d’un homme qui a perdu tout ce qu’il aimait et qui, depuis, n’est plus tout à fait de ce monde. - David Brin

Sanity is viewed as a matter of getting these fluid portions of the self to play well together, without letting them become rigid or too well defined. In human beings, this is best achieved through interaction with other minds — other people — beyond the self. Without the push-back of external beings — outside communities and objective events — the subjective self can get lost in solipsism or fractured delusion.

As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the 'eternal verities' on which literature graduates base their doctoral dissertations. Literature departments were uncomfortable with that. But things change.

And so the fighting retreat continues. Each time science advances, a new bastion forms…a new line, defining some remnant territory to be kept forever holy, mystical, and vague. Safe from profane hands. Until the next scientific advance, that is.