SF Gospel

The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick, 1980-1982

The issue of the SFRA Review containing my review of The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick vol. 5: 1980-1982 has been posted at the SFRA's website. An excerpt:

Those familiar with the previous volumes of Dick’s letters will know, more or less, what to expect of this one. Dick is still exploring and expounding upon his religious experiences of early 1974, and much of this volume consists of extended philosophical speculations. (Indeed, most of the book’s first hundred pages are a single series of letters sent to Patricia Warrick, author of Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick,in January 1981). But philosophical exegesis is not all that was going on in Dick’s life and mind in this period, and this volume presents vital information about other aspects of his work as well. Dick’s final two novels—The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer—were written during this period, and several letters shed light on their composition. A pair of letters to Ursula K. Le Guin (137 and 150–151) show Dick reflecting on the often-problematic nature of his female characters, and even suggest that Angel Archer, the protagonist of Transmigration and undoubtedly Dick’s most carefully thought-out female character, grew at least in part in response to Le Guin’s criticisms. Two letters (to Russell Galen, 89–92, and to David Hartwell, 154–156) contain detailed plot outlines for novels that were never written. Elsewhere, we can glean information about Dick’s knowledge of William S. Burroughs (145), Alfred North Whitehead (148), and Martin Luther (251). Other letters show Dick’s thoughts on the publication of VALIS and his response to the novel’s reviews, his shifting opinions on the film Blade Runner, and his brief love affair, a mere four months before his death, with a young woman known only as “Sandra.” Needless to say, there is much to reward the PKD researcher in this volume.

Read the full review, plus the rest of the issue, here (it's on p. 9-10 of the PDF). 

"Against textual idealism"

Rob Latham's short piece "Against Textual Idealism," published a few years ago but first read by me a couple days ago, hits all the right notes for me as a librarian, scholar, and collector of SF:

It matters intimately to an informed grasp of Dickens’ novels, for example, that most of them were released in serial form, an arrangement that had appreciable effects on such intra-textual features as plot and characterization. Every text, whether an original publication or a reprint, is materially instantiated in a specific medium, accessible through particular modes of distribution, and amenable to discrete forms of reception. Encountering a story by H.P. Lovecraft or Dashiell Hammett in a pulp magazine such as Weird Tales or Black Mask is not the same thing as reading it in a Library of America edition.

I can't say it better, so you might as well just read the whole thing. (To tie it into issues of recent relevance, I think these issues of textual interpretation are more than relevant to Richard Dawkins' unrefined and totalizing view of the Bible. On a more gut and personal level, though, it just means it's way more fun to read an issue of Galaxy than a clothbound scholarly edition.)

Richard Dawkins and religious discrimination

Regulars here know I'm no fan of Richard Dawkins, but even I was surprised at his latest article for Boing Boing. Discussing the recent lawsuit between astronomer C. Martin Gaskell and the University of Kentucky, Dawkins goes lower than I thought he dared, stopping just this side of libel against a fellow scientist. 

 

Some background: in 2007, Gaskell was up for a position at the University of Kentucky. He was a hot contender, but one of the members of the search committee researched his religious beliefs and concluded that he was "potentially evangelical." He was questioned about his faith in his interview, and ultimately didn't get the job-- despite, according to one committee member, being "breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience."  E-mails sent among the search committee submitted as evidence in the case make it clear that Gaskell's religious beliefs-- which don't play a role in any of his peer-reviewed work on quasars and supermassive black holes-- were pretty much the only factor in the committee's decision not to hire him. Gaskell is not a creationist, and accepts the theory of evolution-- things which would be unlikely to turn up in his work anyway. All of which renders that phrase "potentially evangelical" even more chilling. Gaskell was rejected not because he wasn't the right guy for the job, and not even because his beliefs conflicted with his duties. He wasn't even rejected for beliefs that he actually held. He was rejected because of his membership in a group that also contains individuals whose beliefs are in conflict with a related department to the one in which he was applying to teach. It was a clear-cut case of religious discrimination, and the school has settled the case out of court for $125,000.

Enter Dawkins, who concludes from this that all kinds of beliefs, religious and otherwise, should justly and rightly serve as grounds for dismissal or rejection of employment, laying out several hypothetical cases-- none of them bearing more than a superficial resemblance to the Gaskell case-- in which he feels discrimination would be just. He even laments that "the word 'discriminate' carries such unfortunate baggage." The piece reads like an opening salvo in a witch hunt for "the creationists among us": it is a call for greater prejudice. 

The entire argument rests on the faulty assumption that religious ideas are protected and non-religious ideas are not. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that if I were dismissed from my job because I believe in a subterranean super-race of mole people, I would start taking notes for my wrongful dismissal suit. Unless that belief interferes with my completion of assigned tasks (I am an excavator operator who will not break ground on a building project for fear of angering the mole people) or it interferes with my coworkers, clients, or customers (sales are down at the hardware store because I keep scaring people away with talk of their underground masters when all they wanted to do was buy a hammer). My personal beliefs-- religious or otherwise-- are personal, and if they don't interfere with my job, then there is no cause for termination. 

In the Gaskell case, of course, it's even more preposterous: Gaskell doesn't believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old any more than he believes that the mole people are preparing to reclaim the surface world. But Dawkins' entire article is framed to mislead the reader into believing Gaskell is a secret creationist. The attempt to paint Gaskell with the creationist brush has its roots deep in Dawkins' views of religion in general, and the idea of God in particular. Dawkins will only grant that Gaskell "claims... that he is not a full-blooded YEC [young earth creationist]." For Dawkins it can only be a "claim," not a fact, and that use of "full-blooded" shows that he is only capable of considering religious people as holding some degree of creationist ideas. Dawkins includes a selectively-clipped quote from Gaskell, " I have a lot of respect for people who hold this view because they are strongly committed to the Bible," Dawkins quotes. A-ha! A creationist! But here's the remainder of the quote: "...but I don't believe it is the interpretation the Bible requires of itself, and it certainly clashes head-on with science." Gaskell does what Dawkins cannot: see multiple ways of reading a text.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins misdefines the word "God" as denoting an intelligent designer. He builds creationism into the very idea of belief in God. Thus he is beyond perplexed at someone like Gaskell, who believes in both God and evolution. He simply can't comprehend people who find meaning in the Bible without also believing that the Earth is 6,000 years old. Dawkins has drawn boxes for us all to fit in-- "deluded creationist," "'bright' atheist." When presented with someone who doesn't fit in those boxes, his brain shuts down. This is a fact: not all believers are creationists. The data do not fit Dawkins' theoretical model. But rather than reframe his hypothesis, Dawkins continues to insist that his model is correct. His ideas about faith are nothing more than bad science.

The worse thing, though, is the other thing that Dawkins' article intends to do: to suggest that the Unversity of Kentucky's discrimination against Gaskell was justified. If you read waaaaay down into the comments section, he backpedals, claiming that "Nowhere in my article did I say that Gaskell himself should not have got the job," and that he did not intend to discuss the Gaskell case-- begging the question of why, if his hypotheticals don't apply to the case at hand, he bothered to frame the article with it at all. But even if we take those hypothetical situations as "preposterous examples," we are left with the distinct sense that Dawkins is not content with his quest to rid the world of religion. He also wants to rid the world of the strange, the eccentric, and the wacky. I have long felt that Dawkins must be, at heart, a profoundly boring person, for his insistence that the world must actually be as he conceives it. This article cements that opinion. I would not want to live in Dawkins' perfect world, because it would be a world of profound and fathomless sameness. We need our eccentrics. We need preposterous ideas, for how else will we be shaken out of our false beliefs, unless challenged with what we know must be impossible? Give me the bizarre, the preposterous, and yes, the delusional: better that than the bleak unity of a world squeezed into neat, pseudo-empirical boxes. 

What I've been doing lately:

Don't mistake the sluggishness of this blog for inactivity: there's been much going on behind the scenes lately. Most relevant to our purposes here are a couple of Philip K. Dick-related writing projects. I wrote a review of the final volume of the Selected Letters for the SFRA Review. It's not yet available online, but it will hopefully be up soon at the SFRA's website. (I may post it here soon as well.) More importantly, I have a forthcoming essay in Boom! Studios' comics adaptation of  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? My piece, which looks at the theological and ethical content of DADOES (but not quite so boringly as I just made it sound),  will appear in #21, due out sometime in March. I'm told that issue also includes some major material relating to the empathy-based religion of Mercerism and its enigmatic messiah, Wilbur Mercer-- quite appropriate, I think. 

Then there's my best-things-I-read-this-year roundup for SF Signal's Mind Meld, which you can read here. I hope to return to this soon with a bit more robust listing of recently-read materials. (I've been kicking myself since late December because I completely forgot to mention what was actually the best thing I read last year-- C.M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's The Space Merchants, which is every bit as good as you've heard and more.)

Less theologically-relevant, but certainly no less fun, I've been involved in the operation of a gallery show featuring the work of the Sucklord, easily the best artist working in the art-toy idiom. His bootleg toys, mostly cast in resin from remixed molds, are irritating, hilarious, and firmly rooted in a brand of nerdishness that I appreciate greatly. The Suckadelic universe contains only supervillains, with names like "Star Chump" and "Galactic Jerkbag." The Sucklord's primary reference points are in the Star Wars realm, but my favorite piece is a bit more obscure:

The Salarystak is the middle piece in a series that also includes the "Altrusian"--a simple-yet-elegant knockoff of Land of the Lost's Sleestak--and the Starstak, a highly-evolved future form of the same. In addition to the great visual, I love the SFnal moral dilemma that the Salarystak embodies: 

"To which end of the spectrum is his pendulum swinging? He knows not, for he is ignorant of his place in the temporal timeline. He has closed the mental door of escape and filled the void with his Career, his family, his mortgage, his car, and his martinis. Only in his deepest subconscious lies the dim comprehension that there is a bigger picture and something greater is at stake..."

Of course, in the world of the Sucklord, a triptych is presented as a multi-figure blister-pack:

There is a very good chance that I'll be adding that little item to my collection before the show closes on January 23rd. Another contender, this one with a bit more theological flavor to it: A series of four Greek-ish gods, presented as supervillains, who govern everyday disappointments: Chronos (wasted time), Tyros (insufficient income), Daemos (aches and pains), Mordros (general aimlessness), Eros (a broken heart). Nicest touch: their heads are polyhedral dice. [UPDATE: How did I neglect to mention the most theological piece of all, the Crucifett?:]

You can check out what's for sale in the current gallery show at Suckshoppe.com and peruse the exhibit catalog below (warning: it's not for the faint of heart, the easily-offended, or those with good taste in general).