SF Gospel

Say it's only a paper Moon...

...but it wouldn't be make believe if you believed in me...

I can't discuss Moon without giving away major elements of the plot. Therefore:

Spoilers ahead.

Moon is the story of Sam Bell—the sole inhabitant of a moon base that gathers energy to be sent back to Earth. He's on a three-year contract, with two weeks left to go, and the solitude has been getting to him—especially since a damaged communications satellite prevents any real-time communication with his family. He's starting to see things, and it's interfering with his work. While working outside the base, one hallucination causes an accident, and he wakes up in the medical bay with no memory of what happened. He wants to leave the base to get the damaged equipment up and running again, but Gerty, his robotic assistant, won't let him leave. He manages to trick the computer into letting him take a quick moonwalk, and once outside the base he investigates the site of the accident, where he finds... another Sam Bell. There follows some great, tense scenes between the two, as they alternately try to pretend that nothing strange is going on and figure out their bizarre situation.

Before long they are able to squeeze the answer out of Gerty: they're clones of the original Sam Bell, who left the base twelve years ago. Their "three-year contract" is actually a capped life-span, at the end of which their bodies begin to deteriorate and are incinerated. Communications with Earth are being artificially blocked, and the taped conversations he's been having with his wife are fake. Everything he's been living for is an illusion, and, in the Dickian tradition, he's forced to cope with realization of the truth.

Sam Rockwell is a pretty amazing actor, and this movie is a fine showcase for that—it's virtually a one-man show (though I certainly don't want to downplay the contribution of Kevin Spacey, the voice of the very HAL-like Gerty). In the hands of a lesser actor this might have ended up schlocky, but he powerfully communicates the soul-wrecking disillusionment the two Bells experience. (The scene in which the older Bell finally establishes contact with his daughter on Earth is particularly devastating.) As one might expect from a movie about clones, the core of the story involves questions of identity. Each of these beings truly, completely believes that he is the original, real Sam Bell, that he will return to Earth at the end of his contract, that his wife and infant daughter are waiting for him. And who's to say they're wrong? They have the memories and the emotions that go along with them. They have, dare I say it, the soul of Sam Bell. But the company that runs the moon base treats them as objects, as machines like Gerty. But there are hints that Gerty may have emotions of his own. He does seem to malfunction a bit, like HAL 9000. But rather than going on a homicidal rampage, his malfunction manifests itself as compassion. He's programmed to help Sam Bell, and help him he does—at the film's end, he's instrumental in sending one of the clones back to Earth. There are multiple Turing tests going on in this story, and both clone and machine pass them with flying colors.

How to get The Gospel According to Science Fiction in Canada

I've heard from a few people who have had some difficulty getting their hands on a copy of The Gospel According to Science Fiction in Canada. The book is not in stock at Amazon.ca. However, it is in stock at chapters.indigo.ca, so you don't have to deal with a backorder wait. The book is still in print, so there's no need to fear your order getting canceled if it's backordered. And if all else fails, there's always eBay Canada!

Listen Up TV's Science Fiction episode online now!

Well, that was fast. As promised, here is Listen Up TV's episode "Exploring New Frontiers," in four parts.

Part 1, including an interview with Robert J. Sawyer, plus a comment or two from Robert Charles Wilson, among others.


Part 2, featuring yours truly. (They call me a "Harvard-trained expert," which amuses me for some reason. And that is one wacky face I am making in the still frame, huh?)


Part 3, including an interview with author John C. Wright about his (relatively) recent conversion to Christianity, and scientist-turned-writer Peter Kazmaier.

And part 4, the wrap-up.


A nice overview, I thought. You can also watch the episode (and a bunch more) at Listen Up TV's website.

Listen Up TV - "Exploring New Frontiers" of religion and SF

I was recently interviewed for Listen Up, a Canadian religion news show, for a special episode on religion and science fiction. The episode, entitled "Exploring New Frontiers," also includes interviews with Robert J. Sawyer, John C. Wright, and Robert Charles Wilson, among whose company I'm quite thrilled to find myself. It airs Sunday, June 14th on Canada's Global Television Network, but it will also be going up on Youtube in the very near future, so I'll save you the trouble of tracking down a Canadian friend with cable and instead I'll just embed it here as soon as it's available. Sound good? Good.

In the meantime, you can check out the episode summary and a full list of guests at Listen Up's website here.

Stephen Baldwin, King of the Jungle: The bizarre spiritual landscape of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!

New by me at Religion Dispatches: an essay on the surreal role of religion on NBC's reality show I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, the roster of which includes public evangelist (and bad theologian) Stephen Baldwin, and Spencer Pratt of The Hills, whose recent conversion to Christianity is... well... Just read this:

Spencer, who has made clear his intentions to be the show’s villain, is a recent convert to a very Hollywood sort of Christianity. Spencer sums it up best by recounting his first prayer: “‘God, please, the one person I want to go on a double date with is Miley Cyrus. If you’re so powerful, make me hang out with Miley Cyrus.’ He did it within a month.” Mysterious ways, indeed. When Baldwin learns that Spencer has not yet been baptized, he launches into a sermon that shows (or has been edited to show) some dubious scriptural knowledge: “John 3:16: What does Christ say to Nicodemus? You must be born again.” Heidi helpfully adds: “Jesus was baptized!”

Read the full piece at Religion Dispatches. Read my review of Baldwin's awful, awful book, The Unusual Suspect, here.

Not science fiction (and mostly not religion, either): Some recent music.

It ain't all science fiction here. I've been enjoying some music lately, too.

First, one of my favorite bands, maudlin of the Well, released Part the Second, a free reunion album. motW was an odd sort of post-metal group, with complex composition and instrumentation, masterminded by Toby Driver (with whom I went to college, but I assure you I'd love this music even if I hadn't). Their twin albums Bath and Leaving Your Body Map, which are basically a big concept album about astral projection and Kabbalah, remain some of the best music I've ever heard. (For example.) It was a finite project, giving way to the more experimental Kayo Dot in 2003. This new album, available as a free download directly from the band, is a gathering of odds and ends from the band's brief career, recently completed and mixed. It stands as a sort of missing link between their final albums and Kayo Dot's abstract first one, so it works as a good introduction to both. You can download it here.

My other favorite band, Current 93, also has a new album, Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain. C93 has gone through a number of transformations over the year, starting as experimental noise and gradually turning into something resembling folk music, with lots of detours along the way.The group is the project of David Tibet, whose theological yearnings have gone through a similarly expansion over the years—beginning as a Crowleyan and possibly Satanist, he flirted with Tibetan Buddhism before settling into a form of apocalyptic/gnostic Christianity as idiosyncratic as his singing voice. Tibet is, for my money, probably the best living poet we've got. His lyrics are complex tapestries of hallucinatory imagery, forming an ever-growing body of mystical literature that's well worth exploring for anyone interested in religious visions. This album, for instance, hints at the mystical history of a character named Aleph, who seems to be some sort of embodiment of violence and murder, or something like that. The music is surprisingly rockin', with unexpected levels of guitar distortion and riffage. "Not Because the Fox Barks" even approaches Sabbath-y metal (though, admittedly, a better point of reference for the album as a whole comes from the Yes belt buckle Tibet is wearing in his sleeve portrait). But despite the absence of compositonal master Michael Cashmore on this album, Current haven't left acoustic prettiness behind entirely—"UrShadow" stands out in that regard. Nevertheless, this is one of the biggest shifts in sound the group has had since they put down their tape loops and picked up guitars in the late '80s. My favorite general overview of the group's career is at the no-longer-updated Soft Black Stars. Some samples from Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain, plus a more detailed review, are available at Brainwashed. And you can order the album from Jnana (in North America) or Durtro (in Europe, or for downloading, for those of you who don't like lyrics booklets and so forth). 

I also had the opportunity to see my other other favorite band, Opeth, live a few weeks ago. I had seen them once before, and they remain one of the greatest live groups I've ever seen. You'd think that a progressive death metal band would have some difficulty recreating the complexity of their recorded compositions live, particularly when they cover as much dynamic and textural range as Opeth. But the high highs and low lows are all recreated pretty well perfectly in person.And it doesn't hurt that the opening act on this tour was Enslaved, who are pretty great. \m/

In absolutely not metal-related news, I was also fortunate enough to be present for a rare live performance by Scottish-born pastiche artist and satirist Momus about two weeks ago. It was a three-hour chronological career retrospective, giving the whole evening a sense of finality Though I was a bit disappointed that he didn't bring out the guitar for the early songs—it was just him, an iPod, and perfomance artist/interpretive dancer Aki Sasamoto—I was very pleased at the breadth of material.

...So that's what I've been listening to while taking some kind of ridiculously extensive notes for my Cornerstone seminar!

"Dead to that which held us captive": Eric Brown's Kéthani

The dead walk in Eric Brown's Kéthani, which takes place in a world where aliens (the Kéthani of the title) have given human beings physical immortality. The story begins with the mysterious materialization of a few hundred thousand enormous crystalline spires across the planet. These are the "Onward Stations" of the Kéthani, an alien race similar in many ways to the Overlords of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End: their purpose is to give us the means to return from the dead, in exchange for serving as the Kéthani's explorers and emissaries to the stars. 

I first encountered the world of Eric Brown's Kéthani in the first volume of the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction. The story "The Farewell Party" made quite an impression on me, as I wrote: 

These themes—a scientific means of resurrection; the ennui of those who have not yet joined the dead—are reminiscent of Robert Silverberg's novella Born With the Dead, to which this story is a worthy heir. I was pleased to see that Eric Brown has written a number of stories set in this world, including Kéthani, a novel Solaris will be releasing next spring. If it's anything like this moving mood piece, it should be well worth reading.

So, is it? Yes, though its overall effect isn't as strong as the individual story's was. This isn't, strictly speaking, a novel; it's a fix-up with very apparent themes. Eric Brown has been writing stories in the Kéthaniverse since 1997, and this book is a collection of those stories, with brief linking material. ("The Farewell Party" is the final chapter, so I unwittingly began at the ending when I read it two years ago.) But each chapter still feels very much like a short story, rather than a portion of a novel. It's not as extreme a case as H.P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West, Re-Animator," which repeats the same introductory information every two or three pages, but there is still a bit of repetition, which detracts from Kéthani's impact as a novel. There's also a certain sameness of mood throughout the stories; it's not just information that repeats, but some themes as well. 

That's not to say there isn't much to recommend about the book, particularly in its approach to its basic conceit. The Kéthani themselves never appear, but the degree to which their presence transforms Earth's society is, understandably, enormous. But Brown's book doesn't go into too much detail on that big picture stuff: he tells the stories of average individuals and how the Kéthani affect them personally. That's what's most interesting about the idea of alien resurrection, and Brown sticks to it.

And religion plays an understandably big role in those stories. Several chapters of Kéthani describe conflicts between individuals who disagree about the spiritual meaning of physical resurrection: in general, religious people are opposed to resurrection, and refuse to accept the alien implants that make it possible. It's nice that Brown doesn't give us just one religious response, though: different chapters show us Buddhists, Christians, and Nietzscheans who refuse resurrection, plus one relatively radical Anglican priest who doesn't. 

The loudest voice in the book's debates, though, is that of Christians who see the Kéthani's resurrection as a Very Bad Thing, a ploy to keep us out of heaven by offering us eternal physical life. At first I thought the speed with which the Kéthani's implants became universal was a little bit unlikely. After all, given the overly mysterious nature of the aliens, and the fact that every major religion in the world opposed them, wouldn't people be a bit more reluctant? If you believe in a spiritual afterlife, don't you also believe it's supposed to be better than physical life? But the book changed my mind: I think if physical immortality became a real possibility, doubts would fade pretty quickly after the first resurectees returned. Most people, I think, would look at it as a question of economics rather than spirituality, and would hedge their bets: better the proven afterlife than the supposed one (which, by the way, the Kéthani don't believe in). But that quickly becomes pretty extreme: a decade or two after the Kéthani arrive, people begin committing suicide in order to move on to resurrection and a life in the stars. This makes the Kéthani look pretty ghoulish: couldn't there be another way to get us into space, one that didn't lead to this kind of self-directed violence? 

There is, of course, a lot of rebirth language in Christianity. Take Romans 7, for instance, in which Paul discusses Christian freedom from the law in terms of death and rebirth: "But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit." That's the kind of thing the Kéthani offer, but where the rebirth of baptism is symbolic, the Kéthani demand real, physical death, which comes across as... well, satanic. I'm reminded of the humanist complaint about the story of Abraham and Isaac: what kind of God would require someone to sacrifice his son? Well, what kind of benevolent aliens would require us to sacrifice ourselves?

There's something unsatisfying in the book's exploration of these questions. The Kéthani are pretty darned mysterious, and the undead "returnees" avoid discussing their experience of rebirth. That's the mystery at the core of the book: Can the Kéthani be trusted? What do they really want with us? The book's all-too-brief epilogue gives something of an answer, but I kinda don't buy it: it's a very vague, very cheery portrait of a wonderful millennia-long career as an explorer. There's a brief line about the Kéthani's motives being "complex," but I found myself unable to accept the optimism about the Kéthani that the epilogue sells. After 400-odd pages of questioning their motives, and particularly after the issue of suicide arose, I couldn't let the aliens off that easily. But despite that uneasiness, I was very pleased that Kéthani gave me so much to think about. After reading "The Farewell Party" I said this book should be well worth reading; and now I'm happy to report that it definitely is.