: Re: Why not God as our subject? Certainly there are many Science Fiction writers who touch upon the subject of beings supreme to Man...but always Man is central in writing.

@Bryan361

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I have read several stories like this.

In one, humans of the future are able to use sci-fi tech to "read" any moment in the past, and use this to bring back the consciousness of those who have died. The Utopian society they returned to was, effectively, heaven. Mankind is indeed still central in this novel, but it brings about another concept for god: he/it doesn't exist YET, but will, as a culmination of OUR evolution. (Light of Other Days, Stephen Baxter).

In a similar vein is a short story I highly recommend, Asimov's, the Last Question. Oh, I found a link right to it ( it's pretty short: multivax.com/last_question.html)
In the Culture novels, by Ian Banks, there are super-intelligent computers, that are able to simulate entire worlds in such detail that the citizens of these simulated worlds are even granted "living-entity" status. This status prevents the more moral of these intelligences from deleting the simulation, (over which they are indeed omniscient and omnipotent), when they are done with it! Of course he also talks about simulations in THOSE simulations, and multiple "levels" of reality. To make the omnicient/God thing even more clear, one of these novels even deals with simulated hells! (Surface Detail, Ian Banks) While most of these stories DO revolve around human-like people, to make it relate-able and interesting, I would not dare to call the Culture "human-centric".

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