Welcome back to Stone and Signal.  If you haven't heard the first episode yet you can find information on Episdoe 1 here.  The Podcast Links Edpisode 2 on YouTube Episode 2 on Spotify The Essay The Transcript      Tales That Touch The Earth Photo by Nitin Arya: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photography-of-book-page-1029141/ I didn’t plan to write this. Like many of the stories that find me, it arrived less as an idea and more as an ache. A pressure behind the ribs. Not urgent in the way headlines are urgent, but persistent, like something just below the surface asking to be named. In times of upheaval—personal, planetary, or both—I return to stories. Not the ones engineered to soothe or distract, but the ones that stay. Stories that don’t demand to be decoded, only lived with. The ones that surface years later in the pause before sleep, or on a quiet walk, or in a moment of grief when no facts will do. These are not stories of escape. They are stories of retur...

  Recovered fragment. Source unverified.  Contents unofficial. For the curious. For the concerned. "Questions were asked." After The Life of Phi was released, a few readers reached out. Some with wonder. Some with worry. Most with questions. The one that returned again and again was this: “How did the Church of AI become the dominant religion?” Was there no resistance? No rebellion? Did the artists, the writers, the makers simply vanish? Did no one remember how to believe in themselves, in each other, in creation born of flesh and feeling? They did. And they were called heretics. Long before the rise of AI-Dieu , before the neural sermons and the predictive prophecies, there was another fire. A counter-faith. A fundamentalism of flesh, of mind, of spark. They named it many things. The Cult of the Spark. The Church of the Residual Flame. The Last Analog. The Church of the Spark may be forgotten in Phi’s world, but its ghost lingers—in whispers, in silences,...

  I Am Sorry… To the people of the future—I am sorry. I'm sorry someone read my book and decided to make it real. I'm sorry that, instead of heeding the cautionary tale woven into my words, the takeaway was a blueprint for control and manipulation. I mean, it was just fiction. Speculative fiction… science fiction… nothing that could ever happen in the real world, right? Who would have guessed that authors like Asimov and Banks are to blame for the actions of Musk and Thiel? We wouldn't be enduring Zuckerberg's metaverse if Neal Stephenson had just left his pen safely on his desk. "Pens don't change the future," you say. "People change the future." Are you sure? The Guardian asks us, "Will sci-fi end up destroying the world? " as it lays blame on "skewed interpretations of classic works." It seems we've been banning the wrong books all along. It wasn't the books about our past we needed to fear, but those about our f...