The remaking of a mythological text is something that is always prefaced with something else. That is, the process of reclaiming a preexisting text, by reimagining and rewriting it, is marked by a desire to capture something believed to have been missed in its previous tellings. So it is reasonable to ask what is that lost and desired object. By now, it is apparent that something is wrong in our culture. Worst of all, there is a breakdown in our ability to imagine what we might want the future to be.
Times are bad, no question about it.
So the appearance of a text that harks back to the past should come as no surprise. When times are good, the future seems rosy. When things are bad, we long for the past. Polyphilo or the Dark Forest Revisited, then, must be its author's attempt to locate meaning through just such a process of imagining. If it is true that the very rationality that has allowed us to make huge strides in bettering our physical circumstances has also resulted in an atrophy of our physical awareness of our world and a blindness to other possibilities for being in it, then Polyphilo is a just response.