Ready Player One is a dystopian novel, at least so far, whose hero, Wade, has a rough life. Early on we learn of his disillusionment with the world he has been born into: “That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. … We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.” On the other hand, Wade is a ‘gunter’, an egg hunter in a virtual reality world called OASIS.
Now, I’d like to suggest that there is a logical imbalance in the treatment of reality in this setup. Virtual reality is the presentation of stimulation to the gamer, to his senses, that mimics what he could be experiencing in the ‘real world’. It is based on algorithms, that run on computers, and which are no more than complicated streams of bits, zeroes and ones. These are electric signals racing along circuits and through chips.
But, isn’t that eerily similar to what the believer receives from ‘the other world’, the ‘spiritual universe’? Beliefs, ideas, and thoughts are said, by the materialists, to be no more than electro-chemical impulses racing through the brain, along neural pathways. Scientists claim to be able to see where they are located inside the brain, but as yet, the algorithms they are part of have not been explained.
Why is ‘virtual reality’ given such a glamorous role in these stories, while ‘spiritual reality’ or thought itself, is less highly valued. My series, which begins with Perturbations Of The Reality Field, posits a reality that blends the physical universe and the spiritual universe at the quantum level by intertwining strings. I hope you will take a look at it.
Monthly Archives: September 2017
Religion in Sci-fi: Rabbit Heaven
I read Watership Down as a break from heavy philosophical research I’m doing for the next book in my Cluster series. Little did I know that one of the rabbits, Fiver, had a touch of Phillip K. Dick in his blood. In my metaphysics, the quantum strings of the physical universe are looped through similar strings in the spiritual universe. In Perturbations Of The Reality Field my characters use the borderland “between” the two in order to travel faster than the speed of light (FTL). Now I am about to send them deeper into that spiritual universe, a wild place and very unsafe, as Fiver says. Forgive the long quote from Watership Down, by Robert Adams, but it contains several very interesting ideas I intend to explore.
“You’re sure we are here then?” asked Fiver. … “Well, there’s another place – another country, isn’t there? We go there when we sleep; at other times, too; and when we die. El-ahrairah comes and goes between the two as he wants, I suppose, but I could never quite make that out, from the tales. Some rabbits will tell you it’s all easy there, compared with the waking dangers that they understand. But I think that only shows they don’t know much about it. It’s a wild place, and very unsafe. And where are we really – there or here?”
My Writing – second editions
After almost ten years of writing, one book at a time, it became obvious to me that my first five books were actually a series. And they deserved another few rounds of editing and revised covers. That is now completed. BUT, republishing with my original publisher, AuthorHouse, was financially unfeasible. SO, I am reprinting the series by Amazon’s CreateSpace and Kindle. The price of the paperbacks will be significantly reduced, the e-books will remain the $3.99 bargains they have always been.
The change over process may be a little messy, but the new editions will have grey covers with black text, with the original images reduced in size. See the website for the latest images.