Being an SF writer, I actually try to keep abreast of all the above areas; not as an expert, but as a hunter-gatherer for interesting ideas. And everywhere I look, I see the clash of cultures that characterized the twentieth century, coming to a close.

In June of 2003 I gave a short talk at the annual conference of the American Library Association. The title of the talk was "Traitor to Both Sides", and it started like this:

Science Fiction is disreputable. Despite whatever debates we may have about how to define SF, or about what its influence on history or culture may be, this is one thing we all agree on. SF is not considered Literature in literary circles. It’s too much concerned with the physical world--the objective as opposed to the subjective.
Strangely, SF is equally disreputable within the scientific community, because it is, after all, an art form and not an attempt to represent reality “as it is”. I’ve had many a specialist kvetch at me about how SF distorts the facts; we need look no further than Star Trek to see examples of egregious invention of elements and physical phenomena that are ridiculous if not simply impossible.

Being disreputable has its advantages. It allows you to take an outsider's view of matters that would otherwise be too close to be noticeable. In the case of SF, it also means that, since you can't ruin your reputation any more than you already have by choosing to write this stuff, you feel comfortable rooting through any sort of intellectual backwater, side-stream or (sometimes) stagnant pool, for material. As an SF writer, you become the ultimate auto-didact.

Someone who's a traitor to both science and academic intelligentsia is in a unique position to look down on the smoking ruins of a century of warfare between the two sides and discern a pattern to it all. The two-culture war is far from an abstract hobby; it gets fought every day inside the head of anyone who's ever tried to reconcile reason and faith, or scientific discoveries about human nature and evolution versus their own feelings about human dignity. Its struggles directly affect issues such as abortion, crime and punishment, human rights etc. But looking down at the battlefield right now, the observant outsider can see one thing: the war is ending. I don’t think most people on either side realize it yet. But the terms of the cease-fire have been drawn up; the armies are retreating--and the rhetoric and propaganda on both sides looks more and more like face-saving, rather than passionate rallying.

This is a provocative statement, and it would be folly to try to prove it using one single line of argument or one set of examples. Hence this blog. A laser-like analysis of any one field doesn't reveal the shape of the coming changes. You have to step waaay back and look at everything. And that's what I'm going to try to do, for the next little while, in this blog.

Yeah, Age of Embodiment is a temporary project. But it'll last a year or so, at least, at any rate long enough for me to touch on all the issues I wanted to talk about. And then I'll be on to something else.

Anyway, by then all this stuff will hopefully be yesterday's news.

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