Madison Rye Progress

New bit of Marsh for $5+ patronfriends.

I am so happy you got so much out of it! It meant an awful lot to write ^^

i might not be the biggest fan of organized religion but i love thinking about the necessary bureaucratic shenanigans and adaptations of traditions to those established faiths in space-set scifi

how do you prostrate yourself pointing towards mecca in zero-g in saturn's orbit. are we going to have an Roman Catholic Ecclesiastical Province of Luna. What if the Swiss Guard starts training as a specialty anti-boarding shipborne force to protect the Pope's person in case of attempted capture of his Papal Spacecraft. How will traditional models of cross-species reincarnation classify unusual alien life

Isaac Asimov once invited all the great Jewish sci-fi writers to put down their pen names and write unabashedly Jewish sci-fi in an amazing anthology titled Wandering Stars

In it is a really fun short story I think you'd enjoy titled On Venus Have We Got A Rabbi!, in which a congress of Rabbis from across the galaxy convene to update halakah for the space age, and one of the delegation partys are extremely non humanoid aliens! which! if Judaism can only be passed down matrilineally is! a bit of a wrinkle. the whole story is a satire and its really fun and it's available in full (as well as in audio form) here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/on-venus-have-we-got-a-rabbi

In the Post-Self books, one of the main characters is Jewish.

Except, I say 'one', but, given the mechanics of the universe, where one can create copies of oneself that can go off and live their own independent lives, there are nominally 101 of them, and in actuality, probably a couple thousand. By the time the story takes place a few centuries after they were born, they have all gone their separate ways. Their clade (so named because they keep track of the tree-like nature of these branchings of personality through their forked instances) has varied feelings about their heritage. Many consider themselves "raised vaguely Jewish", holding onto various aspects of identity that have shifted, drifted, and faded over the years. Others have instead leaned into that to various degrees, with at least one of them becoming a Rabbi and another a highly respected student of Jewish literature. She is intensely observant in a way that even her down-tree instance (the one from whom she was copied), the aforementioned Rabbi, occasionally finds her to be a bit much.

Many of the conversations that have come up between these two involve various halakha as they apply in a world of uploaded consciousnesses. You live on a giant computer floating at the Earth-Moon L₅ point; which way is Jerusalem? Where is your Mizrah? Sims have no direction relative to each other, much less to the hardware. The System hardware is rotating, surrounded as it is by an inhabited torus-shaped station; does that have an effect?

And what of kashrut? Is eating a dream¹ of shrimp treyf? Is a computer dreaming of a mind eating a dream of shrimp² affecting the observant nature of those uploaded minds within never dreaming of eating shrimp?

And in a world where you cannot forget, is your memory still a blessing?

1. It is complicated.

2. Like really complicated.