SF Gospel

Lost in the Garden

Over at God Spam, Gwynne wonders if Lost's mysterious Island might, in fact, be the Garden of Eden.

"Everyone who had been looking for something in Australia found it on the island: Kate wanted to escape the law, Hurley wanted to be rid of his money, Locke wanted to learn his true strength in the wilderness, Michael wanted more time with Walt, Sun wanted Jin's baby, Sawyer wanted to kill the man who destroyed his mother, and so forth . . . So if that's the case, could the island actually be paradise?"

Puts the thrice-debunked Purgatory theory in an interesting light, doesn't it?

Beliefnet's "10 Greatest Spiritual Characters in Science Fiction"

Beliefnet's Idol Chatter has listed the 10 Greatest Spiritual Characters in Science Fiction [film & television]. Kudos for Book, Locke, and Starbuck—though there are a few other Battlestar Galactica characters that would fit in just as well.

March and April catch-up

So how long does it take to get caught up on blog reading after having a baby? About 10 weeks, apparently. Some by-now-probably-a-little-out-of-date links:

• Escape Pod has posted a podcast reading of Robert Silverberg's "Schwartz Between the Galaxies." This story about an anthropologist who goes a little nuts after realizing that human culture has become homogenous was very, very close to getting on the honorable mention list of The 10 Best Science Fiction Stories About Religion; I ultimately left it off because it's got too much else going on to justifiably say it's "about religion" in particular. But it's still an excellent story, so you should listen to it. [Once you have, check out my discussion of it in chapter 8 of The Gospel According to Science Fiction.]
  
• SF Site reviews Michael Flynn's Eifelheim, and I no longer feel so bad about taking too long to review things after they come out.
  
• The Sucka MC Delusion: The Sci Fi Catholic points us to a pretty darned hilarious animation of Richard Dawkins rapping.
  
• Have you looked at Islam and Science Fiction yet? It's off to a pretty good start, though I'm hoping for more depth (and better proofreading!) in the site's future.
  
• It took a few days to get rolling, but there was some pretty interesting discussion following SF Signal's Mind Meld post on whether or not SF is antithetical to religion, including some comments on Mormon SF, fundamentalism, and epistemology.
  
• Time Immortal offers up a nice, long post on religion on Battlestar Galactica, in dialog with James McGrath's thoughts on the topic.
  
• Kudos to Netflix for having all 5 seasons of Quantum Leap available streaming (when the last season isn't even out on DVD yet, no less). Curses to same for taking down Red Dwarf when I was halfway through series 3.
  
• My friend Jacob Chabot, creator of the Mighty Skullboy Army, has been nominated for an Eisner Award. Here's hoping he has better luck with awards than he does at Heroclix. Skullboy is wonderful fun, and if you have not yet read it, you should.
  
• What I'm excited about this week: My recent purchase of a couple hundred SF magazines from the '50s and '60s.
  

Adam Roberts' Land of the Headless

Not many books see their protagonist beheaded in the first chapter. But that's precisely what happens at the beginning of Adam Roberts' Land of the Headless. Jon Cavala is a poet who lives on a far-future colony world that's governed by a strict theocracy. There are only three crimes on Pluse: murder, adultery, and blasphemy. The punishment is the same for all three: the perpetrator is beheaded and immediately fitted with a life-support computer on his neck-stump, then released back into society as a walking warning to others. The conventional wisdom on this world is that this form of beheading is a scripturally-mandated* punishment rendered humane by technology. Before the neck-stump "ordinators," the headless were sentenced to death as well as decapitation; now they're allowed to carry on with their lives once they've paid their debt to society.

The headless form an oppressed underclass on Pluse. They suffer under pretty severe discrimination, and have few options other than serving as cannon fodder in one of the world's many wars. Land of the Headless becomes a sort of bleakly comic picaresque as Cavala embarks on a quest through this dystopian landscape to be reunited with his former lover (on whose behalf he suffered his punishment), enduring numerous trials and misadventures along the way. In terms of its treatment of religion, Land of the Headless reminded me of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. On the one hand, both novels paint a dark picture of religious tyranny, showing the tragic consequences of following the letter at the expense of the spirit. But both show a silver lining as well: the "Underground Femaleroad" of Handmaid's Tale is operated by Quakers, and Land of the Headless also has some positive religious figures, if you look closely enough. Throughout the novel we see churches and charities devoted to showing compassion to the victims of Pluse's cruel justice. It's still highly critical of religion—those charities aren't out to change the system, just to clean up the mess it leaves—but it's always nice in stories like this to see some indication that the author sees light at the end of ultraconservative religion's tunnel.

*What scripture mandates decapitation is never explicitly stated.

All-Star Superman #10: Kal-El so loved the world...

Superman has always been like a Greek god, and a big part of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman has been an exploration of his role as a deified hero. In the sixth issue (reviewed by me here), visitors from the future described Superman's "Legendary Twelve Labors"—an obvious analog of Hercules' 12 labors. That superhero comics are modern myths is a fast-aging cliché, but Morrison has done an excellent job of reminding us of its truth.

With All-Star Superman #10, he throws us for an interesting loop. We all know that Superman is a Greek god—but now it's beginning to look like he's the Judeo-Christian God, too. As one of his labors, Superman has created a microverse in which he does not exist—a "World Without Superman"—and it looks suspiciously like ours. In fact, it contains the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, an unnamed Greek philosopher (possibly Plato?), and Joe Shuster—all exemplars of the human drive for divinity. In a world without Superman, we aspire to become him—in other words, if Superman didn't exist, we would have to invent him (and we did).

Some reviewers have complained that Morrison is treading ground he's already covered (particularly in Animal Man), but I don't think that's the case. In that story, the real-world creator meets his invented creation; here, the fictional creation actually inhabits a higher level of reality than our supposed real universe. The game is played with the same pieces, but the configuration is different enough to be truly new. Until now I've been thinking of All-Star Superman as an amusing but ultimately scattered series of one-off stories; now it's beginning to look like a major work in Morrison's oeuvre. His run is set to last only two more issues—here's hoping it ends with a cosmic bang rather than a New X-Men-style fizzle.

Also posted at Holy Heroes!!

...And Gaius Baltar is His Prophet: Battlestar Galactica 401

Religion once again takes center stage in the season 4 opener of Battlestar Galactica, and once again the quisling Gaius Baltar is at the middle of it. Baltar, who was the Cylon's puppet president on New Caprica, secretly converted to Six's monotheism back in the first season episode "The Hand of God." But since then he's been pretty tight-lipped about matters spiritual (with the exception of his self-flagellating prayers and his hallucinated conversations with his Cylon familiar, of course). He's breaking that silence in the aftermath of his trial—in the chaos of the Cylon attack that closed out season 3, a group of his followers spirited him away to an out-of-the-way cargo hold. The group—which seems to be mosty-if-not-entirely women—believe he's a prophet, and Baltar, sporting a rather messianic beard, isn't ashamed to play along.

When one of the women complains that her prayers to the gods of the humans' religion feel empty, Baltar invites her to become the second human monotheist:

"If you feel empty when you pray to Zeus or Poseidon or Aphrodite, it's because it is empty. It's a totally empty experience. They're not real. They've been promulgated by a ruling elite to stop you from learning the truth... There is only one God."

The scene is played for laughs, or as close to laughs as we get on BSG, because it's obvious Baltar is just trying to get into his disciple's pants (and he does). But he shows us a glimpse of his true, self-punishing spirituality later on when he utters a heartfelt prayer that God take his life rather than that of the sick child of one of his followers:

"How can you take him and let me live? After all I've done, really, if you want someone to suffer, take me. We both know I deserve it."

You don't need a spoiler warning to know what happens next: the prayer works, and the child lives. God does want Baltar to suffer, it seems, and that end is best served by allowing him to live and continue punishing himself.

Battlestar Galactica now has three prophets in its regular line-up: Baltar, Laura Roslin (whose brain tumor-induced visions guided the fleet closer to Earth), and Kara Thrace (whose apparently spontaneous visions may or may not get them the rest of the way there). The picture is complicated by the fact that the three are in opposition to one another, but that's one thing that the final season will reveal: which prophet's god(s) are right?

For more on Baltar's spiritual journey, see the previous entry: "Is there Cylon redemption for human sin?"

And now, not loving the alien: Asimov's, April/May 2008

First contact stories set in the Middle Ages have a lot to live up to following Michael F. Flynn's novel Eifelheim. Flynn's Hugo-nominated tale of a medieval German village's complex but compassionate response to a stranded band of extraterrestrials is set a high bar for any similar stories to tackle a similar idea. One wonders if S. P. Somtow, whose story "An Alien Heresy" appears in the April/May double issue of Asimov's, intended his story as a reaction to Eifelheim. Somtow's story—which describes a Catholic inquisitor's torture of a shipwrecked alien in they year 1440—has the air of an indignant reply. Flynn's recent work has made clear his affection for the Middle Ages, and his contributions to Analog last year were an eloquent rebuttal to the all-too-common caricature of the period as an age of barbarism and superstition. In that light, Somtow's story ups the ante to the level of the grotesque, giving a laundry list of the backwardness of the pre-Renaissance world and a pretty lengthy torture sequence. The priest at the center of this story isn't just close-minded and arrogant—he's also a self-flagellating hypocrite who forces his illegitimate son to become a castrato. (Got Medieval would just love this stuff.) The most unfortunate thing about Somtow's story is that it's basically been done before—Patricia Anthony's 1997 novel God's Fires, which treats the same basic idea at greater length, if not greater skill. I didn't care for Anthony's novel, which I found a bit tedious; Somtow's story, though I don't care for its general attitude, is a more entertaining read, and doesn't quite wear out its welcome. But if Somtow's intent is to rebut Flynn's more nuanced, better researched depiction of the medieval era, his story is a failure.

There's some excellent material in this issue of Asimov's, but for my money the real winner is Kristine Kathryn Rusch's novella "The Room of Lost Souls." This story reminded me of some of my favorite horror stories—the work of Thomas Ligotti, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, and, yes, even Event Horizon. The room of the title lurks at the heart of a mysterious space station built by an unknown intelligence; those unfortunate enough to venture into it disappear, die, or both. The station and the Room become an object of obsession and an almost religious devotion for those who search for the key to its mysteries. The characters in the story describe their quest as a pilgrimage: "something religious." It's got a fascinating air of menace that makes this double issue of Asimov's well worth picking up. An excerpt from "The Room of Lost Souls" is available here.

My review of Michael Flynn's Eifelheim is here, and my review of his medievalist alternate history tale "Quaestiones Super Caelo et Mundo" is here.

SF Signal's Mind Meld: "Is Science Fiction Antithetical to Religion?"

I was particularly pleased to be included in this week's Mind Meld question at SF Signal: "Is Science Fiction Antithetical to Religion?" My answer appears alongside a plethora of thoughtful contributions from the likes of Mike Resnick, Adam Roberts, Ben Bova, James Morrow, and D.G.D. Davidson. The rundown: basically, everybody answered "no," with greater and lesser degrees of qualification. Some thoughts on individual responses:

Lou Anders' last two paragraphs are a somewhat more clear expression of what I was trying to get it at the end of my response:

What I do think is antithetical to science fiction is fundamentalism and extreme orthodoxy. The scientific hypothesis, which is the basis of all legitimate science, and thus, the bedrock for fiction framed in a scientific mode of thinking, is predicated on the notion that observation informs, shapes and expands our comprehension of reality. If you believe that you already know everything there is to know... any fiction that flows from these presuppositions will be propaganda, not art. Theodore Sturgeon said that science fiction's job is to "ask the next question." As long as you believe that there IS a next question, and are prepared for any answer, even one you might not expect, then you are okay in my book... But tell me you've got a direct and irrefutable line on truth, and I'm afraid I'll stop reading. Personally, I'm not so concerned with final answers. For me, the real fun lies in finding more questions.

Ben Bova gives the most qualification to his "no" answer, but I think that qualification largely stems from a definition error. He states that

"Science tries to find the truth, knowing that we can never be satisfied that we hold the truth in our hands. Religion believes that it has the ultimate and complete truth, and anyone who disagrees should be shunned - or worse."

Where he says "religion," he really means "fundamentalism"—as in the quote from Anders above. Religion, in fact, does not inherently believe that it knows the full and complete truth. The best theology, from Plato to Augustine to Alfred North Whitehead, depends on speculation, thought experiments, and best-guesses; the biggest crime of fundamentalism is its theological laziness.

James Wallace Harris theorizes a historical progression of human thought in which religion leads to fiction which leads to philosophy which leads to science. He describes religion as "a descendent of fiction"—but given that progression, isn't science a descendent of fiction too?

Carl Vincent declares: "Science fiction has never been antithetical to my personal religious experience, it has always enhanced it." Hear, hear.

Adam Roberts—whose novel Land of the Headless I just finished reading and should be writing about soon—states that the thesis of his recent book The History of Science Fiction is "that science fiction as a genre has its roots precisely in the religious conflicts of the Reformation."

Andrew Wheeler cites Isaac Asimov as the clearest example of an author whose atheism is inextricable from his SF, citing the psychohistory of the Foundation sequence as his evidence. I tend to disagree, and I actually think Psychohistory is Asimov's most religious idea. In chapter 4 of The Gospel According to Science Fiction, I write about Hari Seldon as a God-analog who providentially guides the development of human civilization. Orson Scott Card agrees; in the introduction to his collection Mortal Gods he states that Foundation and its sequels "invariably affirm both the need for and the existence of a purposer."

John C. Wright turns in the longest and most complex response, which begins by contrasting H. G. Wells (an atheist author of soft SF) and Jules Verne (a Catholic author of hard SF). I take issue only with his statement that "Progressives... regard religion as one of those things to be left behind on the junk pile of history." Some of us progressives believe in progressive religion, too!

James Morrow gives the closest thing to a "yes" answer, though he kind of ends up answering a different question (about the overlap of SF and fantasy), so he's a bit tough to pin down.

Some books that I'm going to read as a direct result of this Mind Meld discussion include: Adam Roberts' The History of Science Fiction, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion by Brother Guy Consolmagno, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life by Steven Jay Gould, the forthcoming End of the Century by Chris Roberson, and Variable Star by Spider Robinson. Also, my desire to read Ian McDonald's Brasyl is now even bigger; I really need to get a copy of that.

A couple responses to the discussion:
Michael A. Burstein jokes that Mike Resnick "outed him" as a religious author: "Why do people in the science fiction community know that I'm religiously observant?"
Swan Tower rightly bemoans the absence of non-Western religions in the discussion.

Arthur C. Clarke's moral imperative of space exploration

The recent death of Arthur C. Clarke prompted me to read two of his early novels, Prelude to Space and Sands of Mars. Prelude, written in 1947, was Clarke's first novel, it's a fascinating artifact of pre-Space Race SF that's become a virtual alternate history novel. It tells the detailed story of the preparations for the first moon landing—in 1978. In a preface written in 1964, Clarke states that, in choosing this year,

"I was guilty of extreme wishful thinking. I did not really imagine that it would happen before the year 2000—but I wanted to feel that I had a sporting chance of seeing it. Today, of course, if I settled for 1978 I would be extremely unpopular around NASA Headquarters."

Throughout the story there is periodic infodump detailing a projected path of space research through the 30 years following the novel's composition, and the result gives both a fascinating picture of what might have been and interesting perspective on what actually was.

In Sands of Mars, a surprisingly metafictional story of an SF writer who is sent to a Mars colony as a press correspondent, there is some discussion of the value of yesterday's SF. Captain Norden, commander of the spaceship Ares, has few kind words for the likes of Jules Verne:

That's the trouble with all those old stories. Nothing is deader than yesterday's science-fiction—and Verne belongs to the day before yesterday... It may sometimes have a social value when it's written, but to the next generation it must always seem quaint and archaic."

Of course, the current value of Prelude to Space proves Norden wrong. It's a wonderful novel not because its science is so accurate, but because of its general optimism, the sheer exuberance of its approach to the future on whose brink it rested. In an era when the public attitude to space exploration is decidedly more lackluster, that excitement is remarkably refreshing.

Prelude to Space's most moving passage is a message from a more optimistic age: a powerful statement of interplanetary pacifism. Clarke presents a manifesto of peace and cooperation at the backbone of his ideal space age:

"There are some whose minds are so rooted in the past that they believe the political thinking of our ancestors can still be applied when we reach other worlds. They even talk of annexing the Moon in the name of this or that nation, forgetting that the crossing of space has required the united efforts of scientists from every country in the world.

There are no nationalities beyond the stratosphere: any worlds we may reach will be the common heritage of all men—unless other forms of life have already claimed them for their own.

We, who have striven to place humanity upon the road to the stars, make this solemn declaration, now and for the future:

We will take no frontiers into space."

This passage brought to mind the revised National Space Policy on which I wrote in November 2006. Clarke reminds us of the moral imperative that we must consider in our approach to the stars. His message was not simply for the era in which he wrote, but truly a declaration "now and for the future."

Arthur C. Clarke, Requiescat in Pace

As you no doubt know by now, Arthur C. Clarke has died. Clarke has long been a favorite author of mine—in fact, his Rendezvous With Rama was basically the first SF novel I read. I had read dozens of SF novels before, of course, from 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 to The Dispossessed, but Rama was the first novel I chose to read because it was SF, and it instantly turned me into a fan. On top of that, he wrote two of the best philosophical novels the genre has ever seen—Childhood's End and 2001. If you haven't read any of the three novels I've named, do yourself a favor and get started. He was a true visionary, and both the genre and the world at large will miss him.