Dark Space, etc.

Aka recently pointed out this book review, written by R. J. Burgess. It begins thusly:

It's surprising how rarely a true God shows up in science fiction. For a genre so fascinated by the mysteries of the universe, SF often seems reluctant to speculate about the existence of a great almighty. Classic novels such as C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy or Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker aside, God-like entities seem, more often than not, to be viewed as bad Star Trek clichés, as though the genre insists on denigrating such beings to the status of highly advanced aliens or artificial intelligences.

It's good then to see that Dark Space, the fourth novel by Australian writer Marianne de Pierres, is one of those rare examples of SF that sits firmly in the "taking God seriously" camp. The Sole entity at the heart of this galaxy-spanning series is a great big MacGuffin of a deity that is thrust at us from the very first page as being something so utterly unique and alien that it can only be classified as a god.

That first paragraph reminds me a bit of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun. It introduces a pantheon of active gods and goddesses and reveals that they are artificial intelligences. But the pantheon also includes a "minor" god, the Outsider, who turns out to be a whole lot "bigger" and more mysterious. (And there are alien deities in the following Short Sun trilogy.)

God is generally not very easy to incorporate into a work of fiction, not as a character in any usual sense. Once you start to delineate and explain and provide motives, it's no longer God at all, at least not in a transcendant capital-G sense.

Anyways, in other (vaguely related) news, here's an interesting quote I came across today from Karen Armstrong:

Yes, once I'd stopped prancing and posturing around on TV, where I was expected to have an inflammatory opinion and to let people have it. All this was pure egotism. I did some early television programs and expressed my secularism very cleverly. I'm slightly down on cleverness, which can be fun and witty at a dinner party and I enjoy that as much as anybody else. But it can be superficial. Once my television career had folded, I was left on my own with these texts. There was nobody to exclaim derisively about the irrationality of a Greek Orthodox text or the stupidity of a certain Jewish mysticism. I began to read them like poetry, which is what theology is. It's poetry. It's an attempt to express the inexpressible. It needs quiet. You can't read a Rilke sonnet at a party. Sometimes a poem can live in your head for a long time until its meaning is finally revealed. And if you try and grasp that meaning prematurely, you can distort the poem for yourself. And because I'd been cast out from the media world, and was living in a world of silence and solitude, the texts and I started to have a different relationship.