The theme that I hope to get across in Life is the universality of agnosticism (that sounds so cool) and the unknowability of the nature of reality—put more comprehensibly, the idea that nothing can prove or disprove anything (for example, the truth of any theology or lack thereof). The story is an ‘idea story’ along the lines of those often written by Greg Egan, an Australian SF writer who graciously provides stories for free on his website (as well as publishing them other places); you might want to check out Oceana, winner of the Hugo award for best SF novella of 1999.

Apart from relatively trivial facts—I used to listen to the Beatles enough to know "Nowhere Man" by heart (the song, incidentally, happened to fit the story so incredibly well that I wondered whether the Beatles had had something like this in mind when they wrote it; the most obvious parallel, for example, is that who more exemplifies a ‘nowhere man’ than a person slogging through the dim layers of reality, who may or may not be living out lives that don’t exist?) and I’m familiar with coach-class cabins through long experience—there seem to be only two other autobiographical nuggets buried in the story: First, I am a long-time agnostic (actually, I’m an atheist/agnostic; I can’t decide whether to be agnostic—but that’s a topic for another paper) and have long pondered philosophical questions; second, during a fit of self-pity during tenth grade, I came up with the idea of Life^TM—that is, the idea of inhabiting another life for a time. Overall, Life is far less autobiographical than other fiction I have written (for reasons I’ll get to).

It is also the only short story (and one of a very few pieces of fiction) I have written since Murder by Silicon, a terribly written story with a great plot (so great that it was actually exhilarating to write the ending, though the style flowed like ice), good characterization, and some nice scenery, which I wrote for creative writing class over a year ago. I have, as I wrote about in one of my journal entries, been in a terrific rut, writing-wise, for the past two years. Life doesn’t come close to my 8th grade writing in terms of style, for example (it far surpasses it with regard to plot and theme, but I’m not sure how well those two came through). Part of the problem, I think, is my inability to find a coherent voice when writing fiction; constantly trying to get the style flowing necessarily stymies attempts to inject myself into the writing.

Like Murder by Silicon, Life has a great plot. The implementation isn’t as good as it could be, though, so, at least in my mind, it isn’t a great story.

The following picture (and the rest of the Web, for that matter) looks best at at least 800 by 600 pixels of resolution and 16 bit color. Here's how to change your settings to get that:

• For Macintosh:
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• For Windows 95/98:
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