The Second Apocalypse

General => Author Q&A => Topic started by: Callan S. on June 22, 2016, 09:28:19 am

Title: The themes, then and now?
Post by: Callan S. on June 22, 2016, 09:28:19 am
Were all the themes there at the start of the second apocalypse story? Over two decades ago? Surely your meeting with the poker playing nihilist was after you'd started the idea (as D&D gamers). So why do all the themes fit into something you'd made up from years before that - did they? And if they did, given the revelation of the poker nihilist, isn't it spooky that the themes still fitted in? Like, super spooky?

I just wonder how you can essentially shift philosophies dramatically over the years and yet the story started before the shift and begun after the shift remains...unmoved? Or am I just imagining that and the story was a lot different back then at the start and in the first few years than now, in philosophical terms?
Title: Re: The themes, then and now?
Post by: Cû'jara-Cinmoi on June 22, 2016, 12:10:47 pm
Good question: I originally worked out the story over the course of a three year long D&D campaign in my mid-teens. I had been wrestling with the implications of determinism since I was fourteen, so the whole dichotomy of meat and spirit was front and centre in my thinking. I kept picking at the story for years afterward, marbling in more and more thematic concerns the deeper my knowledge of philosophy became. But the master theme, and the dilemma that cracked apart my Christian worldview, remained constant, primarily because no one had any answers to my questions, then or now. I write about this in "Outing the It that Thinks" which should be coming out this summer in a Nietzsche anthology called "Digital Dionysus."
Title: Re: The themes, then and now?
Post by: Callan S. on June 22, 2016, 07:54:08 pm
Thanks, Scott! Just seems like there's a deep current built up there, over years, even as you'd tried to sail another way.

Quote
I write about this in "Outing the It that Thinks" which should be coming out this summer in a Nietzsche anthology called "Digital Dionysus."

Budgets permitting, we'll all keep an eye out for it!
Title: Re: The themes, then and now?
Post by: Madness on June 24, 2016, 01:40:56 pm
There's actually a transcribed talk Cû'jara-Cinmoi gave years ago on TPB by the same title (https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/essay-archive/outing-the-it-that-thinks-the-collapse-of-an-intellectual-ecosystem/), which I imagine the new article will feature in sentiment.