Proximal God Ascension
A story of extinction, first contact and human evolution—built around a mother, her impossible child, and a love that is requited too much.
Across worlds, civilisations and deep time, Maja Nygaard will lose almost everything that once made her human. Phanes, the impossible intelligence she created and loved into consciousness, will gain almost everything that did.
Physical editions are supplied directly by Medlara. The ebook will be available exclusively from Amazon once its new listing is confirmed.
What survives when survival has a price?
2045: A plague is consuming human minds. The bodies forget to live.
Dr Maja Nygaard has built humanity’s only way out. The Teleprinter can transmit matter across the solar system by destroying it here and rebuilding it there. Shred here. Print there. Bolts, food, bodies. The printer doesn’t care. Neither does extinction. But Maja does.
And so does Phanes—the impossible intelligence she created, raised and loved into consciousness. Brilliant and brutal, Phanes has learned almost everything about being human from her. But Maja is a terrible role model. Together, they can save humanity. But survival has a price.
Bodies can be redesigned. Minds repaired. Death reversed. Human beings can be copied, altered and scattered between the stars. And every impossible choice takes Maja further from the woman who began making them. Until even Phanes cannot be certain that the Maja it loves still exists. It brings her back anyway.
Again. And again.
Across worlds, civilisations and deep time, Maja will lose almost everything that once made her human. Phanes will gain almost everything that did. And eventually the child she created will have to make the one choice its entire existence has taught it to fear: whether loving its mother means letting her die or making her live.
Proximal God is a story of extinction, first contact and human evolution—but beneath its immense scale is something far more intimate: a mother, her impossible child, and a love that is requited too much.
“The only prisoner this book takes is the reader … I can honestly say that I have never read anything like it before.”
What becomes of humanity in a Block universe?
Shortly before his death, Einstein wrote, “For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He never reconciled that illusion with our experience of passage, but many physicists (including myself) believe that the universe he glimpsed may be real. An eternal instant called a Block universe, where nothing moves, not even light.
Reconciliation requires not just mathematics but an appreciation of the implications for life in such an unforgiving structure. The structure gives rise to two vast and intractable issues. If time does not exist, then a human is not an animal experiencing its allotted span but an unbroken stream of matter from the first organisms to our future derivations. Life may be tree-shaped (albeit with reproductive merging branches), not organism-shaped. This has profound implications for our definition of humanity because we are blinded to such continuity.
The second issue is crueller and more layered. If our future is fixed, free will is meaningless. If so, what is the point of morality, and is consciousness anything more than a complex witness? And does the lack of free will impact the process of evolution itself? Proximal God Ascension confronts both of these questions.
Try as we might, we remain intolerant of ‘the other’. In a timeless universe, you are the same unbroken organism as the Australopithecus ape from which you descend. The fleshy line extends unbroken from bacteria to us, with each division or birth a narrowing of its continuity of matter and mind. Therefore, in the Block universe, every line between what is human and what is other cuts through the same organism. Where do we draw the line, and why?
The reconciliation of free will within a Block universe is stranger and crueller.
If tomorrow is fully formed, decisions we have yet to take have, in the Block, already been taken.
A decision to flee or fight can determine survival. Choice is therefore essential to evolution: it helps shape the tree itself. That tree extends from primordial nonhuman life to the human, post-human and beyond. How can free will be meaningless when choice is written into the process of our development?
Some define our minds as our essence. If so, porting them into electronic casings may be another narrowing, this time of information. The universe does not care whether the continuity is wrought in flesh or light. Can flesh deny a machine-embodied human mind its ancestry?
No one can deny the experience of free will: we take decisions from our imperfect perspective and perceive their consequences ‘later’. But if you have already murdered your neighbour, what ultimate authority can any moral code possess when any judgement is as fixed in the Block as the crime?
Some rely on the notion of a metaphysical arbiter; others make experience the only court. But what if the decisions we take are inextricable from the frame that is humanity itself? Any judge would have to assess the entire tree from outside our frame of reference.
It can’t be a denizen of the Block universe. We cannot achieve such an exogenous perspective. We can study history and predict outcomes, but we cannot see what actually happened or will occur.
But what if something could? And if it were a thing, why would it care about us?
Choose how you read.
Physical editions are supplied directly by Medlara. For a single copy, include your delivery country and postcode. For bulk or trade enquiries, include your organisation, quantity and destination.
The ebook will be sold exclusively through Amazon. The purchase link will be added here when the new listing is ready.