"Famous as the Moon" Now Available in Big Echo!

I'm thrilled to announce that my short story "Famous as the Moon" is now available in the latest issue of Big Echo: Critical SF.  There is a lot of really great stuff in this issue (Issue 11), so check it out!

For a previous incarnation of my story, I prepared a bit of a philosophical commentary.  While I realize that from an artistic point of view there's something a bit gauche about explaining a short story, my academic tendency for pedantic over-explanation is deeply ingrained.  So, I thought I'd provide this here for anyone who might be interested.


Author's Commentary on “Famous as the Moon”

I recommend reading the story first, but readers wanting more context might start with this commentary.  But read in whatever order you like.  I can't stop you.

Some people think religion is an adolescence that humanity will someday outgrow. While I’m not a religious person myself, I don’t see religion going away entirely. But it might transform into something we’d barely recognize. Scattering into the stars might accelerate these changes (my story assumes interstellar colonization without faster-than-light travel, although this requires as-of-yet unimagined propulsion technologies). A big question in philosophy of religion is: What is religion? Are the “Buddhists” in this story religious? Has this Buddhism become secular philosophy?

I think future centuries will be far less Eurocentric than most Western science fiction has predicted (even Star Trek is basically a more enlightened version of contemporary America). We think of multiculturalism as something new, but cultures have been interacting for thousands of years. Many people in my story are of South Asian and/or European background, inheriting a Buddhism with an additional millennium under its belt that includes strands of native Western Buddhism as well as new developments from Asia and elsewhere. Given the rise of bigotry and exclusionary policies in many countries in recent years, I hope we will work toward a future like this.

As a scholar of classical Indian philosophy, I’m intrigued by the tradition of public debate that forms the context of the textual debates and even generated developments in logic. I’ve imagined going back in time to witness these debates. In my story I imagine the next best thing: cybernetic recreations.

I take for granted in the story that true artificial intelligence is possible, both in the anthropomorphic “clones” and in the ethereal AIs. However, I see no reason to assume, as many SF fans, tech billionaires, and esteemed astrophysicists seem to these days, that AIs would be malevolent toward humans. The “bad” AIs in my story are more absent-minded than evil. For all we know, AIs might be more compassionate than humans.

Another issue is skepticism about the external world. Some AIs adopt something like the forms of idealism found in some Yogācāra Buddhists in India and in George Berkeley in the West, only it’s based on a virtual world I call the ether, a far future descendant of cloud computing. I intentionally leave this issue undecided. There’s also the issue of whether we should value things not fully real, an issue taken up by philosophers like Śāntideva and Plato as well as in recent thought experiments like Nozick’s experience machine.

Buddhist philosophy is distinctive for its positions on personal identity: what is it that makes you you over time? Buddhists typically answer that there is no single, enduring self; belief in such a self causes suffering. This, along with my desire to keep a short story short, is why the narrative is intentionally disjointed, consisting of short scenes that are connected by the reader’s imagination rather than a single substantial thread. I hope this device, not to mention the playful elusiveness surrounding the narrator’s identity, prompted some thought and some fun for the reader.