I expected my interests in science fiction to lead my semester long webtracking journey to the realms of philosophy, anthropology, and theology. I made it there in some ways, but as I look back on my record of the semester I see that I took deep dives into somewhat random topics. These included Alternate Reality Games, sf music (in particular the BBC Radiophonic Workshop), the Canadian artist Grimes, the sub-genres of Punk Punk, the coexistence and blurred distinction between science fiction and fantasy, and finally the current state of robots in religion.  Some of these deep dives can be seen in my word cloud. There were very few unexpected words that showed up in a large representative of sources.

In this post, I will discuss terms that don’t necessarily make a big appearance in my word cloud but which, I believe, capture the way that I have wanted to think about science fiction.

The first is personification. I believe this term comes up in my word cloud because, as I was searching about Grimes, I really wanted to find examples of the concepts so often dealt with in science fiction being personified or anthropomorphized. The reason that Grimes’ album Miss Anthropocene  captured my attention was because it claimed to anthropomorphize Climate Change its self. I really appreciate the artistry and imagery in that  and I wish I had been able to find more examples of it.

I spent some time this semester thinking about how math can play a role in science fiction. As I learned again about the Infinite Monkey Theorem in my class on measure theory, I search for it’s use as science fiction element. Though I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, I still have plans to read “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges. It may not be sf, but it is a creative imagining of mathematics and philosophy.

Finally, I had plans all semester to dive into the intersection between sf and Christianity. In particular, I am very curious about how sf concepts may show up in Christian theology and vice versa. Upon reading “Readymade Bodhisattva” and “Act of Faith” I started reading about various Christian theologians who are already thinking about the theological question of how advanced AI in the narrative of God’s creation. It is possible that the words religion, human, God, and death in my word cloud all represent this interest.