SF Gospel

My choices for the Asimov's and Analog readers' polls

It's the end of the year, which means it's time for the annual Asimov's and Analog readers' polls. Below are my picks for the best stories of the year (with links to my reviews and analysis where applicable)!

Asimov's

Best Novella

1. The Erdmann Nexus by Nancy Kress (Oct/Nov)
2. The Room of Lost Souls by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Apr/May)
3. The Hob Carpet by Ian MacLeod (Jun)

Certainly the toughest category in both polls, there were many strong contenders for Asimov's best novella. MacLeod's oddity about a space-prince with a fetish for genetically engineered slaves was certainly unique, and Rusch's SF/horror tale had a profoundly creepy atmosphere. But the strong characters in Kress's story of an emergent hive mind in a nursing home wins my top score. Runners up: Robert Reed's "Truth" (Oct/Nov), Brian Stableford's "The Philosopher's Stone" (Jul), and David Ira Cleary's "The Flowers of Nicosia" (Dec).

Best Novelette

1. The Ray-Gun: A Love Story by James Alan Gardner (Feb)
2. Lester Young and the Jupiter's Moon Blues by Gord Sellar (Jul)
3. Vinegar Peace, or, the Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage by Michael Bishop (Jul)

Long titles rule the day here, apparently. This category was easiest to decide on—for the top slot, at least. Gardner's story of destiny, love, and alien artifacts was probably the best story I read last year, period. Sellar's story involves aliens who love jazz so much they hire musicians to accompany them on tours of the solar system while taking some very PKD time-and-space-altering drugs. Michael Bishop's story of a group home for parents whose children die in a near-future war resonates even more strongly when the recent death of the author's own son is taken into consideration. There were several other strong contenders in this category: Elizabeth Bear's Lovecraftian "Shoggoths in Bloom" (Mar), Ted Kosmatka's theology-of-physics-themed "Divining Light" (Aug), Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem's elegiac "In Concert" (Dec), and Neal Barrett, Jr.'s ecumenically postapocalyptic "Radio Station St. Jack" (Aug) would all be worthy winners. 

Best Short Story

1. This is How it Feels by Ian Creasey (Mar)
2. Inside the Box by Edward M. Lerner (Feb)
3. Dhuluma No More by Gord Sellar (Oct/Nov)

In Creasey's heartbreaking short, a man charged with DUI must live with the implanted memories of a young girl killed by a drunk driver. Lerner's story earns its place on the list by considering the POV of Schroedinger's poor hypothetical feline. Sellar's postcolonial tale of a iceberg-mining ship run by African emigrants reminded me of Mack Reynold's forgotten gem Blackman's Burden and its sequels. 

Best Poem

1. Deaths on Other Planets by Joanne Merriam (Apr/May)
2. War Gods by Bruce Holland Rogers (Jun)
3. Landscapes by Geoffrey A. Landis (Aug)

Bluntly speaking, I don't pay too much attention to the poetry in Asimov's, so I submit these choices without comment.

Best Cover

1. March (Tomasz Maronski)
2. February (Bob Eggleton)
3. July (Tor Lundvall)

I'm a sucker for a good surrealist landscape, and Maronski's cover for the March issue is a great one. I don't know what's happening in Eggleton's spacescape, but it looks amazing. And I always enjoy Lundvall's Chagall-ish covers, which are far more expressionistic than you might expect to see on an SF magazine. 

Analog

Best Novella

1. Test Signals by David Bartell (May)
2. Brittney's Labyrinth by Richard A. Lovett (Jun)
3. The Spacetime Pool by Catherine Asaro (Mar)

There's a bit of an imbalance in the Best Novella category for Analog. Because this magazine serializes novels (which Asimov's generally does not do), it publishes fewer novellas—by my count, only four this year. Thankfully both Bartell's "Test Signals," a mutation-themed mystery, and Lovett's "Brittney's Labyrinth," a sequel to his excellent "The Sands of Titan," were strong entries.

Best Novelette

1. Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink in the Can by Thomas R. Dulski (Apr)
2. The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya by H.G. Stratmann (Sept)
3. The Exoanthropic Principle by Carl Frederick (Jul/Aug)

A lot of long titles in the novelette category for Analog as well, it seems. Dulski's story is a bizarre mystery involving the Albigensian heresy, among other things. Stratmann's sequel to to last year's "The Paradise Project" features a distinctly positive representation of faith. Frederick's story earns points for exploring the religious implications of a universe a step or two up the ontological ladder from our own.

Best Short Story

1. The Meme Theorist by Robert R. Chase (Oct)
2. Where Away You Fall by Jason Sanford (Dec)
3. The Bookseller of Bastet by John G. Hemry (Mar)

Chase's story involves a scientist who begins having odd visionary experiences, including encounters with my favorite medieval anchoress, Julian of Norwich. Sanford's story is in intriguing exploration of the concepts of free will and destiny. And Hemry's elegy for forgotten information squeezes an amazing amount of complexity into fewer than four pages.

Best Fact Article

1. The 3D Trainwreck by Thomas A. Easton (Nov)
2. Here There be Dragons: The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker and Other Mysteries of an Explored Planet by Richard A. Lovett (Oct)
3. The Challenge of the Anthropic Universe by Carl Frederick (Jul/Aug)

I tend to be more interested in the less-technical fact articles in Analog, but I found Easton's exploration of 3D printing technology fairly fascinating. Lovett's article looks into some of the biological surprises our planet still springs on us. Frederick's discussion of the anthropic principle earns its place by virtue of its interesting subject matter, though I think the limited definition of God he uses when discussing religious ideas ultimately amounts to a straw man.

Best Cover

1. July/August (Bob Eggleton)
2. April (NASA)
3. September (David B. Mattingly)

I'm also a sucker for spacescapes, apparently, and Eggleton's impressionistic spaceships push his cover into the top slot. When I made my choices I had no idea the painterly April image was a photograph.

So those are my choices... What are yours? (And if you're not subscribing to one or both of these magazines... when are you planning to?)

Heroes and mythology; Grant Morrison on religion and God

Over at Religion Dispatches, Nick Street argues that Heroes is a prime example of American squeamishness about homoeroticism in mythology. The result is a "half-baked assimilationist version" of the heroic archetype: the characters struggle to rid themselves of difference instead of transcending their old lives by embracing their difference. In short, they're desperately striving not to be liminal figures.

The unsatisfying muddle of the current storyline calls for a Promethean figure, someone unafraid to heed the call of departure from conventional life as well as from the audience’s expectations. What Heroes needs is another Zack, unbound—a heroically transgressive character who will steal fire from the gods and illuminate the path that will lead us out of our present dark age.

Which is kind of what I was saying a couple weeks ago: Heroes doesn't get superheroes, and continually stops its characters short of the transformation they need. 

And how did I miss this one? At Newsarama, Grant Morrison talks about religion, spirituality, and God. It's a bit annoying, frankly, mostly because he starts out with this:

I think religion per se, is a ghastly blight on the progress of the human species towards the stars. At the same time, it, or something like it, has been an undeniable source of comfort, meaning and hope for the majority of poor bastards who have ever lived on Earth, so I’m not trying to write it off completely.

But it soon becomes clear that when Morrison says "religion" he means "church." Unsurprisingly, he doesn't like hierarchy, but he most certainly does believe in transcendence.

As I’ve said before, the solid world is just the part of heaven we’re privileged to touch and play with. You don’t need a priest or a holy man to talk to “god” on your behalf just close your eyes and say hello: "god” is no more, no less, than the sum total of all matter, all energy, all consciousness, as experienced or conceptualized from a timeless perspective where everything ever seems to present all at once. “God” is in everything, all the time and can be found there by looking carefully. The entire universe, including the scary, evil bits, is a thought “God” is thinking, right now.

Which is, in my mind,is pretty spot-on. It's an old idea called panentheism (not to be confused with pantheism), and it's been appearing in writing—religious writing—for centuries. What are process theology, Kabbalah, and Sufism if not religious? Morrison, it seems would call them "spirituality"—and he argues that "Religion is to spirituality what porn is to sex."

I've always found the distinction between "religion" and "spirituality" unsatisfying. It's like people who argue that they hate science fiction, but that they love Orwell (for instance), or Margaret Atwood. 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale aren't SF, and why? because people who aren't SF fans like them. Their picture of SF is a caricature, just as the picture of "religion" as a cruel hierarchy is a caricature (and a mostly outmoded one at that. The most politically conservative churches have no hierarchy.) 

To Grant Morrison, to all those who draw a line between religion and spirituality, I say: it's okay. "Religion" is bigger than you think. There's room in here for lots of ideas. Just as the universe, in a panentheistic system, is part of God, spirituality is part of religion.

He talks about All-Star Superman some, too, and whether or not Superman is a Christ figure. Read that segment of Newsarama's 10-part interview here.

My Anathem review, or, All books should be about monks that live inside a giant clock

I think Anathem might have been written with me in mind. I mean, it's an SF novel, but it's also chock full of philosophical dialogs between monks. Who is the target audience for that if not me?

There are few authors from whom I'm willing to read 900 pages. Fortunately Stephenson rewards that kind of investment well: Anathem takes place in an immersive world, and at various points in the story I was reminded of some of the best such immersive worlds in SF/F: Gormenghast, Perdido Street Station, His Dark Materials, and Dune, to drop just four names. Stephenson knows how to draw you in: he gradually introduces an entire vocabulary, and within a hundred pages or so you're thinking in the character's words. When those characters start presenting the book's bigger ideas, packaged in Socratic dialogs, it's hard not to be pulled into the worldview of the avout theors.

What are those, you ask? Anathem takes place on Arbre, a world in which the brightest minds are "collected" into monasteries where they focus their energies on the study of pure mathematics. The monasteries, or "concents," are sharply segregated from the Saecular world; the "avout" inside their walls are only allowed to leave once every 1, 10, 100, or 1,000 years, depending on how extreme a vow they take. (Oh—some of them, like the one where Anathem begins, are also really, really big clocks.) The avout are strict empiricists, but they aren't allowed to use technology—contrast that with the "Deolaters" of the outside world who believe in God and constantly fiddle with noisy electronic gadgets. Anathem's setting is one in which the commonly-drawn division between religion and science has been reified in the millennia-old stones of the concent walls.

Things are more complicated than they seem, however. We know this from the earliest pages: after all, here it's the empiricists who have elaborate rituals and more-or-less ascetic practices. But as we learn the philosophical history of the avout the mystical underpinnings of their system start to become clear. For instance, there's Protas, Arbre's version of Plato. After comparing clouds to the shadows they cast on the land below, 

He had his famous upsight that while the shapes of the shadows undeniably answered to those of the clouds, the latter were infinitely more complex and more perfectly realized than the former, which were distorted not only by the loss of a spatial dimension but also by being projected onto terrain that was of irregular shape... Returning to Periklyne he had proclaimed his doctrine that all the things we thought we knew were shadows of more perfect things in a higher world.

A thousand years before that there was Cnoüs, an architect who launched the entire history of Arbran philosophy—and, coincidentally, the division between avout and Saecular. Cnoüs has an "upsight" while looking (like Protas) into the sky, drawing a triangle on a stone tablet to illustrate his newfound understanding. He tells his two daughters, Deät and Hylaea, of his vision, but he dies shortly thereafter. The two daughters offer conflicting interpretations. Deät says that

He was seeing into another world: a kingdom of heaven where all was bright and perfect. According to her, Cnoüs drew the conclusion that it was a mistake to worship physical idols such as the one he had been building, for those were only crude effigies of actual gods that lived in another realm, and we ought to worship those gods themselves, not artifacts we made with our own hands.

Hylaea said that Cnoüs had actually been having an upsight about geometry. What her sister Deät had misinterpreted as a pyramid in heaven was actually a glimpse of an isosceles triangle: not a crude and inaccurate representation of one, such as Cnoüs drew on his tablet with ruler and compass, but a pure theorical object of which one could make absolute statements. The triangles that we drew and measured here in the physical world were all merely more or less faithful representations of perfect triangles that existed in this higher world. We must stop confusing one with the other, and lend our minds to the study of pure geometrical objects.

What lurks beneath the surface of this story is the idea that the scientific idealism of Hylaea is just as mystical as the religious anti-idolatry of Deät. Within a few pages of relating this story Erasmas, Anathem's protagonist, begins to ponder the similarities between the two conflicting interpretations, and the first 650 pages or so of the novel depicts his gradual acceptance that his belief in the "Hylaean Theoric World"—what we would call Plato's realm of forms—is a is a mystical concept that underpins the entire thought-system of the avout. Oh, other stuff happens, too—there's a dangerous Arctic trek, a kung fu brawl, an attack by mysterious aliens, and a love story. But the important stuff, the stuff that Stephenson obviously cares most about (and the stuff that interested me the most, too), is the philosophy, and that is aaaaalll about Plato. (Or Protas, at least.) And that Platonism leads the story into a lot of science—everything from orbital mechanics to quantum computing to volcanology has a moment in Anathem's pages. But Erasmas comes to the conclusion that it all hinges on the Hylaean Theoric World, something "non-spatiotemporal—yet believed to exist."

Of course, the idea of what a more ideal universe might be gets called into question, too. I doubt Plato envisaged the form realm's inhabitants entering our universe and declaring war. (That's not exactly what happens here, but I don't want to say too much...) There are some interesting perspectives on the religious beliefs of the Deolaters along the way: for instance, the followers of the Warden of Heaven, who hold some messianic ideas about the avout, or the Kelx, who believe that our entire universe is a story being told by a condemned murderer who's trying to convince a judge to grant a stay of execution. (Bottom line: be good, or the judge will get bored of the story and cut it short by having our de facto God executed.) Erasmas offers an intriguing perspective on the Deolater's apparent nonchalance:

If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him? Instead of which Deolaters like Beller would go on for hours without bringing God into the conversation at all. Maybe his God was remote from our doings. Or—more likely— maybe the presence of God was so obvious to him that he felt no more need to speak of it than I did to point out, all the time, that I was breathing air.

Nevertheless, the story of Anathem involves the unification of opposites that aren't really opposites, as the Saecular and mathic worlds combine and synthesize into something greater. (In a recent interview with io9 Stephenson warned against thinking of it as an "alliance," but I think using Hegelian terminology is entirely appropriate.) In the novel's closing pages Erasmas and his circle are laying the foundations for their transformed world, establishing more open replacements for the old concents. He explains the new order's attitude to the segregation between the two worlds of Arbre:

"The rule of thumb we've been using is that Deolaters are welcome as long as they're not certain they're right," I said. "As soon as you're sure you're right, there's no point in your being here."

Questions are better than answers, and Anathem is all about inquiry—scientific and religious; philosophical and mystical. Yeah, I think I am the target audience for that.

Grasping for the Wind on religion in SF

SF/F review blog Grasping for the Wind hosts a roundtable discussion on religion and SF, asking:

Does the very nature of science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) automatically preclude fair treatment of religion? Must religion always be seen as an outdated and outmoded way of thinking, or are there authors who can and have included religion (whether real or imagined) in its pages without forcing an either/or proposition between religion and science?

The discussion is similar to that in the recent SF Signal Mind Meld post on the same topic (in which I participated, natch). As with that discussion, there are a lot of assumptions buried in the phrasing of the question. The respondents generally discuss SF's surface treatments of religion: priest heroes, preacher villains, and god-spaceships. I think the real meat of the interaction between SF and religion runs deeper, on the level of themes rather than plot elements. That being the case, I think most of the responses, and the question itself, are barking up the wrong tree (or at least the wrong branches): the depiction of religious individuals and institutions isn't as interesting as the depiction of religious ideas (which may not be clearly identified as such). The responses name some good books, including a couple that are new to me, but for the most part they're talking about the likes of Creationism, eternal damnation, and other fundamentalist bêtes noirs, which are far from the most interesting topics in the SF-and-religion realm.

Read the full discussion here.

Apologies for the dearth of posting lately, which is mostly the result of three things: 1) my preparation for and participation in Cornell University's recent conference on hip hop (I was part of a panel presentation on the creation and use of Cornell's hip hop archive), 2) the fact that my son can now crawl, which means he can wreak much chaos, which makes working difficult, and 3) the fact that I am 600 pages deep in Neal Stephenson's Anathem. There will be a review, oh yes.

[*sigh of relief*]

America did the right thing yesterday, thank God.

In lieu of liveblogging or some such, Religion Dispatches solicited meditations on the election from their regular contributors, and my entry, entitled "No Moral Surrender," is here. It's all about Republican (and evangelical) moral cynicism. I almost tied the piece into SF as a providential guide, which meshes well with Obama's future-building vision, but I knew they wanted brevity, and that kind of pontificating would have pushed it close to thousand-word-essay territory, so I left it out. 

Pretty much the only thing that didn't go swimmingly yesterday is that California seems poised to pass Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage in the state. The only silver lining on that cloud is that Orson Scott Card (probably) won't be leading an armed rebellion anytime soon.