To (mis)quote Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, “I looked and looked but I didn’t see God.”1 Humans are cunning little monkeys, though, so even if at present we assume there are no gods as such, it’s within the realm of possibility that we might someday build something (or somethings) functionally equivalent to gods.
We could even turn ourselves into gods (via tech assist or magic). Would this be an unmixed blessing? Um, not really. We already know that humans can be monumental dicks; deified humans could be just as nasty.
Some examples:
- In Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, having clothed themselves in the trappings of the Hindu pantheon, the humans-turned-gods amuse themselves by oppressing mortal humans.
- In Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a singular event transforms Jon Osterman into the godlike Doctor Manhattan. It strips him of his essential humanity in the process. Result: he is a terrible boyfriend and a potential trigger for World War 3.
- Ser Noris, the magician who is the big bad in Jo Clayton’s Duel of Sorcery series, has managed to grant himself godlike powers. He resolves to test his abilities by first ruining, then destroying, the world. Wouldn’t therapy have been a better solution?
- Human children in Clarke’s Childhood’s End are guided towards powers their parents cannot comprehend. The cost: the children’s humanity, plus a surprising amount of environmental damage.
- In Greg Bear’s Blood Music, researcher Vergil Ulam’s successful effort to smuggle the results of his bold biotechnical research out of his lab leaves him—and quite soon millions of others—infected with biological computers. At first simple, the noocytes evolve rapidly, modifying their hosts in the process; fine when this involves correcting eyesight, but not quite so fine when it comes to reducing humans to goo and reshaping reality itself.
Or maybe we could build godlike computers. While it is comforting to believe that the builders can program ethical constraints into their creations, it would be unwise to trust in the wisdom of programmers. (Just take a look at the news in any given week for stories involving hackers and malware. No system is without exploitable defects.)
Even if we were to create computers which would, as good utilitarians, aim at the greatest good for the greatest number, their perspective would not be ours. What they see as a long-term good may not be so…for us. The computers may even be hostile. Consider AM, the Allied Mastercomputer, in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” It’s powerful, but in no way benign. AM hates humans and can indulge its whims. Or consider Skynet or HAL.
Perhaps we’ll be get lucky. Perhaps deified humans or godlike computers won’t be monsters.
Deified humans? No doubt there are examples of stories where humans were enhanced without becoming monstrous, but none come to mind at this time.
Godlike computers? Iain Banks’ Culture setting is ruled by the super-intelligent Minds. Rather than being relegated to irrelevance or tortured for the Minds’ amusement, the human-level citizens of the Culture appear to live rewarding, enjoyable lives. Of course, given the scope of the Minds’ abilities, the mortals may have no real choice in the matter.
Maybe making gods will turn out fine. Most SF predicts grimmer outcomes, but you never know… Shall we try it and see?
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He was a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]This is a disputed quotation. See the link above for a discussion of its provenance.
What about The Godmakers by Frank Herbert? I recall the resulting god being at least relatively benign.
The AI Core from Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos also comes to mind.
Haviland Tuf himself from Tuf Voyaging.
The end state for far too many transhuman to posthuman SF.
Maybe “benign” is relative, especially if you are on the receiving end? The computers in Colossus certainly meant well….
@@.-@ mstevenbrown Yeah, Unity was the nicer version of Skynet, but I’d argue that neither were truly sapient. They were expert machines (what marketing calls “AI”) that were also optimizing systems. Unity, Colossus and Guardian, were designed with the parameter of “No Wars”. Funny enough, so was Skynet. But I think the big difference is that Unity had to keep humans alive per its programming parameters, while Skynet didn’t. So both optimized “No Wars” in their own way…
David Zindell’s A Requiem for Homo Sapiens is this concept explored at trilogy length, from several angles.
Vinge’s Erythrina (from the True Names) may turn out all right. Likewise Greco from Chiang’s Understand – but we see each of these for quite brief periods after their ascension – a few days later they may turn sharply worse.
Well, most of them, anyway.
@AndyLove, Vinge has entities in the universe of Deepness in the Sky that are actually referred to as “gods”.
AIs in Stross’s Accelerando wind up taking over the inner Solar System to convert most of the mass into computing substrate.
Warren Ellis’s Supergod takes it to (beyond) the logical extreme, where different nations end up in an arms race, competing to create their own Superman/Dr Manhattan level super heroes. Unsurprisingly for a Warren Ellis book, it doesn’t end well for the human race.
“History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods…” Yuval Noah Harari
Since we’re including comics, don’t they provide endless examples of stories “where humans were enhanced without becoming monstrous”?
Science Fantasy: gods as high-powered espers which are enhanced by the field around a particular planet. The Hammer of Darkness by L.E. Modesitt Jr. has a man trying NOT to be a god for a thousand years while the gods keep testing him and tempting him and ticking him off in an effort to get him to join them. Spoiler: At the end, he conquers all the gods with a power they didn’t expect but he’s still trying to hold on to his own humanity … and he knows he’s going to lose his humanity eventually and the cycle will start all over.
@9: But It’s not clear whether we can call those characters non-monstrous (the Old One put Pham through serious trauma and killed quadrillions as part of his plan, after all – and he was apparently one of the nicer ones).
How godlike counts as godlike? As I recall, humans in Walter Jon Williams’ Implied Spaces have fairly demigodlike capabilities, at least, and they’re only as bad as regular humans.
Oh yeah. The Aristoi in WJW’s book of the same name are godlike but pretty decent folk (with a finite number of exceptions).
@12. Skallagrimsen: I didn’t know that quote, but that’s my usual approach when talking to people who earnestly profess a belief in gods or a God. Any divine or infernal beings we imagine to exist were created by us. Maybe our imaginations will guide us to evolve in godlike directions, if we don’t destroy ourselves first.
Since HAL was mentioned, I’d add the Starchild, who’s a perfect Alien Jesus and saves Earth from a nuclear war in the novel version of 2001.
There’s an obscure novel from 1982, Jeremy Leven’s Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., that was about the creation of a supercomputer inhabited by Satan. It’s a academic campus novel crossed with Rosemary’s Baby. The main character’s credentials stand for Just Some Poor Schmuck. It postulates that God came into existence when a caveman/woman trembled in fear when they saw a giant bolt of lightning and heard a deafening thunderclap outside their shelter. And we’ve been living in fear ever since.
Dr. Manhattan represents an absent or indifferent god. Not really his fault that he transcended the human. In some ways, can’t blame him for being tired of human foibles and politics. What cosmic being would waste time on that crap? The current Watchmen show may have something to say on that topic if indeed Dr M has reincarnated himself.
There’s The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man by Dave Hutchinson – it’s about an ordinary tech reporter who, in surviving an accident at a supercollider, becomes something like a god. Good work on exploring how he finds out what he is and what he can do. Mainly what he winds up doing is repeatedly suppressing the efforts of another godlike survivor to return to Earth from the higher-order space where they got their powers. The other guy’s more Lovecraftian, but then he apparently started out psychotic before being rotated.
Hutchinson never misses, it seems. Very enjoyable read. And for once, I found it in my local chain bookstore.
In Daniel Galouye’s LORDS OF THE PSYCHON, the humans eventually become godlike. But first they have to train themselves with a sort of self-directed psychoanalysis. Otherwise the new godlike powers tend to be used by one’s inner demons to inadvertently commit suicide.
In Dave Duncan’s tetralogy A Man of His Word, becoming a god doesn’t change who you are; most of the examples we’re given are decent people who become decent gods. (This is a gross simplification from old memory — becoming a god is not trivial — but IIRC it’s the essence of that aspect of the story.)
Your summary of Lord of Light is a bit one-sided; various “gods” join Sam in his war on inequality&stasis. IIRC, Zelazny played a lot with the idea of the boundaries between men and gods becoming less well-defined; I recall a novel in which there’s a to-do because a human has taken on the post/attribute/… of a god of some extraterrestrials/aliens.
@22: In [spoiler protected rot13]Wbua Penzre’f Rvafgrva’f Oevqtr[/rot13], a main character received weakly godlike powers (easily enough to take over the world), but they come with a built-in ethical constraint that prevents him from using them to harm anyone with his powers.
And I’ve remembered a few more. Max Gladstone explores artificial (?) divinity in his Craft series, particularly Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise and Full Fathom Five.
Then there’s The Empress of Forever with a god-like human (the titular empress herself).
Charles Stross’ Scratch Monkey where we’ve got literally god-like AIs dealing with humans because they feast on our informational content (something he touches on in his Laundry series) which leads to human societies time themselves into very unpleasant knots to avoid this. Literally, “Cthulhu saves because he might get hungry later.”
In a somewhat similar thanks there’s Ada Hoffman’s The Outside, with AI gods, cyborg angels and out of context/extradimensional threats that make these AI tyrant’s look like a really good deal in comparison.
Linda Nagata touches on it in Memory and her Inverted Frontier books Edges and Silver.
Then there’s Sam Hughes Ra and Fine Structure. In both of them you get god-like humans, albeit by different means and outcomes. Both are worth a read.
Two I liked a lot less were The Transhumanist Wager and The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. They’re at least part of why I described a lot of transhuman and posthuman SF as a race to godhood.
Last but far from least are Graydon Saunders Commonweal novels (The March North, A Succession of Bad Days, Safely You Deliver and Under One Banner) have people making a democratic Commonweal in the face of god-king sorcerers and worse (and one of those worst? It’s decided the Commonweal is the best bet in town). Challenging but worthwhile reads.
I’ve always wanted to ask “surprisingly flammable “what have you been doing to test it?
Normal every day things, like striking a match while standing in a cloud of gasoline vapour or trying to move a hot pot using oven mitts I optimistically assumed would be fire proof.
I dunno that “ruled” is the right term for what the Culture AIs do. However, the term applies nicely to the AIs in Neal Asher’s multiple overlapping Polity serieses.
Charles Stross was cited twice in comments, but oddly his Eschaton duology (Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise) wasn’t. While The Eschaton states clearly that it isn’t God, it sure behaves like it is.
Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods and Fritz Leiber’s Lean Times in Lanhkmar have interesting things to say on the subject.
Who knows? Maybe godlike computers might not be too bad. A line from an old Richard Brautigan poem comes to mind, “all watched over by machines of loving grace.”
@Alan: well, there are a lot of awful humans around doing a terrible job, so maybe giving machines a shot isn’t a bad idea, as long as they come with off switches and/or reset buttons. Then there’s the question of who gets to program these machines, which becomes a sort of “original sin,” determining what kind of intelligence we get. What if these new consciousnesses incorporate some significant flaws which lead to unforeseen consequences?
Coming at it from the other side, you get the Kabbalistic idea of the angels as effectively machines or robots, lacking free will.
There’s a subtle subplot of Tom Siddell’s SFF webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court that seems to be heading in this direction, and quite possibly without the character in question knowing it. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this works out.
It entertains me that most of the examples describe the god in the bible and probably a load of other gods too. Except the Egyptian toilet god. He was all for goodness.
andy Weir’s short story The Egg has a brilliant explanation by God to a mortal on the entire process
The AI in “When HARLIE was One” by David Gerrold ends up being both godlike and benign, though it was mostly guided there by the protagonist of the story (which is basically the whole plot of the book). Actually a pretty good read, I might have to dig it out again.
As #1 mentioned, Frank Herbert long running reflections on religion in several of his works are missing in the article. To name three of them:
The Godmakers. Very suggestive. The technopriests employ psi machines and amazing science in order to create three gods. The first one, mineral, the second, animal. These have happened before the events in the novel, which tells the story of the human they chose to become a god.
Destination: Void. Onboard a colonization ship, the crew builds a supercomputer after the organic ones fail (disembodied human brains gone mad). The supercomputer eventually becomes more than they expected.
The Jesus Incident. Humans try to colonize a hostile planet while Ship toys with them.
The Lazarus effect and The Ascension Factor. The last sequels of the saga.
This is for not mentioning Dune and its sequels, reflecting on messianism and more, or The Dragon in the Sea (also published as Under Pressure), where the crew of a submarine gets their act together with a little help of religion and their resident chaplain-psichologist (a role that also appeared in Destination: Void and its sequels).
Scott Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char has something to say on the subject. Without giving too much away, it helps to remember that it’s relatively modern to even consider that gods might be subject to the morality we might think applies to human beings.
Jack Williamson’s 1947 “With Folded Hands” bears on this as well. Humanity produces weakly godlike androids charged to “Serve and Obey and Guard Men from Harm” who relieve mankind of all hazardous activities ultimately including going outdoors and walking across the room.
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned Fredric Brown’s one-page short story “Answer” yet.
Donald Fagen, lead singer of Steely Dan, wrote a song called I.G.Y. One of the lyrics was,
“A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young…”
Great song, great ideal to strive for. My kids are going to grow up to be better than me. Why can’t their computers be better than our’s today?