Chaos Theory and Feminist Theology

I'd like to start this web blog by talking about the main theme of much of the science fiction that I write, which is the interface/confluence of chaos theory and feminist theology. In my story "The Summer People", parts of which you will be able to see next week (February 14 2005)at:

http://blake.prohosting.com/duji/nuegua/index.html

I explore the possibility of an emerging technology--in this case, organic virtual reality--from a feminist and spiritual perspective. The New Genetic Woman Project, or Nuegua for short, has taken over a failed bioengineering project, failed specifically because its visionary leader claims to have discovered the gene for psychic ability. This of course gets him kicked out of the 'old boy's club' of Science.

This visionary Sean Landsten, (think of Sean Connery in "The Rock" 1996), finds himself out of work at age 62, an age when most retire. But he has fallen in love with Alathea Radford, an 37-year-old entrepeneur who believes that his Recursive Instructional Nexus technology, or RIN, for short, is the missing ingredient in her ecology reclamation project.

Her project is called the Cactus Mother. It is a bioengineered motile: part prickly pear cactus, part hermit crab. Mobile at birth, after two years it finds a suitable spot and puts down roots, becoming a massive structure that is home to a colony of ten million Phillipine termites. This combination is ideally suited for reclaiming desert land, and converting it to garden, one grain of sand at a time.

Alathea's problem is that she cannot control the growth process, as she must do it in biological rather than human/social time. She needs an interface to a human operator, and that is just what Sean has created.

The Recursive Instructional Nexus interfaces the Cactus Mothers to a human female through an artifically-created structure known as the earlid. (Later on, this is part of every Nueguan female's genetic heritage). With it, upon entering a state known as lucid dreaming, whatever the subject dreams is interpreted as a command by the termites. Dream of a wall, they build it.

There are of course numerous problems in attempting to manifest dream content physically. In attempting to solve them, Sean stumbles upon an alteration in the neural circuitry of some of his female subjects that makes them prescient and clairvoyant. Unfortunately, their performance is based on
chaotic nodes of stability rather than mechanical reproducibility, and his insistence on the validity of his findings costs him his career in the scientific establishment.

So much for chaos theory and technology. Where does feminist theology fit in? Alathea helps him to create the first Grotto of the Pregnant Virgin, software written for DNA-based computing that both extends and sets limits to the manifestation of dream content. Think of a relational database management system with a compassionate AI.

The result: several centuries later, after our present society is nearly extinguished through barbarism, in the Superstition Mountains of northern Arizona, in the Christmas Mine area along the Gila river, Nueguan culture flourishes. By this time, their origins are shrouded in myth and religion. Science has been replaced by theology; a theology founded on technology.