The Bob Dylan Tambourine Software & Satori Support Services Consortium, Ltd.

Bishop, Michael. "The Bob Dylan Tambourine Software & Satori Support Services Consortium, Ltd." Interzone 12 (1985). The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery, eds. New York: Norton, 1993.

Story related to earlier mechanical and cybernetic god stories, except here, God is in the program, the software. In the world of the story, the "... Spiritual Revolution is comin' at us in the long shadow of the Computer Revolution," and a Bob Dylan avatar is the entrepreneurial guru of "a technology that's made the rudiments of religion user-friendly" and has made computer technology and addition to faith as "viable avenues to immortality." In the world Dylan brings, "We'll pray with our fingers on the keyboards of our Apples and IBMs. We'll go into our machines to go into ourselves, and it's the inside—not this [Brooks Brothers] suit or these [Gucci] shoes that God see's. My programs ... mediate between the pilgrim user and our truest concepts of Deity. Each one of us is a church, and we worship alone at our reflexive response altars" (Norton 622-25). The motto of the new age might be, "Nobody ought to hafta pirate God-consciousness" (626). (RDE, 16/02/95)