The View from Meatspace

I’m a nervous optimist.

Life here in meatspace is changing fast. Global insecurity is skyrocketing, fueled by the spread of misinformation and our eroding trust in public institutions. The narratives of once-fringe voices have moved into the mainstream. We’ve become so polarized that civil discourse on important issues is all but impossible.

Our political insecurities are compounded by legitimate and immediate concerns about overpopulation, climate change, migration, and wealth inequality, not to mention the exponentially rapid rise of AI and VR technologies that may provide marvelous possibilities for good, but also pose incredible dangers the scope and scale of which we cannot yet begin to grasp.

Change is inevitable. It’s coming at us like a freight train. Big, sweeping societal change. It’s going to be hard. But change always brings new opportunity. And the greater the change, the greater the opportunity. If we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the threats facing our world , we’ll completely miss the opportunities to leverage the coming changes into something really, really positive.

Truly, it’s an exciting and scary time to be alive, more rife with opportunity and threat than any time in human history.

During times of stressful change, many of us turn to entertainment as an escape for our worried imaginations. Movies, television shows–and books. This is natural. Throughout history, it has always been so. Stories are important. They help define who we are. They are often most important as shared experiences that bring us together to discuss important issues. Science fiction stories are especially important, because they address not just what is, but what might be.

For me, science fiction has always seemed the best vehicle to explore the bounds of humankind’s future and plumb the depths of the human soul. It has the greatest potential of any form of entertainment to shine a light on the threats and opportunities coming our way, and give us a chance to think them through before we’re hit with them in real life.

With all this in mind, my goal as a writer is to craft engaging tales, peopled with everyday characters who are thrust into situations that make our own global crises look paltry in comparison. Characters whose souls carry the burning ember of heroism. Characters who are just like every one of us, forced to bravely confront rapid change as their longstanding worldviews dissolve around them.

This seems like a good time to paraphrase my favorite internet quote:

We are all ghosts driving meat-coated skeletons made from stardust, riding a rock, hurtling through space.

Fear Nothing.

Thanks for joining me on the ride through meatspace,

Patrick Cumby