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Empire of Dreams and Miracles
I'm a regular reader of the sci-fi magazines, and I have to say, the stories in this collection are so much better than 95% of what gets published in those magazines. Maybe it's because the big-circulation magazines are so desperate for readership that they prefer to publish only stories from well-known authors, and many of them seem to use the short-story format only as a place to dump ideas that just don't quite make it into novels. The unknown authors in this anthology, on the other hand, seem to come up with fresh ideas and take pains to craft good short stories around them. This is probably what OSC is referring to when he writes in the foreword to the collection that in order "to find deep novelty, readers of science fiction must find new writers as well as new tales from old friends."
Okay, enough of that. What are the stories like? There's a lot here that Slashdot readers would find provocative and interesting. My favorite in the collection is "Twenty-Two Buttons" (my first reaction when I saw this title was: On a mouse or keyboard? Alas, that's not the sort of buttons we are talking about). The story takes place in a future where pollution, crime, and lawlessness have turned the Outside into a myth, and people spend all of their time inside their houses. They manage to go to work and school, find friends and lovers, and have contact with people outside the family only through the Net (ok, ok, so some of us already are living that way, but still), which is heavily censored and monitored by the government -- in fact, the story implies that the dangerousness of the Outside is exaggerated in order to justify the government's control over the Net (draw your own paranoid analogies with the present). This has some fascinating consequences. For example, children make play dates over the Net and rely on VR projections to learn to socialize. Families meet each other through a kind of Net dating service for whole families, and though two families may be from opposite ends of the continent, they manage to sit down "together" to have dinner, the VR screen going down the middle of the table. (I actually kind of wish that were true. Why should I be stuck with the people who happen to have moved in next to me?) Since physically moving yourself and your possessions from one place to another is so expensive, once you are married you are pretty much truly stuck. The main character in the story had an affair over the Net because he connected with the woman he could only touch through the mediation of technology so much better than his wife, but when the affair was discovered he was too afraid of the Outside to join the other woman. In the end the other woman did in fact leave the protected life on the Net and go Outside, and she tantalizingly sent him the buttons from her blouse, inviting him to "come out and play." (The actual story is so much better than my crappy summary, sorry.) This is the story in the collection with the most un-sci-fi-ish prose style, but it actually works really well.
"Carthaginian Rose" is based on an idea from Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines. Basically, the idea is that we'll soon (as in within 30 years) be able to scan people's brains into computers powerful enough to simulate neural activities -- and instant immortality! The scanning technology initially will be kind of crude, and so we might need to do it destructively on some people to try it out (Kurzweil speculated that a person facing imminent death may volunteer to be the first test subject). The story takes this idea and speculates on what kind of person that first volunteer would be and how someone might be driven to happily, willingly, and even work hard at being destructively scanned.
The title story, "Empire of Dreams and Miracles," is probably the craziest story of the bunch. It involves a future so far off that people literally kill for sport (the victims are then brought back to life). The entertainment industry is centered around competition among the killer-artists to bring the most pleasure and novelty to each kill, and the psychology of a culture with no real death but a lot of colorful imitations of it is described with a great deal of detail and imagination. The images are eye-popping and they come at you one after another, giving you almost no time to absorb each one (so you end up feeling a little like the sensation-saturated inhabitants of this future). The fascination with violence, death, and the sexual energies in both can be seen as a satire of our own world or just really good mood setting.
"Who Lived in a Shoe" is about alien house hunting. For any slashdot readers who have looked for a dwelling the story will resonate. It's a funny, light piece that is less sci-fi than fantasy. Some of the houses that the main characters visit on their search may well appeal to the crowd here. This story shows the wide range and styles in this collection.
There are eight other stories in the collection, ranging from Twilight Zone-like horror to cosmology-as-religion. There are space stations and artificial intelligences, social commentary as well as pure fantasy. All of the stories are well-written short stories, not aborted attempts at novels or sketches that go nowhere. OSC wrote an introduction to each story and it's interesting to get his take on each.
To be sure, sometimes the writing in these stories is not as polished as one could wish, but you see that kind of roughness even in the mass-circulation magazines. After all, we are talking about sci-fi here, not the Atlantic Monthly. All in all, given the diverse range of ideas, characters, and styles in this collection and the fact that these are all fresh, new talents in the field, this is my second favorite short fiction anthology for the year (it was my first favorite anthology until Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life -- you just can't argue with all those Nebulas).
You can purchase Empire of Dreams and Miracles from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I stopped reading stuff associated with OSC because of his obvious creationist agenda, and his less than subtle hints about what is right and what is wrong in his view of things.
He is an amazing storyteller but:
I don't like it when SF is used as a platform for pro-life/creationist crap.
By choosing SF as a 'genre' I assume that I can stay clear from writers with agendas like that, and I think that this can be qualified as 'false flag' deployment.
Of course writers are free to do so but then I'd rather send my cash somewhere else to support writers that have their feet a little more on the ground.
Next thing we know there will be SF without evolution and SF with 7 day creation bits in it.
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Those who read the Marvel comics in the 80's will be interested to know that one of the principals here is Jim Shooter, the Editor-in-Chief in those times.
Shooter is a very skilled editor, and a very good writer in his own right, altough his authoritary style made a lot of enemies at the time.
One can find more info and a biography here.
I haven't been able to find any reference for this, and sadly, unless Terry Bisson knows, it might be quite lost. The book was apparently completed by Bisson after Miller died, and there is on reading it, a slightly gummy feeling of amalgamation; I can't quite tell whether it was rewoven altogether from the author's notes, or merely brushed up and missing chapters/sections added.
More significantly, I wish I could tell whether the book, in general, was written shortly after, or perhaps 15 or 20 years after Canticle and left in some musty cabinet not to be discovered until after his passing; it would be illuminating to see which of the changes in writing style and theme resulted from Miller's changes in perspective over time, and what, was in fact Bisson.
It's even possible (from my reading) that the entire book was simply one chapter of Canticle that got left out of the original, or which the author might have written some time afterward, and not a stand-alone book, which Bisson felt he had to expand out to make it publishable.
The story itself is a minor historical footnote in the history of the Church after the flame deluge; as were nearly all of the stories from the original, and to me, its as breathtaking as any one of the earlier parts, but still doesn't feel like a Novel in its own right.
All of the previous is speculation; most of the reviews that I've seen assume it was a separate book written by Miller in the 1990s, and handed specifically to Bisson on his deathbed. I haven't found any of Bisson's words on the matter, if anyone here does know, I'd really love to hear.
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In Catholic theology, priests do not perform the miracle of transubstantiation (please note the correct spelling). Only God can perform miracles. The Church -- the people of the Catholic faith -- IS the incarnation of Christ and God. The priest is nothing more than a person who officiates the sacrament.
Just as priests can officiate private masses (as monastic priests will often do), there is nothing really preventing "tele-sacraments". Many masses are already broadcast to different buildings or rooms when the physical facilities are not enough to accomodate everyone of the Church community in the same physical presence. People have received the eucharist in their homes for more than a millenium when they were too ill or infirm to make it to the public Mass.
As a Catholic theologian, I can easily see Catholic practice shaping itself to fit in a world as described in "Twenty Two Buttons." I certainly wouldn't invite such a world, or such changes to the practice of sacraments in the Church, but it is not laughable.
As for the issue of transferring an immortal soul to a machine, I'm not clear on what theological grounds you are making such an assertion.
The body is the vessel of the sacred soul, and both body and soul are resurrected in the rapture. I won't question that human bodies are sacred.
Nonetheless, there are theological accomodations already for people who have incomplete bodies -- either from birth or from accident. A person with an artificial heart or without legs won't be left behind during the resurrection simple because their physical body is incomplete. In the resurrection we will all have bodies in the image and likeness of God, as Adam and Eve were in Eden. Who is to say that there can't be a transfer of one's consciousness and soul to a machine in a medical emergency? How is this different from someone who has had a heart transplant, or who gets artificial limbs?
Impossible?
The Catholic Church is all about the celebration of the impossible.
God became a regular man. Ridiculous.
God died. Absurd.
The dead God came back from the dead. Impossible.
This incarnation, death, and resurrection is played out again in a substantial way every day through the sacraments. Laughable.
These are the tenets of Catholicism.