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It's also the background theology of the world of The Epiphany of Gliese 581 https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581 >And there were those that believed the Common Task was to resurrect the dead in computer simulations, reconstructed from the histories; others who believed spacetime was a crystal in four dimensions and, with the right instruments, the past could be accessed as readily as we look through a telescope; others whose cosmology was an engineered samsara, where, at the end of time, the end becomes the beginning, and the eternal return becomes our farcical resurrection. Others pushed the responsibility for the Common Task onto the gods: in their unknowable lives, they said, the gods were plotting the construction of heaven and the redemption of all men. >He wrote of famines and things that were to her as distant in her past as the Mongol invasions had been to him. >The book opened with the essays of Fedorov, trailed by commentaries written centuries later, called the Letters. In the second part the book moved abruptly, far into the future, to the accounts of the life of Herati of Merv. And by this time two of the promises of Fedorov had been fullfilled: immortality and the settlement of space by the immortals. >The ancients subdued disease and age, they and their children settled the cosmos, they remade their bodies and their souls by hand. But even the gods could not turn back time, or rescue a mind from ashes. And the irreversibility of death was the central anxiety of civilization, and the central sorrow. In Ctesiphon, where quadrillions lived, death was almost unheard of. The surgeons had conquered suicidality. But the numbers of the dead increase only monotonically. |