or with a digital intermediary but in which that consciousness is not active (it is only a means of transmission). In this context, you can note similarities to the spiritual/religious concept of reincarnation, but it would deserve a separate analysis.

Finally, it can be frequently seen in the stories narrating the transition from living matter to other living matter that this is shown without providing an explanation, as in a lot of science fiction concerning cloning. Each clone, like magic, seems to have all or part of the background of the original, although cloning is to all intents and purposes a copy of the body from its genome but not of the consciousness that lived in it (or memories that defined the consciousness as such) and therefore has nothing to do with the subject of the immortality of the soul. Sometimes, when they want the individual to believe to be the original, the presence of such knowledge is desired (I don’t offer examples to avoid spoilers). In other cases, however, it is even an error in the process of cloning causing troubles for those who wanted to make use of these clones for their own purposes. Oops!

Science fiction and spirituality: post-physical life, part #2

In the previous post of this series (which you can find here) I introduced the topic of post-physical life in science fiction, identifying the three approaches by which it is represented (soft, intermediate, and hard) and offering some examples of the first two.

Today, however, I want to present some examples of the so-called hard approach, which is typical of cyberpunk and of all that science fiction in which the role of the net (anyhow this is represented) and virtual reality is predominant.

Cyberpunk actually was born in the 80s, that is, before the Internet (which comes for the first time to the public in 1991), but it is the access to the net and the concept of virtual reality that have added to this sub-genre of science fiction the ability to represent post-physical life. This is thanks to the presence in the stories of some technology that can digitize the consciousness of a human being, giving the illusion of making it eternal, thus defeating death.

Beyond the fact that you are defeating death or not, if you accept the concept that a software application created as a copy of an organic consciousness is in fact alive (and this is taken for granted in this type of stories), this is definitely post-physical life.

Given the topical theme, there are numerous examples of this type of approach. The following relate to some of my readings and a film I've seen recently, but you could write a treatise on the subject.

In fact I have already talked about post-physical life in some of my previous posts (and podcasts) dedicated to the relationship between science fiction and spirituality.

Within the Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton (here the series of posts dedicated to it) we saw the so-called ANA-Government, where ANA stands for Advanced Neural Activity. The ANA is nothing but a collection of digitized consciences of all human beings who, tired of the physical life (the story is set in 36th century where the physical life may be extended almost indefinitely), decide to migrate to Earth and then download their digitized consciousness into ANA, in which they can communicate with each other in a virtual reality, while, thanks to the net and/or the ability to download themselves temporarily onto clones or solid projections, they can continue to interact with the physical world.

In the franchise of Battlestar Galactica (here is the post dedicated to it), instead, particularly in the spin-off Caprica, we saw a different kind of post-physical life. Zoe Greystone creates a virtual copy of her, thanks to her invention of a program that generates it by a process of extrapolation from all the activities in the net by the original person. This copy of Zoe not only has all the memories of the original, but does not feel at all as a copy, and when Zoe dies, it is considered like a post-physical version of her.

But let's briefly see two more examples.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks is a cyberpunk novel, where in the distant future, after using the 8 physical lives granted, a digitized consciousness pass to a post-physical life in the Cript (a very complex virtual reality), where 8 more digital lives are granted to it. The difference is that the digital consciousness does not age, but it can be killed by accident or murdered.

Transcendence is the recent film with Johnny Depp where, in an attempt to create a strong artificial intelligence, they come to the conclusion that the only way to be sure that an AI has a consciousness is to copy an existing one. Will Caster is going to die and uploads his consciousness (through a long process explained in a pseudo-scientific way) creating an immortal copy of himself, which is carrying all the baggage of experiences and feelings of the original person as much as it feels as such.

A peculiar aspect of (almost) all these stories about virtual consciousness is that they tend to consider a digital copy equivalent to the original, as if the true consciousness/soul is passed to virtual reality, in a process comparable to that of the soft approach (ascension of the soul). In truth it is not so.

The original dies and what remains is only a copy.

Rarely this issue is addressed, because those who interact with this copy has the impression, or rather the illusion, to have to do with the original. In fact, however, the digitization of consciousness does not defeat death, it's just an illusion to defeat it, because the original no longer exists. The original dies anyway. Who thinks of becoming immortal by digitizing their conscience is only creating another form of life (non-organic life) with their memories and their character, a sort of virtual twin (which is the same, theoretically, as all twins, but yet another person).

Only the copy will have the illusion of having defeated death. The copy, having memories of the original, has the perception of being passed from a physical to post-physical condition. But nothing of the sort has happened.

If you think about it, from the original idea to fight against your fears of death you come to the fact that, when you die, no one will cry for you, because for the others you don't die.

Personally I find this quite disturbing. More than a victory over death this is simple the denial of death. It would be interesting to see this issue addressed in science fiction. (Maybe someone can suggest a good book or film about this?)

Even in Caprica, where the fact that Zoe is a digital copy is clear, having been created by the original, and having lived with her for some time, when the real Zoe dies, the other characters, despite being aware of the true nature of the virtual one, decide to ignore this fact.

In the end, the digitization of consciousness is a method to avoid suffering for the death of others rather than to avoid fearing for your own death.

With these almost philosophical considerations I'm closing this post.

In the next one, that will be the last dedicated to post-physical life, I'll report two other examples of books, definitely less known than the Void Trilogy, in which, however, the return from post-physical to physical life reappears. From this last point, I will make some concluding remarks on the similarities and differences between post-physical life and another topic that somehow appears in science fiction, that is reincarnation.

Science fiction and spirituality: post-physical life, part #1

My most recent participation to FantascientifiCast (Italian podcast about science fiction) dates back to May 24th, during which I analysed the topic of post-physical life in science fiction. If you missed the episode (and of course understand Italian), you can listen to it here.

As usual, I’m back to dealing with this topic with a blog post.

Post-physical life in science fiction can be seen as a kind of metaphor of the immortality of the soul, as it is understood in the religious/spiritual scope. In a sense it is a way of representing (in literature, but also in movies, on TV, in comics and so on) the human ambition to defeat death, or at least to delay it as much as possible. The same happens in religions, which were born from the desire to give an answer to life’s big questions, including “where are we going?”. Religions often provide an answer to this question which implies the existence of a soul’s life that continues after the death of the body.

The thought of the possibility of a post-physical life, both in the religious/spiritual scope and science fiction, is a comfort for the fear of death, not only to believers in real life, but also (let’s face it) to those who read or watch science fiction stories (or for those who create them), if not in an absolute sense, at least when they are immersed in those worlds and lose touch with reality.

In science fiction there are different ways to represent the post-physical life, but it can be summarised in three approaches that I defined, respectively, soft, hard, and intermediate.

The soft approach is observed in those stories in which the characters after death, or for their choice at some point in their lives, “ascend” to a life of pure thought and may reappear in the narrated events as ghosts, emanations, or similar appearances. The ascension to a post-physical life leads to an indefinite existence in an alternate reality (a concept reminiscent of paradise). This step is not in any way scientifically explained and therefore the soft approach implies a strong drift to fantasy.

The hard approach, instead, is typically seen in cyberpunk or otherwise in science fiction that regards virtual reality. In this case, you are forced to refer to a more recent science fiction, following the advent of the Internet or just before it. 

In these stories the consciousness of the characters is digitalised (and this is an attempt at a scientific explanation) to create a virtual version that has the perception of being the original human (or alien), although it is not nothing more than a copy. This digital consciousness, which is a copy of a real one (artificial intelligence differs from this because it is, instead, created from scratch), is potentially immortal, just as the soul.

Although there’s an attempt to give a pseudo-scientific explanation, this type includes both hard and soft science fiction stories (like space operas), however this does not necessarily imply a drift to fantasy.

Finally we have the intermediate approach that is typical of stories created prior to the birth of the Internet and which combine scientific or pseudo-scientific aspects with spiritual or even dreamlike ones. Often the boundary between the two is not defined.

And now we come to a few examples. In this post I’ll just offer some on the first and the last approach, leaving the second one to another post that I will publish in a few days.

The soft approach no doubt includes the Star Wars saga, especially the old trilogy which was characterised by a halo of fantasy. In the new one they have then tried to give pseudo-scientific explanations, though not particularly convincing (and I would say useless). In particular I am referring to the fact that some Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, after the death of the body, reappear in the story in the form of “ghosts”. Actually in “Star Wars”, when Obi-Wan Kenobi is killed by Darth Vader, he dematerialises!

Another example of a soft approach is what is observed in the franchise of Stargate SG-1. Here we learn about the existence of an alien race, now “extinct”, i.e. the race of the Ancients, that doesn’t exist anymore in the real space-time as it is ascended. The ascension plays an important role in the various seasons of the series and its spin-off, because other races aspire to it, including even the Replicators in Stargate Atlantis, but they will never reach it as they aren’t organic beings. In this case the ascension to a post-physical life doesn’t necessarily follow death, but it is a state that the individuals, under certain conditions, can

achieve on their own will when they are alive, because it is regarded as much more desirable than physical life itself.

The classic example of the intermediate approach can be summed up in one name: Philip K. Dick.

In “Ubik”, for example, Dick combines the scientific element (the preservation of bodies of the dead that enables the maintenance of a small brain activity thanks to a not fully explained method) to the dreamlike aspect and a first invention of a “virtual reality” (in the sense of opposite to the real one) well before the birth of the Internet.

I won’t go into detail to avoid spoilers for those who haven’t read it yet, but this little information shows elements of the other two approaches, in particular the hard one, with the essential difference that when Dick wrote this book the Internet didn’t exist at all as well as it there wasn’t such a thing called virtual reality. These are true scientific speculations, made on the basis of the knowledge of the period, in which, however, you might even see something prophetic.

And here I stop. In the second post dedicated to this topic, however, I will focus on the examples regarding the hard approach in the representation of post-physical life in science fiction.

Science fiction and spirituality: the Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton [Part 3]

And here we come to the final post of the series of articles dedicated to the Void Trilogy by British author Peter F. Hamilton and anticipated by my appearance on FantaScientificast.it (an Italian podcast) in November.

In the first post I have briefly outlined the books of the trilogy, and I told you about the backstory. In the second one, however, I focused on the religious and spiritual aspects inside the story, analysing some of them and highlighting as the author loves starting from these issues and then reduces everything to material terms.

In this last post I finally express my comment on this author.

Peter F. Hamilton is without a doubt one of my favourite authors. He has become so when I read the Void Trilogy. He is so, first of all, because he writes complex stories with different reading levels. Spirituality is only one of them, which can be safely ignored by the reader who isn’t interested in this kind of topics, because the skill of this author, in my opinion, is given by his ability to measure the various elements in his books, so that none of them is too intrusive. And so Hamilton’s novels are able to satisfy the science fiction fan who prefers, for example, action, or the socio-political aspect, also typical of space opera, or even that relating to the use of virtual reality, the deepening of the characters, who are always very well characterised also by the emotional point of view, and so on.

To tell you the truth, some consider him a bit verbose, on the other hand we are talking about an author who hardly writes novels under 600 pages. The length of his stories doesn’t only concerns the complexity of the plot, which in itself would be enough, but also the expanded way in which he narrates certain scenes, often focusing on long dialogues or details of the action, giving the impression of a certain slowing of time during their development.

A trivial example would be a scene where a character opens a door and shoots; Hamilton is able to show the train of thoughts passing through the mind of the person concerned in that split second, but also the mental, physical and technological process of the performed act. This characteristic has the advantage of allowing him to really show us the scene, making us almost feel part of the book, especially when what he is telling us goes far beyond common imagination.

Many passages of the Void Trilogy take place in the minds of human enhanced beings that within an instant see icons, activate virtual processes, recall applications, communicate via the Unisphere and so on. These are acts that cannot be transferred to images, for example, a film adaptation would be impossible, but through his words, the author slows down action managing to make us understand all these details, which in a short time our imagination can handle with ease, without affecting negatively the suspension of disbelief.

I found myself several times reading these long scenes and having fun doing it and at the same time suffering for my curiosity to know what would happen next, a “next” which was late to come. And it ended up with me reading dozens of pages without even realizing it. And so his books with chapters with an average of 100 pages and this trilogy that exceeds 2500 pages are read in a shorter time than you might think.

Beside that, what I like about him is the ability to imagine new scenarios, mix known elements of science

fiction with very original ideas, and to really put much stuff in his books, able to open up your mind and inspire even those who write science fiction, like me. And Hamilton was very inspiring to me in the novels I’ve written until now, including the unpublished ones, even non-science fiction ones. In addition to some ideas which I admit I borrowed (after all writing is always a bit characterised by copying, sometimes unintentionally, and reworking the ideas of others), reading his books taught me not to be hasty in bringing the scenes to completion, to stop to analyse the details, emotional, sensory ones, or relating to the reasoning, in order to better show the action to the reader, in the hope to involve them as much as possible. By doing so, I found myself feeling more involved in the scenes I wrote and, I think, having a vague idea of how Hamilton himself may have fun to design and create such complex narratives.

Then I must say that this author doesn’t hold back before controversial issues in his stories, certainly suitable only for adult audiences. In Hamilton’s novels you usually find sex, narrated in the most varied situation, and decidedly alternative concepts of family (polygamy, sexual and romantic relationships with virtual entities, with more people of various kinds, with characters whose consciousness is shared by several bodies, whether they are real or virtual, etc ...), but everything is treated in a natural way, without any sense of forbidden, and this is just another of the reading levels that I referred to earlier that the reader can decide to neglect.

For me Hamilton was, in a sense, a revelation and has contributed a lot in increasing my love for science fiction, both as a reader and as a writer. One thing I always say is that if you read Hamilton and you survive, i.e. you can appreciate his novels in spite of their complexity and the excessive length of his works, then you can read pretty much everything. And I’m still convinced of that.

If you have never tried to read a book of his, I can only advise you to do so, perhaps even with the Void Trilogy. Then it will be all downhill!

Science fiction and spirituality: the Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton [Part 2]

Last week I began this series of posts dedicated to the Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton, offering an overview of the books, and summarizing the backstory from which arises the plot of the series. You can read all this in the previous post.

But today I want to focus on the spiritual and religious elements contained in this British author’s work. First I will make a list of topics (a discussion on common religious themes in science fiction can be found in this post) and then I will show some examples, trying to avoid as much as possible any spoiler on the plot.

Spiritual and religious topics of the Void Trilogy

1) Presence of a religion within the story. In this case I’m referring to the Living Dream. Religion is a very common element in space opera, along with politics. In this series these two aspects, as often happens in reality, get confused, so we have the case in which the religious element anchors the reader to the real life and at the same time supports the suspension of disbelief.

2) Elements mentioned in the story that are reminiscent of well-known religious topics or archetypes. There are numerous references above all to Christianity in general and to the great monotheistic religions, which are used in different contexts, but remain quite recognizable.

3) Metaphor of the spirit and the immortality of the soul. Thanks to technology a form of immortality is recreated through the perpetuation of a digitized form of consciousness.

4) Seeing the wondrous and magical elements as a simple expression of a science that we don’t know yet. This is also a recurring theme throughout the bibliography of Hamilton.

Examples of spiritual and religious topics in the Void Trilogy

After listing the topics briefly, below I present some examples taken from the series.

Let’s start obviously with the Living Dream. This has got a typical religious structure that can recall that of the various Christian churches. Since Hamilton is British, I suppose he referred to Anglicanism, even if the model is ascribable to most clerical structures.

In addition to the religious structure in itself you can see the fanaticism of believers (another very topical theme), who are very determined to find the dreamer, because they feel they need him to enter the Void and wouldn’t stop in front of anything to achieve their goal.

Religion is used here as the main engine of the events, because the whole story arises from this intention of the believers of the Living Dream, and at the same time it connects the reader to everyday reality, in which such phenomena are sadly common.

But here we observe Hamilton’s cunning in using the typical elements of existing religions, but in fact in describing a kind of fanaticism that looks more like that one addressed to celebrities. Although Edeard is seen as a sort of messiah (and the dreamer as a prophet), actually this fanaticism is not spiritual, but very materialistic. Believers want to go to Querencia, the planet in the Void, to live with their bodies that wonderful life seen through the dreams of Inigo. There is just nothing mystical in this desire.

Then there are a whole series of references to religious themes within the story, they are cleverly used as well, because ultimately there is nothing spiritual in them.

To avoid spoilers, I won’t tell you who the Waterwalker is, but it is obvious that something reminds us of the Gospel, isn’t it?

Another example is the religion existing on Querencia (a kind of religion in the religion) in which they venerate a certain Lady and there are women (priestesses/nuns) who dedicate their lives to this kind of pseudo-divinity. The Lady is depicted in a statue in a church-like building and apparently this can recall the Virgin, although reading the story this turns out to be a female figure more like Mary Magdalene.

It is clear that these similarities are not accidental, but they are - perhaps a bit irreverent - citations by Hamilton, made to bring before the reader something known and easy to understand, in a text that is instead full of elements going well beyond our ability to grasp their meaning and requiring a huge effort of imagination.

In the series it is also referred to angels flying on wings, another typically religious element, but in reality these wings are force fields and angels are spaceships.

At one point the author describes a population called Silfens, which is presented in a pastoral and mystical way (it is a kind of fantasy drift in the work, like the events narrated on Querencia). This aspect, however, is only a facade that hides a complex technology. The Silfens, for example, use the quantum entanglement to communicate (the same used for the Gaia Field).

Then we can see the spirit that is assimilated to files stored in a server, a digitized consciousness, which can be loaded into the mind of an enhanced clone of a deceased person, so it represents the illusion of defeating death (I talked about something like that also in the article on Battlestar Galactica). This can be seen as a kind of metaphor for the immortality of the soul.

And yet, the desire of believers of the Living Dream to go into the Void undoubtedly recalls the Exodus of the Jews and their desire to reach the Promised Land.

Similarly the spaceship with which the first inhabitants of Querencia arrived can be assimilated to Noah’s Ark and they are like the only survivors giving rise to a new civilization, which therefore arises from a previous one. It is also a subject that is very dear to science fiction.

Lastly, the Void itself can be likened to a kind of paradise.

Spirituality reduced to science

These are just a few examples that I still can recall more than three years after reading the series. Probably many more would come out with a more careful analysis. The point, however, is another.

On the one hand we have Hamilton that spreads many religious, spiritual and paranormal elements in this beautiful trilogy, but he does so only in appearance, and then at the end he gives everything a pseudo-scientific explanation. It is not hard science fiction, because there are ftl engines and many other scientifically impossible things, though they are less than you can imagine, but the author lingers in reducing everything to material terms, which are put in contrast to the spirituality that seemed to characterize them.

In other words we have a trilogy stuffed with spirituality with the purpose of denying it.

In the next post I will try instead to offer a my personal comments on this series by  Hamilton and in general on this author that, in addition to being one of my favourites, is without doubt one of the most interesting storytellers in the panorama of contemporary science fiction.

Science fiction and spirituality: the Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton [Part 1]

My most recent appearance on FantaScientificast (Italian podcast dedicated to science fiction) with “Life On Mars?” dates back to November. And as usual I am to repeat the topic in an in-depth post on my blog.

As you can infer from the title, or by listening to the podcast, the topic is the Void trilogy by British author Peter F. Hamilton. Since it is a topic that is very dear to me, because Hamilton is one of my favourite authors, and there is definitely a lot to say, I decided to dedicate a series of three posts to it.

General information about the books in the series

The Void Trilogy is a series by British science fiction author Peter F. Hamilton and

it is included in the same universe of the Commonwealth saga, which includes two other books: “Pandora’s Star” and “Judas Unchained”. The first book of the trilogy is set chronologically 1200 years after the last one of these two books. The plot often refers to this saga, but not reading it does not compromise the understanding of the trilogy.

The series obviously includes three books, whose titles are:

“The Dreaming Void” (2007)

“The Temporal Void” (2008)

“The Evolutionary Void” (2010)

My reading of the books date back to 2010, when the first one was released in Italian and the last one into English. A little because the translation had not particularly pleased me (mainly because of the astronomical number of typos) and a little because I didn’t want to wait, after reading “The Dreaming Void”, I finished reading the trilogy in the original language.

In addition, the plot, which is very complex and rich of characters, is seamless, then waiting between a book and the other involves the risk of forgetting everything or nearly so. There are even important characters that appear for the first time towards the end of the first book, which ends with a discrete cliffhanger.

The whole Commonwealth saga (including the trilogy) is available as ebook on Amazon, like many other books by this author. Moreover, all Hamilton’s books are available on Amazon in paperback.

Backstory

The story is set in the thirty-sixth century.

The Void is a kind of self-contained universe that is at the centre of the galaxy and is studies for millions of years by aliens called Raiels. They believe it is a threat to life in the galaxy because of its sporadic phases of expansion, which devour whole solar systems close to the core of the galaxy. One of these events occurred several hundred thousand years ago, which prompted the Raiels to create a class of interstellar spaceships called High Angel with the aim to rescue sentient civilizations in the event of a new expansion. The caste of Raiel warriors serves to protect the Void from any intrusion by other living beings in the galaxy, because they fear that this could trigger a further expansion.

The Void, however, isn’t a natural system. Inside it there is a strange universe with physical laws different from those we know.

In 3589 a human being, called Inigo, began to dream of a wonderful life inside the Void. His dreams were transmitted to the rest of humanity through the Gaia Field, a kind of emotion social network, made possible in enhanced humans  containing a chip in their brain. This also allows you to store your thoughts and offers a series of advantages, including real-time connection to the network (Unisphere), communication, downloading of applications, concepts and so on.

Many humans are enhanced and live for hundreds of years. Their thoughts, their essence, consciousness, can be stored in servers, in case they die and a clone is created in which upload it. In practice, one never dies, so much so that after a long life humans decide to abandon the physical life to download their consciousness into the so-called ANA (Advanced Neural Activity), a kind of huge collector of these virtual beings, where they continue to live as thought, and which has become the government of the Commonwealth, in other words, of humanity.

Inigo’s dreams gather around him a large group of believers, who over time constitute a religion, the Living Dream and revere the protagonist of these dreams (Edeard). These believers live in a planet where they recreated the pattern of life, and even the city (Makkathran 2), which they saw in Inigo’s dreams. They are, in fact, set on a planet inside the Void called Querencia.

These believers are fanatics who want to organize a pilgrimage into the Void  to live the life that was shown to them. But the Raiels and other species (including other humans) fear that their migration, which they are certain will lead to their death, might lead to a further expansion of the Void. So they ready to stop this pilgrimage at any cost.

This is just the background from which the story takes place within the trilogy. In reading the plot some religious and spiritual elements are immediately noticeable, which occur frequently in space opera, but I intend to analyse them one by one in the next post in this series, and also to show how the author plays with these easily recognizable themes, and then bring they all to his very rational view of reality.

Science fiction and spirituality: Battlestar Galactica

In my latest participation in FantaScientificast (Italian sci-fi podcast) I got to give my contribution to the Team UP dedicated to the media franchise of Battlestar Galactica, analyzing the religious and spiritual elements of this saga. In this post I will return to this subject, summarizing some aspects of this latest combination of spirituality and science fiction.

It must be said that no doubt Battlestar Galactica is one of the best examples of the special relationship that binds immaterial and science. The whole Battlestar Galactica saga is actually impregnated with the spiritual element, so that religion is one of its pillars.

Without going into explanations (I invite you to read the details on Wikipedia) I'm going to summarize the main points of the religions in the saga.

On the one hand we have the Twelve Colonies, who worship the Lords of Kobol. Theirs is a polytheistic religion, inspired mainly by Greek-Roman mythology, combined with several common aspects of Christianity, Judaism, but also the religion of ancient Egypt (including the goddess Isis, the only non-Greek-Roman one). According to their Sacred Scrolls, once humans lived in Kobol in a kind of paradisiacal symbiosis with the gods. At one point a jealous god would decide to set himself above others, sparking a war, which led to the end of civilization of Kobol and the exodus of the twelve tribes (which in the end turn out to be thirteen).

On the other side are the Cylons, who are monotheists. They do not deny what happened on Kobol, but they say that the Lords of Kobol are false gods and that there is only one God, creator of mankind, which, however, turned out to be a failed creation. For this reason, their task is to destroy and replace it.

The monotheism of the Cylons, as it turns out in the prequel Caprica, comes from the Monad Church, a monotheistic sect existing in the Colonies. This was linked to a terrorist group, the Soldiers of the One, which included Zoe Greystone, daughter of Daniel Greystone, inventor of the Cylons, and in turn inventor of digital consciousness, from which that of the Cylons comes.

This is the scenario in which the story of Battlestar Galactica moves; here you can group five religious and/or spiritual macro-themes.

The first one is the use of religious themes to support the suspension of disbelief. In fact, the many references to human religious themes, which are universally known and recognizable, from the present or the past, provide the viewer with real, everyday references, which facilitate their identification in the story. All Battlestar Galactica is actually based on the principle of inserting elements of everyday life alongside others more typically fantastic ones, and this practice is without doubt one of the reasons why this series has been able to strike so deeply the collective imagination. It is normal that this is then applied to religious themes, which are a main subject.

And here we reconnect to the second macro-theme: religion as the engine of the actions in the story. This applies to both factions in the game. As mentioned, the Cylons consider mankind a mistake of God, then their actions, designed to replace it, can be interpreted as a sort of crusade. The religion is undoubtedly the basis of these actions of theirs. But humans are not exempt as well, as they come to follow the dictates of religion, the Sacred Scrolls, to find Earth. Certainly within them there is much more heterogeneity of views in this sense, compared with what occurs within Cylons, at least at the beginning (subsequently various factions will also be created in the latter). Most humans are not religious and their agreeing to follow the instructions given in the scriptures is mostly a choice of convenience, dictated by the desire to find a new home. They want to believe that there is something true behind the scriptures, because they want to find Earth. However, believers or not, humans end up getting involved by the religious element.

The third macro-theme is a subject that is very dear to science fiction, especially the more contemporary one: the metaphor of the immortality of the soul, which in the case of Battlestar Galactica is obtained by downloading the memories of Cylons in new bodies, after their death. Such a mechanism provides Cylons with a real immortality of their consciousness, or better a copy of it, which continues to live even after the death of the body. The comparison of the download to a kind of immortality is very explicit in Caprica, where the Soldiers of the One are persuaded to sacrifice themselves, by making them believe that their soul would continue to live in paradise, when in fact it's a virtual clone of them, which will be transferred to the virtual reality. The virtual clone, however, is not the original person, but a copy of their consciousness. The original one dies with the body.

A fourth macro-theme relates to the use of Jewish-Christian (but not only) religious archetypes in the religion of the Twelve Colonies. We have the Garden of Eden, represented by Kobol, where humans and gods live in harmony. We have the theme of Exodus or, more precisely, the one of the Noah's Ark. The war that occurs at Kobol, destroying civilization, is like a Great Flood eliminating evil and from which only those who embark on these spaceships (arks) are saved to found a new civilization.

This is part of the popular sci-fi theme of indefinitely putting backward the origin of humanity (humanity that derives from another alien humanity). In this case, if the matter stops to Kobol, a divine origin of mankind is assumed, in the likeness of the gods; this concept is present in Christianity, but also in the Egyptian religion, where early pharaohs were gods and the origin of mankind is confused in the mythology.

Finally the last macro-theme concerns a whole series of purely spiritual elements inside the saga, which are totally devoid of any attempt of a scientific explanation, and sometimes even of a logical one. These include the prophetic visions shared between the President Roslin, Sharon Agathon and Caprica Six. Although the visions of Roslin are initially explained by the use of a drug, there is no scientific justification for the fact that she shares them with two Cylons and above all that these then come true.

The other purely spiritual element is represented by the angels. We have the angels of Number Six and Baltar, which are visible only to the real Baltar and Caprica Six, but they do not come from their imagination, nor are any virtual clone of theirs. In fact, they physically interact within the scenes and provide them with information, which they could not have in any other way. They are therefore true paranormal entities. It all becomes even more extreme with the angel of Kara Thrace, who returns in human form after her death and that will have a decisive role, with its inexplicable knowledge, in bringing the fleet to the new Earth, where, incidentally, there are already primitive human beings. At the end of her task, the angel disappears.

With the angels Battlestar Galactica crosses without appeal the frontier of fantasy, as their presence and their role must be accepted by faith. The latter aspect was disapproved by the fans, not so much for its being spiritual, but for the absence of an attempt to give the slightest logical explanation, as if the authors were not able to find one. On the other hand it must be admitted that their presence adds an aura of mystery and poetry that characterizes the series finale, a finale which in any case would be difficult to accept, because no one would ever want to reach 'the end' of Battlestar Galactica.

This article is originally available in Italian on Anakina.Net.

Science fiction and spirituality: the border which separates science, religion and magic

In reading science fiction books or watching movies and TV series of this genre I've often noticed as one of its favourite themes is to give an answer to some of the big questions that man arises, such as: "Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? "

It is done clearly by drawing liberally from fiction and tying it to the scientific elements, in such a way as not to allow the reader (or viewer) to understand the fine line that separates them. But there is another field from which science fiction often draws its ideas. I'm talking about spirituality, and religion in particular.

Besides, the above-mentioned questions are the same ones that serve as a foundation for the concept of religion, though in this case the answers are sought in something far from tangible. The need to give an answer to these questions is in fact at the basis of all the religions of the world. There is therefore no surprise that in many science fiction stories some of the most famous religious archetypes appear, though reworked in a different context.

Some time ago I addressed this issue in broad terms as part of "Life On Mars?" (sorry, this is in Italian) on FantascientifiCast.com (it's an Italian podcast about sci-fi) and I'll talk about it in my next foray into the show, which will take place in mid-February.

In the meantime, I would like to explore this topic here in my blog to show you some of the ways in which spirituality and religion appear in different forms in the field of science fiction, sometimes without us realizing it.

The subject is complex and is not easy to deal with it in a schematic way. Therefore, I will try and move with a certain freedom from a subject to another, offering you some examples from science fiction.

In this post, I will address in particular the magic-science-religion trio. These three disciplines nowadays are clearly distinct and distinguishable in the context of contemporary Western civilization, they were not the same if you go back in time. They are often three different interpretations of certain phenomena on the basis of the observer's eyes. In ancient civilizations, such as the Egyptian one, science, religion and magic were in fact the same thing. Without the scientific knowledge of today, the ancient Egyptians tended to merge the three areas as different expressions of the will of the gods, which were not considered as inaccessible entities to worship, but they actually were part of people’s lives. And certain events, which in their eyes seemed magical or miraculous, became de facto evidence of the presence of God. The same events with the present knowledge would, however, be more simply explained in a scientific manner, stripping them of all their mystical aspect.

This fine line that separates science, religion and magic is often the subject of many science fiction stories. Perhaps the most striking example is Star Wars, where the Force is presented at the beginning, in the old trilogy, as a kind of religion which manifested itself with seemingly supernatural powers and was often accused to be “superstition”. In the new trilogy, this aspect has failed when they gave a scientific explanation of the phenomenon (the midichlorians), bringing more and more the science/religion/magic equation toward the scientific side, at the expense of the miraculous or magical one.

The example I did before about the ancient Egypt finds perhaps its greatest expression in another sci-fi saga, Stargate. It fully exploits the notion that ignorance of men leads them to give spiritual explanations to scientific events. In this case there were aliens posing as gods who were worshiped as such, allowing them to subdue the human population of thousand years ago. The same aliens brought into contact with modern humans are unmasked from their magical aura and appear for what they are: beings from distant planets with technology vastly superior to ours, but which is nothing more than the result of science, and as such it can be understood, controlled and fought.

It is no coincidence that the two examples that I did fall within the sub-genre of space opera. The latter in fact, besides telling stories of space travel and extremely advanced technologies, which often take cues from real scientific knowledge, normally deals with topics with a political, sociological and religious or even more generally spiritual nature, in an attempt to transfer the themes of today's realties in other fictional universes. And this is a process that has always drawn the attention and the imagination of the public.

There is a saga in which this mechanism is fully exploited so as to become its main theme, even undermining the simple dualism between good and evil and turning it into something subjective. I'm talking about Battlestar Galactica (the reimagined series proposed since 2004). However this will be the topic of my next appearance on FantaScientificast and I'll take that opportunity to tell you about it in greater detail in a future post, which will discuss the use of religion and spirituality in science fiction as a tool that increases the credibility of a story.

This article is originally available in Italian on Anakina.Net.