So the first archetype-figure is one I'm calling the god of Virtue (for lack of a better name). This is the god of the selfless universal love of all sentient beings -- both a kind of utilitarian idea of morality where all that ultimately matters is relieving suffering and promoting happiness, and the willingness to make any personal sacrifice necessary to bring about the universal good. Ey represents the utter refusal to participate in any system of exploitation or to live happily at the expense of others. Ey is the one who walks away from Omelas -- who actually obeys Jesus' command to sell everything you have and give to the poor. Ey stands for a pure and  perfect ideal of morality that no one can realistically live up to, yet which is difficult to logically refute as the only really correct and moral way to live.

Contrasting with that is the god of Beauty, who pretty much represents all the other stuff human beings care about -- everything that can't easily be fitted into a rigid utilitarian idea of morality, like art and culture and personal love and so on. Not that any of these things are strictly anti-utilitarian: of course anything that makes humans happier has some value to the god of Virtue; but Beauty values them all for their own sake, irrespective of any utilitarian calculus.

Like -- the god of Beauty wholeheartedly admires the magnificence of ancient monuments like the Pyramids and shit, while the god of Virtue asks if that magnificence was really worth all the slave labor and exploitation that went into building them. The god of Beauty loves St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel and is glad they exist, while the god of Virtue can only think of all the poor the church could have fed and clothed with that money instead.

I also associate this deity with the beauty of Nature in all of its savagery. Ey's the part of you that admires the graceful strength of the wolf as it leaps upon its prey -- while Virtue can only weep for the deer as it's viciously torn apart. This is Mother Nature -- a cruel mother who slaughters her own children by the billions for the sake of perfecting her art.

Ey's the part of you that thinks life might just be too boring without a little bit of violence and suffering.

Ey's also the part that values the special loyalty and care you show toward those you love -- while to Virtue all people have equal value and it's selfish to privilege some over others for reasons like personal affection or blood relationship. Perfect virtue requires prioritizing the universal good over the personal good of your own tribe or family.

Finally there's the third figure, the god of Truth -- the most frightening of the three, representing all the unpleasant truths that people don't like to acknowledge. Like the fact that we're all going to die, that life has no real meaning or purpose, and that when it comes down to it neither the ideals of Virtue nor Beauty actually hold any objective value or truth but are just meaningless byproducts of the evolutionary forces that happened to shape the human mind. Our sense of beauty evolved to help us identify things useful to our survival; and our supposed "virtuous" or altruistic acts are all unconsciously motivated by our own self-interest in one way or another. And even if our striving for goodness were real, the amount of suffering in the world is such that realistically we'll never be able to make a meaningful dent in it no matter how hard we try.

This god sees the world as it truly is -- governed by the cold and ruthless logic of physical law and natural selection, a rigid mathematical construct without the faintest gleam of life or color. Here there is no beauty, no feeling, no hope. I call this entity the god of Truth because intellectually I think its bleak outlook is the closest to objective reality of the three -- but you can't fully buy into it without wanting to kill yourself. Hence the necessity of the other two worldview-archetypes.

New fiction books read: 48

The Adventures of Solar Pons by August Derleth

System Collapse by Martha Wells

Transpecial by Jennifer R. Povey

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick

A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias - For people who like alien worldbuilding, this is a fun book about aquatic aliens who live in a lightless environment, featuring a detailed description of how an underwater civilization might work (what kinds of technology they would have etc) where they also rely primarily on hearing (both passive listening and echolocation) instead of sight to perceive their surroundings.

Sherlock Holmes: The Legacy of Deeds by Nick Kymes

The Truth and Other Stories by Stanisław Lem - This is a posthumous collection of some of his work that hadn't previously been translated into English. Given that I might have expected these stories to be among his lesser ones, but there were several in here that I actually really liked. Some of them seem to be pretty early uses of concepts that later became commonplace in SF; for example there's one story dealing with the idea of whole universes, including sentient lifeforms, that are actually part of a massive computer simulation. This story was originally published in 1963, and after googling around a bit the earliest other story I can find references to online that depicts a fully computer-simulated reality like that is a novel called Simulacron-3 from 1964 (which is named in various places as the earliest known use of the trope). So I guess Lem was ahead of the curve on that one. Also I have to say that I love the title they gave this collection -- while literally referring to one of the stories in it called "The Truth", it has a double meaning that fits the volume well, and I think Lem would have liked it.

Mother of Demons by Eric Flint

Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Paths of Disharmony by Dayton Ward

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

Rocannon's World by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

Strange Relations by Philip José Farmer

My Friend the Murderer and other Mysteries and Adventures by Arthur Conan Doyle - Some of his early work, before he did the Holmes stories. Most of them are not that interesting but I thought "Selecting a Ghost", a spoof on gothic fiction, was pretty funny.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Selections From Strangers in the Universe by Clifford D. Simak

Observations by Gaslight by Lindsay Faye

Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov

The Last Day of a Condemned Man by Victor Hugo

Ambulance Ship by James White

Larklight by Philip Reeve

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

Tales of Science and Sorcery by Clark Ashton Smith

Gaslight Ghouls: Uneasy Tales of Sherlock Holmes, Monsters and Madmen, Ed. J.R. Campbell

Chanur Saga by C.J. Cherryh, books 1-3

Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein

The Gods of Pegāna by Lord Dunsany

The Mask of Cthulhu by August Derleth

Eifelheim by Michael Flynn

A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick

The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Eden by Stanisław Lem

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin

Murder and Magic by Randall Garrett

Exordia by Seth Dickinson

Sleep and the Soul by Greg Egan

Torin trilogy by Cherry Wilder, books 1 & 2

All Hallows' Eve by Charles Williams - I have to say I understand why this guy isn't as well-known as his pals Tolkien and Lewis. He has some interesting ideas but seems incapable of turning them into a story that's actually interesting to read.

Skyward series by Brandon Sanderson, books 1 & 2

New nonfiction books read: 5 (lol)

The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

Buddhisms: An Introduction by John S. Strong

Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition (only kind of a "new" read since I had read the original edition)

The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition by Kristin Andrews

Rereads: 10

Into the Land of the Unicorns by Bruce Coville

Frightful's Mountain by Jean Craighead George

The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford

The Music of Dolphins by Karen Hesse

Distress by Greg Egan

Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler

Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

Their Majesties' Bucketeers by L. Neil Smith

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg

A combination of books from my childhood bookshelf that I'm slowly reading through and deciding which ones to keep and which to donate, and books that I reread while making that "what SF gender are you" quiz lol.

Ancient texts read: 5

The Gospel of Truth

2 Enoch

The Gospel of Mary

Tao Te Ching

The complete works of Lucian of Samosata

Total: 68 -- a pretty average year for me.

Oldest thing read:

Tao Te Ching (c. 400 BC)

Newest:

Exordia (Jan 2024) - I haven't read a single thing published in 2025 yet lol.