Rise of the Iron Moon

I'm reading The Rise of the Iron Moon by Stephen Hunt, which has seen some powerful personal syncs connected with the reading. It's an alien invasion story, where octopus-like creatures from Mars use a singularity time machine to invade the earth 5 million years in their future - our present. As far as books go, I'd rate it a 5 by the usual book rating criteria, but for me, it was a perfect 10.

"If you don't believe in something, you'll fall for anything." This week's sign on Rose Hill Presbyterian church (my childhood church).

The Rise of the Iron Moon:

"Pah, so much for the Circlist heresy and their half-witted humanist religion without gods. When the kingdom's people had stopped believing in the Druid's many deities they had not begun believing in nothing, they had started believing in anything."

I suppose we haven't really believed in the gods since Nietzsche let the cat out of the bag, but we keep going through the motions, as if the decaying rituals still had some power left in them. The fall of the Twin Towers was the straw that broke the belief system's back, the destruction of the third temple.

"they had not begun believing in nothing"

I suppose that's what we are: "belief machines". We cannot NOT believe, it's just that what we believe is always shifting. What we believe actually comes true, at least on a collective level. Of all the forces on the planet, it would seem that human belief is the most powerful, and a close second is the mass media. It shapes our ideas of what is true or not, and thus literally shapes the future. No wonder media control is so important to our modern Titans, everything is simply a matter of public relations.

I believe that what we call God is our collective subconscious. Sometimes that scares me because God is all powerful, and frankly, our subconscious is a dark and scary place. I wonder if this fear of the subconscious is what drives the formation of religions - a desire to control the subconscious by any means necessary. The Church knows that our reality is literally created by what we believe, and it desires to keep us away from the abyss. And yet, the abyss has swallowed even the Church, having lost every shred of legitimacy in the ongoing sexual abuse trials. It has been consumed by what it thought it could control. A good lesson, I think.

"they had started believing in anything".

So what DO we believe in, now? More or less everything and anything. It's the Dark Ages, all over again. The internet, far from being a tool of enlightenment, has been like the whisperer of rumors in the town square, and allowed our dark subconscious access to the security codes. The Forbidden Planet, consumed by subconscious forces beyond their control.

In Rise of the Iron Moon, the invaders are brutally efficient, carnivorous consumers of planetary life. Their bio-engineered servants are man eating apes, they treat human beings like humans treat cows and pigs. They have developed massive slug-like creatures that burrow into the earth, devouring mineral deposits while excreting useful mechanical components. They consume a planet like locusts consume a wheat field, caring not an iota about the pain and suffering, and then move on. In other words, they behave exactly like a corporate board of directors. They justify their actions like a farmer justifies his farming - a planet is a field to be harvested and then left for a few million years to lie fallow and regenerate.

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Stephen Hunt:

Shortly after winning the FT Award, he was hired by the Financial Times to be head of online development for their own magazine arm, where he introduced sites for their media, including Investors Chronicle, The Banker, as well as various channels of the newspaper's main FT.com site. In 2001, Hunt became research director of the investment bank Almeida Capital, where he founded AltAssets, an online service focused on the venture capital and private equity market.

Stephen Hunt works for the bankers (The Masters) and yet, he is somewhat like the runaway slave of his story, someone who realizes the end result of global corporate rule - and is sending an encoded message. Perhaps one that even our subconscious will hear.

"There is more power in the human heart and the imagination of a child than in any stone circle or blade."