[Steve’s Note: My more technologically-advanced and -trusting colleagues Anthropik may well take issue with this particular piece]

The Huygens probe landed on Titan, where it was met by the crystalline ice-beings, who, assuming it was a God, brought it through the forests of living glass; past the plains where the giant helium-fish swim through the sky; up the winding stair to Ixilazt, the City Atop the Cloud, for their gargantuan queen to devour (as indeed, all Gods must be devoured).

Except, not this time. The methane sea is there, says Huygens probe, but the ice giant crystalline crabs who spin their frozen webs into a city by the sea, ah, they were not to be found. Amorphous Titan has been hammered into solid reality by the Iron Light of Science.

Of course, it is not the only planet to share this fate; and of course, mine are not the first cosmic imaginings to be shattered to pieces.

My hero the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft envisioned a mad universe, ruled over by insane alien gods profoundly indifferent or hostile toward humanity. He prided himself on his ability to take known scientific fact and extrapolate logically outward into cosmic horror.

But Lovecraft was writing in the early half of the twentieth century, and to appreciate him now requires a great suspension of disbelief. There are no strange celestial crab-things on Pluto; and archaeologists in the Australian desert have found no traces of the ruined cities of the Great Race of Yith. Lovecraft’s dreams, like mine, have been torn asunder.

Now don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t dream of suggesting we halt all space exploration in order that children like me may have strange-lit daydreams and grow up to be science fiction writers. That would be silly: Everyone whose thought about it if this rotten civilization is to survive it must either expand into space, or cease to base its economy on continual growth.

Space exploration will continue, and more and more corners of the universe will lose their secrets and their power. Do the beautiful nightmares begin at last to die?

Or does a new terror begin to take hold? A terror of a universe too dumb to be insane; too blind to be indifferent; too utterly banal to be ruled by mad gods.

Or perhaps — the dreadful Thing at the back of my mind is speaking — perhaps the mad gods are not dead at all.

As every economist is apparently capable of knowing and yet still capable of sleeping at night, our economy is predicated upon continual expansion and growth. This cannot continue forever on a finite planet.

But Stephen Hawking and Fred Adams other members of our most advanced scientific communities have suggested a way for it to continue expanding forever: by replacing biological life with robotic life, that can leave this planet (able to survive the needed length of time for the journey through space) and travel to worlds, building an infrastructure upon them which can expand to still further worlds, until the entire physical universe is covered with this bizarre self-justifying insanity.

Advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics are already beginning to foreshadow this. I can already be given a mechanical hip. How soon before all my body parts are replaced as the flesh begins to weaken — perhaps rebuilt into a more stable mechanical form by billions of tiny nanobots living inside of me?

And surely they won’t stop at merely creating better versions of what already exists. If modern trends are anything to go by, my newly mechanical brain will certainly need a direct internet link, which I will agree to for its supposed entertainment purposes (I appear in the online virtual reality Dungeons and Dragons game with nothing more than a thought!), but which can surely be used by the Central Governing Computer to override my own consciousness and transform me into a drone-slave to serve whatever economic or law-enforcement purpose is needed.

I will agree to this too, if I’m told it will protect my children from crime and drugs and terrorists.

The universe is young, say the scientists. Perhaps the mad gods are not dead, but rather, in their infancy. How soon before they begin their unending nightmare campaign to remake all worlds in their terrifying image, expanding forever outward from their ancient mythical homeworld, an evil place cloaked in frightened whispers and shadowy legends out of the distant past — a place called Earth?