SF Gospel

On down the River...

SF author Philip José Farmer passed away in his sleep this morning, aged 91. Farmer has long been a favorite of mine, largely as a result of his Riverworld series, about an alien-designed afterlife wherein everyone who ever lived is resurrected along the banks of a river 10 million miles long. Religious themes cropped up frequently in his writing, perhaps most notably in the Father Carmody stories and the novel Jesus on Mars. His best stories were spirited blends of philosophical depth with old-fashioned fun, and he will be missed.

http://www.pjfarmer.com/

Telekinetic toys at Toy Fair

Ersatz telekinesis toys are a trend at this year's Toy Fair. Babble reports on the Star Wars Force Trainer (from toy maker Uncle Milton), an EEG-based toy that enables you to lift a ball on a column of air with your mind. And it makes Star Wars noises at you. Watch the video here.

A similar toy, also unveiled at Toy Fair, is Mattel's Mind Flex. It doesn't make Star Wars noises, but the ball isn't enclosed. There's video of that one here.

If sincerely hope that extensive use of these toys can unlock real telekinesis. 

Free Will Friday: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dollhouse, and Battlestar Galactica

What follows is a bit spoilerific, particularly regarding Battlestar Galactica. Consider yourselves warned.

Fridays will be packed with good SF for the next few weeks, with Joss Whedon's much-delayed Dollhouse and the return of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Fox and the last few episodes of Battlestar Galactica on SciFi. Free will is the emerging theme on the three shows, with plenty of flawed creations rebelling against their makers thrown in for good measure.

Things have been rough for the Terminator formerly known as Cromartie. After stalking the Connors for a season and a half or so he was killed (in a church!), only to be resurrected by Catherine Weaver, a T-1001, as the mouthpiece for the Babel computer (a precursor to the evil Skynet). (If you haven't been watching the show, all that is really way less complicated than it sounds.) Now named John Henry, the robot has become pretty inquisitive in his philosophical discussions with former FBI agent and apocalyptic Christian James Ellison. In the most recent episode, "The Good Wound," Ellison finds Henry playing with some toys, and the android makes some comments on the lack of intelligence in his body's design:

They have excellent range of motion in their limbs. It's from the ball and socket joints. This body uses hinge joints in the knees and elbows. It's less efficient... I have a question for God... I wish to know why he didn't use more ball and socket joints when he made you.

[I've taken the liberty of finding the scene for you right here:]

John Henry's question has an impassioned parallel in "No Exit," the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica. Brother Cavil (whose real name has now been revealed as "John") has always been cynical in matters of religion. In this episode, he confronts Ellen Tigh—the last of the Final Five, who (as we now know) created all of the other Cylon models—about the reasoning behind their design:

In all your travels, have you ever seen a star supernova?... I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the universe, other stars, other planets, and eventually other life. A supernova: creation itself. I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And do you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull, with eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum, with ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air... I'm a machine, and I could know much more. I could experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body. And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way.

[And again:]

Ellen isn't claiming to be God, of course, but in a very real sense Cavil is confronting his creator directly. And a rebellious creation he is, too, and as the full extent of his evil becomes clear—he masterminded the Cylon attack that wiped out the twelve colonies, and planted the Final Five among humankind so that they could witness the fruits of his rage—his relationship with his creators becomes much more complicated. But the very fact that he is able to rebel at all is part of the nature that the Final Five built into him. Later in the episode Ellen brings up the issue of free will directly: Cavil cannot lay the blame for his evil actions at other beings' feet, but by the same token he can choose to be good. Ellen shows that even for a monster like Cavil, the door of redemption is still open a crack. Indeed, forgiveness may prove to be the overarching theme of Battlestar Galactica as a whole, as humans learn to coexist with the Cylons who virtually destroyed their entire species. 

The themes of Dollhouse have not yet begun to emerge on that kind of grand scale, but it's certainly off to a good start. The eponymous organization is difficult to explain—it's somewhere between a spy cell, a mad scientist's lab, and a brothel. Basically, Dollhouse rents out brainwashed women who are given memory implants to enable them to meet whatever needs their clients may have. In the first episode, a Doll named Echo is grafted with the personality of an expert hostage negotiator to handle a ransom transaction for a kidnapped child. But questions of identity, ethics, and free will are inherent in the show's concept, and there are hints that the erasure of Echo's mind at the end of each mission may not be total. (That kind of thing is de rigeur for stories involving memory implants, of course.) Moral issues are sure to be dead-center in Dollhouse's future. 

Hell Froze Over

If I may briefly descend into totaly nepotism, I encourage everyone to watch the first episode of "Hell Froze Over," a new web short series my friends have been working on. (I'm in an episode later in the season, but they haven't yet told me when it's going up.) The official summary: "To prove to her roommate that her bad luck in love has nothing to do with the men she chooses, Jody decides to date every man she's ever rejected, starting with the guy she just passed on the street." Thus:

New episodes will be available weekly at www.hellfrozeover.tv.

And, so this post will have some SF content, you can also watch Signal Decay, a short film about teeth from another dimension. (I play the dentist.)

Exciting news (that I can't talk about yet)

I got some exciting news today yet, though it's much to soon to give any details about it. Suffice it to say that I have been invited to participate in a project that's very dear to my heart, and for a good cause to boot. This is on top of another fun project that I am still in the early planning stages of... If all goes as planned there should be some more formal announcements coming in the next couple months.

Superstitious religion in Harry Turtledove's The Valley-Westside War

From Harry Turtledove's postapocalyptic alternate-future novel The Valley-Westside War: 

     For that matter, what was the difference between superstition and religion generally? Lots of people had spilled lots of ink and killed lots of trees and pushed around lots of electrons trying to define the answer. So far, most of what they said boiled down to What I believe is religion, and what those foolish people over there believe is superstition.

There was no evidence that knocking on wood made the world less likely to go wrong. There was no evidence that praying in a church or synagogue or mosque made the world less likely to go wrong, either. That didn't stop people from doing both kinds of things. When it became plain that science explained how things happened—not necessarily why, but how—better than religion did, lots of "experts," from Karl Marx on down, predicted that religion would wither up and die.

It hadn't happened in the home timeline. It also hadn't happened in any high-tech alternate Crosstime Traffic had found. Most people weren't rational enough, or weren't rational often enough, to be satisfied believing this was all there was. By now, the "experts" doubted they ever would. That might prove as wrong as the earlier experts' certainty that religion would fail.

Though I credit Turtledove with putting a bit more complexity into this brief passage than one might have expected, I have to call into question his assumption that the point of praying is to make "the world less likely to go wrong"—not to mention the whole framing of the question as one of superstition in the first place. There's a lot more to religion than attempting to steer the universe to one's personal will (that's called magic, and with or without a "k" at the end, it's a whole 'nuther can of worms). There are a lot of different kinds of prayer, of which the petitionary is but one—and many would say the lowest. 

In any event, The Valley-Westside War is an entertaining tale and a lightning-quick read. (I gather the CrosstimeTraffic series is intended as YA SF, so that all makes sense.) My favorite bit is a brief reference later in the story to A Canticle for Leibowitz—a comparison of UCLA's postapocalyptic librarians to Miller's science-preserving monks. Librarians as an information priesthood? That's a thread I'd like to see picked up somewhere...

James A. Herrick Redux

By an odd bit of synchronicity, a day after my review of James A. Herrick's anti-SF polemic Scientific Mythologies appeared in the Internet Review of Science Fiction, Christianity Today ran a short piece on SF by Herrick. The essay is essentially an abbreviated version of the book, and it's no better. Herrick's insistence on viewing the world in terms of spiritual warfare, his insistence that SF contains "arguments against Christianity and in support of rival worldviews," reflect an entirely wrongheaded fear of pluralism and syncretism. I must note, however, that Christianity Today apparently has better fact-checkers than the book's publishers, as a couple movie titles that are given incorrectly in the book appear in proper form in the article. But I still have to wrinkle my brow at "Neo Anderson." In short: Herrick is still wrong on religion, and wrong on science fiction.

The image to the left was created to accompany a line in my IROSF piece on Herrick's deranged insistence that Close Encounters of the Third Kind draws a comparison between the appearances of its alien and human characters. If I were Richard Dreyfuss, I'd be pretty insulted.

Read Herrick's "Sci-Fi's Brave New World" here.

Read my review of Scientific Mythologies here.

Wrong on Religion; Wrong on Science Fiction: James A. Herrick's Scientific Mythologies

You know how I've been promising a review of James A. Herrick's screed against SF spirituality? Well, it's finally available in the February issue of the Internet Review of Science Fiction, alongside essays on SF romance films, the new rules for the Nebula awards, and the SFnal computers of the '90s. Check it out here.