“There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.” — Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

There's also something to be said for the beautiful pairings of words into well-shaped phrases, the meaning of which sparks joy, sadness, wisdom, and deep understanding in our hearts when we read it.

Science fiction plays an important role in forcing us to question the meaning of our day to day lives and the status quo of the world around us.

This week's poll asks for you to think of the quotes that struck fear and wonder, laughter and awe, into your heart when you read it. Add your nomination(s) below and then vote on your favorite(s).

We base our lists on the votes and nominations from this blog and our Facebook Reader group, and we want to hear your opinion!

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The Fermi Paradox: Where Are All The Aliens?

Maybe there aren’t any—in this simulation. We might be the only civilization in what only looks like a vast universe. What about those points of light you see in the sky that we call stars? They could just be part of the backdrop of the simulation, a way to fool us into thinking we’re a part of something much bigger than we actually are. Simulating the rest of the universe at a great distance from us is actually relatively easy. There isn’t a lot of detail that we can see with telescopes. It’s not like we can actually travel to Alpha Centauri and go walk around on its planets. The sheer vastness of space and the difficulty we have in crossing those distances might just be an element of the simulation that’s designed to keep us contained in a manageable space, one that doesn’t overtax the resources of whatever supercomputer is running it all.

The Double-slit Experiment

Photons fired at a screen through two slits in a copper plate produce an interference pattern on the screen, behaving like a wave and passing through both slits at the same time. But if we conduct the same experiment under observation (remote, human, mechanical—doesn’t matter who or what is observing the photons): the photons behave like particles, and only pass through one of the slits, leaving no interference pattern on the screen. Electrons exhibit the same strange behavior. So what’s happening? Some say that this effect is the code of the simulation conserving resources by only simulating what it needs to. Video games today do this to great effect, only rendering what you can see at any given moment.

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There Are Error-Correcting Codes in the Fundamental Equations of String Theory

Theoretical Physicist James Gates thinks he’s found error-correcting computer codes in the equations of string theory. These types of codes are common in web browsers, and in the error-correcting memory of computer servers, but what is error-correcting code doing in the base code of our universe?

Conclusion

I could go on and on about this, but I won’t bore you with endless speculations and implications based on scraps of evidence. I’ll write a book about it, instead ;). But whether you believe we could be living in a simulation or not, I encourage you to think about the bigger questions behind that idea. Ironically, they’re the same questions we’ve been asking since the dawn of time: why are we here? What is the possible purpose of it all? Is there a God? I’ve come up with a few disturbing possibilities as to the why of it below:

1. We’re prisoners from a far future society of humanity. We’re being rehabilitated in a relatively short-term (insert your hypothetical lifespan here) simulation, or else we’re just here to separate us from the ‘real’ reality and the ‘real’ people in a humane way that doesn’t allow us to hurt anyone. Our degree of suffering down here might even be commensurate with some type of sentence or eye-for-an-eye justice system.
2. We’re bored immortal post-humans (humans who have uploaded their consciousness to android bodies, or to a supercomputer) living in a metaverse of countless different simulations. So why all the pain and struggle in this particular simulation? Maybe we got bored of having it easy. Think about it: if you never had to struggle, never felt pain, never suffered, would you appreciate anything anymore? A simulation like this one might be the equivalent of thrill-seeking for an immortal intelligence. That said, I don’t think anyone would choose to be a starving child in Africa. It’s possible that some of the people on Earth are the equivalent of NPCs in a game (non-player characters), which means that they only appear to suffer and aren’t really real, but that’s a dangerous line of thinking to incorporate into an actual philosophy of life. You don’t know who might be real and who isn’t, so you can’t make any assumptions without committing grave errors in judgment. Plus, this is just a wacky theory, so yeah. There’s that.
3. Humans digitize and become immortal machines. Then what? How do you have kids? You can’t. You could program them, but they would have no notion of what it’s like to be a human. It’s likely that you would find them and their worldview utterly alien to your own (having once been a human yourself, you have that context as a base level of programming that underlies your decisions and personality). So this simulation could be a way to train and educate the ‘children’ of a race of post-human androids in matters of empathy, humanity, mortality, etc.
   

And finally, you may or may not be religious, but if what we think is reality is actually simulated, then there is a creator behind it all. And if this is a simulation, then any version of supernatural events becomes quite possible. Not only that, there could be a super intelligence behind it all, an AI that created the simulation and governs it. That AI would be God by all of our classical definitions. And if that AI also runs the ‘real’ world / base reality as some kind of benevolent ruler, then it would be a kind of God in that reality, too. Of course, there could be an evil AI as well. Maybe some rebels who didn’t like how things were being run in the metaverse programmed their own super-intelligent AI to run things differently. Sounds familiar somehow… I’m not saying that’s what’s going on behind the curtains, but the fact is that anything is possible.

​Unfortunately, there’s no way to find out for sure without dying first. Don’t worry, I promise I won’t say I told you so when we’re all back in the base reality again.

Until then, my advice is to be the best version of yourself that you can, because one of the more frightening possibilities is that we are all prisoners in here, and if that’s so, then proving our successful rehabilitation might be the only way we’re ever getting out.

I arrived at a rather unenviable and hopefully “once in a lifetime” position recently—having accurately predicted the novel coronavirus now sweeping the globe. 

It’s an inexplicably eerie feeling. A pandemic is not something you ever hope to be “right about.” You hope it never happens. Unfortunately, one of my greatest fears has come true. A fear with its roots firmly planted in my first novel, The Jakarta Pandemic (TJP for short), published ten years ago.

The idea for TJP sprang from an already unhealthy obsession with viral outbreaks. Captain Trips from Stephen King’s epic, The Stand, was burned into my psyche from an early age. I burned through The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton in a single sitting. The book Hot Zone by Richard Preston and movie Outbreak was like a one-two punch, released a year apart in 1994-95. The movie 28 Days Later in 2002. Max Brooks brilliant novel, World War Z a few years after that. I couldn’t get enough of these stories. And then the Swine Flu pandemic hit in 2008! Looking back, it should have come as no surprise to anyone, especially me, that my first stab at writing a novel would center around a pandemic. 

However, despite my initial enthusiasm—the project barely got off the ground. The usual first time, part time writer challenges applied. Didn’t know what I was doing and wasn’t sure it would be worth the effort. Limited time to write. Busy with two young kids. Everything got in the way, but the biggest delay came from what turned out to be the novel’s greatest strength.

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I spent at least six months researching past pandemics, virology, disease epidemiology, U.S. and world pandemic response protocols and detection capabilities, vaccine production, the U.S. healthcare and medical infrastructure, U.S essential services infrastructure, supply chain dynamics.

I consumed every article or paper publicly available that could help me understand the various impacts of a pandemic on society. I had hit what writers call “research paralysis,” where I was obsessed with collecting and digesting more information than I truly needed to write the novel.

When I finally broke through to the other side, I decided to tell the story differently. I steered away from the heroic CDC scientist hopping from one jet to another to reach the next hot zone or the critical response team fighting against all odds to stay one step ahead of the pandemic. Instead, I focused on a single family’s tense and claustrophobic struggle to stay alive during the most lethal pandemic in recorded human history. Of course, I threw way more at them than an unseen virus. Society collapses in my novel (along with nearly all essential services), pitting neighbor against neighbor in a vicious struggle to survive.

What does this have to do with me predicting the COVID19 Pandemic? 

Fast forward ten years from the publication of The Jakarta Pandemic to January of this year. Without going into exhaustive detail (I’ve already taken up enough of your time)—YOU DON’T LOCKDOWN AN ENTIRE CITY OF 11 MILLION PEOPLE FOR THE SEASONAL FLU. I had been watching the virus news closely when Wuhan was locked down by Chinese authorities, noting that the first case detected in the U.S. a few days earlier, had recently returned from a trip to Wuhan. That was all I needed to know.

Interested in going deeper into Steve's thoughts about the current Covid-19 situation? You can read about the rest of his Paul Revere ride through the coronavirus pandemic on his personal blog HERE. 

Steven Konkoly is the USA Today bestselling author of over twenty novels and novellas.

His canon of THRILLERS includes: the FRACTURED STATE books, a “24-style,” near future conspiracy series set in the southwest United States; the BLACK FLAGGED books, a gritty, no-holds barred covert operations and espionage saga; and the ALEX FLETCHER books, a tense, thriller epic, chronicling the aftermath of an inconceivable attack on the United States. He recently released HOT ZONE, the first book in a thriller series chronicling the events surrounding a bioweapons attack against the United States.

You can contact Steven directly by email or through his blog.

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