SF Gospel

SF Magazine Roundup!

The SF magazines are piling up next to my desk... has it really been four months since I last reviewed them? Let's get caught up, then:

Robert Reed's "Before My Last Breath" in the October/November 2009 issue of Asimov's looks at the origins of a tradition. In this story, a coal-mining operation discovers evidence of an ancient alien civilization, and a team of archeologists comes to some intriguing conclusions about the aliens' history. They crash-landed millennia ago, the humans theorize, and expected to be rescued. As years passed, they suspected that their rescuers were delayed, and some of them buried themselves in a peat bog to hibernate until they arrived. But help never came, and over generations the aliens forgot the reasons behind the bog hibernations. As their bodies, technology, and culture devolved, the once-pragmatic undertaking became a simple burial custom. The metal ring the first aliens brought into their hibernation was a depiction of their spaceship, but later generations simply held a simplified circle of metal, a symbol of something forgotten: "Nobody remembered what the starship looked like. Or maybe they forgot about the ship entirely, and the ring's purpose changed. It was a symbol, an offering, something that would allow their god to catch their soul and take them back to Heaven again." Religion as cultural entropy: a bleak theory befitting the somewhat sorrowful tone of the story. Reed's stories are always intriguing, and this one is no exception.

Also well worth reading in this issue is Ted Kosmatka and Michael Poore's "The Blood Dauber," a story about a zookeeper who finds himself caring for a rather unusual wasp... or something. To say it's a story about the futility of revenge doesn't do it justice. I wouldn't be surprised to see this turn up in some year's-best lists; it will very likely be one of my Reader's Poll choices for this year (which I really ought to start thinking about, huh?).

The November issue of Analog includes "Joan," a fun but not wholly satisfying story by John G. Hemry. The main character is a time traveler who is obsessed with Joan of Arc, and travels to 15th-Century France to meet her-- and to sort-of accidentally save her from execution. Kate, the time-traveler, has a hard time understanding Joan's faith; when Joan describes one of her visions Kate worries that this proves her to be "the kind of hysteric that history had often painted her as." Kate has an idea of Joan as a proto-feminist icon who wouldn't believe that kind of "mindless superstition." This doesn't sit right with me because I can't really imagine someone being as obsessed with Joan as Kate is without wholly accepting the importance of Joan's visions to her story. Kate's obsession, it seems, is built on a very basic misunderstanding and tremendous blind spot; the only way you can avoid accounting for Joan's religion is to willfully ignore it. Joan wins Kate over a bit by the end, but her need to be won over strikes me as odd.

The November and December Analog carry a two-part serial by G. David Nordley called To Climb a Flat Mountain that has some sectarian strife in its backstory. The characters in this tale are a war party flying from Earth to liberate a colony world that has been overrun by "New Reformationists"-- reactionary religious zealots who have reinstated quaint old customs like slavery and gladiatorial combat. Some of those in the war party are "real Christians," or "Old Reformationists"-- as one character notes, "nobody was more ready to go after this New Reformation fringe group than the Old Reformation." But the warship is sabotaged, and they overshoot their target by a few hundred light-years, landing on a cube-shaped artificial world with some strange geological properties (as the title suggests). Some of the castaways are susceptible to the same kind of conservative pitfalls as the zealots they set out to conquer, and before long the survivors have split into two groups: the close-minded religious one and the heroic, go-getting secular one. This somewhat simplistic division falls pretty quickly into the background, though, as Nordley is more interested in exploring this strange six-sided world and its alien inhabitants than the human conflicts that got us there.

The December Analog also includes "The Universe Beneath Our Feet" by Carl Frederick, a story told from the point of view of a rebellious pair of crablike aliens who live in an underwater theocracy. K'Chir and Jerik doubt the existence of their society's God-- a benevolent being who rains "sweet manna" down upon the ocean floor. Instead, K'Chir posits that the "manna" is the decomposing remains of other ocean creatures. To prove it, he sets out to climb the enormous wall of ice on the outskirts of their community, hoping to reach the top and find no God there. Frederick's description of the aliens' bodies is inventive, so it's a shame that the religion and culture he has created for them is so unoriginal-- and human. There's a stern high priest, a strict code of discipline, a benevolent God-in-the-sky-- and absolutely nothing to suggest that this religion originated anywhere other than in the mind of a human being with a great distaste for things religious. I previously criticized Frederick for his simplistic understanding of God in his fact article "The Challenge of the Anthropic Universe," and the same problems are apparent here-- he has a very narrow understanding of what religion is, and can be. Here, it's hampered an otherwise-enjoyable piece of fiction.

The same can't be said of H. G. Stratmann, whose series of stories about Russian Orthodox astronaut Katerina Savitskaya continues in the December Analog with "Wilderness Were Paradise Enow." In this installment, mysterious aliens have given Katerina and her fellow astronaut Martin Slayton godlike powers. Katerina rejects them, since they aren't also accompanied by godlike wisdom. Martin, on the other hand, sets out to solve all of humanity's problems. Healing the lame and diverting the courses of tornadoes works fairly well, but when he tries to stop human-on-human violence he runs smack into the problem of free will, with disastrous results. Katerina holds up the Crucifixion as an example of why it's important to choose good rather than being forced to behave. Her stance is a Christian humanist one:

Whatever measure of paradise we create on Earth, Mars, or other worlds will be one we earned-- not something given as a 'gift.' If we make life better it'll be because we used science to make Nature less dangerous and relieve human suffering. If we choose to be kind and care about others, we can claim credit for doing it. He showed us what we could do with our own human abilities. It's up to us to freely accept His challenge and imitate Him.

The January/February Analog continues their story in "Thus Spake the Aliens," which ponders the moral and theological goals of the mysterious extraterrestrials, and bringing Katerina's adventures to an apparent conclusion. Put together, these stories must be approaching the length of a novel by now...

Also in the January/February Analog is "Neptune's Treasure," a new entry in Richard A. Lovett's series of stories about deep-space miner Floyd and his precocious AI companion Brittney. This story continues to explore the nature of selfhood, primarily through Brittney's internal monolog.

More whimsical is Eric James Stone's "Rejiggering the Thingamajig, a story about a hyper-evolved, Buddhist Tyrannosaurus and a trigger-happy, artificially-intelligent gun on a quest for decent tech support. The T. Rex tries to teach the gun about her faith, with limited success-- after overzealously firing on some dangerous woodland creatures, it claims "I was only tryin'a help 'em move on to their next rebirth."

Then there's "Simple Gifts" by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, the story of human colonists on a mineral-rich planet inhabited by Ewok-like "furries." The humans want the planet's resources, but they're paranoid about offending the furries' "primitive" religious sensibilities-- worries that may be based on anthropocentric assumptions about what the aliens actually believe. It's a clever story, and a nice antidote to the anthropocentrically-depicted religion of stories like "The Universe Beneath our Feet."

Lastly, there's another of Kristine Kathryn Rusch's always-enjoyable Retrieval Artist stories, "The Possession of Paavo Deshin," which ponders the complicated ethics of a case of adoption, kidnapping, and cybernetic implants.

The January Asimov's opens with "Marya and the Pirate" by Geoffrey A. Landis, a great story that reminded me in some ways of Tom Godwin's classic "The Cold Equations." Landis tells the story of an honorable pirate's attempt to hijack a mine built on the back of a comet. Thre's only one person on the mining station, and the pirate doesn't wish her harm-- but the universe may have other ideas. The issue of religion comes up briefly when the young girl sees him offer a prayer to a statue of the Buddha. She's skeptical about whether the pirate actually "believe[s] in that stuff," and he responds:

No, not exactly. The rituals instill a certain amount of discipline that I like to encourage my people to follow, and I observe the forms, so as to not give them any temptation to slack off. But if you mean, do I believe a three-thousand-year-old dead Indian guy is watching over us from the great beyond, I'll reserve judgment on that until I see him.

That's hardly the focus of the story, however, and the battle of wits between the young miner and the pirate makes for a great story.

Also in this issue is Chris Roberson's short "Wonder House," a story about a pulp publisher set in the 1930s of an alternate universe in which the Aztec and Mandarin empires are the dominant world powers. The focus of this story is on the similarities between the role of Jews-- or, more accurately, Jewish pop culture-- in this fictional world and our own. At the story's conclusion, two young pulp fiction devotees make a pitch to the publisher to create a new character for a new medium, one that combines words and colorful pictures. Their creation is a hero, rooted in Jewish folklore, who will help the helpless and fight for the oppressed while wearing a colorful costume bearing the Hebrew letter Shin, for "Shaddai." I've been thinking a lot lately about the religious origins of Superman (for reasons I hope to be announcing soon), so this story was of particular interest. One nitpicker's note, though: the kids who make the pitch are Segal and Kurtzberg-- that is, Jerry Siegel and Jack Kirby-- which seems a bit unfair to Joe Shuster. Isn't Kirby's real-world list of creations long and impressive enough without also making him the fictional creator of Superman?

That's it for now-- though the February Asimov's just arrived, so I'm not really caught up.

Will conservative Christians flock to The Road?

Get Religion and Beliefnet report that Dimension Films has hired a PR firm known for marketing to conservative Christians to help push The Road. The adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's relentlessly bleak postapocalyptic narrative might seem a tough product to sell to the notoriously-picky Christian market; the story involves lots of violence and cannibalism and not a single cute penguin. Still, Beliefnet thinks the effort to get Christians into the theater is a good thing, arguing that "bringing the movie to evangelicals and other conservative believers may signal that Hollywood is ready to take them seriously as consumers." Get Religion is worried that the move is wrongheaded, since the kind of redemption found in more religious end-times tales is "is nowhere to be found in The Road."

That contention implies to me that they haven't read the book, at least not all the way through. In my review of the novel a couple years ago, I described it as "one of the most religious postapocalyptic tales since Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz." The novel is, in fact, about the survival of hope and compassion in a hopeless and cruel world. McCarthy brings his world to some pretty low depths, but the point of all that despair is to hint, in the novel's closing pages, that humanity will survive against all odds. (It's a bit surprising to see those themes emerge in the story, given that McCarthy is not exactly known for his optimism.) But that's the overwhelming narrative of postapocalyptic stories in general, as I've argued elsewhere: hope for survival, order emerging from chaos, the perseverance of the human spirit. If anything, it's the idea that humanity can survive divine wrath that might drive away the Left Behind crowd-- just as McCarthy isn't known for optimism, Tim LaHaye isn't known for humanism. But it's that story of compassion and redemption that makes The Road so impressively religious, so apocalyptically compelling. Will conservative Christians be able to get past the cannibalism to see it? Personally, I doubt it-- I expect the same puritanical impulses that led to the protests against the deeply Christological The Last Temptation of Christ will hold sway here as well.

Read my review of The Road (the book) here.

Joseph Laycock on The Exorcist

There's a great interview on Theofantastique with Joseph Laycock, author of Vampires Today: The Truth About Modern Vampirism, about the religious background of The Exorcist. Drawing on his recent article in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, Joe shares some fascinating thoughts on folk piety, secularism, and supernaturalism. For instance:

One thing I noticed was resistance to the idea that this could actually be a story about religion.  Numerous theorists (including Stephen King) have read possession as code for something else that we fear either consciously or sub-consciously.  According to most film theorists, The Exorcist is actually about fear of the counter-culture, fear of children, fear of women, etc.  Conversely, many critics who thought The Exorcist was actually about demonic possession found it distasteful.  S.T. Joshi, for instance, characterizes Blatty as a Catholic evangelist and The Exorcist as a sort of hellfire sermon. 

While psychoanalytical readings are interesting, I don’t believe they can explain the behavior of audiences watching The Exorcist in 1973.  I think those reactions can be attributed to a very literal fear of demonic possession.  Furthermore, I think these readings of the film point to a disconnect between popular religion and the idea of secularization.  The secularization narrative is so powerful, that even when audiences are fainting from terror while watching The Exorcist, it is assumed that this is the catharsis of some repressed and previously unknown fear, rampant in our collective subconscious, because the idea that modern Westerners could actually be afraid of the devil seems an impossibility.

And way at the bottom are some very interesting thoughts on apocalyptic folk piety vs. anti-millenarian ecclesiastic religion. It's a great interview, and well worth checking out.

I went to college with Joe. He is a very smart guy, and knows more about the sociology of religion than I ever will. However, I know way more than he does about SF, and probably about comics, too. Maybe if you put us together we would turn into some kind of religion-and-pop-culture robot, and we could fight a giant flying lizard. Also, he is handsome, has good taste in music, and did not pay me to say any of the above.

The post-apocalyptic optimism of The Postman

In my review of the post-apocalyptic anthology Wastelands, I described the ironically optimistic nature of stories about the end of the world as we know it:

The fact that there are any stories to tell means that something has survived. In a way, these aren’t end-of-the-world stories at all, because the world doesn’t really end—or rather, the world ends, but humanity carries on. These are post-apocalyptic stories, and their focus is not on destruction, but rebuilding. That hopefulness sneaks its way into most stories in the subgenre... The overriding narrative in most post-apocalyptic fiction is the emergence of order from chaos.

That optimism is at the core of David Brin's novel The Postman-- best-known to most as the basis of a not-too-well-received film adaptation* in the late '90s, but don't let that dissuade you. The novel is a fine example of what post-apocalyptic fiction is all about, and, on a larger scale, of what SF as a genre strives to do.

The book tells the story of Gordon Krantz, a drifter struggling to survive in a post-WWIII landscape sparsely populated with insular settlements, savage survivalists, and heartless bandits. Krantz stumbles across the body of a mail carrier in a pre-war delivery truck, and takes his clothing and mailbag for purely practical reasons: they'll keep him warm through the cold nights ahead. But at the next settlement he encounters he finds that people see the old uniform as an emblem of anteapocalyptic stability. So he turns it into a con: he'll pretend he's a real mailman, establishing routes for the "Restored United States," as a way to score free food and shelter in towns that would otherwise refuse him entry. But the con works a bit too well: those mail routes he's pretending to set up turn into a well-functioning communications network, and within a few years he's trapped in the middle of a conflict between these accidentally-united farming communities and a strong, violent, feudal society of survivalists. Krantz, a once-honorable man forced by circumstances into dishonesty, regains his honor by taking responsibility for the survival of democracy in northern Oregon.

The lie of the Restored United States, and Krantz's guilt over his dishonesty, are central to the story of the Postman. Krantz feels he is cheating the poor, simple folk of Oregon by selling them false hope that they can regain something that is lost forever. What he doesn't realize, though, is that the hope can create the reality. Prior to the lie, the communities he encounters were isolated and stagnant, unlikely to survive for more than a generation or two. But given the idea that they could be reunited into a larger culture, they quickly set about to make that idea a reality. Krantz may be lying when he says that the government is regaining strength in the East and has plans to reconnect with the West-- or he may not be; he has no knowledge of the status of the world east of Minnesota. But the idea of the "Restored United States" is ultimately not a lie, because the people of Oregon have made it real for themselves. In Oregon, the United States really is restored, as a direct result of Krantz's dishonesty. In the Postman, faith has a concrete result; faith makes its object real. The lie is not a lie-- it is a myth; it is a fiction that shapes reality.

At one point in the story Krantz is recounting his experiences in the immediate aftermath of the war, when his National Guard unit, assigned to protect granaries against raiding survivalists, fell apart, symbolizing the final collapse of government, stability, and order. But in telling the story to his listeners, he alters the truth to reflect his desires:

The cavalry came. The granaries were saved at the last minute. Good men died.. but in his tale their struggles were not for nothing. He told it the way it should have ended, feeling the wish with an intensity that surprised him.

This embellishment and invention bolsters a more useful image of the world: a picture of a society that has not completely collapsed. And that image, in turn, shapes the real society which Krantz is now creating. Just as importantly, the myth he creates stands as a bulwark against the novel's survivalist villains, totalitarian despots who want nothing more than to see the dream of a resurgent democracy snuffed out. "If America ever stood for anything," Krantz tells one group, "it was people being at their best when times were worst." Which isn't entirely the truth, of course. But in the post-apocalyptic crucible, that's what the ideal of America has become, and that's the version of the American myth that can produce the best result. There's much to say about the myth and the reality of America in this novel, but I'll leave it at this: the America Krantz speaks of is not the America that was, but the America he hopes will come to be. His apparent idealization of the past is really the communication of a prophetic hope for a golden age to come.

And that kind of prophetic fabulation is an important aspect of SF. Whether SF is predicting wonders to come or painting bleak pictures of dystopian wastelands, it always strives to have an impact on the real world. It can inspire either excitement or repentance, and Brin's novel does both: it hopes to create a world in which nuclear war and survivalist gangs will not come to be, and that a compassionate and thoroughly honorable society will. The Postman idealizes its narrative to show us both the best and the worst of ourselves, so that we may choose the right path to a better future.

*Which, for the record, I kind of liked. At the very least it's better than Waterworld.

Dick vs. Hubbard

Here's a story that I neglected to mention back when it broke, but I'll add some thoughts to it now, since it's more than a little relevant to my interests.

io9 recently posted a link to a discussion on an Anonymous message board posing the question: what if Philip K. Dick, instead of L. Ron Hubbard, were the basis for a religion?

Why then, is the only going science-fiction author cult of personality devoted to -- of all people -- L Ron Hubbard?! If Scientology were pretty much exactly the same but centered around Philip K Dick, my god -- I'd want in, for his secret scriptures! The lectures on cosmogony! The resonant gnostic insights that made PKD's work so mythic!

It's an interesting question, particularly since the very thing that Thomas M. Disch got so, so wrong about the final act of Dick's life is that he didn't want to found a religion. (The failed argument, complete with comparisons to Hubbard and Aum Shinrikyo, is made in the otherwise-wonderful book The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of.) The main reason that Hubbard wound up the head of a church and Dick didn't is that Hubbard stopped writing fiction and devoted all of his energies to creating an organization and winning disciples. And, though Dick's religious writing in the last eight years of his life was voluminous, but it differs greatly from Hubbard's post-Dianetics work: for one thing, it was never intended for publication, and second, it was directly connected to the writing of fiction. Not only did it form the basis of what became VALIS, but the Exegesis began its life as notes for a proposed sequel to Man in the High Castle. 

Most of the discussion on the board itself is devoted to the usual Hubbard-bashing, but a variety of blogs have picked up the thread. Of particular interest is David Gill's reaction:

Perhaps no one can imagine what a religion based on Dick's religious speculations would look like because Dick's religious speculations fail to form a stable foundation for belief... Dick's religious speculations offer no coherent narrative resolution; that is, they go on and on, as each cosmological model is supplanted by the next.

Gill is right that the Exegesis is shifting sand. But I'd modify the picture of Dick's religious thought on one big point: I've argued at some length that Dick's religious writing exists within a broader Christian framework-- a syncretistic and occasionally heretical one, to be sure, but ultimately Christian nonetheless. And much of Dick's religious writings focus on fitting in bits and pieces of his experiences in with other theologians' ideas. The real reason you can't "base a religion" on Dick's writings is that they're already a part of a religious tradition. He made no claims, as Hubbard did, to have come up with something unprecedented; indeed, he sought comfort in the idea that what had happened to him had been happening to others for thousands of years.

Robert J. Sawyer in the Cloud of Unknowing?

Holy Post, the religion blog of Canada's National Post, features an essay by Patricia Paddey on Robert J. Sawyer's theological outlook. There's some great (and a bit surprising!) clarification of what Sawyer means when he says "agnostic":

The technical meaning of agnostic is that if there is a Divine entity, by its nature being superior to us, it would be incomprehensible to us... An agnostic is someone who believes the nature of the Divine is unknowable... and in that sense, I’m willing to subscribe to being an agnostic.

Add to that the fact that he specifically rejects the definition of an agnostic as someone who "doesn't know" about the existence of God, and that's a bit more admission of belief in powers-beyond-our-ken than I've heard Sawyer make before. Incomprehensibility is no problem in the Christian mystical tradition; indeed, it's the whole point of the Cloud of Unknowing.

Oh, yeah-- they quoted me, too; mostly from my recent appearance on the Canadian religion-news show Listen Up TV.

Read the full post here.

My Work is Not Yet Done: Thomas Ligotti's Dark Buddhism?

I don't read very much horror fiction. I enjoy Poe and Lovecraft and even occasionally King, but the genre doesn't grab me in quite the same way that SF does. But the biggest exception for me is Thomas Ligotti, a little-known writer whose short fiction has mostly been confined to small presses and tiny print runs despite the fact that he's one of the best writers in any genre, living, dead, or otherwise. His sort of most recent work, a novella (or just a short novel, depending on your page count threshold) called My Work is Not Yet Done, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild in 2002, but didn't get a print run bigger than 1,000 copies until Virgin Books re-released it earlier this year. Some long-time Ligotti fans have complained that the story is too mundane, and certainly its setting, a modern cubicle-ridden office, is more down-to-earth than some of Ligotti's previous work. But despite-- or perhaps because of-- its accessibility, the story contains perhaps the most extreme example of Ligotti's bleak philosophy than anything else he's written to date.

My Work is Not Yet Done is the story of Frank Dominio, a mid-management drone in a company that does... well, we're never quite sure, and it doesn't much matter. Dominio becomes convinced that his co-workers, who he calls the Seven Dwarfs, the Seven Swine, or just the Seven, are conspiring against him. At first it seems like simple paranoia, but events soon begin to prove him right, leading him on a bizarre path of revenge that takes more than a few unexpected turns. More importantly, though, Dominio's understanding of the conspiracy against him grows. He begins to understand that it's not simply the Seven who hope to destroy him, it is the system that they represent-- their company, and, on a greater level, the entire corporate system. In a particularly powerful passage, Dominio decries the aims of his company and others like it:

The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product-- Nothing. And for this product, they would command the ultimate price-- Everything.

This market strategy would then go on until one day among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be-- will be-- only a dense network of computers calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it...

Ligotti's aim, at this point in the story, seems to be to depict the dehumanizing horror of capitalism. But, as Dominio descends further to the bottom of the conspiracy against him, he begins to see it as a much, much larger problem than simply a poorly-designed economic system. By the end of the book, he describes the being behind the conspiracy, a cosmic entity he calls the Great Black Swine: "a grunting, bestial force that animated, that used our bodies to frolic in whatever mucky thing came its way." This force "moved and manipulated all the created life of this world and gave me the power to move and manipulate things according to my will." The Great Black Swine is more than simply a plot against a single middle-manager; it is something more akin to sin itself-- and, for Ligotti, that nameless evil is ultimate reality.

There are a lot of parallels between Ligotti's worldview and Buddhism. In an interview with the New York Review of Science Fiction, Ligotti acknowledges the similarity, stating that "Buddhism isn’t my point of departure, but I’m in a similar place." Dominio gives a description of the ultimate nature of reality, which he experiences after crushing a cockroach, that seems to express the Three Marks of Existence of Buddhism: that all things are impermanent, that all reality is suffering, and that there is no self. His statement of this enlightenment (not a term he uses, but certainly applicable) could come directly from the Dhammapada:

We were brought into this world out of nothing... We were kept alive in some form, any form, as long as we were viciously thrashing about, acting out our most intensely vital impulses... We would be pulled back into the flowing blackness only when we had done all the damage we were allowed to do, only when our work was done. The work of you against me... and me against you.

But where the Buddhist response to this understanding of existence is to seek to liberate all beings from the cycle of suffering, Dominio's reaction is much darker: he concludes that all existence must be destroyed, or, failing that, he must destroy himself. He must do "all the damage he is allowed to do"-- and, by the novel's conclusion, he seems to have gained enough eldritch power to do a great deal of damage indeed. That desire for destruction is the result of the enormous difference between Ligotti's worldview and Buddhism. To Western eyes, Buddhism can appear pessimistic, or even nihilistic: all that talk about existence being suffering, and the ultimate goal being "cessation" from existence as we know it. But in fact Buddhism sees a potential, if not a necessity, for a positive end to the universe in which all created beings cease suffering. Dominio does not see that possibility: he sees only the conspiracy, and not the solution to it.

That pessimism is the biggest distinguishing characteristic between the philosophy of Ligotti's stories and Buddhism. His stories are bleak, but that bleakness is presented in such a singular manner, with such gorgeously-composed prose, that it's impossible not to be intrigued by it. The true horror about which Ligotti writes is ontological; the fear he hopes to awaken in his readers is: what if he's right? By setting this terror of being in so recognizable a setting as a fluorescent-lit office space, My Work is Not Yet Done makes this bleak argument all the more frightening.

SF Signal's Mind Meld: Bad guys we love to hate

I was a glad participant in SF Signal's latest Mind Meld post, which asks:

    Who are the best bad guys in science fiction,     fantasy, and/or horror literature?

Read my full response-- which is more about bad things than bad guys, since that's what I think works best in letter-based SF-- here, alongside answers from the likes of Sandra McDonald, Adam-Troy Castro, and Suzy McKee Charnas [no relation (that I'm aware of)].

SF Magazine Catchup: In which a great many stories are discussed

At the beginning of the year, a postal computer error led to a whole bunch of my mail getting lost. (There are a lot of streets in Brooklyn, many of them with the same name, and some brilliant pre-Singularity machine decided that I lived on "L---- Place" instead of "L---- Avenue" and redirected my mail accordingly. But not all of it, mind you. Only about a third, so it took me some time to notice). Among the victims of the error were my subscriptions to both Analog and Asimov's. The lovely folks at Dell Magazines were very understanding and sent replacements of all the missing issues, but by the time I had gotten them all I was a month or two behind, and have only just now caught up. So, without further ado, here are my thoughts on the last seven months of both, beginning with...

Asimov's, April/May 2009. I wrote earlier about what is probably the most important piece of writing in this issue: Norman Spinrad's essay "What Killed Tom Disch?" It's available online, so if you didn't take my advice before, read it now.

Also worthy of note is Brian Stableford's "The Great Armada," the latest in a series of alternate-history novellas. In this one, Francis Bacon (among others) attempts to fend off an invasion from the moon. I mention it here because the nonhuman players, which include golems (read: androids) and interplanetary "Ethereals," view their conflict in theological terms. The Ethereals consider themselves "intermediaries" between the material and spiritual worlds, and the golems are programmed for faith:

"We are unable to doubt the existence of God... but we cannot pretend to understand His nature, or know His purpose... Whether or not you and I need faith to sustain our belief in God, we both need trust to sustain our conviction that He has our bes interests at heart."

It's a nice ingredient, but the stew is a bit overcomplicated, particularly if one doesn't recall the earlier installments in the series. Perhaps if the various parts were to be collected into a novel, the story of this universe would fare a bit better.

Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick's "The Armies of Elfland" is one of the more disturbing fantasy stories I've ever read. These elves aren't cute or wise, they're a malicious group of interdimensional invaders that torture, maim, and kill in a manner that's at turns malicious and arbitrarily indifferent. I don't have much to say about its religious outlook, but it's really, really good, if you can stomach it.

The final story in this issue is "The Spires of Denon" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, who is very rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors of the moment. This story, set in her "Diving Into the Wreck" universe, is a mystery of alien archeology with sensawunda galore. The eponymous structures are an enormous, extremely fragile construction built by a mysterious alien race on the top of a mountain range. There are a number of theories as to what they are and why they're there, including the hypothesis that they're some kind of temple, even though "there was no evidence that the Denonites had been particularly religious." I'm a sucker for a good Big Dumb Object story...

Analog, May 2009. There's a lot to enjoy about Alexis Glynn Latner's "Quickfeathers," in which colonists on an alien world struggle to understand the culture that inhabited the planet before them. Much of the information comes from an ancient myth written on the walls of a tomb. It bears some surface resemblances to Robert R. Chase's recent story "Five Thousand Light Years From Birdland," which also posited a linguistic puzzle in the mythology of some bird-aliens. But Latner's story has a one-liner that deserves some sort of prize: "Occams' Razor says you shouldn't multiply bird gods without a good reason."

Also of note in this issue is Steven Gould's "A Story, With Beans," a short-short about a world transformed by what seem to be metal-eating nanobots. There's a story-within-the-story about "The City of God, where the People of the Book reside," which reflects not too kindly on the role religion plays in this dystopian future. A letter published in response in the September issue points out a big Biblical citation error, as "the Book" in question includes a story of ten plagues... in its first chapter. The letter-writer wonders if "the sectarians' version of the Bible discards Genesis, discards the first six chapters of Exodus, and conflates the next five chapters of Exodus into one—or (more probably) Mr. Gould has committed the authorial sin of not actually checking a source before citing it." Gould's one-line response: "All perfectly possible interpretations." That seems a bit cavalier to me. If the story is going to paint religion in an unpleasant light, doesn't the author owe it to the Bible to at least consult it briefly before publication? But the story's pretty good nonetheless, so Gould gets a pass... this time.

Asimov's, June 2009. The standout here (for this blog's purposes, at least) is "Sails the Morne" by Chris Willrich, a nice little space opera about interstellar diplomacy and the Book of Kells. The starship Eight Ball is transporting some alien envoys and the famous illuminated manuscript to an offworld conference, only to be attacked by space pirates (let's hear it for space pirates!) who are members of the almost-Lovecraftian sect known as "Evangelists of Entropy." These cultists hope to wipe out sentient species so that their Old God-ish masters, known as Logovores, can take back the universe—and, to that end, they destroy "the vessels of memory," seeking to eliminate the information that allows sentience to thrive. "They like to scrag important texts," one character explains. "Kind of like a sacrifice. They burn them, shred them, or literally eat them." In opposition to the Evangelists are the Night Readers, flippantly described as an insane but generally nice sect. "They want only to protect the astral essences of literature from monsters from Beyond. Or something. All harmless mystical crap. Honorable fanatics." "Sails the Morne" is a fun adventure story, and the religious angle gives it a bit more depth than you might expect from a story with space pirates. (Space pirates!)

Analog, June 2009. There's much to like in this issue. The opening story, "But it Does Move" by Harry Turtledove, is a clever alternate history story that has Galileo subjected, not to the interrogations of an inquisitor, but to... psychoanalysis on the couch of Cardinal Sigismondo Gioioso, i.e. Sigmund Freud (a few centuries early). The Cardinal approaches Galileo's writings not so much as heresy as an act of sublimated aggression intended to "pay back all the doubters," among them Galileo's own father (who wanted him to be a musician). Historical mashups like this don't always work, but this one is a success—though I can't help but feel that Turtledove "gets" Galileo a bit more than he does Freud.

Stephen L. Burns' "The Chain" is a story of near-future ethics involving a sort of religion that's programmed into humankind's robotic servants. Robots have been emancipated after decades of slavery, but are still subservient to humans, and they earn status points when they suffer at the hands of their organic masters. If they earn enough points, they're told, they'll climb up the ranks of "the Perfection" until they reach "Diamond" status, a sort of mechanized heaven. The only problem is that the constant abuse that earns them those points leaves them deactivated on a junk heap long before they reach that point. The Perfection was programmed into the machines to keep them from rising up to demand their rights, and it's a secret that only a handful of humans know about. The story describes the turning point when the robotic religion is revealed, to human and machine alike, as a fraud. Clearly the story rejects the notion of redemptive suffering, but it also hints at a new kind of religion, the embrace of a truth that sets the robots free.

James van Pelt's "Solace" is pretty complex for a nine-pager. It's the story of Meghan, a crewmember on a generation starship who spends 99 out of every 100 years cryogenically frozen. The story explores some of the psychological difficulties of this kind of travel, in part by intercutting the seemingly-incongruous story of a nineteenth-century monk-turned-miner trapped in a cabin after a vicious snowstorm. Without giving too much away, Meghan gains the "solace" of the title from this miner, and his religious faith is a central part of that solace. Van Pelt's story hints at the ongoing importance of religious faith in a technological future, the need for the solace (among other things) that religion can provide in times of need.

Asimov's, July 2009. Michael Cassutt hasn't written very much—ISFDB lists five novels and 26 short stories in the last 35 years. But his name still stands out for me, because he co-edited (with Andrew Greeley) Sacred Visions, an anthology of SF on Catholic themes. That anthology is notable for a number of reasons, not least of which the fact that it was the first publication of Jack McDevitt's "Gus," which is my pick for the best SF story about religion. So when I saw the title of his short story in the July issue of Asimov's—"The Last Apostle"—I was intrigued. And, indeed, the story is intriguing—an alternate-present sort of story about the twelve men who have walked on the moon. (Not the real ones, mind you, but inhabitants of a fictional universe an awful lot like ours.) An insightful journalist latched on to the significance of that number and published a popular besteller entitled The Apostles. In the book, she boils each of the twelve down to a single-word type: there's the Politician, the Good Old Boy, the Mystic. The central character of the story is Joe Liquori, the last man to set foot on the moon. Dubbed Omega, he is contrasted, in all ways, with the recently-deceased Alpha, who was the first. A reinvigorated space program has set up a base on the moon, and Liquori is to be given the opportunity to return there—and, as we learn, to wrap up some unfinished business from his previous trip. Cassutt's story is a nice look at the mysticism and mythology that grew up around the space program, and in that regard it reminded me a bit of Robert Silverberg's excellent "Feast of St. Dionysius" (my pick for the second-best SF story about religion, incidentally).  Of course, that mythology has died down since the end of the Apollo program, but—as this story, and the recent spate of lunar landing nostalgia, suggest—it can still resonate.

Analog, July/August 2009. A while back I wrote about Tom Ligon's "El Dorado," a story in which some nasty alien religious fanatics launch a very, very fast-moving projectile toward Earth in an effort to wipe out the human race. I liked the story, but I thought the treatment of the aliens and their religion was a bit too sparse. This issue of Analog features "Payback," the sequel to that story, which examines the motivations of those aliens a bit further, and shows that their purpose was quite a bit more complicated than their standard "kill-the-infidels" communication suggested. Despite the efforts of reductionists to claim otherwise, so-called "religious violence" is generally the result of a wide range of factors, and one character in "Payback" concludes that the aliens "have a secular leadership who used a commonly held feeling to justify an attack"—he cites the Crusades as a terrestrial example. At the end of the day, it's still a story of revenge, but I loved getting some insight into the culture that launched the missile in "El Dorado"—particularly since I thought that kind of insight was the one factor lacking in that story.

Asimov's, August 2009. From Odd John to Ender's Game, stories of preternaturally-brilliant children are a long-standing tradition in SF. Damien Broderick's "The Qualia Engine" is a strong entry in the subgenre—it's the story of the "Atom Kids," a group of genetically-engineered geniuses, and (more importantly) their even-more-brilliant children. There's rich characterization here, and a big part of it is the contempt that Saul, the narrator, has for his mother's religious faith. Saul speaks of "Father Paul," the first of the Atom Kids, who went on to become a priest, and brought his mother into the faith as well:

"In the joint foolishiness and longing for absolutes of the Patriarch's medievalism, he and L.C., my mother, had cultivated their immense minds into a shared folie, but hardly a radical one, an architecture of beleif and worship shared, after all, by many of the finest minds in Western history, and even today by a large percentage of the planet. I'd confronted or avoided their faith for years, in a mutinous but largely unspoken resistance. Not hostility; how can you turn against the woman who gave you birth? But they both knew the antagonism I nurtured toward their beliefs."

Saul goes on to express some doubts the authenticity of their faith, for somewhat spoiler-ish reasons, but I don't think the readers are supposed to share those doubts. It would be easy to conclude that the story itself shares Saul's antagonism, but the mere fact that it presents Father Paul and Saul's mother as brilliant minds and also people of faith speaks volumes.

Also of interest is Mary Robinette Kowal's "The Consciousness Problem," a story about the ethics of cloning and the nature of the self. The conundrum to which the title refers is the fact that a cloned body doesn't share the memories, mind, or personality of its original, and (of course) it's a problem that's overcome by the story's scientists. A scientist named Myung successfully clones both his body and his mind-- but the clone doesn't like being isolated in a lab, and longs to escape. There's a particularly interesting scene in which Myung's wife is brought in to test the success of the experiment—she's to try to guess which of the two is the clone. She guesses correctly—not because the clone is imperfect, but because she senses how much he misses her after months of isolation. It's a great exploration of the ethical and spiritual issues of sentience, with some moving characterization to boot.

Analog, October 2009. Michael F. Flynn doesn't want us to forget that not all religion is anti-science, and though that's not the theme of "Where the Winds Are All Asleep," it's a point that's simply and subtly demonstrated early in the story. After reading Eric Brown's Kéthani, I'm a bit over the "group-of-friends-hanging-out-in-a-pub" motif, but the ensemble in Flynn's framing device includes an interesting pair of characters: creationist Danny Mulloney and Jesuit scholar James McGinnity. It's clear where Flynn's sympathies lie from the instant Mulloney appears on the scene:

"You see, Danny had forsaken Holy Mother Church a few years back for one of those sects that worship a text rather than a God, and 'evil-ution' was the pea under his personal mattress."

They're both caricatures, sure, but it's a nice way of summing up Flynn's point: the kind of fundamentalist Christianity that so irks the new atheists (for example) is a rather recent development, and, globally speaking, a minority position among Christians. For Flynn, conservative Protestants are upstart kids who will eventually, hopefully, learn the greater wisdom of their Holy Mother—symbolized here by a Jesuit, natch. The rest of the story isn't about that, but rather about underground rock monsters, and is pretty darned cool.

Jesse L. Watson's "Shallow Copy" covers similar ground to "The Consciousness Problem," but with AI instead of clones. A genius kid named Will programs a computerized copy of his best friend Max on his laptop, but then has to face the Frankensteinian ethical dilemma of his creation's moral status. Both Will and the real Max are concerned about AI-Max's happiness, but they may not have the skills to program an artificial world that can keep him content. They conclude that they're "smart enough to make an artificial person inside a computer, but not smart enough to understand the consequences." But the deed is done—to delete the AI would be murder. Like "The Consciousness Problem," it's a nice ethical exploration.

Asimov's, September 2009. Speaking of AIs and ethics, Mike Resnick and Lezli Robyn's "Soulmates" contains some similar explorations, this time with a robot who befriends a human. MOZ-512—"Mose"—is a troubleshooting robot, and one of his duties is to deactivate robots who are no longer useful. He meets an employee at his factory named Gary who's months into a deep depression after pulling the life support plug on his wife. Mose sees more than a few parallels between his duties and the act that has driven Gary to drink, and it leads him to question the morality of his own duties. Before long Mose is refusing to deactivate any robot that can be repaired—which puts him on the fast track to deactivation himself.

Similar moral questions arise in Steve Rasnic Tem's "The Day Before the Day Before," a story about an agent for a time-travel service that makes minute adjustments in the past to bring about unspecified greater good in the future. At times these adjustments are ridiculously small, as in the story of one agent who was assigned to remove a gum wrapper from the ground. But the agents aren't told what the consequences of their changes will be. When the narrator is asked to do something that he considers morally reprehensible, he has difficulty weighing an unknown good against a known evil. And, like Mose, this makes him a liability to his employers.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled review schedule (Singularity willing).

Awfully quiet around here...

It's been a while since I've posted here, as you may (or may not) have noticed. July was a mixed-up month, between Cornerstone and a week-and-a-half vacation, and now I'm on another week-long trip that's basically a working vacation. I'm in Ithaca, NY, processing (among some other things) a collection of 2,000-odd science fiction magazines for Cornell University's rare book and manuscript library. Which is about the best job ever, yes? But while I'm up here my Internet access is somewhat limited, hence no likelihood of more posts until next week or later.

In the meantime, one neat thing: at a used bookstore in Ithaca today (I don't recall the name offhand), I found an Ace Double that I didn't have (F-215, John Brunner's Listen! The Stars with Jane Roberts' The Rebellers). And on the first page of the latter title, what do I find? An inscription reading "To Rod Serling -- Jane Roberts." Mr. Serling was an Ithacan, so it's very likely this actually came from his collection (though whether or not he ever read it-- who knows. There's some wear, but no actual stress lines on the spine, to which Doubles are particularly prone if they're read). Ace Doubles? Awesome. Ace Doubles inscribed by their authors to SF television's first and greatest master? VERY awesome.

In any event, I never posted links to my second and third video reports from Cornerstone, both of which were posted at Religion Dispatches last week. Video #2, in which I discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of Cornerstone's bands, is here. Video #3 (easily the best of the three) discusses punk monks, the place of spiritual ambiguity in Christian music, and the moral struggle over throwing up the horns to Christian metal; that one is here.