SF Gospel

Focus on the Family vs. real dystopias

The latest Republican attempt at scaremongering John McCain into the White House co-opts the form of science fiction. Last week Focus on the Family issued a 16-page piece of dystopian fiction, a letter from "A Christian from 2012" detailing society's descent into chaos following 4 years of an Obama presidency. From terrorist attacks the end of the Boy Scouts, FotF's letter paints a ludicrous picture with the specific intention of getting young evangelicals, many of whom support Obama, to change their votes. The letter is a ham-fisted attempt at the genre of dystopian SF—a genre that has been pretty solidly left-wing since its inception. Here are just a few liberal dystopias that are both more plausible and better-written than the 2012 letter.

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler

Following a broad economic collapse caused by a laissez-faire government (sound familiar?), America has descended into total anarchy. The first volume depicts some of the chaos—the middle class living in walled forts; roving gangs of anarchists. In the second volume, a reactionary movement called Christian America promises a return to order—one that requires concentration camps for "heathens" like the novel's agrarian protagonists. Maybe it's just me, but I find it much easier to believe Christian America as an heir of Focus on the Family than the 2012 letter's world as an heir of Obama.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

In Huxley's definitive dystopia, capitalism is no longer just an economic system, it's an object of worship (with Henry Ford standing in for God). In 1958, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited, a book of essays that showed further pessimism about the world's regression to assembly-line living

The prophecies I made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would... In the West, it is true, individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of freedom. But even in those countries that have a tradition of democratic government, this freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane.

V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

I don't think I can say anything better than what Alan Moore wrote in his 1988 introduction to this story:

Naiveté can also be detected in my supposition that it would take something as melodramatic as a near-miss nuclear conflict to nudge England towards fascism... It's 1988 now. Margaret Thatcher is entering her third term of office and talking confidently of an unbroken Conservative leadership well into the next century... The tabloid press are circulating the idea of concentration camps for persons with AIDS. The new riot police wear black visors, as do their horses, and their vans have rotating video cameras mounted on top. The government has expressed a desire to eradicate homosexuality, even as an abstract concept, and one can only speculate as to which minority will be the next legislated against. I'm thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It's cold and it's mean spirited and I don't like it here anymore.

Thankfully Thatcher's prediction of permanent Conservative leadership didn't come true, and Alan Moore still lives in Northampton. The 2006 film version wisely does away with the nuclear war angle, instead depicting England's adoption of a Bush-style government as the cause of all the trouble.

Southland Tales, written and directed by Richard Kelly

In Richard Kelly's whacked-out apocalypse, the fate of the world depends on the result of a presidential election. Southland Tales isn't afraid to get specific in naming the affiliations of its bogeymen: Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Bobby Frost is the head of US-Ident, the military contractor that won the task of strengthening and streamlining the surveillance state. In this film, Republican victory means solidifying the bond between evil government and evil business, which somehow opens a black hole above Los Angeles. Or something. It's hard to follow, but one thing is clear: Richard Kelly doesn't like Republicans.

The Tower, by the Legendary Pink Dots

British artists really didn't like Margaret Thatcher, did they? The Tower is a tour-de-force concept album about the bleak direction in which the Conservatives were leading the country. Against a synth-driven background of demented circus music, the lyrics are a litany of brutality, repression, and intolerance. Unlike Alan Moore, the Dots weren't sticking around to see how things turned out; they packed their bags and moved to the Netherlands soon after the album was released. The final song on the album, "Tower Five," is a less-than-fond farewell: "You wanted easy answers / You want a tidy end / Don't you know you've got a lot to answer for? / You wanted shining heroes. / You wanted sparkling knights / BUT THEY'RE GONE. / You chose your grave. / Lie there." [Lyrics and samples here.]

Children of Men, co-written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Children of Men's Britain has become a police state as a result of anti-terrorist and anti-immigrant paranoia. As in the film version of V For Vendetta, it's a direct result of adopting George W. Bush-style policies, and the film is rife with images intended to remind us of American policy: Guantanamo-style detainees held in cages, media obsession with "illegal immigrants," and, most chillingly, the words "Homeland Security" above the entrance to a bleak refugee camp.

The Book of Revelation, by John of Patmos

As I've long argued, John's Apocalypse is a revolutionary book that's been co-opted, in recent years, by reactionaries. Its most moving passage describes the destruction of a Babylon, depicted in Rev. 18 as a proto-capitalist dystopia: "The merchants of these wares, who gained wealth from her, will stand far off, in fear of her torment, weeping and mourning aloud, 'Alas, alas, the great city, clothed in fine linen, in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold, with jewels, and with pearls! For in one hour all this wealth has been laid waste!'" (Rev 18:15-17) How's that for a religious picture of a world on the brink of collapse?

Post for Sojourners: "Why does God need a starship?"

In the latest issue of the liberal Christian magazine Sojourners, Rose Marie Berger interviews Mary Doria Russell, author of The Sparrow, and Elizabeth Palmberg offers up a list of recent SF novels with spiritual themes. (Don't get scared by the login screen; both articles are available after free registration). The Sparrow, the tragic story of a Jesuit mission to establish contact with an alien society, is probably one of my favorite books, and the interview offers some great insight into Russell's own spiritual journey, of which the novel was an important part. 

In conjunction with these features, Sojourners blog God's Politics has some additional content on religion and SF, and some of it is written by me. In a short post entitled "Why does God need a starship?", I talk about what the speculative nature of SF means for the genre's discussions of religion: 

Most SF about religion questions and reinterprets spiritual matters, seeking new interpretations of old ideas. The goal of the genre in general is to build the future, to envision possible worlds to help us deal with imminent changes in the real world. That often means leaving behind theories that no longer fit reality, and this puts the genre in opposition to traditionalism and fundamentalism: It’s hard to imagine the religion of the future if you’re bound to the past.

There's also an additional list of classic works of SF with religious themes, to which I made a brief contribution. 

Why Heroes isn't good now, wasn't good before, and will never be good in the future

There's been much online hand-wringing in the last year and a half over where Heroes went wrong. Viewers who loved the first season felt betrayed by the second, and downright insulted by the opening of the third. I came to Heroes late, watching the entire first season over the course of a week or two before the second began. As such, I didn't see the division between the first two seasons so sharply, but I did see all of the problems the show's fans attributed to the second season—glacial pacing, lack of focus—in the first. I once heard someone describe Heroes, rather accurately, as "Watchmen as written by Chris Claremont." To some people that might sound like windsurfing in Heaven on a giant ice cream cone, but I think it sums up much of what's wrong with the series: overwrought soap opera trying to fill the shoes of an epic.

Here's what's wrong with Heroes: it's grossly misnamed. The characters never do anything heroic. The title of the third season, "Villains," only serves to emphasize this fact. The bad guys in the Heroes universe are obvious: they do things like eat people's brains. Flashes to a possible future show the supposed good guys doing bad things, but this really just highlights the fact that they don't spend any time at all doing good deeds. Clare saved somebody from a fire once, but other than that the "heroes" mostly do lots of aimless running around trying to stop vast conspiracies. Vast conspiracies have their place, but would it kill them to catch a mugger from time to time? For all of its many (many, many) problems, Smallville at least knows to have Clark Kent occasionally save people from car crashes and stop bursting dams. But the characters on Heroes all feel exceptionally self-absorbed, or at least clique-absorbed: they only care about what the show's other characters do, and not about the world around them. For all the big talk about "saving the world," the show is really just about saving the cheerleader. Add to the mix new "villains" like Daphne, who's basically just doing a job, and visions of a milquetoasty future for arch-brain-eater Sylar (the show's most interesting character), and the "heroes" start to look altogether unheroic. The show tries desperately to link the characters to a bigger picture, but they always come out seeming like they only care about themselves. The moral universe Heroes set up from day one is a murky one, and that means it's hard to care about anybody turning evil—they were already halfway there to begin with.

The real problem with Heroes is tied in with its pacing. The characters spent the entire first season, and part of the second, figuring out that they had powers; by the second season much of the cast still hadn't met each other. That's over 20 hours of story time spent on the bare beginnings of an origin story. The entire show, three years in, still feels like an origin story, and it's beginning to look like it will always feel like one. The problem is that origin stories need to end so that the real story can get going. Heroes feels like the middle part of Spider-Man's origin story, when he's trying to become a TV star. There's no sense of a moral imperative driving the characters, no why behind their choices of how to use their powers, and it doesn't look like that's going to be changed by a "With great power..." moment. The characters feel half-written, waiting for a transformational moment that will never come. Until that happens—and it looks like it probably won't—Heroes can never be a good show. The characters are stuck in an ethical limbo, which is no place for so-called heroes to be.

Rocking the Kaʿbah: "The Flowers of Nicosia" and Heavy Metal Islam

The December 2008 issue of Asimov's features "The Flowers of Nicosia," a lengthy novella by David Ira Cleary. It's the story of Downtown Dharma, a Nirvana-idolizing band that decides to play in Muslim countries to "heal Islam." Dennis, the group's frontman, explains:

I could see Downtown Dharma, engaging some hostile fundies, guys hell-bent on blowing up the band, the club, any guy without a beard or woman without a bhurka, and we able to reach their gentle natures, the human part unsullied by the raging mullahs and the oil-sheik dictators. All through our music. Get 'em to fizzle-out their fuses, break their timers, love their neighbors whether they were Jew or Jain, Christian or Kurd.

When they're unable to get visas to the places they really want to play—Iran, Egypt, Lebanon—they settle on Cyprus, which serves as a metaphor for the complexity of both West and East. Against the backdrop of Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, the band's goals begin to seem naïve, particularly when terrorist biological attacks put their lives in danger. But there's also something refreshing in their optimism, and they're able to reach at least a few hearts before their tour is through. The story has some problems, mostly musical—the band idolizes early-90's grunge a bit too much, and the lyrics that Cleary writes for them are on the underwhelming side. It would have been better for more ambiguity in the specifics of the music; I'd have been more convinced of Downtown Dharma's abilities to "heal Islam" if their words and sounds were implied rather than spelled out. The story includes its own criticism, however, after the group plays a cover of the Stone Temple Pilots' "Flies in the Vaseline":

The thought of a bunch of flies, trapped in a goo that doesn't even have the benefits of something sweet like honey, seemed a perfect metaphor for the mindless inertia of terrorism, both for its perpetrators and its victims. The audience clapped politely. They didn't get the message. so I talked, explained the metaphor, saying how fundies of any creed were no wiser than flies, how teh audience in its willingness to rock on nights like this showed the kind of open-mindedness and tolerance that no fly or fundie could ever know... I would probably have kept yakking, but Vlad [the bassist] came up to me and said, "You're losing them with this fucking sermon. Make music."

While reading the story, I was skeptical about the ability of a group of Western rock stars to make any changes, large or small, in Muslim society. But right after reading the story I dug into a non-fiction work on a similar topic—Heavy Metal Islam, a new book by Middle East scholar (and metal fan) Mark LeVine. The book explores the indigenous metal subcultures of Morocco, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and Pakistan, finding in each a powerful youth culture. LeVine's portrait of these six scenes underscores the complexity of Muslim culture—a culture that the Western media paints in black-and-white. LeVine states of his subjects:

Their imagination and openness to the world, and the courage of their convictions, remind us that Muslim and Western cultures are more heterogeneous, complex, and ultimately alike than the peddlers of the clash of civilizations, the war on terror, and unending jihad would have us believe.

In "The Flowers of Nicosia," we get the sense that the members of Downtown Dharma didn't have a very clear picture of what Muslim culture and society were like when they hatched their plan to deploy as nonviolent warriors against fundamentalism. When they finally play in Cyprus they see how much more complicated the truth is than the limited picture they had been shown. Nonetheless, LeVine's book shows that music does have the power to break down boundaries. In the final paragraph of his chapter on Israel and Palestine, he expresses his hope that a musical confluence between Jewish and Palestinian metal and hip-hop groups can help to demolish the boundaries that drive their society apart:

If only I could get Saz, Dam, Orphaned Land, Abeer, Palestinian Rapperz, Ramallah Underground, Useless ID, Betzefer, Ghidian, Sara, and Khalas to do a show together—set up a stage on both sides of the Wall, crank up the amps and turntables, and do a hard-core, oriental-tinged, rap-metal version of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" so loud that it would literally blow the Wall down, the way Joshua had done a few millennia before... Maybe ten bands and 100,000 watts could change the face of Israel/Palestine where ten years of failed negotiations and ten times as long of violence could not.

After reading that passage, suddenly Downtown Dharma didn't seem quite so naïve anymore. They were expressing an ancient hope—the idea that music can bring us together despite our culture's best efforts to drive us apart.

Don't let the devil turn you into a bat.

My latest post on Religion Dispatches a quick one about some odd posters that have been turning up in major metropolitan areas lately that say things like this: 

Pray in mind a few minut a day
Go church
Mary Mary Mary beautiful gorgeous Mary
The Devil makes bats of 2 million people children every year. In America
You must keep the Ten Commandments
Listen Christ Radio 56 AM and Christ will protect yous

While you're there, check out the current lead article, "The Kids are Religious Right," about how the youth pro-life movement uses punk to spread its message. It's not only a great article, it's by Justin Philpot, who is a good friend of mine. It's based on his Masters' thesis, so you know it's smart. 

Analog, December 2009: Tao and Fate

The December issue of Analog continues Robert J. Sawyer's Wake, a story about the emerging consciousness of the Internet, among other things. The way the net develops intelligence—mild spoiler warning—involves the Chinese government briefly blocking all incoming and outgoing electronic communications to cover up a major human rights violation. The sudden division from one into two leads the net to realize its self-ness—a process which, as I mentioned last time, Sawyer compares to Helen Keller's discovery of the world around her. A brief passage in the second installment illustrates the Internet's growing sentience as it ponders, through a briefly-available connection opened by a Chinese hacker, the difference between self and other:

One plus one equals two.
Two plus one equals three.
It was a start, a beginning.
But no sooner had we reached this conclusion than the connection between us was severed again. I wanted it back, I willed it to return, but it remained—
Broken.
Severed.
The connection cut off.
I had been larger.
and now I was smaller. 

The passage, and Wake's method of illustrating the development of this emergent consciousness in general, evokes the oblique creation story in the chapter of the Tao Te Ching:

The Tao gives birth to One.
One gives birth to Two.
Two gives birth to Three.
Three gives birth to all things.

It's just one more in the novel's growing list of parallels to the development of a worldwide AI. [And this installment adds a bonus parallel involving self-aware apes!] The story adds philosophical complexity with every chapter, which is hardly a surprise from Sawyer.

This issue of Analog also includes "Where Away You Fall" by Jason Sanford, which ponders the concepts of free will and destiny. The story's protagonist, Dusty, is a member of the Seekers, a religious sect that believes "that salvation lay in living simply and reaching one's God-given destiny." The group believes that every human life has a single, all-fulfilling purpose. Every individual's purpose is a secret known only to the believer and his or her pastor—which gives the Seekers' pastors a dangerous amount of power. Seekers are Luddites who frequently carry out terrorist attacks to slow the progress of technology, so it's particularly odd that Dusty's pastor tells her that her destiny is to go to outer space. The Seekers come across in a poor light, but the story's real target is the concept of a single, reductionist purpose to any human life. I don't think it's giving anything away to say that free will wins out over destiny in Sanford's tale.

And last-but-first, the issue opens with an editorial by Stanley J. Schmidt on moral relativism and religion. I don't have terribly much to say about it at the moment, but there's a brief discussion of it on the Analog forum here.

Worst Enemies, False Memories, Free Will

Last night NBC premiered My Own Worst Enemy, an SF-flavored action series starring Christian Slater as Henry Spivey*, a suburban nebbish who learns he's been sharing his body with Edward Albright, a government assassin. In fact, his entire life is a fabrication—he's an artificial persona, complete with a lifetime of false memories, designed to protect his violent counterpart. The first episode was pretty good, despite some problematic logic—for instance, when Edward's handlers learn that Henry has woken up in the middle of a mission and botched an assassination, why would they let him wander around in Edward's life for a few days rather than immediately erase his memories? And I can't help but think that it would make a great movie, but will have difficulties sustaining itself as a series. (Come to think of it, a very similar concept did make a pretty good movie in Cypher, from Cube director Vincenzo Natali.)

Nevertheless, the first episode was a pretty solid execution of an interesting concept. There's a bit of free-will talk: Edward's stated reason for giving his life up for a black-ops experiment is that "to prove the existence of free will, a person must do a thing he does not want to do." But the real meat of the free-will issue involves Henry, not Edward. He's an artificial person, but he continues to think of his life as real even when the veil has been lifted. (He has been living it for 19 years by the time the series begins, after all.) It's similar to the question of sentient AIs like Star Trek's Data. Henry may not be a synthetic android, but he's still a sort of artificial intelligence, and if My Own Worst Enemy's creators are smart, future episodes will thoroughly explore the self-and-soul can of worms that the series' concept opens up. 

Speaking of dark sides and doppelgangers, it seems there's another Gabriel McKee out there in the world, and he's about as far from me as he could get. I wasn't going to mention this because I don't really want to drive any traffic to his site, but when I saw his post about "Manhattan liberals" this Brooklyn progressive had to say something. Am I part of a political conspiracy? Does my darkside awake in the wee hours to blog about the evils of my own opinions and beliefs? Or do all bloggers share their names with doppelgangers and evil twins who are their polar opposites? In any event, consider this a disambiguation: I am most assuredly not the author of "conservative008.blogspot.com," and you can pretty safely assume that I disagree with everything you might read there.

*5 bonus Black Lodge Points if you noticed that Henry's wife is played by Shelly from Twin Peaks!

Update: Here's the full pilot episode, courtesy of the always-amazing Hulu.

Have some links

Here are some links! These aren't the newest; hopefully they're not stale. 

The October issue of the Internet Review of Science Fiction includes an essay by Charles Edric Co entitled "Finding God in Science." It's mostly a review of James Rollins' Black Order,the plot of which centers on the efficacy of prayer (on the quantum level, at that). There's also a long essay by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (who recently reviewed the Gospel According to Science Fiction) on Robert Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles, which satirizes religion and atheism alike, and Niall Harrison's fairly in-depth review of Neal Stephenson's Anathem. (I really, really need to read that book, and I will be buying a copy very soon. But dang, Neal Stephenson—does everything gotta be 800+ pages with you?)

Two recent Mind Meld posts at SF Signal contained material of interest. A couple weeks ago they asked Charles Stross, Lou Anders, and others, "As a reader, can you enjoy a story that is pushing an opposed viewpoint from one that you hold (religion/politics)?" One of the unspoken specifics, which several of the responses made explicit, was Orson Scott Card, whose homophobia has become a bigger barrier to many of his readers than his Mormonism ever was. More recently, they asked "What's your favorite sub-genre of science fiction and/or fantasy?" James McGrath (of Exploring Our Matrix) answered "theological science fiction." Is that its own sub-genre yet? He makes a good case, and gives some nice examples you'd do well to check out.

Full-Contact Christianity recently offered up a very different kind of theological SF in a post entitled "Theological Science Fiction and the Fall of Satan." The post isn't really about SF at all, but rather about theological speculation. Tim Nichols, the blog's author, tells a "theological science fiction story" based on Genesis, giving some theories to fill in Scriptural story gaps. TIt's a good illustration of the kind of interpretive process that goes into any reading of scripture, though Nichols, who seems a bit on the conservative side, probably wouldn't characterize it quite that way. I wonder if he's aware of the Qur'anic story of Satan (Iblis)? It's very similar to the "theological science fiction story" he tells...