The Sparrow
Cory Doctorow, at one point decided to write a
series of stories with the same names as famous science fiction stories. I was thinking about this recently in the context of PRISM:
"Not even a sparrow, worth only half a penny, can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it." -Matthew 10:29-3
And of course, there is a very good SF novel titled "The Sparrow" (skip the sequel). So this is my new short story (which has the same title), which I will never write: In 2012, our protagonist is the victim of a crime, and in 2013, she learns about PRISM, and wonders why her attacker could not be caught by these same technologies. That is, if we live in a security state, why are we not secure? If the NSA knows about every sparrow, why do we still have unsolved crimes?
It's not actually true that this maps perfectly on to the problem of evil, because, unlike (a hypothetical) God, we don't necessarily trust that the security state's conception of evil matches out own. But there are some interesting discussions to be had which aren't the usual discussions.
This entry was originally posted at http://novalis.dreamwidth.org/173100.html. There are
comments on the DW version of this post already. Please comment there using OpenID. Hint: if you get zapped to the Dreamwidth homepage, click here to log in with OpenID.
series of stories with the same names as famous science fiction stories. I was thinking about this recently in the context of PRISM:
"Not even a sparrow, worth only half a penny, can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it." -Matthew 10:29-3
And of course, there is a very good SF novel titled "The Sparrow" (skip the sequel). So this is my new short story (which has the same title), which I will never write: In 2012, our protagonist is the victim of a crime, and in 2013, she learns about PRISM, and wonders why her attacker could not be caught by these same technologies. That is, if we live in a security state, why are we not secure? If the NSA knows about every sparrow, why do we still have unsolved crimes?
It's not actually true that this maps perfectly on to the problem of evil, because, unlike (a hypothetical) God, we don't necessarily trust that the security state's conception of evil matches out own. But there are some interesting discussions to be had which aren't the usual discussions.
This entry was originally posted at http://novalis.dreamwidth.org/173100.html. There are
comments on the DW version of this post already. Please comment there using OpenID. Hint: if you get zapped to the Dreamwidth homepage, click here to log in with OpenID.