Stapledonian SF

Greg Bear, Eternity (London, 2010).

The intelligences who travel to the end of the Way enter a cosmegg, or potential universe, and, having unsuccessfully tried to shape this new cosmos from within, are about to be engulfed and destroyed by chaos when however they are rescued by the Final Mind of the universe that they have left: Stapledonian indeed. We are told this story only in summary because its details would transcend our understanding but hopefully its consequences will include important events for the comprehensible human characters of the novel.

Although we cannot understand all the details, we are told that a united, immaterial intellect and will operated below the level of light and energy. Thus, intelligence was a process not only within highly evolved, energy-using organisms but also below the most basic level of energy. Is this possible, if not in a naturally occurring universe, then at least in a secondary, artificial one?

"It is far more difficult to be a god than we could possibly have imagined." (p. 78)

I already know this! - because I have just reread Mike Carey's Lucifer. Yahweh's granddaughter, Elaine Belloc, practicing in her own newly created universe, finds it hard to manage even a single planetary ecology. She learns that sometimes the best but also the hardest thing to do is nothing. I have learned that this is true in human affairs. I know that Christian theology includes the concept of an omniscient, omnipotent Providence that need not intervene because its creation is like a well-plotted novel in which the characters act according to their natures but the author controls the resolution. I take issue with this concept on another blog and I also know that Christian theology includes other views of creation. See the novels of Susan Howatch.

Having read about a would be "god," we turn the page and are back on Gaia, the Earth dominated by the Greek culture that gave us the Classical gods.

Time travel but more than time travel is involved so I am not sure whether my analyses of the logic of time travel are applicable. The Final Mind sends a constituent member of the would be god back to the twenty first century to request that the Way be re-opened but then destroyed from this end. But how can it be destroyed? They have already traveled/will travel along it.