Jason Rennie’s Sci Phi Journal offers Catch!, a short story by Mark Brandon Allen, about how far we can/should go in creating a “world” for a person in a damaged brain state. It is read by Mike Huberty of the band Sunspot. Catch! It if you can.

“Strange how the mind works,” Brad mused. He looked questioningly at the scan technician.

The Ensign smiled at Brad as she continued to work the scanner. “This was the right thing to do,
she said.”

No Spoiler alert.

Here.

Also from the Science Channel, how to build your own time machine and skip awful meetings.

Wow. Three years of my life back. There was a time when I thought the sweetest word in the whole universe was “adjourned.”

(Note: If you follow me at Twitter, you will get regular notice of new posts .)

What make you all of this, in City Journal:

How Science Fiction Found Religion

Benjamin A. Plotinsky

Once overtly political, the genre increasingly employs Christian allegory.

Winter 2009

There is a young man, different from other young men. Ancient prophecies foretell his coming, and he performs miraculous feats. Eventually, confronted by his enemies, he must sacrifice his own life—an act that saves mankind from calamity—but in a mystery as great as that of his origin, he is reborn, to preside in glory over a world redeemed. Tell this story to one of the world’s 2 billion Christians, and he’ll recognize it instantly. Tell it to a science-fiction and fantasy fan, and he’ll ask why you’re making minor alterations to the plot of The Matrix or Superman Returns. For reasons that have as much to do with global politics as with our cultural moment, some of this generation’s most successful sci-fi and fantasy movie franchises follow an essentially Christian plotline.

Hallelujah!” cries a minor character early in The Matrix, the 1999 cyberpunk flick, directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, that took the nation by storm and, together with its two sequels, raked in about $600 million domestically. “You’re my savior, man, my own personal Jesus Christ.” The character is addressing Thomas Anderson, a restless computer hacker, played by Keanu Reeves, who goes by the handle “Neo” and has sold him some precious illegal software. It’s just one of the movie’s many references to its central inspiration. Neo, we learn eventually, is in fact a nearly divine savior, the Jesus Christ of the bizarre world in which he lives.
Anderson doesn’t realize it yet, however. First, a mysterious man named Morpheus must contact him, conveying a shocking truth: the universe isn’t real but is actually a “Matrix”—a “neural interactive simulation,” a “computer-generated dreamworld”—and the year isn’t 1999 but something like 2199. Early in the twenty-first century, Morpheus explains, human beings and intelligent machines went to war against one another. The machines, seeking a constant source of bioelectrical energy, started to breed people and use them as human generators, keeping them in little cells but convincing them, through illusion-conveying cables attached to their brains, that they still lived in an ordinary world. “You are a slave, Neo,” Morpheus says. “Like everyone else, you were born into bondage.”

It’s basically religion, at least I think. Funny how science fiction would come out that way.

Here’s Colonel Spitfire and the 7th Brigade Part One and Colonel Spitfire and the 7th Brigade Part Two.

This weeks installment of Sci Phi Journal is the first two part story and is written by Dr Chris Drohan. It is quite a weird story, but I also quite like it. I’d be interested to see what others think. Warning, there is a bit of reasonably graphic violence in this week’s story.

Relearning Touch

This weeks installment of Sci Phi Journal is a story called Relearning Touch by up and coming author Melvin Cartegena, and it is read by podiobooks author Arlene Radasky.

Here’s a brilliant example of language embedded in language. A friend writes to tell me that this video was submitted in a contest by a 20 year old. The contest was Titled “u @ 50.”

To get the point you must watch it through to the end.

Here’s the latest online short story from Australian Jason Rennie’s online Science Fiction and Philosophy shop: “Epilogue” by British author Paul S. Jenkins, free in a number of formats, about the day God decides to resign:

“Let me summarise my proposed course of action. Soon after the end of this broadcast, and of those transmitted to other countries, I shall be vacating my position as overseer of the world, indeed of the universe. I shall be going you-know-not-where, never to return. It will be as if I had never existed, a state of affairs which correlates quite closely with the views held by a significant proportion of you. “The result of this action will be to render some specific questions irrelevant: Did the universe have a creator? Does mankind have free will? What is the meaning of life?

by Tom Gilson

Did you know there were two tin woodmen in Oz? Probably not–the second one appears for the first time here.

“He thought it was a curse. I saw it differently. You probably remember his story–how he fell in love with a certain girl, who happened to be my niece. Her mother, my poor late brother’s widow, didn’t want her girl getting married, so she went to the witch to buy a hex on the fellow. Next time he went out to the woods, his axe slipped and cut a horrible gash in his leg. There was nothing to be done for it, the leg was lost; so he went to the tinsmith and got a replacement. He went back to chopping, not knowing his axe had been turned against him. He lost one arm to it, then another–and then in the end he was all tin.

“I didn’t understand what was going on any more than he did. Anybody could have told something was up, though. He wasn’t that bad an axe-handler! Somehow he was oblivious to what was really happening, and he kept right on cutting wood, and cutting himself. Maybe there was a spell on his brain, too–I can’t believe it was just his axe that was addled. Most people would have found it pretty remarkable to survive with a tin body, but he took it in stride–as long as he was well oiled, that is. His one big complaint was he had lost his heart.

“Well, I’m a woodman too. I saw what he never saw. Oh, he was proud enough of his new tin body, all shiny and all, and he was glad enough to have a skin that the axe couldn’t cut any more. But he never caught on to just how much good it had done him. He was a woodcutting machine! Fast, accurate, never bothered by the nettles and the brambles; he could keep going and going with hardly a break except to oil up. And he had the gall to complain about it!

“He didn’t know–not until it was way too late–just who it was who had caused this. But I knew. She was having one of those little gossip sessions with my wife, complaining about this and that. My wife–bless her–was one of my own bigger mistakes. When she got into one of these gripe-fests with other women, she only complained about one thing: me. ‘He’s lazy, he doesn’t make us any money, I’m so mistreated,’ and on and on. What did she know about woodcutting? I swung that axe all day long, sweating, blistering my hands, never knowing when some idiot with another axe was going to drop a tree on my head–and all she could do was whine.

“I have to admit, though, she wasn’t all wrong. Woodcutting is a hardlife: we never had any extra money, hardly enough food to eat, and our home was always just about falling apart. That’s how it was until I got things figured out. It was lucky, in a way, how I happened to overhear them talking (usually I stay as far from them as I can). My sister-in-law was crowing to my wife about how she had gone to the Wicked Witch of the East, and how it had cost her just two sheep and a cow to get this spell cast.

“That gave me the idea. It was only natural, don’t you think? We didn’t have any livestock to spare at the time, but I figured I could make a deal to pay the witch later, once I got myself improved.

“The witch went for it, the same deal she asked from my sister-in-law. Now, you’re probably thinking she would have had some huge evil trick in mind, to steal my soul from me, or make me burn with misery getting turned into tin, or have me pine away with regret for all I gave up. No, she may be a wicked witch, but she kept her word. A few good chops and a visit to the tinsmith, that’s all it took; then two sheep and a cow, as soon as I could afford them. That’s all she got out of me.

“I really don’t need animals like that now anyway–tin men don’t eat, and we don’t mind about keeping warm. I just have to keep my joints oiled up. I may not have a heart, but then, I wasn’t all that lovey-dovey with my wife anyway, if you know what I mean. Who cares about all that, anyway? I hardly ever think about a tree falling on me anymore; the other woodcutters mostly stay out of my part of the woods. I move a lot faster now.

“Why do they call her a wicked witch, anyway?”

by Dennis Wagner

Prediction: intelligent design will be here to stay when it appears in Hip-Hop music.  News Flash: Atom tha Immortal has released the first full-fledged ID Hip-Hop song I’m aware of called Achilles. Give it a listen here and read the lyrics below. To learn more about Atom or to download his newest album, Sons of Slaves and Lords, go to his website.

Apocalyptic G-d presence/
Feeling the fire of G-d’s essence/
You need Rosetta Stones to unlock my poem’s message/
Born in a body of sand since early dawn/
Adam spawned genetic code of early on/
Written on the rocks of Hebron, The Earth Is Gone/
Reverted from an Information Age to Early Bronze/
Punishment of Civilization/
The only reason why this wicked nation ain’t burning is G-d’s patient/

Chorus:
——-
The best decision/
For somebody in your position/
Is head down, hands up in submission/
Realize/
We’re where the future lies/
With Y-S-H-U-A the truth’s alive/
(x2)

Will somebody tell me how come/
My sound waves will never ricochet/
Obliterate your breath and leave your chest concave/
Killing a knave/
Sound decibel levels of wrath/
Your inner ear hammer will crack your anvil in half/
I follow a path through Euclidean spacetime/
Mythological allusion inserted in every line/
Telekinetically crack a lion’s spine/
Freeing the blind from mind control on mankind’s soul/
So/
We strike Achilles at his heel/
We strike the modern man like Gregor Mendel, meddling with his alleles/
Wounds of Darwinian Theory will never heal/
Once the population finds Intelligent Design/
Enzymes hold the signs of a Divine Mind/
Darwinian speculation is useless/
To explain emergence/
Of cellular machines below the surface/
Seeing Specified Complexity points to a purpose/
Of a system of integrated parts/
Excluding chance as part/
Of how it could ever start/
So/
I speak with truth and in reason/
But whether you believe or not/
We leave Darwinian fish bleeding/

(Chorus)

Jason Rennie pf Sci Phi journal offers

This weeks installment of Sci Phi Journal is the wonderful story, You Pretty Thing by Australian Author Lee Battersby. It is read by Rick Stringer of the variant Frequencies Podcast. I hope you like it.

The basic thesis is that a man has developed a plan to cheat death:

“This,” he said, indicating his body. “A clone, created from genetically manipulated junk stock. Download myself into it via a brain transplant at the point of death.”

“The cancer?”

“Not in my brain.” He tapped the side of his head. “All my memories, all my experiences. I’m me. The body is just a vessel.”

“Except?”

“Except I have to prove it. Beyond reasonable doubt.”

The questions you are invited to discuss in the comments are

I Do you think Rhodes has managed to achieve immortality ?

II Is this really still Jonathan Rhodes ? I

II Does the test prove that ?

The story is available in available in a variety of sound, text, and palm reader formats.