SF Gospel

Better living through vampirism

New on Religion Dispatches: an interview with Joseph Laycock, a scholar who's interested in real-life vampires as a new religious movement. His book, Vampires Today: The Truth About Modern Vampires, comes out tomorrow from Praeger, and it sounds far, far more scholarly and respectable than one might expect a book on real-life vampires could ever be. But it's not quite so serious that the interview can't still include great lines like this:

While it may be comforting to think that we are totally different from vampires, this is not the case. 

Plus the bit about how all the good vampire book titles are taken—priceless.

I mention this first of all because it's a fascinating project, and secondly because I can personally vouch for Mr. Laycock's intelligence, having been his classmate at not one but two institutions of higher learning (namely, Hampshire College and Harvard Divinity School).* He's a great guy in addition to being a scholar of singular intelligence and most interesting interests. So check out his book, OK? Good.

Read the interview at Religion Dispatches here. Order a copy of Vampires Today here.

*Strictly speaking, we weren't technically "classmates" at HDS, since he entered the fall after I graduated. But it's close enough to count, right? 

The complex religious landscape of Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock

Destined to be remembered as one of this year's best SF novels, Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock is the compelling tale of rebellion against tyranny, both political and religious. The eponymous hero is a nephew of Deklan Comstock, a tyrannical dynastic president living under self-imposed exile for fear of his uncle's paranoid tendency to execute those who might threaten his power. Julian has little interest in political power—he's far more interested in science and the arts, his life goal being to create a film entitled The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin. That puts him in an unpopular minority in this novel's 22nd-century America, in which the expanded United States are largely ruled by the very, very conservative Church of the Dominion (of which more later). Julian isn't one to hide his beliefs, which makes it difficult for him to keep a low profile, but opens the door for a series of rousing adventures.

Julian, along with his mentor Sam Godwin and his childhood friend (and the book's narrator) Adam Hazzard go into hiding to escape Deklan's forces, but before long they're pressed into service in a war between the United States and the "Mitteleuropans"—Germany to you—over Labrador (which, in this future, is part of the U.S., and, thanks to global warming, has become very desirable real estate). Julian, incapable of keeping a low profile, becomes a war hero under the assumed name "Julian Commongold." When his identity becomes known to his uncle, the duplicitous president makes him a general—and immediately sends him into an unwinnable battle. Improbably, Julian survives, and before long he's been made President himself, begrudgingly accepting the power he never wanted to take. He makes the most of his newfound power, becoming a dedicated reformer and setting out to re-separate Church from State (all while making good on his wish to produce a Darwin biopic). He pushes a bit too hard, however, putting his reign at risk of an early termination. 

The novel's treatment of religion is more complex than the surface Darwinist-versus-powerful-evangelical-church setup would suggest. For one thing, the Dominion isn't a single church at all, but rather a multidenominational certifying body that establishes broad doctrine for its member churches. As Hazzard states:

In America we're entitled by the Constitution to worship at any church we please, as long as it's a genuine Christian congregation and not some fraudulent or satanistic sect. The Dominion exists to make that distinction. Also to collect fees and tithes to further its important work.

The Dominion is more like, say, the Family Research Council on overdrive—and the doctrinal demands it makes are about the same as the FRC's. The Dominion has achieved a great and terrible homogenization of American religion, crushing churches that believe, for instance, that evolution and faith are reconcilable. Wilson is wise to make it a broad organization rather than a single church—SF novels that predict futures where minority sects have disappeared entirely because everyone has joined the One Big Church never really sit right with me. (Ben Bova's Grand Tour series, though generally enjoyable, suffers from this error.) 

This setup also allows for a variety of depictions of faith in Julian Comstock. Adam Hazzard's father, for instance, is a minister in the Church of Signs, a snake-handling Pentecostal denomination that is tolerated but not fully approved by the Dominion. Julian's mentor Sam Godwin is a closet Jew who knows little of his tradition beyond a few snippets of Hebrew prayers—his situation is similar to that of Spanish Jews during the Inquisition. And toward the end of the novel Julian befriends (and likely falls in love with, though it's not stated explicitly) the founder of the very liberal Church of the Apostles Etc., which bears more than a passing similarity to Unitarianism. (Its main doctrine: "God is Conscience; have no other/Love your neighbor as your brother").

One of the most interesting portraits of religion in this world comes when Hazzard discovers a con man named Private Langers posing as a Dominion chaplain offering comfort at the bedsides of dying soldiers. Langers, who first appears in the novel as a "colporteur" selling Bible tracts with titles such as Acts Condemned by Leviticus, Explained and Described, with Diagrams, has a history of stealing from the dead, and Hazzard rightly suspects him. But he's also serving a positive purpose, as the head doctor explains:

There are no genuine Dominion officers to be had. Julian Conqueror barred them from the expedition, and for the most part that's not a bad thing, since we haven't had to endure their Sunday scoldings. But a dying soldier generally wants a godly man beside him, and seldom inquires into the Pastor's pedigree... He may be a cracked vessel, but we don't own a better one just now.

This hardly amounts to a commendation for the grave-robbing Langers, but it does put Julian's campaign against religion into a different light. His hard-heartedness diminishes the Dominion's evil, but it also prevents honest believers from doing good. 

It's possible that I simply had Kings on the brain while reading this novel, but I saw more than a few echoes of the David story in Julian's military career. Deklan's jealousy of a youthful warrior is reminiscent of Saul's relationship with David, though his later attempt at arranging Julian's death on the frontlines draws a bit more on David's treatment of Uriah. These allusions—plus an epigraphic quote from First Corinthians on the book's last section—make the novel's approach to religion even more complex. There's a feeling of timelessness about the story, and that kind of Biblical allusion is a big part of that. (There's also the fact that the novel's 22nd Century looks, after a series of minor apocalypses, an awful lot like the 19th, and its narrator writes in a suitably old-timey prose to match.) 

Julian Comstock is a rich and rewarding story—I've barely scratched the surface of its themes here. Expect to see it on next year's Hugo shortlist; it certainly deserves to be there. 

Julian Comstock will be available from Tor on June 9th.

800 Words: A new play about Philip K. Dick's religious visions

If you're planning to be in Minneapolis anytime between May 28th and June 7th (or if you're looking for a reason to be), this sounds pretty intriguing: 800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick, a play based the final days of Dick's life. From the official description:

800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick is based on the life of ground-breaking science fiction author, Philip K. Dick, complete with secret agents, Dick’s dead sister and a talking cat. The play begins just as Philip’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is about to be released as the Hollywood film Blade Runner... But Philip can’t stop obsessing about visions he had years earlier when an extraterrestrial God spoke to him using artificial intelligence. Award-winning playwright Victoria Stewart uses uniquely theatrical conventions to create a surreal landscape where memories of these seminal events bleed into each other, fusing and merging in a funny, dark trip – not unlike a Philip K. Dick novel – where his recurrent obsessions of God, art, madness, time, fiction and reality come alive on stage.

It sounds intriguing, and more respectful than some other PKD-related projects I could name. won't be able to attend, but I'd love to hear a review or two if any of you do.

For more details see the play's official site.

Did network squeamishness about religion kill Kings?

In a story on Newsarama, Kings creator Michael Green alleges that NBC effectively kept his parallel-universe adaptation of the King David story from reaching its audience by leaving its biblical basis out of the promos:

"When the time came for the marketing, there was a very deliberate, outspoken, loud desire articulated by them that, 'We are not going to say King David.' They were scared to say King David. They just felt that that would be detrimental to the show," Green explained. "I thought it was the clearest way to express what the show was about, and I thought it might actually generate interest. But there was a fear of either backlash or marginalizing or pigeonholing. There were a lot of reasons they had. They wouldn't go near it in the marketing, but they never had a problem with it on the creative level, which is why I was so baffled."

Which explains why I was a few scenes into the first episode before I caught on that this was a scriptural adaptation. The promos basically sold it as "what if the United States were a monarchy?", which hardly does justice to the show's spiritual basis. The fruits of that misleading advertising ripened yesterday when NBC signed Kings' death warrant; it will finish its thirteen-episode run but won't get a second season. 

You'd think I would love Kings—after all, it's an SF Bible adaptation starring Ian McShane!—but frankly the first few episodes left me a bit cold. I plan to watch the rest, but it has yet to completely blow my mind. Nevertheless, it has some soaring high points, particularly when King Silas Benjamin (i.e. Saul, played by the aforementioned McShane) talks about God. [For instance:]

In any event, I like it more than Cynthia B. Astle, who declared the show "a tool for fostering biblical illiteracy" in an essay for Religion Dispatches. (Not the least of its problems: the story it's adapting isn't taken from Kings at all, but Chronicles. Whoops.) Diane Winston offers a nice counterpoint in a companion article that applauding the show's transparent treatment of religion—you know, the transparency that was wholly lacking from all of the show's promos. I think there is a bigger audience for shows like this, but it seems the networks are scared to look for it.

Read the Newsarama article, which also discusses the same problem in advertising for the late Eli Stone, here.

You can watch Kings on Hulu.

Why I'm not that upset about the cancellation of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

It's official: The Sarah Connor Chronicles will not get a third season.

I liked the show from the beginning. Though it wasn't the most intelligent show in the world, it was always philosophically interesting. (I wrote about it here, and here, and here, and here.)

But you know what? I don't mind that it's done.

[Spoilers ahead.]

The reason? The ending of the second season was a totally satisfying conclusion to the story the show told. The show took place in the middle of its main characters' established story, so there was a built-in limit on where it could go. And, with the final scenes of the last episode, it reached that limit. We know from the beginning that John Connor will end up leading the anti-machine resistance in the future, and now we know how that happened. Having him time-leap around the war was, frankly, a little bit ingenious. The leader of the resistance isn't some future John Connor; it's this John Connor. Cameron is deactivated, so her absence in any future lore is explained. John Henry is a minor loose end, but not an unreasonable one. With the major cast-whittling we saw toward the end of the second season—I don't think I've seen that many surprise deaths on any show that wasn't called The Sopranos—it certainly looked like the show's creators knew they might be wrapping up the whole story, and where they left off was solid. Not only that, in a post on Fox's official show blog, showrunner Josh Friedman encourages anybody who's angry over the cancellation to move on. See? Nothing to be angry about: if the show had gone on, it might no longer have been the best thing the Terminator franchise ever offered up. (Yeah, I said it! But I haven't seen Salvation yet, so ask again in a week or two.) 

If you haven't seen them yet, do yourself a favor and watch the last few episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Hulu.

PS. I was absolutely amazed that Dollhouse got renewed. Waaaaaay too many people wrote that show off after one or two episodes; if you stopped watching it you absolutely need to watch (at the very least) the last two episodes, which catapulted the show into solidly-good territory (Alan Tudyk's presence helped). With this, the V remake (more Alan Tudyk!), and the Robert J. Sawyer adaptation Flash Forward, next year will be an exciting time for SF TV.

Robert J. Sawyer to high-school student: "Skepticism can be dogma"

Robert J. Sawyer reports on his blog about a letter he received from a 12th-grade student writing an English paper on The Terminal Experiment and Calculating God. The student asks, "Are you a religious man yourself?" Sawyer's responded that he's not—but, unlike many non-religious, his skepticism is open to new evidence: 

I liked playing with the notion of whether skepticism/atheism was really a reasoned position, or simply another belief system that would endure regardless of the evidence, or lack thereof, for its veracity.

Read Sawyer's full response here.

Also worth checking out: Sawyer's roundup of a variety of reviewers' comments on the philosophical depth of his novels. They're all right.

You can also read my review of Calculating God here. And I wrote a bit more about both that novel and The Terminal Experiment in The Gospel According to Science Fiction.

Some Star Trek bits

• Beliefnet presents an argument that Star Trek (TOS) was obsessed with the Ten Commandments. 
• ASSISTNews offers up a quiz linking Star Trek and scripture.
• Craig A. James, author of the Dawkinist evolutionary psychology tome The Evolution of Religion, reads way too much into the latest movie's one direct reference to a deity. I mean, I acknowledged that I had to dig a bit to find a theological thread in the film, but this is going a bit too far!
• This one's just confusing. At FoxNews.com (*shudder*), James Pinkerton turns what could have been an interesting theological essay on Star Trek and the divine origins of imagination into... a rant about Israeli security? Ooookay.

Roundup of religion in the Lost season finale

Over at SF Gospel's spouse blog God Spam, Gwynne rounds up the religion references in the season finale of Lost. Some interesting stuff—I'm particulary intrigued by the theory that the mysterious nameless fellow talking to Jacob in the first scene might be named Esau. But I'm skeptical that the statue is Anubis—that head looked much more reptilian to me, so I'm leaning toward crocodile-god (and lord of the seas!) Sobek. 

Of course, the real meat of the episode was about free will and destiny—as in the instance of Jack's (unlikely?) transformation into a man on a totally-nuts mission. (Wasn't that Locke's job?) But, to put it bluntly, I've mostly given up trying to analyze Lost's themes until the show wraps up next year. Until we know what the destiny they're all working toward is, any statement is kinda moot. (Plus I can hardly ever remember what's going on from week to week, but that's another matter.)

...To boldly go back to the future

In his review of Star Trek, Roger Ebert protests the direction of the franchise:

The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action. Like so many franchises, it’s more concerned with repeating a successful formula than going boldly where no “Star Trek” has gone before.

I don't know that I'd go quite so far as to say the new Star Trek cares only about "loud and colorful action" (though there's certainly plenty of that). And I did enjoy the film, quite a bit. But I couldn't help feeling that the story itself was a bit... shallow. The plot—evil Romulan from the future wants to blow up lots of planets; fresh-faced but familiar starship crew must stop him (with some help from a certain time-traveling Vulcan)—is pretty simple, once you get past the temporal layers. In an essay for Religion Dispatches, Nathan Schneider bemoans the simplicity of new villain Nero compared to more complex foils like the post-Cold-War Klingons of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. There's not much to this character beyond his desire for revenge, and the film seems to know it: toward the film's end, when the Enterprise has defeated Nero, young Kirk shows the villain mercy, offering to transport his crew from the doomed ship and give them medical help. There's an all-too-brief exchange between Kirk and Spock on the wisdom of offering assistance to the Romulans, but it's cut short when Nero rejects the offer. Kirk, with an apparent sigh of relief, orders the Enterprise to open fire on Nero's ship: so much for mercy, and so much, too, for exploring revenge versus forgiveness. It feels like a bit of a scoff at the way that Star Trek has approached philosophical and moral issues in the past.

The story isn't that deep—but that doesn't mean Star Trek is without depth. What's most interesting here isn't the story they're telling, but the mechanics of how it gets to be told in the first place. Contrary to what you may have heard, this is not a prequel. The Kirk in this film is not the same Kirk from the original series. Owing to the time travel plot, this is an alternate universe, with its point of divergence occurring at the time of Kirk's birth. This is an ingenious approach to the fact that this is a franchise with an established mythology, and a fan base that is notoriously attentive to the details of that mythology. Since this is a parallel universe, any inconsistencies (and there aren't many) can be explained by that divergence. Indeed, this doesn't negate anything that has gone before, so you can't really call it a "reboot;" they've just copied the operating system onto a new machine. 

Moreover, the mechanics of the setup open the door for some consideration of free will, even if the film doesn't give that consideration quite as much attention as it might deserve. For instance, future-Spock (or "Spock Prime," as the credits would have it, implying some DC Comics influence) orders past-Kirk not to mention his existence top past-Spock, lest foreknowledge of their friendship spoil its development. That turns out to be something of an empty warning (witness the on-screen meeting of the two Spocks later on), but it is a sign that there's a bit more going on beneath the surface here.
(Over at In the Open Space, Carmen Andres has some more thoughts on free will in this Star Trek and in Nemesis). 

Of course, all of the above is in willful neglect of what Star Trek really gets right, which is the characters. Everyone gets a moment to shine here, a chance to prove why they're the best at what they do. Not only that, but the catchphrases, when they appear, don't even feel contrived. These characters are in good hands, and I'm looking forward to seeing where next they boldly go. 

How many gods does it take to build a working artificial intelligence?, or, a Caprica review

Is the Sci Fi Channel (or, pardon me, Syfy) trying to doom Caprica before it even launches? It's been something like two weeks since the DVD came out, and I've heard barely a word about it. Probably because, like me, nobody wanted to spend 27 bucks on an unknown quantity, and they all waited for their Netflix copies to arrive. Well, my rented copy arrived this week, and I sure hope this botched release isn't part of a plan to tank the series, because the pilot is good. Really good, in fact. It's very, very different from Battlestar Galactica—there's nary a space battle to be found. But in terms of tone and setting, Caprica owes much to Gattaca—easily one of the best SF films of its decade. It’s nice to see a piece of filmic SF that doesn’t depend on explosions. (OK, fine, Caprica does depend pretty heavily on its one explosion. But that’s different.)  

Some minor spoilers ahead.

The story begins 58 years before the events of Battlestar Galactica—years before the first Cylon War. We meet Zoe Graystone, daughter of a scientist who, after inventing a successful virtual reality interface, turns his attention to cybernetics. (Yep, that leads exactly where you think it does.) Zoe’s a bit of a genius herself, and she creates a virtual copy of her own mind in the VR world, a digital copy that’s struggling to understand itself and its connection with the real world. Zoe’s also a member of, for lack of a better description, a club of monotheists. Unfortunately, this group has links to a terrorist organization called Soldiers of the One, and Zoe is killed in a surprise suicide bombing carried out by one of her compatriots. When her father discovers the AI copy of his daughter a few weeks later, he’s inspired to put her into the robotic body he’s been building—and it looks like we’ll have to wait for the start of the series next year to see the full ramifications of that decision.  

Caprica goes out of its way to avoid direct connections to the BSG universe for the first hour or so, and that’s a good thing. It sets us up to care about its characters on their own merits. That way, when they finally do show us, for instance, a young William Adama, it serves first and foremost to enhance Caprica’s story, not to append BSG’s. This show is determined to stand on its own two feet—and sturdy feet they are.  

Hidden deep in the heart of the Caprica pilot is a "how the leopard got its spots" tale—but for "leopard" read "Cylons," and for "spots" read "monotheistic religion." If anything, the conflict between monotheism and polytheism will be even more central to Caprica than it was to BSG. In a conversation with the headmistress of Zoe’s school, the man investigating the bombing looks at the dangerous philosophy he sees lurking within monotheism: 

It doesn’t concern you, Sister, that kind of absolutist view of the universe? Right and wrong determined solely by a single all-knowing, all-powerful being whose judgment cannot be questioned, and in whose name the most horrendous of acts can be sanctioned without appeal? 

That’s a bleak portrait of monotheism, to be sure, but that’s the speaker’s bias. The monolog begs the question, however, of what kind of alternative polytheism is—can’t Caprica’s polytheists, too, find divine sanction for horrendous actions by appealing to a variety of minor gods? Indeed, a group of Hecate worshippers practices virtual human sacrifice in the VR world, so monotheism isn’t the only culprit in this culture. In any event, the role of religion in society is going to be a major factor in Caprica’s story. 

Issues of race and class are also apparent, with one of the central character relationships being between the wealthy, WASP-y Caprican Daniel Graystone and the immigrant/peasant Tauron Joseph Adama, both of whom lost family members in the bombing. There are some nice hints about the differences between the various colonies' cultures—the bit about Taurons wearing black gloves when they're in mourning is a nice touch, and I hope we see more of that kind of detail.

But even more central is the question of artificial intelligence and the nature of the mind. The electronic copy of Zoe is a great means of discussing the nature of intelligence, mind, and soul. It’s particularly interesting that the digital doppelganger is built largely from external electronic information—report cards, receipts, medical reports, e-mails, and the like. How much of our selves is reflected in external data? This kind of discussion should shed some interesting light on the inner lives of Cylons as the story unfolds. Let’s just hope that Syfy gives Caprica a chance—it shows every sign of being a truly great show.