“Birth of a Pantheon”
Originally published at ipse illum dicto. You can comment here or there.
I signed the contract today, so I think it’s safe to announce this. I’m going to have a short story, “Birth of a Pantheon,” in an exciting new anthology called Touching the Face of the Cosmos: The Roots and Future of Human Space Exploration in Religion edited by Paul Levinson and Michael Waltemathe. “Birth of a Pantheon” is one of my Venus stories, set in the same universe as “Pressure and the Argument Tree,” but decades earlier, and I’m thrilled it’s going to be sneaking out into world.
It’s actually a sort of funny story how it made its way into this anthology. “Birth of a Pantheon” is a sort of strange story, dealing simultaneously with the hard science of aerobraking while delving into the philosophy of the human relationship with the divine. It’s not something that would fit in well in most of the markets out there. Well, then, one day Paul Levinson posted an announcement about this anthology, which specifically is interested in collecting original stories, papers, and articles that address how human space exploration is going to affect religion and philosophy, and I was like, “Huh, I’ve actually got one of those.”
Well, Paul Levinson liked it, and so I’m joining the table of contents.
It sounds like a really interesting project, so I’m looking forward to reading everything else that ends up included. Hopefully none of them boil down to, “What does God need with a starship?”
#SFWApro