Macro-history

• The Evolution of the Planet:

Planet earth has been evolving into a global brain for quite sometime now. The cyber-revolution started by Shannon, Weiner, and Von Nuemann has now created a science fiction scenario featuring what Teilhard de Chardin called the emergence of the Noosphere. A layer of psychic skin around the planet that is conscious and reflective.

Harvest of Gems is a book about the earth's mind. The world's nervous system if you will. Forty Immutable Parables is a book about the mind of our ever-changing universe. Alien is a poem about scary dreams concerning this universal mind. And Little Monk is a book of dreams for spiritual adults. And Ginger Smudge is a book of dreams for spiritual kids. I write dream books for spiritual people.

• The Evolution of Spiritual-Sci-fi:

The origin of spiritual-sci fi came from my days as a university student at UC Berkeley. I was a member of the World Future Society where I met Buckminster Fuller and a then unknown congressman named Al Gore. The future was speculated about with great relish from multiple angles, cultural, technological, economic, and political. Fritjof Capra described the move from a Newtonian Cartesian mechanistic-reductionist world to a more fluid one based on multiplex layers of systems which were often imponderable to the rational mind.

My time at the Esalen Institute further reinforced this new world-view, but from a more exclusively psychic angle as I began to see the universe as a web of thought prone to constant change. It was not too far a leap from this experience to one which then fully embraced Buddhism and all kinds of shamanic thought. But I could not ignore the technological changes around me and began to see the digital and psychic evolutions as different dimensions of the same thing.

This fusion of two holistic visions followed me later during my long pilgrimage with advanced masters. Often visions of aliens and other forms of extra-terrestrial life crept into my meditation. What the full meaning of these visions was could only be speculated upon. But on a deeper level a strange psychic and emotional integration was forming inside me.

• The Roots of Spiritual Sci-fi:

John Truby, my screen-writing teacher helped plant the seeds of spiritual sci-fi indirectly. John's ideas about high concept genres such as fantasy, mythology, and fantasy along with their impending global relevance pointed me towards a new and exciting artistic direction. All these high-concept genres had a future in the global entertainment arena. I felt I was part of this and began experimenting with different combinations of film theory and writing styles. I wanted to reflect a multi-layered approach to art. Especially one that combined Buddhist ideas of mind with science fiction scenarios.

The personal and global appeal of this new kind of genre excited me quite a bit. The high concept title was big enough to include other kinds of artistic off-spring. Little Monk and Harvest of Gems vol.2 were the first preliminary attempts at writing spiritual sci-fi. Harvest of Gems vols. 3 and 4 were the big break-out works, however. Forty Immutable Parables and Alien were the climax of this new literary evolution along with many of my later poems. Spritual sci-fi took about ten years to fully mature: 1993-2003. Ginger Smudge and most of my poetry echoed this maturation process too, as mind and matter sciences began to fully fuse in my artistic imagination. Spiritual and moral dimensions could also no longer be avoided.

Micro-history

• The Strategy of Spiritual sci-fi transmission as verbal art:

A vast new literary vista opened up suddenly without warning inside my startled mind demanding new kinds of exploration. It was a vista that reflected not just the birth of a new literary genre, but the transition from one historic age to another. The ushering of a global age based on mind science taking precedence, but not eliminating the sciences of matter. All this change was taking place within a context urging new kinds of moral and spiritual values to safe-guard the age from newer and more lethal dangers. Dangers which were now planetary in scope and which demanded a critical stepping back in the collective mind towards extra-terrestrial vantage points.

Whether aliens existed or not was irrelevant. An alien view was what was still needed to look at global problems from a bigger perspective. It was a powerful mind experiment. This fusing of futurist and new age trends and concepts. It also led directly to a seamless strategy of artistic implementation and transmission that slowly evolved organically inside my mind with the latest
technological trends on the planet.

• The Actual Experience of Spiritual sci-fi transmission:

Making spiritual sci-fi a hot property evolved quite slowly, but after a few years really cool messages about our planet's future could no longer be held back. It was all about looking at critical signals and aggregating them through words in many different genres. Salinger, Kerouac, and Joyce were pressed into service, but with Buddhist and sci-fi sonics and vistas. Beat and avante garde spiritual sci-fi was then born. Ginger Smudge and Little Monk led the way with spiritual sci-fi for kids and adults with lighter reading habits. Alien and Forty Immutable parables finally burst the old molds and began a completely new form of the emerging genre.

Then the publishing of my works on the web and later into paper-backs with Print on Demand technology mirrored my artistic evolution with the new wired digital environment emerging out of Silicon Valley. Which was not too far from many of the spiritual places in my then growing monastic network. Finally, the bold step of finding and evaluating a a global and crack team of editors and translators was the next step. This team or global group mind was guided by me with daily group e-mails. The translations were completed despite the loss of our financial backer and the beginning of a severe global economic recession. Many of the group e-mails of this project can now be seen in the letters section of this website.

The translation project became a forum for my ideas and also a test of spiritual sci-fi's world-wide appeal. The results were encouraging. There was delight and awe among the translation team as they struggled with the translations across the planet in a three year time span. The whole project was against conventional publishing wisdom since not a single book in English had been yet sold when the project was started.

Then the difficult promotion and brand-building phase began late last year. It was done and it is--still being done mainly through word of mouth in e-groups specializing in modern literature, sci-fi, and fantasy. No radio interviews or book reviews in the regular media have happened yet. But it's only a matter of time before some savvy people in the older media forms finally wake up. This website made under truely heroic and difficult conditions by our webmaster will certainly make this happen.

• Spiritual sci-fi as a business for the production and selling of new multi-media categories and brands:

We at spiritual sci-fi are now totally committed towards becoming the new leader of this new genre born just in the last decade. We are determined in capturing the word spiritual sci-fi in the minds of readers all over the world. Literature in every genre: epic poetry, lyrical poetry, novels, kid's books, short stories, and screenplays have now been written in this new genre.

We also welcome all followers in this new genre. We salute leaders in the older high-concept genres like Star Wars and Harry Potter who have helped pave the way for this new hybrid genre. But we are the real thing when it comes to spiritual sci-fi and our books all have a unique identity as they now start to spread across the planet mirroring along the way its emerging global mind. We have complete faith in our vision.

Seeing both Macro and Micro Histories from a Distance:

• The Novelty and Leadership Potential of Spiritual Sci-fi as Literary Genre and Cultural Transformer:

We at spiritual sci-fi feel that we are now filling a perception hole inside the earth's collective mind. A filling that's urgently needed today. We are filling this hole with a new genre in the right place and at the right time. We are contrarians going in the opposite direction of all established literary and publishing trends. We are also quite proud of this.

By filling a cultural hole and going against the established grain, we hope to awaken and delight many people on this shrinking planet. A shrinking planet that is also expanding the minds of it worried inhabitants sometimes in a painful, but playful way. We know have something fresh for the global media to chew on. We also have faith in this vision and in the creations that have come out of it. It's a gut-feeling and it feels good to be first, even if we're not completely sure where we are heading. We're the first on this ski-slope and it's a truely great feeling.

• The fusing and Mirroring of both Planet and its Artistic Secretions:

We have a long-term commitment to spiritual sci-fi. Regular sci-fi in the mind of the public involves UFOs and mysterious technology, we have re-wired this image with new concepts from spiritual literature such as powerful, but all loving gurus, the idea of cosmic pilgrimage, and also the necessity of meditation.

Two different kinds of reader are now starting to over-lap as New Age and high-tech ideas begin to fuse and form a new high concept genre, one with great global appeal. The whole formation and translation process is merely a reflection of the planet's own evolution. Nothing, more, nothing less. This discovery occurred for me in 1994 with my literary breakthrough. But the positioning breakthrough occurred just last year.

This symbiotic relationship between the planet and its inhabitants has occurred in a world of complex and noisy change. Making it hard to see at times, the simple truth. Spiritual sci-fi is a fusing of saintly and alien perspectives on a daily practical basis. What was once on the edge will soon be in the mainstream; and just in time too. We are in a unique position now to help bring this forth and we also know it will have broad appeal.

• The Feedback Cycle between the Planetary Mind and its Artistic Mirrors:

We are focusing on the word spiritual sci-fi in order to magnify the entire genre itself. Combining the spiritual and the high-tech paths in a cool way is a Finberg specialty. We are staking a claim now inside the vast global mind and we encourage others to follow us. We are offering readers something totally different. We have started out as rebels and we hope to become leaders quite soon. We are trying to keep things simple in an increasingly complex and global environment. We welcome both kids who need easy reading and lovers of the abstract arts and more difficult reading.

It always takes time for a new kind of cultural focus to take hold and also for a new genre to be then fully understood. Also for word of mouth to spread. So we welcome now all ages and all generations, all races and all religions. Also both genders.

We are simply just a feedback device for our evolving planet. Creating a new literary market with vast new multi-media possibilities has really been only a by-product of this creative process. For the more we work on our exciting vision, the more we have a sense of its total inevitability. That it's a vision whose time has come and that it will simply not fail. Our focus then is predicting today where the future is going to be and as a consequence this focus is now also helping to make it happen.