Three Explorations

Genesis, PART TWO, VI.

Gaia, linked to her extra-solar visitor, Wayfarer, will conduct him through her database of observations of Earth over millions of years.

Christian Brannock, a human personality uploaded into Wayfarer and now called simply "Christian," will explore Gaia's emulations of history and of alternative histories.

A robot incarnating Wayfarer and in particular his Christian Brannock aspect and therefore now designated "Brannock," will explore the dying physical Earth.

Gaia claims that it would be better to observe and learn from the natural end of life on Earth rather than to intervene and delay that end. In fact, she is conducting another project that she is concealing from her fellow post-organic intelligences. There is discord in the heavens.

The omniscient narrator refers to:

"...this myth of ours." (p. 159)

This cannot be the author directly addressing his twentieth century readers.

(Interruption: The first mas market edition of Genesis, which I have, is dated February 2001. However, the text is copyright 2000 and the first edition was dated February 2000. I regard the years, 1901-2000, not the years, 1900-1999, as constituting the twentieth century. Thus, Genesis was written and published right at the end of the twentieth century although, appropriately, the novel also spans the turn of the century because its first mass market publication was at the very beginning of the twenty first century.)

Someone is recounting the story in a verbal narrative to someone else who can only receive it in this form. Who are they? This same question had arisen a long time before in relation to Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation. Far from disrupting the narrative, I think that the question adds a welcome extra layer of mystery.