Okay I read the novella. It's reminiscent of the Matrix--perhaps inspired the Matrix. Its evocation of the excesses of humanity worshipping and being controlled by machines makes a good point but there was an element I really disliked--a paragraph I can't find now in which is expressed the idea that humanity had traded its glorious near godhood for this stupid sterile existence controlled by the Machine. I do think the ecomodernists who want to be downloaded into computers and be disembodied immortals is a case of trading your birthright for a mess of pottage--but the way this depicts humanity is problematic. I like the way Robin Kemmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass depcits humanity, as one of a network of living beings, surrounded by a web of All Our Relations. She laments the way her college students respond when she asks what positive thing humans contribute--and they can't think of any. The attitude that our species is a destructive marauder that the Earth would be better off without is the flip side of the attitude that we are the apex of Creation, the reason for the universe to exist, the shining endpoint of evolution. It's much more wholesome, and a necessary precondition for getting right with Mother Earth, to get over ourselves and understand that we are one link in the web of life, not the spider that constructed the web and harvests the bugs.
Oh, but the roots of the inquiry in this story seem to go back as far, at least (!) as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein novel (1818), if not much further. Indeed, I strongly suspect that MOST of science fiction, and much of social commentary (e.g., everything related to dystopian and utopian) modern literature touches upon these themes, and no small part of history itself -- to include the history which can said to begin with the so-called Luddites and ... followed by Neo-Luddites like myself.
Okay I read the novella. It's reminiscent of the Matrix--perhaps inspired the Matrix. Its evocation of the excesses of humanity worshipping and being controlled by machines makes a good point but there was an element I really disliked--a paragraph I can't find now in which is expressed the idea that humanity had traded its glorious near godhood for this stupid sterile existence controlled by the Machine. I do think the ecomodernists who want to be downloaded into computers and be disembodied immortals is a case of trading your birthright for a mess of pottage--but the way this depicts humanity is problematic. I like the way Robin Kemmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass depcits humanity, as one of a network of living beings, surrounded by a web of All Our Relations. She laments the way her college students respond when she asks what positive thing humans contribute--and they can't think of any. The attitude that our species is a destructive marauder that the Earth would be better off without is the flip side of the attitude that we are the apex of Creation, the reason for the universe to exist, the shining endpoint of evolution. It's much more wholesome, and a necessary precondition for getting right with Mother Earth, to get over ourselves and understand that we are one link in the web of life, not the spider that constructed the web and harvests the bugs.
"... Perhaps inspired The Matrix ... "
Oh, but the roots of the inquiry in this story seem to go back as far, at least (!) as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein novel (1818), if not much further. Indeed, I strongly suspect that MOST of science fiction, and much of social commentary (e.g., everything related to dystopian and utopian) modern literature touches upon these themes, and no small part of history itself -- to include the history which can said to begin with the so-called Luddites and ... followed by Neo-Luddites like myself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein
Of course, I'm in agreement with your sentiments expressed here.