All fiction, whether straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, is a personal reinterpretation of its writers' existence during the time the fiction was written. Therefore science fiction has rarely predicted with any accuracy, save through coincidence or extremely will-informed suppositions a la Verne or Wells, the specifics of the future that ensues, post-publication. (Where do you park your atomic-powered lawnmower?) Sometimes, however - who can say how the spark catches fire, how the fish manages to live on land - it turns out to exactly, mysteriously, capture the spirit. In Neuromancer Gibson first apprehended, as no one else had, what I believe shall prove to be the shape of things to come; he saw the writing on the wall, the blood in the sky, the warning in the entrails. Saw the mind beneath the mirror-shades, as it were, and what that mind would be capable, or incapable, of thinking. Saw the substance disguised in style. What if someone, in the spring of 1914, had stood in the center of Berlin, foresaw in a vision the philosophies and worldviews capable of provoking the events for which the twentieth century would be most remembered, and then went off and wrote it all down? Now let's be Heisenbergian and ask: What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?

• literature
• existence
• time
• science fiction
• future
• writing
• worldview
• prophecy

As far as worldviews are concerned, we are dealing with a conception of reality freed from the categories of good and evil, but with a metaphysical foundation, not a naturalistic or pantheistic one. Being knows nothing of good or evil, nor do the great laws of things, nor the Absolute. A good or an evil exists solely in function of an end, and what is the standard by which to judge this end and thereby fix the ultimate legitimacy of an action or a being? Even the theology of Providence and the efforts of theistic theodicy to prop up the concept of the moral God cannot do away with the idea of the Great Economy that includes evil, in which evil is only a particular aspect of a higher order, transcending the little human categories of the individual and the collectivity of individuals. \nThe 'other world' attacked by European nihilism, presented by the latter as sheer illusion or condemned as an evasion, is not another reality; it is another dimension of reality in which the real, without being negated, acquires an absolute significance in the inconceivable nakedness of pure Being. \nIn an epoch of dissolution, this is the essential basis of a vision of life that is appropriate for the man reduced to himself, who must prove his own strength. Its counterpart is to be central or to make oneself so, to know or discover the supreme identity with oneself. It is to perceive the dimension of transcendence within, and to anchor oneself in it, making of it the hinge that stays immobile even when the door slams (an image from Meister Eckhart). From this point on, any 'invocation' or prayer becomes existentially impossible. The heritage of 'God' that one dared not accept is not that of the lucid madness of Kirilov; it is the calm sense of a presence and an intangible possession, of a superiority to life whilst in the very bosom of life.

• worldview
• reality
• good and evil
• being
• morality
• moral relativism
• nihilism
• theology
• the fourth way
• gnosticism

Machines, as I think most of us have noticed by now, make very poor replacements for human beings, and the reverse is almost as true. Shifting from a machine society to a human society in the wake of peak oil, then, is not simply a matter of replacing one set of components with another that happen to be human. It's necessary to replace attitudes, values, and expectations that are suited to machines - and nearly the entire modern worldview can be summed up in these terms - with the very different attitudes, values, and expectations that produce good results when applied to human beings.

• society
• transition
• peak oil
• narratization
• worldview

In order to function normally, man has to achieve from the beginning a serious constriction of the world and of himself. We can say that the essence of normality is the refusal of reality. What we call neurosis enters precisely at this point: Some people have more trouble with their lies than others. The world is too much with them, and the techniques that they have developed for holding it at bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself. This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality. But we can also see at once that there is no line between normal and neurotic, as we all lie and are all bound in some ways by the lies. Neurosis is, then, something we all share; it is universal. Or, putting it another way, normality is neurosis, and vice versa. We call a man “neurotic” when his lie begins to show damaging effects on him or on people around him and he seeks clinical help for it or others seek it for him. Otherwise, we call the refusal of reality “normal” because it doesn’t occasion any visible problems.

• lies
• reality
• neurosis
• worldview
• magick