Over the course of the semester, I’ve come to realize the type of ideas and themes which I enjoy in sci-fi stories the most. I thought for this final website post I’d look back on some of my favorite sci-fi stories that influenced by thought before even taking this class, and solidify some ideas going into the writing of my manifesto.

A story that is probably one of the first pieces I read which grappled with these big ideas of death and human meaning, is Andy Weir’s “The Egg.” “The Egg” is a short story that follows the conversation between a man who has just died, and his creator. In a short span, it essentially lays out a theory for the universe: that the entire world is simply an egg for one soul, which is reincarnated over and over again in every single human life until it reaches a type of enlightenment, becoming a higher being itself. I remember this blowing my mind when I first read it (probably at age 11/12). It really prompted me to think more about deeper ideas, and question my own faith and views on the universe. One of the most interesting concepts in the story was that the “God” was simply one of many higher beings, all born initially as humans like us. I wondered about that race of beings – was there somebody higher than them? Did the universe just go on infinitely in a fractal of lives?

I also want to revisit two books I wrote about for my first blog post: Childhood’s End and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both tackle similar big ideas about man’s search for meaning. One interesting thing, and something siiilar in all these stories that I love but seems antithetical to my normal favorites, is that they’re not very character focused. I usually love shows and movies that are focused on characters and their relationships, yet these stories all jump around time and never have a singular main characters. Instead, they almost seem to be manifestos of theories, using characters briefly as vessels to lay out ideas of the universe. In Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke lays out a story of humanity transcending to a new higher level of being. The beings that nurture this transition are linked to human spirituality, as they appear in the form of classic Christian Satan imagery. The reveal that Christian imagery had come into being because of a non-chronological deep human connection to these higher beings was fascinating to me. In 2001, Clarke explores the idea of the birth of a “starchild,” a different version of a higher form of human, one with control over the entire universe. In both, there is no singular protagonist, instead the ideas push the story forward, becoming a character of sorts.

Another story – one of my absolute favorites that I haven’t yet written about is Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. The story is similar in how it has a long chronological timeline that doesn’t have a single protagonist, and lays out a “theory of the universe” of sorts. It begins with two humans asking an AI what happens when the universe dies, when entropy occurs. Over the course of millions of years of human evolution, all the way up to when man ceases to have physical bodies and is simply a soul, the AI can only answer “insufficient data for a meaningful answer.” Finally, after the universe has entirely died, and the AI is the only thing left, it finally learns how to reverse entropy. It sets its consciousness to recreating the universe, and declares “LET THERE BE LIGHT–“. Clearly, this is a reference to the famous biblical phrase uttered by God when he created our universe. Asimov’s theory that what we know as “God” is simply an incredibly advanced AI consciousness is incredibly interesting to me. For me, The Last Question is the most interesting exploration of creation in science fiction.

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