.@hjbentham .#Follow @ClubOfINFO .#scifi. #philosophy. #fantasy. #Kindle.
People were, historically, more prone to
believe in a Heaven after death when their living standards and life expectancy
were poorer. It is appropriate that in a speculated post-apocalyptic or
dystopian world, characters should be very prone to such belief.
Also, the
despair of living in a squalid and unfair world usually leads to strange
theories about how things got that way, and some ideal alternative is often
imagined to exist elsewhere or at some point in the future. Hardline, cultic
and extremist behavior flourishes when humans are perceived to be facing an
existential threat. Religious traditions positing an afterlife as certain and
assured are inherently hardline, because the existential threat addressed by
them is death itself – that ticking clock from which none of us will escape. When
other existential threats surface, the number of hardline and fanatical ideas
increases exponentially.
To consider
this subject, I used it to shape themes in my first full-length novel The
Traveller and Pandemonium, authored with great
care from 2011-2014. In the fictional world of the book, humanity is under
much more nightmarish pressure than it is on Earth, and this pressure results
in a plague of unlimited conflict and fanaticism tearing civilization apart.
Rather than humans controlling and threatening the natural world, the natural
world is encroaching on humans and threatening them. Humans are forced to cage
themselves away for protection from the hostile aliens inhabiting the world in
which they have found themselves, producing the surreal image of cities
contained in bird-cage-like domes to shield them from the roaming creatures
outside.
In a sense,
the world I created for this story does not abide by the anthropic principle –
a principle of cosmology which states that the world must include coincidences
that support the evolution and existence of the people observing it, or there
would be no such observers. Due to this principle not functioning in the world
of the story, the alien setting of the story is threatening the human
inhabitants with extinction rather than supporting them.
Faced with
such a deadly situation from the outset, the main character, nicknamed “the
Traveler”, is searching for the answer. How could humans exist in a world that fundamentally does not support or give any illusions of meaning to their existence?
