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.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Monday, April 07, 2008
Book & author index
There's a link on the sidebar, under "Books" entitled Science fiction, fantasy and faith. That'll take you to an Amazon.com website where I've indexed books relevant to this blog. I don't expect anyone to necessarily buy these books through Amazon - it's just a useful way of gathering information about them, plus Amazon supplies brief descriptions. I up-date it periodically.
Currently the list of authors contains:
Michael Bishop - James Blish - G.K. Chesterton - Paul Cornell - D.M. Cornish - Philip K. Dick - Michael Flynn - Zenna Henderson - Robert Jordan - Jay Lake - Madeleine L'Engle - C.S. Lewis - Louise Marley - Walter M. Miller, Jr. - Elizabeth Moon - Susan Palwick - Katherine Paterson - Tim Powers - J.K. Rowling - Mary Doria Russell - Cordwainer Smith - J.R.R. Tolkien - Kathy Tyers - Charles Williams - Connie Willis - Gene Wolfe - John C. Wright.
There are other category pages, like Little-known Worthies, Quakers, and Literary SF/F.
Not every book is strictly science fiction or fantasy. There's a lot of variety. Some of the books have been included because the author is a religious person; in other cases the books contain religious imagery while the authors themselves does not practice any particular religion. And so forth.
Currently the list of authors contains:
Michael Bishop - James Blish - G.K. Chesterton - Paul Cornell - D.M. Cornish - Philip K. Dick - Michael Flynn - Zenna Henderson - Robert Jordan - Jay Lake - Madeleine L'Engle - C.S. Lewis - Louise Marley - Walter M. Miller, Jr. - Elizabeth Moon - Susan Palwick - Katherine Paterson - Tim Powers - J.K. Rowling - Mary Doria Russell - Cordwainer Smith - J.R.R. Tolkien - Kathy Tyers - Charles Williams - Connie Willis - Gene Wolfe - John C. Wright.
There are other category pages, like Little-known Worthies, Quakers, and Literary SF/F.
Not every book is strictly science fiction or fantasy. There's a lot of variety. Some of the books have been included because the author is a religious person; in other cases the books contain religious imagery while the authors themselves does not practice any particular religion. And so forth.
Friday, April 04, 2008
Shea on sf
Indefatigable Catholic blogger Mark Shea has written a new column about Catholicism and science fiction, mentioning Gene Wolfe, Michael Flynn, John C. Wright, and others.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Bishop on sf
Michael Bishop talks about science fiction and The Sparrow:
Even so, my experience has been that readers who dislike science fiction, who would never willingly challenge themselves with the best that the field has to offer, will devour a fine sf work by accident and then baldly declare that it could not possibly be science fiction because they don’t like science fiction. Fairly recently, in fact, a young woman I know, a fellow resident of Pine Mountain, read The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell and proclaimed it a life-altering masterwork. But she vigorously denied my claim that she had read an excellent example of what a science-fiction novelist can do when she brings the full arsenal of her thought and literary skill to bear.
It just can’t be science fiction, my acquaintance said; it deals with religious issues, theological matters, matters that matter. Yes, I said, it’s about a Jesuit priest who travels to another planet. There, two sentient species, one alarmingly akin to kangaroos, have a weird codependency that the priest fails to fathom until the stronger species mutilates him for his egocentric obtuseness, and he spirals off into madness and a heart-rending loss of faith. Clearly, I told my friend, this novel is a simple but exotic variation on the Mitford series by Jan Karon. She didn’t find this amusing, but I found her denial of the science-fictionality of The Sparrow not only off-putting but as obtuse as the cluelessness of the novel’s priest, with the added black mark that she insistently willed her obtuseness. An additional irony: This woman claimed that The Sparrow had deepened and enriched her nascent Catholicism, and it had done so, she felt sure, because Mary Doria Russell’s own Catholicism pervaded every character and plot twist. But, as I know from a brief meeting with Ms. Russell, she is an ardent convert to Judaism.
from a self-interview at his website.
One does still run into this alarmed rejection of the science fiction label. It has become a fairly meaningless label, to be sure, but I'm not entirely sure why it generates hostility. As Bishop says in that self-interview, for some people it does seem to contain "the subtextual editorial comment, 'Science fiction is spaced-out kiddy lit for losers and nerds.'" So you get literati insisting surprisingly vehemently that The Road, or Oryx & Crake, or The Time-Traveller's Wife are NOT science fiction, because that would of course mean they were thinly-disguised science reporting/loserish wish-fulfillment, written poorly by science nerds for other science nerds. And when a literary author does put out a book like Oryx & Crake, sf authors huff and puff about how it's just rehashing material that science fiction did thirty years ago, and did better. I think it's just dumb tribalism and wish everyone could get over it, though I don't think they will. As Bishop points out, the way your books are presented and received does have important implications for how much money and/or prestige you earn.
Even so, my experience has been that readers who dislike science fiction, who would never willingly challenge themselves with the best that the field has to offer, will devour a fine sf work by accident and then baldly declare that it could not possibly be science fiction because they don’t like science fiction. Fairly recently, in fact, a young woman I know, a fellow resident of Pine Mountain, read The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell and proclaimed it a life-altering masterwork. But she vigorously denied my claim that she had read an excellent example of what a science-fiction novelist can do when she brings the full arsenal of her thought and literary skill to bear.
It just can’t be science fiction, my acquaintance said; it deals with religious issues, theological matters, matters that matter. Yes, I said, it’s about a Jesuit priest who travels to another planet. There, two sentient species, one alarmingly akin to kangaroos, have a weird codependency that the priest fails to fathom until the stronger species mutilates him for his egocentric obtuseness, and he spirals off into madness and a heart-rending loss of faith. Clearly, I told my friend, this novel is a simple but exotic variation on the Mitford series by Jan Karon. She didn’t find this amusing, but I found her denial of the science-fictionality of The Sparrow not only off-putting but as obtuse as the cluelessness of the novel’s priest, with the added black mark that she insistently willed her obtuseness. An additional irony: This woman claimed that The Sparrow had deepened and enriched her nascent Catholicism, and it had done so, she felt sure, because Mary Doria Russell’s own Catholicism pervaded every character and plot twist. But, as I know from a brief meeting with Ms. Russell, she is an ardent convert to Judaism.
from a self-interview at his website.
One does still run into this alarmed rejection of the science fiction label. It has become a fairly meaningless label, to be sure, but I'm not entirely sure why it generates hostility. As Bishop says in that self-interview, for some people it does seem to contain "the subtextual editorial comment, 'Science fiction is spaced-out kiddy lit for losers and nerds.'" So you get literati insisting surprisingly vehemently that The Road, or Oryx & Crake, or The Time-Traveller's Wife are NOT science fiction, because that would of course mean they were thinly-disguised science reporting/loserish wish-fulfillment, written poorly by science nerds for other science nerds. And when a literary author does put out a book like Oryx & Crake, sf authors huff and puff about how it's just rehashing material that science fiction did thirty years ago, and did better. I think it's just dumb tribalism and wish everyone could get over it, though I don't think they will. As Bishop points out, the way your books are presented and received does have important implications for how much money and/or prestige you earn.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
An Evil Guest
You can now pre-order Gene Wolfe's latest book from Amazon. It's scheduled to be out on September 16th.
Also, a deluxe version of The Book of the New Sun is coming out. Learn more here.
On to Mars
This just in! Virgin and Google team up to colonize Mars!!
Or not. Happy April Fool's Day.
Though the idea's time may come. I think the point of the joke is to get people thinking.
I liked this part:
"Here's the Virgle Pioneer pitch: Things will get better. Eventually. Sure, the work will be hard, the broadband rates low, the commodes decidedly open source, and yes, your life might be extinguished in a fiery instant of catastrophic technological malfunction. But your enriched descendants will appreciate your sacrifice, which should render worthwhile your choice to spend the rest of your (perhaps radically foreshortened) life in deprivation and uncertainty."
Or not. Happy April Fool's Day.
Though the idea's time may come. I think the point of the joke is to get people thinking.
I liked this part:
"Here's the Virgle Pioneer pitch: Things will get better. Eventually. Sure, the work will be hard, the broadband rates low, the commodes decidedly open source, and yes, your life might be extinguished in a fiery instant of catastrophic technological malfunction. But your enriched descendants will appreciate your sacrifice, which should render worthwhile your choice to spend the rest of your (perhaps radically foreshortened) life in deprivation and uncertainty."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
