Fractured but whole

 https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/9/9/279

With rare exceptions, this “time after” is a portrait of destruction—a fractured society, an untenable political situation, a destroyed Earth, an apocalypse delivered not by an angry god but by a short-sighted human race. And it was these themes as genre that became part of the oeuvre of Ursula K. Le Guin.

The real dystopia inherent in Le Guin’s “Newton’s Sleep,” however, is less the dangers of a post-apocalyptic Earth, and more the themes of scientism—the reductionist belief that only science can explicate reality—religious intolerance, and technology enabling a disconnection from nature. The break from nature in “Newton’s Sleep” is profound; it is difficult to imagine a greater separation from the Earth-bound natural world than the technological wizardry of an orbiting space station. But the deeper lesson of the separation seems to be that the wages of a worldview focused exclusively on viewing nature solely as the sum of rational laws is chaos. Even though the story is a quarter century old, the important commentary for our twenty-first century brains is not just the breakdown of the Enlightenment view of nature and religion, but that separation from the Earth is something we are physiologically and spiritually incapable of sustaining. As we will see, the naturalness of nature on Spes appears to go both ways, and the attempt to seal nature out of the human experience has dire psychological, physiological, and spiritual consequences.

The story is part of Le Guin’s short story collection, A Fisherman of an Inland Sea