Athena_Author



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The Machines

From the Author's Note to Athena Reborn: A Novel:

If my work has meant something to you - if Athena had any kind of impact on you, if some story in Wonder Tales from the Periphery moved you or made you think, then there is something about myself that I need to share with you. It's the only autobiographical fact I have any interest in sharing, the only thing about me that matters to you outside my work.

Every breath that I take, and so every story that I write, is only possible because of technology. There are no natural remedies, no spiritual alternatives for what I was born with. My existence is wholly contingent upon a level of technological sophistication which was heretofore unimaginable, and which will in many ways define the coming era. When you long for a return to simpler times, you wish for a world in which I could not exist.

If you are looking for answers, consider the fact that I was granted the blessing of this technology despite being born into poverty and my writing never having been particularly lucrative. The civilizational structures I live within were arranged in such a way that this technology would be deployed to save my life.

And are these structures not also, at the end of a day, a kind of machine? What is the state, what is civilization, if not a machine?

Think about what this means, what this is. Is it systemic compassion? Is it liberation from Nature? Is it equality of opportunity? Whatever your belief system, think hard about what it means that I am alive because of these machines, and I have created something that matters to you.

Thank you for reading.