SF Gospel

Doomsday Film Festival

Don't think the prolonged quiet on this blog is due to inactivity-- quite the opposite. For instance: I'll be speaking on a panel this Saturday at the Doomsday Film Festival in Brooklyn, N.Y. I'm speaking after the late-Cold War anxiety tale Testament. But if you're interested you might as well just get the festival pass, because the entire lineup looks amazing! (I'm most looking forward to Damnation Alley and Hardware.) Buy your tickets soon, because by all accounts the theater is tiny (like a fallout shelter, natch). The festival begins tomorrow night (Friday, Dec. 10th), and my film and panel session begin at 3:30 on Saturday the 11th. See you at the end of the world! 

Radio Free Albemuth: The politics of mystical experience

Radio Free Albemuth is generally considered an oddity in the Philip K. Dick canon. Initially entitled Valisystem A, it was Dick's first attempt at transforming his religious experiences into a novel. When he sent it in to a publisher they returned it with a request for minor revisions; instead he scrapped the whole thing and started from scratch, resulting in the masterful Valis. Valisystem A was essentially forgotten until three years after his death, when it was published under the title it's known by today. There is disagreement among the grand assembly of Dickheads over the relative quality of many of his lesser-known books, but perhaps none is so controversial as RFA. Some think it is a minor footnote in the grander story of Valis (Jonathan Lethem, who left it out of the third Library of America novel in favor of A Maze of Death,* is in this camp); but others-- myself among them-- think it's an overlooked masterpiece, a powerful fusion of theological exploration and science-fictional storytelling.

John Alan Simon, the writer, producer, and director of the recent independent film adaptation of Radio Free Albemuth, clearly falls into the latter camp, as evidenced by his ardently faithful adaptation. It's obviously a labor of love, as underscored by the story of the film's production: Simon has been working on the adaptation for over 15 years. The screenplay hews closely to the novel in both structure and content-- something that no other PKD adaptation has done except A Scanner Darkly. The story is all there: Nicholas Brady, a PKD stand-in, is contacted by a semi-divine alien satellite that hopes to rescue humankind from the ontological injustice underlying not only a growing fascism in the United States, but all human suffering everywhere. His friend, the science fiction author Philip K. Dick, is gradually pulled into Brady's understanding of the world and his attempts at revolutionary action-- an action that cannot be judged in worldly terms of success or failure. The film transcribes the story with painstaking care.

That's not to say there isn't some creative interpretation going on, but the film handles that interpretation smartly. This is especially evident in the numerous dream sequences: the dreams of PKD stand-in Nicholas Brady are a central aspect of the novel (and of Dick's real-life religious experiences), and the film captures the otherworldly quality of those dreams brilliantly. (The bemused look on the face of Jonathan Scarfe, playing Brady, as he receives a computerized message from an alternate-universe "Portuguese States of America" is a particular high point). The film uses an awful lot of computer effects for a movie without a car chase, and those effects pay off-- they are an otherworldly intrusion, just like the alien-divine messages they represent. There's a slightly different look to each dream, including a couple fully-animated sequences. Some are extremely polished; others are deliberately more sketchy, but there's a powerful aesthetic driving all of these sequences. It's clear that a lot of thought went into the look of Brady's visions, which are, after all, the backbone of this story.

There's also a strong emphasis placed on the novel's political message. It gives a sinister illustriation of an America gradually transforming into a police state that reminded me of Southland Tales.** In this context, those contacted by the alien satellite from Albemuth become not just religious visionaries, but revolutionaries as well. Collectively known as "Aramchek," they become the victims of brutal political repression. The falsity of the distinction between politics and religion is a recurring theme in the story. Near the novel's end, the narrator (Philip K. Dick himself, albeit a fictional version thereof) discusses this idea in dialogue closely reproduced in the film:

"[Aramchek believes] that we shouldn't give our loyalty to human rulers. That there is a supreme father in the sky, above the stars, who guides us. Our loyalty should be to him and him alone."

"That's not a political idea," Leon said with disgust. "I thought Aramcheck was a political organization, subversive."

"It is."

"But that's a religious idea. That's the basis of religion. They have been talking about that for five thousand years."

I had to admit that he was right. "Well," I said, "that's Aramchek, an organization guided by the supreme heavenly father."

This political theology-- in essence, a form of Christian anarchism-- is at the heart of Radio Free Albemuth, and the film highlights these concepts brilliantly. That's an element that was significantly diluted in the transition from Albemuth to Valis: bringing the story out of an alternate-universe police state and into something more closely resembling the real world reduces the urgency of this political theology. Simon also holds the film rights to Valis, which goes further down the theological rabbit hole, and has written a screenplay for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which depicts a particularly unpleasant police state. In this context, Radio Free Albemuth may end up occupying the central territory in a sort of trilogy exploring the breadth of Dick's philosophy and theology. The film is currently in search of a distributor, but when it becomes more widely available, it's definitely worth seeking out.

Fore more on Radio Free Albemuth, see the film's official website and the Wall Street Journal's coverage of the premiere.

*Admittedly an overlooked masterpiece in its own right, and an excellent fusion of SF and theology.
**I should probably note that I mean this comparison as a compliment, since not everyone is kindly disposed to that film. See also my comparison of Sunshine to Event Horizon.

Radio Free Albemuth in NYC

We interrupt our (de facto, impromptu, and strictly temporary, I assure you) hiatus to pass on the announcement of a film screening this week: Radio Free Albemuth, adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, has its New York premiere this Thursday, October 7th, as part of the Gotham Screen International Film Festival. The novel on which the film is based, originally entitled Valisystem A, was Philip K. Dick's first attempt to communicate his religious experiences into fictional form. Legend has it that the publisher requested fairly minor revisions when he turned in the draft, but he instead completely rewrote the thing, producing Valis. When the Valisystem A draft was found in his papers after his death, it was considered different enough from its descendant to deserve publication under its own cover (and new, disambiguating title). I'm certainly a fan of Valis, but I've always considered Radio Free Albemuth to be at least as good, and in some ways even better. Writer/producer/director John Alan Simon has maintained a healthy level of contact with the PKD community throughout the development of the film, which bodes well for the finished product. I am certainly looking forward to the screening (and, no doubt, pestering Simon with questions about his take on the Exegesis afterward).

Tickets to the screening can be purchased here. 

Philip K. Dick News: Androids and the Exegesis

Cornell University's incoming freshmen are lucky: their summer reading assignment for this year is Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Cornell's Carl A. Kroch Library invited me to curate an exhibit on the novel's bibliographic history and broad influence (including its slightly more famous stepchild, Blade Runner). The exhibit is now open and runs through October 8th, but don't worry if you're not planning a trip to Ithaca in the next few weeks-- an online version of the exhibit is available on Cornell's website. I had always enjoyed Androids, but I gained a new level of appreciation for it in researching this exhibit (which is my first official curatorial credit, hurrah).

From my introductory essay:

Dick once described himself as “a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.” He saw his works as explorations of two primary questions: “What is reality?” and “What is human?” Androids enthusiastically tackles the second question, skillfully fusing its ideas about cruelty and empathy into a compelling detective story. Other works in his oeuvre explore the question as thoroughly--for instance, the novel We Can Build You and the speech “The Android and the Human.” But none do so in so entertaining a fashion as Androids.

This is turning out to be a very busy PKD year for me: in addition to this exhibition, I've read (and will shortly be reviewing, for the SFRA Review) the long-awaited final volume of the Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick. And, most importantly and excitingly, I've joined the team of scholars that is assembling a new, two-volume selection of previously-unpublished theological material from Dick's Exegesis (previously mentioned, prior to my involvement, here). They've got a great group working on this project, and they're doing the job exactly how it should be done. There is absolutely brilliant stuff in there that will soon see the light of day for the first time... and needless to say, I'm pretty thoroughly thrilled. More on that as publicity and propriety allow. In the meantime, check out the exhibit!

Android Dreams: Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott's Replicant Futures

Doctor Who: Alpha and Omega

The fifth season of Doctor Who has ended, and so too has my series on the show for Religion Dispatches. Check out the final installment for James McGrath's thoughts on the Doctor's role in the (re)creation of the universe, and my discussion of Rory Williams, the robot who thought he was a man. See below for separate links to every post in the series (including a few that I seem to have neglected to mention here before. It's been a busy summer, folks).

Part one, discussing "The Eleventh Hour," "The Beast Below," and "Victory of the Daleks," plus some general thoughts on Doctor Who.

Part two, on "The Time of Angels."

Part three, on "The Vampires of Venice." 

Part four, on "Amy's Choice."

Part five, on "The Hungry Earth."

Part six, on "Cold Blood."

Part seven, on "Vincent and the Doctor."

Part eight, on "The Lodger."

Part nine, on "The Pandorica Opens."

Part ten, on "The Big Bang."

My deepest thanks to my co-contributors Henry Jenkins, Joseph Laycock, and especially James McGrath!

"Amy's Choice": Will the real universe please stand up...?

The latest in my series of posts on the current season of Doctor Who is up at Religion Dispatches. This week, James McGrath, Henry Jenkins and I ponder the difference between reality and dreams, and possibly an unnameable third choice, in "Amy's Choice." Read it here.

Through a wormhole, darkly: The Light of Other Days

 The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. 

This novel, one of Clarke's last (though I think it's safe to assume that Baxter did most of the actual writing), explores the cultural and psychological impact of visual wormhole technology that allows viewers to see what's going on anywhere on Earth... and, eventually, anywhere in the universe, at any time. This is an idea that comes up, briefly, in Clarke's masterpiece, Childhood's End, where the alien Overlords introduce similar technology to humankind, and in the space of a page or two it allows the human race to cast of its myths and illusions and live more fully in the present. That's not quite what happens here-- there is a bit of myth-debunking (on which more below), but for many people the ability to witness the past leads to a morbid obsession with what has gone before. And the elimination of the very concept of "privacy" creates a far more wide-reaching generation/technology gap than Facebook or the iPod ever could. 

Religion crops up concretely in a few places in the novel. Early on (before the WormCam is developed) there's an enterprising, technophilic evangelist who uses VR to turn his worship services into grand spectacles. He's a stock character, and on this front the story doesn't give us anything we haven't seen before in, for instance, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. One of the central characters is a Catholic physicist, which proves a bit more interesting: he has a crisis of faith after viewing some bloody scenes from the Crusades over the WormCam. He seeks to get past this impasse by joining the "12,000 Days" project, which seeks to fully chronicle every day in the life of Jesus Christ. Clarke and Baxter devote an entire chapter (albeit a fairly brief one) to presenting their world's true account of the life of Jesus, which the Afterword states is based largely on A.N. Wilson's biography Jesus: A Life. There's nothing terribly shocking here-- the Christmas story is an invention (as, interestingly, was the entire life of Moses); he was more a mason than a carpenter; there were 14 disciples, not 12; there were miracle cures, but all of the illnesses so cured seemed to be hysteric in nature. Things get really interesting, though, when we get to the Crucifixion:

The moment of His death is oddly obscured; WormCam exploration there is limited. Some scientists have speculated that there is such a density of viewpoints in those key seconds that the fabric of spacetime itself is being damaged by wormhole intrusions. And these viewpoints are presumably sent down by observers from our own future-- or perhaps fro a multiplicity of possible futures, if what lies ahead of us is undetermined... Even now, despite all our technology, we see Him through a glass darkly.

Ah, now there's an interesting SFnal take on the death of Jesus! Even in this strictly materialistic novel, the death of Jesus is a special event-- who knows what might be the result of a near-infinite number of microscopic wormholes piercing the fabric of spacetime at the same moment and place? It's a question Clarke and Baxter don't explore further, but I'm not sure they need to. Ambiguity is the point here, after all...

Lastly, there's a brief mention of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the noosphere at the end of the novel. The "apotheosis" at the end of the aforementioned Childhood's End bears a great similarity to Teilhard de Chardin's conception of the Omega Point, an eschatological moment in the future when the human race becomes a single mental entity. Here, nearly 50 years later, Clarke seems to acknowledges that similarity directly, and hopefully sends a few readers in search of The Phenomenon of Man...

Doctor Who, vampires, and reenchantment

The third post in Religion Dispatches' series on Doctor Who is up now. This time, guest smartie Joe Laycock kicks off the discussion with some thoughts on the disenchantment of vampires. Check it out here.

Planetary Profiling: Doctor Who pt. 2

The second entry in my series on Doctor Who for Religion Dispatches is up now. This week James McGrath and I discuss the Weeping Angels two-parter, "Time of the Angels" and "Flesh and Stone."

The first post in the series is available here, and the current one is here.

The Doctor Who Media Club kicks off

Exciting news: I am spearheading a weekly series for Religion Dispatches exploring the intersection of religion, ethics, and maybe a bit of politics in the current season of Doctor Who! For the first week it's just me and James McGrath (of Exploring Our Matrix) posting, but we expect other contributors to join us shortly. In this week's installment, I discuss why the Doctor is an anarchist messiah, and James considers the Doctor's attitude to romance, interstellar exploitation, and whether or not the past should be changed (should one find oneself inside a time machine). Check it out here and check back again every week for new installments!