I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction lately. Most of it is near-future stuff about new economic systems and the proper application of existing technology, but it was only a few years back that I was reading stuff about space ships and memory recording and post-scarcity type utopias. In many of these books the ultimate goal of many space-fairing civilizations, or the final achievement of many alien races, are these consciousness-upload arcs where entire plants can transfer themselves into an energetic plane where they might enjoy themselves forever, deathlessly in paradise.

Some of these places are quite sophisticated; in Stephenson’s Fall, people are required to go through a destructive scanning process where they enter this “afterlife” with no real memories of their past, but with some of the brain plasticity and capacity they enjoyed in life, they must find themselves and rebuild. In Peter f. Hamilton’s Void series there are stringent requirements around how the God-like powers bestowed upon the uploaded might be accessed, they’re based on faith and belief in near-magical feeling ways.

It always struck me that…it sure would be nice to live in a world where you could behave well and find your consciousness lightened and floating off to some mythical place where you might join with all you love, timelessly and forever. Much of the aspirations of these secular books are basically paradise with extra steps and no faith at all.

Being in the world and finding it without sufficient magic is just a lack of immagination.