Starships & art

If you haven't already, check out Zachary Kendal's Silk for Calde blog, where all sorts of interesting things are going on. For example, a fascinating series of posts on the "generation starship" trope, exploring the history of such stories and the surprisingly large role religion plays in them. This research is for the honours thesis he's writing on Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun, which draws upon many of those older motifs but puts them to different use. The posts are on The Voyage That Lasted Six Hundred Years, Universe and Common Sense, Non-Stop, Spacebred Generations, and Captive Universe. Zachary has also pointed out a series of posts on religion in science fiction at Chris Bateman's blog, Only a Game. I've only looked at a few of them but they seem thoughtful and well-researched. Also, did you know they have Daleks in Australia?

In other news, has anyone been watching Work of Art? I was a bit skeptical of the competitive reality show format, but (after some encouragement from my girlfriend) I got hooked on the last few episodes of the season. The winning artist, Abdi, incorporated evocative religious imagery with social commentary in his final few works, such as Baptism and his final exhibition Luminous Beings. And the painting of him and the President running around on a spaceship is unspeakably awesome. He's currently displaying work at the Brooklyn Museum.