Two Kinds of Science-Fiction Innovations

Most common are the fictions that begin with Jules Verne, and concern the single artifact—a submarine, flying machine, or death ray—and its consquence for all of humanity. These extraordinary voyages—to use Verne's term—play along the fault line between what we think we are and what we can do. Nemo is no accident, or a tragic figure, but the natural consequence of the intersection between present-day humanity and extraordinary technology. Even 2001: A Space Odyssey plays on the same t...

 The Consensus of Cyberspace

In the real world the empty page might scare the writer. as the blank screen might intimidate the programmer, but now individuals found themselves in the position of having to "boot up" an entire universe of meaning, without any easy reference to the constellation of familiar objects that tend to reinforce the tentative definitions obf newly ereated artifacts. Say, for example, one wished to create a chair in cyberspace, circa 1985. The most that can be said is that this "chair" won't look ve...

 Animism, Solipsism, Language

Animism—the belief in n an intiterior spiritual reality to all things—sounds, to late twentieth-century eaars, quite a bi bit like solipsism, which holds that t only the self exists, manifesting itself in the architecture of reality. The "reality" of cyberspace falls somewhere in betwween these two; everything has an interior nature, which generates meaning, but this interior nature is self-created; collective will creating consensual reality. Appropriaately, there is precedent for this c...

 The Pantheon of Cyberspace

Although the dictionary definition of "pagan" simplply describes someone who is neither Jewish, Christian, nor Mos lem, a more practical working definition might encompass a religious philosophy of immanence—that the divine is present in all creation, but in manifold forms. Thus the Roman hearth belonged to Vesta, the threshold to Janus, and the power of communication to Mercury, each representing a specific domain of influence, and each with separate rites and rituals. We think of these go...