I just finished reading Ken Liu’s short story “The Waves” this morning about human interstellar travelers who are presented with, progressively, the choice of biological immortality, the choice of machine immortality and the Singularity, and the choice of transforming into pure energy life forms, interspersed with retellings of the creation myths of various cultures.

I had also recently read his short story “Arc” about a character who is given the choice of eternal life and who chooses against it.

The first thing that came to mind was that this was a science fictional account of Tolkien’s “choice of the Half-Elven”.

The last thing that came to mind was that, while there probably isn’t a God, there may very well be gods.