Stories of Your Life and Others

The Evolution of Human Science
This short-short was written for the British science journal Nature.
Throughout the year 2000, Nature ran a feature called "Futures;" each week
a different writer provided a short fictional treatment of a scientific
development occurring in the next millenium. Nature happens to be a
distant corporate cousin of Tor Books, so the editor in charge of "Futures,"
Dr. Henry Gee, asked Patrick Nielsen Hayden to suggest some possible
contributors. Patrick was kind enough to mention me.
Since the piece would appear in a scientific journal, making it about a
scientific journal seemed like a natural choice. I started wondering about
what such a journal might look like after the advent of superhuman
intelligence. William Gibson once said, "The future is already here; it's just
not evenly distributed." Right now there are people in the world who, if
they're aware of the computer revolution at all, know of it only as
something happening to other people, somewhere else. I expect that will
remain true no matter what technological revolutions await us.
(A note about the title: this short-short originally appeared under a title
chosen by the editors of Nature; I've chosen to restore its original title for
this reprint.)

---

Hell Is the Absence of God
I first wanted to write a story about angels after seeing the movie The
Prophecy, a supernatural thriller written and directed by Gregory Widen.
For a long time I tried to think of a story in which angels were characters,
but couldn't come up with a scenario I liked; it was only when I started
thinking about angels as phenomena of terrifying power, whose visitations
resembled natural disasters, that I was able to move forward. (Perhaps I was
subconsciously thinking of Annie Dillard. Later on I remembered she once
wrote that if people had more belief, they'd wear crash helmets when
attending church and lash themselves to the pews.)
Thinking about natural disasters led to thinking about the problem of
innocent suffering. An enormous range of advice has been offered from a
religious perspective to those who suffer, and it seems clear that no single
response can satisfy everyone; what comforts one person inevitably strikes
someone else as outrageous. Consider the Book of Job as an example.
For me, one of the unsatisfying things about the Book of Job is that, in
the end, God rewards Job. Leave aside the question of whether new
children can compensate for the loss of his original ones. Why does God
restore Job's fortunes at all? Why the happy ending? One of the basic
messages of the book is that virtue isn't always rewarded; bad things happen
to good people. Job ultimately accepts this, demonstrating virtue, and is
subsequently rewarded. Doesn't this undercut the message?
It seems to me that the Book of Job lacks the courage of its
convictions: If the author were really committed to the idea that virtue isn't
always rewarded, shouldn't the book have ended with Job still bereft of
everything?

---