Oops, and The Year of the Flood

OK, next time I should do my research before posting! :-( After looking more closely at the Blogger settings, I've realized that having "Followers" and having a restricted group of people "follow" your blog are two different things. That is to say, if I do restrict access, I'd have to send e-mail invitations to each reader individually - just being a Follower is not enough. And to me that seems a bit too complicated and invasive of my readers' right not to have to give out their e-mail addresses. So I think I'll just leave the blog unrestricted. Sorry about that - this was not intended as a sneaky campaign to get more Followers (though I did gain 6 - thanks, folks!)

To deal with the concerns I had in the first place, I may look at the archives and prune out some personal stuff that I feel uncomfortable about having out in public. And one of my Internet-whiz followers has kindly given me some suggestions on managing my web presence - that is, managing what the average person finds when they try to Google me.*

In other news, earlier this year I mentioned Margaret Atwood's recent novel The Year of the Flood. This summer I got a chance to read it, and I really liked it. It's the companion piece to her earlier Oryx & Crake. Both employ theological symbolism and wrestle with hard philosophical questions. I asked Gabriel McKee's opinion and he felt that O&C was the better book. From a literary standpoint I think he may be right. I enjoyed The Year of the Flood more, however, because it was (relatively speaking) more upbeat, and it focused more closely on issues in which I have a special interest. For example, much of it concerns the pros and cons of growing up in a small counter-cultural sect whose beliefs seem fanatical and ridiculous to the world around it. (Not unlike my own upbringing.) In that sense it reminded me of Anne Tyler's novel Saint Maybe. In places the two books share a sly but not unkind sense of humour in the way they view the foibles and quirks of tiny religious groups.

The concerns of Atwood's imagined sect, God's Gardeners, have to do with environmental degradation, reckless bio-engineering, the mass extinction of species and humanity's self-destructive tendencies. Their beliefs bring together a particular reading of the Bible, apocalyptic ideas, radical environmentalism, evolutionary thought and survivalism in a system that would likely seem heretical to many Christians, radical environmentalists, evolutionary biologists and survivalists! But I think their ideology shows a kind of internal logic and that Atwood is simply selecting and exaggerating some existing patterns, a bit like she did with the radically anti-feminist theocracy imagined in The Handmaid's Tale. A close reading of the Bible certainly can lead and has led people to take up radical positions on environmental protection/creation care. The original founders of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals included clergymen and evangelical activists (such as William Wilberforce) who were seen as fanatical nutcases by contemporaries. Harsh modern realities like mountaintop removal or large-scale industrial farming have led to the formation of religious groups such as Restoring Eden.**

The Year of the Flood isn't a cheerful book. It's about the collapse of society as we know it, and it looks squarely at despair, violence, oppression and, above all, human selfishness. Atwood is rarely sentimental and views human nature in a rather pessimistic light (almost Augustinian, one might say). At the same time YotF is about an endearingly flawed community of people who are trying to find a better way to live, and there are some (relatively) happy endings to be found. It casts a different light on its bleaker companion, Oryx & Crake. It's entered my canon of must-read science fiction books and it's one of the most thought-provoking portrayals of religion in sf that I've read to date. Not only that, but it's helped me make some changes in my eating habits and the way I view the natural world. So I highly recommend it and I plan on re-reading it at some point.

On a related note, another post-apocalyptic book I read this summer was Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery. It wasn't as memorable as The Year of the Flood but it was highly enjoyable. It didn't have too much to do with religion, though it did feature an entity/process called The Vibe (if I remember correctly) which was something like a cross between Providence and the Tao. The book features the adventures of six super-criminals during and after the complete economic collapse of the United States. It's about capitalism, money, the 1960s, slavery, the American Dream and American history more generally. It touches on abolitionism, which is a topic I've been reading a lot about this past year.

And that's it for today!

PS: Check out this new masterpiece about Superheroes In The Bible.


*Any Hawksley Workman fans out there? He has an amusingly bizarre ten minute "I Googled you, didya Google me? No?" schtick that he uses at concerts.
** FYI, I find that Lee over at A Thinking Reed blog frequently puts up interesting posts on the connections between traditional Christian theology/ ethics and environmental issues such as animal rights and vegetarianism.

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.

Changes

I see it's been about five months since I last posted something... That was partly because I was doing school work and graduating from university. And partly because I was making big life decisions and moving to a new town (which is where I am now). But it was also because I've just gotten out of the habit of blogging. University (which monopolizes my reading and writing time) and Facebook (which fulfills my strange need to tell the Internet what I'm up to) are the two main culprits there. Over the summer I guiltily thought about blogging many times, but just never did.

Furthermore, I've begun to feel a bit more paranoid about posting my life's story out in the open on the Internet. Anyone who Googles my full name will quickly come across this blog, even though I don't use my full name, and in the past I've posted some fairly personal stuff, as well as expressed some opinions I probably don't even agree with any more. On the other hand, I do have a soft spot for this blog, as well as my little network of blogquaintances. I do still have ideas about religion in science fiction and fantasy when I read books, watch movies, and so forth. And apparently some people (11!) have cared enough to add me as followers. So here's what I'm going to do: In two or three weeks, I'm going to switch the blog over to the setting that only allows "followers" to see it. If you happen to actually read this, and you would like to read more in the future, and you're not already a 'follower,' please sign up. Or if you don't like signing up for things, post a comment to this post and I'll see what I can do. In return, I'll promise to be a bit more proactive about posting sf/f-related thoughts and recommendations instead of just thinking "Hey, I should post about that" and then forgetting.

In more topically relevant news... I finally got around to watching the original Tron and was mildly amazed. I watched it because there's a sequel coming out. Now, I remember being a kid and finding Tron toys in my cereal, but I somehow never watched the movie until this year (when it first came out my parents weren't big on letting me watch that sort of thing - just like Star Wars). It's aged pretty well - yes, the technology and hairstyles are dated, but the stylized graphics of Tron-world are still cool. And I'm sure this is old hat, but why did no one ever tell me how darned theological this movie was? I mean, they play the computer-user-as-incarnate-God-who-is-saving-the-world angle so hard it almost becomes annoying (but not quite). It'll be interesting to see what the new movie, Tron Legacy, does with the concept. The trailer features the line "He said he was going to change everything: science, medicine, religion!" So I'm expecting at least a nod to those themes. Speaking of computer-user-as-God, you should all go and watch the final episode of ReBoot season three. Heck, just watch the whole season.

I also watched The Book of Eli. [Spoiler warning] I don't think it's much of a spoiler to reveal that the book in question is a King James Bible. Eli (Denzel Washington) wanders a post-apocalyptic world on a mission which he believes is from God, trying to find a safe haven for his book, which is possibly the last surviving copy. I agree with Mike Perschon's assessment that it wasn't a great movie, or even a very good movie, but that it was somewhat better than the bad reviews might lead you to believe. The twist ending is mostly ridiculous, it's all more gory than it has to be, and Eli is rather unbelievably good at dealing out death (not to mention avoiding it). But the visuals and atmosphere are quite striking, and the clash between differing uses of the Bible is very interesting. The villain (emaciated old man Gary Oldman) really wants a copy, so that he can use it to rule and manipulate his people. Eli wants it preserved, but for other reasons. In the end, though (or maybe because) Eli has total faith that his mission is God's will, he's content to pass the Bible on to a kind of militant librarian/curator society that is gathering and preserving knowledge and culture of all sorts. (Like in A Canticle for Leibowitz, but pluralist or secular.) At the end we see the Bible placed on a library shelf among other books. Eli's faith is such that he is confident that the sacred text can speak for itself. Oldman, by contrast, cares nothing for other books and has them burnt when he finds them; he prizes the Bible alone, but for the wrong reasons. Oh, and also Tom Waits has a role and there's a great scene where he and Gary Oldman appear together and try to out-haggard each other. I kind of imagine them saying "I look like a homeless alcoholic!" "Oh yeah? Well, I look like a dying heroin addict!" So it's worth watching, if you can stomach the outlandish violence. For martial arts enthusiasts: Washington was apparently trained for the role by Dan Inosanto and Jeff Imada. The fight choreography features eskrima.

OK, I'm going to sign off for the time being. I seem to remember there were some books I wanted to mention but I'll save that for another post.

PS: If you like video games, comics, or humour, go see Scott Pilgrim Versus the World. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

American Narnia?

I guess being the president would have its perks. Rather than getting taken on a bunch of boring official tours, you'd get to look at the really cool stuff. For example, President Obama recently inspected the wardrobe which grants access to Narnia.

New York magazine did a series entitled "A history of Obama feigning interest in mundane things," which has since been remixed by Dean Trippe into the far more interesting "Barack Obama looking at awesome things." Awesome things include a Green Lantern Corps power ring, Thor's hammer Mjolnir, and The Fortress of Solitude.

Jewish Narnia?

Here's an interesting review essay by Michael Weingrad. In the course of his piece Weingrad asserts that fantasy as a genre has attracted few Jewish writers, and ponders why that might be. Of course a number of people beg to differ about his premise (ie, Robert Silverberg's Majipoor series might be a counter-example, though I guess it's technically science fiction.) Over at his New York Times blog, Ross Douthat provides some thought-provoking commentary. He quotes Abigail Nussbaum at length; her equally thought-provoking post on Weingrad's essay is here. I'd recommend reading all four of the above posts/articles; I think they all make good points.

Turning to a more specific topic, one of the books Weingrad reviews is Lev Grossman's The Magicians. Grossman, if I remember correctly, is the journalist who wrote an article in Time asserting that the total absence of religion in Harry Potter (as opposed to Narnia) illustrated the triumph of secularism in the modern world. Of course, that was before the final Potter book was released... which had all that stuff in it about Harry, the saviour of wizards and witches, sacrificing himself for his friends and being resurrected. It was 'round about the chapter entitled "King's Cross," if you've forgotten.

Anyways, apparently Grossman has since written his own fantasy story, satirizing both Narnia and Harry Potter. Weingrad writes of the novel:

...its goal is to ask the question of whether fantasy and adulthood are mutually exclusive, as the process of becoming an adult means accepting the reality principle rather than “looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life,” as one character puts it. Of course, such an either/or does not do justice to fantasy literature, which, at its best, confronts loss, pain, and frustration. Grossman does not, for instance, turn his satirical sights on Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which after all is a world saturated with failure and loss, and his send-up of Narnia’s divinely incarnated lion Aslan falls short of grappling seriously with Lewis’s actual theology. Moreover, his overeducated, young, single protagonists—like Whit Stillman characters thrown into a Harry Potter novel—can offer only a thin slice of what it means to be an adult. Nevertheless, Grossman’s experiment of placing real, urban, early twenty-somethings in a Hogwarts-and-Narnia-like environment is often dazzling. What he shows is the extent to which medieval magic cannot make our human unhappiness disappear.

PS: In passing, Nussbaum's post points out this blog post from Martin Lewis about Arthur C. Clarke's story The Star. In the comments a bunch of people, including Lewis, John Kessel, Adam Roberts and Paul Kincaid (all, I think, identifying themselves as atheists) engage in a spirited discussion about the theological meaning of the story and of SF's roots more generally. Meanwhile, over at this post some of the same players discuss The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Gene Wolfe more generally. Kessel seems to be a fan of Wolfe's.)

Atwood on theological narrative in SF

This is five years old, but I think it's worth citing. Margaret Atwood muses about science fiction:

More than one commentator has mentioned that science fiction as a form is where theological narrative went after Paradise Lost, and this is undoubtedly true. Supernatural creatures with wings, and burning bushes that speak, are unlikely to be encountered in a novel about stockbrokers, unless the stockbrokers have been taking a few mind-altering substances, but they are not out of place on Planet X. The form is often used as a way of acting out the consequences of a theological doctrine. The theological resonances in films such as Star Wars are more than obvious. Extraterrestrials have taken the place of angels, demons, fairies and saints, though it must be said that this last group is now making a comeback.

We want wisdom. We want hope. We want to be good. Therefore we sometimes tell ourselves warning stories that deal with the darker side of some of our other wants. As William Blake noted long ago, the human imagination drives the world. At first it drove only the human world, which was once very small in comparison to the huge and powerful natural world around it. Now we're close to being in control of everything except earthquakes and the weather.

Read the whole thing here.

I just discovered that in September 2009 Atwood published a sequel/companion piece to her thought-provoking dystopia Oryx & Crake, entitled The Year of the Flood. One of the main characters is Adam One, leader of God's Gardeners (a group blending environmentalism with religion) which appeared briefly in the earlier novel. I recall Atwood sympathizing with the God's Gardeners point of view in an interview she did on O&C. I imagine she wanted to explore these ideas a bit further. The promotional website for the novel lists a number of books on the environment, religious history, and green spirituality.

The Year of the Flood includes fourteen hymns sung by the GGs. A composer has written music for them, and a companion CD has been released. Apparently at least one of the stops on Atwood's book tour took place in a Anglican cathedral and featured a choir singing some of these hymns.

A million alien Gospels

But in the eternities
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O be prepared my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The myriad forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

The final two verses of an elegant little poem entitled Christ in the Universe. It was written by Alice Meynell, a British writer, suffragist and convert to Catholicism. She lived from 1847 to 1922.

I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury's longer poem Christus Apollo, which includes the lines:

Christ wanders in the Universe
A flesh of stars,
He takes on creature shapes
To suit the mildest elements,
He dresses him in flesh beyond our ken.
There He walks, glides, flies, shambling of strangeness.
Here He walks Men.
Among the ten trillion beams
A billion Bible scrolls are scored
In hieroglyphs among God’s amplitudes of worlds;
In alphabet multitudinous
Tongues which are not quite tongues
Sigh, sibilate, wonder, cry:
As Christ comes manifest from a thunder-crimsoned sky.
He walks upon the molecules of seas
All boiling stews of beast
All maddened broth and brew and rising up of yeast.
There Christ by many names is known.

PS: This is news to me, but apparently Christus Apollo was set to music in 1969 by the prolific film score composer Jerry Goldsmith.

So that's what they mean by "He ascended into heaven..."

Yes, a photographer has located Jesus' rocketship here in my home town.

Procrastination

...is what's enabling me to write this post. That and my guilt over not posting for almost five months. I don't imagine anyone's been waiting on tenterhooks, but I do feel like I should say: I'm not dead!

So, what's happened since July? In August I quit my job (of thirteen years) in order to concentrate on my last year of undergrad studies. I'm almost...mostly almost... finished applying for grad schools to study history at a Master's level. (Clemens, thank you very much for your advice in that regard, I will e-mail you back some day, I promise!)

Anyways, that's one thing I'm procrastinating from right now, sending in documentation for my grad school applications. I also should be writing papers about: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Beyers Naude, a Dutch Reformed clergyman who broke with his church in order to fight apartheid; and sanitationist ideology (public health stuff) in mid-Victorian England.

I can't say I have much to report on the science fiction/fantasy level. I did read most of The Master and Margarita. Beautifully written in many respects but I'm not sure I understood it. Much of the book's power and reputation seems to come from its thumbing its nose at the Soviet regime. I got some of that but I'm sure a lot went over my head. The Pilate storyline, along with various quotations in the accompanying material, gave me the feeling that Bulgakov had an unorthodox but genuine reverence for Christ. But I don't think I understand what he was getting at there either. Pilate's psyche seems to be the main focus and that probably ties in with the critique of Soviet bureaucracies. I ended up skipping the last few chapters about Margarita, the Devil and the Master because I had to return the book to the library. I admit that it was probably not the best choice for light summer reading. I do want to revisit it at some point, though.

I did finish Reynold's House of Suns - it was enjoyable, with an intriguing moment of transcendence towards the end. On the recommendation of the friend who gave it to me I also read Greg Bear's novel City At The End Of Time. It was thought-provoking. It's a bit too long but interesting regardless: an eschatological, metaphysical, multiverse mashup of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land with sprinklings of Borges, Philip K. Dick and possibly Wolfe and Tim Powers. Probably there were other influences too but those are the ones I noticed. It definitely contains some theological symbolism, mainly Hindu and Greek but some Christian too. (Meanwhile, I got my friend to read Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun and he quite liked it.)

Mostly I've been reading books for school. I just finished a short paper on the Know-Nothings, nativism and anti-Catholicism. The run-up to the American Civil War was remarkably interesting - how was a Canadian to know this?! The best-written and, well, most entertaining book we've read in that class has been David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in American history. The other standout book of this term has been Antjie Krog's The Country of My Skull, a poet/journalist's account of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It's searing and gripping: it's painful to read about so many atrocities but I couldn't put it down. Whatever you do DON'T watch the horrible Hollywood adaptation, In My Country. That was painful too but for all the wrong reasons.

Last but not least, in mid-November I received my shodan in Goju-ryu karate. The training and grading process was somewhat stressful but very rewarding. Of course, it only marks the beginning of serious karate training. It's a bit like graduating from high school. I look forward to the challenge.

Anyways, back to work! Let's see... Just how do you spell Gobodo-Madikizela...?

Lazy, fun summer days

...are finally here. My "Russian History Since 1855" class finished in mid-June. It was quite interesting. So much rapid (often forced) social and technological change, and so much pain and suffering! It made me feel grateful to my ancestors for coming to North America. One theme I found intriguing was of continuity in Russian history. There were some surprising similarities between the tsarist, Communist and post-Communist regimes. I'd recommend the text we used: Walter Moss's History of Russia, Volume 2. It was highly readable, if riddled with typos.

The text included not only political history but also cultural and artistic developments, and reminded me of some Russian sf/fantasy-with-religious-elements that I've been meaning to get around to: the films of Andrei Tarkovsky (especially Solaris and Stalker) and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Nothing says "summer relaxation" like a fat Russian novel, in my opinion.

In related news, did you know that a religion-themed Canadian TV show recently called on Gabriel McKee as an expert on religion in science fiction? The show also features Robert J. Sawyer, John C. Wright, Robert Charles Wilson and Peter Kazmaier. Check it out!

Science-fiction-wise, I'm currently reading House of Suns by UK author Alastair Reynolds. It was kindly given to me as a birthday present (I turned 32 on the 28th of June.) It's entertaining so far, though I find myself over-analyzing and trying to spot all the influences he's drawing on.

In other news- it's finally summer! The Winnipeg Folk Festival is coming up soon! Hurray! The mosquitos are back! Booo! I've already registered for my last year of undergraduate classes, which I'm looking forward to a great deal. They include Byzantine History, South Africa in the 20th Century, and the Origins of the American Civil War. And I need to start researching grad schools pretty soon, so as to begin applying this fall. Perhaps I'll be coming soon to a university near you!

Also, in mid-June (a few days after my Russian history exam) I graded to my first kyu (second-level brown belt) in Goju-ryu karate. So for the next five or six months I'll be training hard for my shodan (black belt) grading, which is coming up sometime late this year.

So maybe "lazy" isn't the right word for this summer... But I think "fun" will still apply.

Alive!

Yes, I am alive. Winter term is done! Work has been a little hectic since then, though, and I've been trying to get caught up in karate. On Monday spring term begins - I'm taking six hours a week of "Russian History Since 1917." Gulag archipelago, here I come!

I have been able to fit a few books in, though. One was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which I heard about from Åka. It's quite compelling. Some people might describe it as being a little gimmicky - it consists of six stories, each one chronologically later than the one before it, and each one interrupting the last, until you come to the middle story, which is told in its entirety. Then you start to get the second halves, until you come to the earliest one at the end. Each one is in a different genre. The first is rather like an Aubrey/Maturin tale from Patrick O'Brian. There's a paperback thriller story from the '70s. The final two (or middle two) are a harrowing Blade-Runneresque cyberpunk tale and an homage to Riddley Walker.

I thought he carried it off fairly well, and I'm used this sort of complex narrative style, thanks mainly to Gene Wolfe. A few weeks back Ian observed to me that "confusion" and "genre" are like salt and pepper for Wolfe, and (as usual) he's right. Mitchell drops a few more hints than Wolfe would, I think. Anyways, Cloud Atlas has numerous moments of brilliance and I want to reread it some day. It's also got interesting religious, metaphysical, and ethical themes. There are some admirable religious characters (Christian, Buddhist, and, er... henotheistic neo-pagan? something like that) as well as some utterly deplorable ones; some liberating uses of religion and some highly oppressive ones. I don't think I'm giving anything away in saying that reincarnation helps tie these stories together, though the book doesn't revolve around it. There were a few bits in the cyberpunk story that reminded me of Cordwainer Smith's "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," (always a good thing) and a searing, enlightening moment when the cyberpunk story's main character asks "Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases? He sees a game beyond the endgame."

It's well worth reading. Here's some interesting thoughts on the book and especially the cyberpunk bit, from a Christian who works as a biologist - but note that those thoughts include some spoilers.

Another book I've finally managed to read is Neal Stephenson's gargantuan Anathem. It's quite something, and I'm not just talking about the workout it gives your forearms. To call it "thought-provoking" doesn't do it justice. It's brainy and funny and all over the map, like all of Stephenson's work. I think any I review I did would have to be in the form of a month-long Socratic dialogue and at the end of it I might have to go live in a monastery, so I'll just say that I agree entirely with Gabriel's review over at SF Gospel. I particularly liked Fraa Lio, the martial artist, and Fraa Arsibalt, the overweight genius who's interested in building bridges between science, philosophy, and religion. There were a few moments near the end that reminded me very strongly of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun, when Silk and Patera Quetzal are in the tunnels, and it made me think of Stephen Jay Gould, and Tim Lilburn, and also this book... but I digress. I will say there are numerous echoes of A Canticle for Leibowitz. Here's a good quote, only one of many (Protas is basically Plato, and a Bazian ark is like a Catholic church):

"If Protas could be respected for saying so, then what was wrong with me thinking that our Mynster, and this machine hall, were both shadows of some higher thing that existed elsewhere-- a sacred place of which they were both shadows, and that cast other shadows in such places as Bazian arks and groves of ancient trees?" - (p. 84)

Towards the end the main character (following Emerson) draws a contrast between poets and mystics. Poets understand that while symbols can bear cosmic truth, they change, so that a symbol that is true or liberating at one time can become false and oppressive. Mystics, he says, wrongly fixate on just one set of symbols. I get the point that Stephenson is making, but I personally wouldn't use the words 'mystic' and 'poet' in that regard.

I bring this up because I just saw a brilliant poet-mystic in concert last night - Leonard Cohen. It was AMAZING. The guy just keeps getting better with age. If he's coming to your town or somewhere nearby, do yourself a favour and go!

The Third Man

This post is not actually about the great Orson Welles/Graham Greene movie. It's about a book I recently came across, The Third Man Factor. It has an ambitious subtitle: The Secret to Survival in Extreme Environments.

Fans of T.S. Eliot will recall these lines from The Wasteland:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

This is part of the poem's 'Journey to Emmaus' section, but in the notes Eliot explained: The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.

It turns out that a fair number of people in extremely stressful conditions, often explorers, report an encounter with a mysterious "Other." Unlike sleep paralysis or experiences of "hauntings," these presences seem supportive or helpful and have given some people the determination to carry on and survive harrowing conditions. It's not always a get-out-of-jail free card - Geiger cites one case where a climber described the experience in his diary before dying. The book uses some neurological findings to argue that the Other is a psychological survival mechanism, a hallucination triggered by the brain in certain cases of stress.

Geiger cites some people who interpret this in a dismissive fashion - standard-issue "See, all this mystical bunk is just in your head!" rhetoric. He also quotes those who believe that something supernatural or paranormal is being encountered, beyond how the brain interprets it. The introduction to the book is from Vincent Lam, the Canadian doctor and award-winning writer. Lam is an Anglican (the last I heard anyways) and in his introduction he describes a stressful period in his life when he encountered what he believes was "a guardian angel."

Geiger himself takes a stance between these positions. He seems to conclude that it's "just" happening in the brain, but that it's a wondrous, even spiritual experience at the same time. For him, it speaks to human inter-connectedness, our need for others, and the amazing flexibility of the human psyche. There's an interview with Geiger here. The Globe and Mail reviewed the book here.

On a related note, have you seen Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends?

Robots warring (in a flooded world?)

Sometimes I wish science fiction would stay science fiction. I occasionally read or hear a news story that triggers a flashback to a hundred science fiction stories I've read on the same subject; and I have to remind myself that, no, this is here and now in the real world. The imagined future has arrived. It's not just an abstract problem anymore.

The story that did that to me today was about robots. P.W. Singer, an expert on modern warfare, and the author of books on child soldiers and mercenaries, has come out with a new book on the growing use of robots in war. There are thousands already in use, and many more in the design & development stage. You can read some articles about his book here. I heard an interview with him today. He points out some of the troubling new ethical and social issues this kind of technology creates. For example:

So, for example, if you are sending less and less Americans into harm’s way, does it make you more cavalier about the use of force? And one of the people that was fascinating that I interviewed was a former assistant secretary of Defense for Ronald Reagan, who actually had this to say about these systems. He worried that they would create more marketization of war, as he put it. We might have more shock and awe talk to defray discussion of the true costs of war.... I mean, the concern I have is that it takes certain trends that are already in play in our body politic. We don’t have declarations of war anymore. We don’t have a draft. We don’t buy war bonds anymore. We don’t pay higher taxes for war. And now you have the fact that you may be sending more and more machines instead people. And so, you may be taking the already lowering bars to war and dropping them to the ground.

He suggests that in some ways we have a parallel to 1942, when atomic weapons were in development. Wouldn't it have been better to debate the morality of nuclear bombs before they were used, rather than after?

This exchange was particularly interesting:

AMY GOODMAN: What happens if a robot commits a massacre?

P.W. SINGER: It’s a great question. You know, who do you hold responsible? Do you hold responsible the human operator? Do you hold responsible the commander who authorized them there? Do you hold responsible the software engineer who wrote it wrong? And how do you hold them accountable? We don’t have good answers.

And what was funny is, one person that I interviewed was a Pentagon robotic scientist. And he said, “You know what? You’re wrong. There’s no social or ethical or legal dimensions with robotics in war that we have to figure out.” He said, “That is, unless the machine kills the wrong person repeatedly.” Quote, “Then it’s just a product recall issue.” That isn’t the way I think we should be looking at the social, ethical and legal dimensions of all of this. And that’s why we need to launch a discussion about it. Otherwise, we’re going to make the very same mistake that a past generation did with atomic bombs, you know, not talking about them until Pandora’s box is already opened.

You can read the whole interview here.

I also came across this story, about a new study that shows a general warming trend in Antarctica. If the West Antarctic ice sheet were to collapse, the average global sea level would go up by six meters! (I think previously the estimate was five meters.) And apparently we need that ozone hole after all, since it keeps things colder. Anyways, it's not an imminent threat (ie, not in my lifetime) but it would endanger humanity if we keep going the way we have been.

Happy Inauguration Day!

Wow, has it really been more than a month since my last post? Ouch. Sorry about that. [Insert lame but true excuses about the holidays and university workload here.]

If you have been missing my unique blend of... whatever-it-is, please head on over to Holy Heroes!! for a long post I did recently about Crucifixion in the Work of Grant Morrison. It caused Eve Tushnet to say "faboo!!!"

Oh, and there was also this little one about The Beast's God.

My next blog project (blogject?) is to post my "ten favourite books read in 2008" and "ten favourite graphic novels read in 2008." I have the lists worked out, but the trouble is coming up with something more thoughtful to say about each one, other than "Great book!" Sadly, most of the books were non-fiction - the only science fiction-with-spiritual-themes that made the list was (drum roll...) Philip K. Dick's UBIK! Ubik is the miracle product! It gets those stains out! It eliminates the heartbreak of psoriasis! Repairs your car! It walks your dog, and doubles on sax! If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you must read... UBIK!

And Happy Inauguration Day to all my American readers and, well, everyone, really. Hello to the new guy and good riddance to the other fellow!

Oh, and here's an interesting oddity. CBC radio evidently decided that President Obama wouldn't have enough to do already, so they asked their audience for help in compiling a mix of great Canadian music for him to listen to. I doubt he'll get around to it, but there are a lot of good tunes on it. Check it out!

Jamaican Echoes

As they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community.

from Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

I want to point out a great new CBC radio documentary about dub music. You can listen to it at the Inside the Music Audio Archive - it's called Jamaican Echoes, and it's about an hour long. It does a good job of explaining what dub is, how it developed, and how it spread around the world. Dub techniques and innovations created by Jamaican artists went on to influence huge swathes of contemporary music, from hip-hop to disco to punk to bhangra, not to mention most any style of electronic music you care to mention.

I would've liked some mention of nyabinghi drumming but I suppose that would involve explaining lots of other facets of reggae music. It's a great introduction nonetheless, and includes excerpts from many classic tracks. Be sure to crank up the bass before you listen to it, or you'll miss the point entirely.

I can't be entirely sure, but I think my first introduction to dub was reading Neuromancer, so I've always been focused on both the mystical and science-fictional elements of the music.

PS: For further exploration of the original dub remixing process, you might want to check out this podcast. It contains 21 different versions of Jackie Mittoo's Drum Song.

Robinson interview

Here's a rewarding interview with Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer-prize winning novelist. As the introduction says, she's "a Christian whose faith is not easily reduced to generalities." Indeed. Aside from being a very good writer, I think I would describe her as a philosopher; someone who loves knowledge and is deeply interested in reality in all the ways it comes to us. I'm posting the link here because she talks about both science and religion.

On religion:

Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I’ve found fruitful to think about.
Or:
The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves. But it is not in our nature to stop harming ourselves. We don’t behave consistently with our own dignity or with the dignity of other people.

On science:

I read as much as I can of contemporary cosmology because reality itself is profoundly mysterious. Quantum theory and classical physics, for instance, are both lovely within their own limits and yet at present they cannot be reconciled with each other. If different systems don’t merge in a comprehensible way, that’s a flaw in our comprehension and not a flaw in one system or the other.
...Science is amazing. On a mote of celestial dust, we have figured out how to look to the edge of our universe. I feel instructed by everything I have read. Science has a lot of the satisfactions for me that good theology has.

And:

I’m not terribly persuaded by the word supernatural. I don’t like the idea of the world as an encapsulated reality with intrusions made upon it selectively. The reality that we experience is part of the whole fabric of reality. To pretend that the universe is somewhere else doing something is really not true. We’re right in the middle of it. Utterly dependent on it, utterly defined by it. If you read somebody like Wallace Stevens, he’s basically saying the same thing.

She also talks about the relationship between religion and science, about beauty, about Lincoln and Marx, about "puritanical hedonism," and well, lots of other things.

Tidbits

Wow, November has been a quiet month around here. But any of you who've been university students can understand why, I'm sure.

Åka has kindly pointed out two posts from Auxiliary Memory, the blog of James Wallace Harris. In Defining Science Fiction he attempts that notoriously slippery task and describes science fiction as a belief system, much like religion. Interestingly, though, while he is an atheist who prefers sci-fi to religion, he doesn't mean this in a triumphalistic way. Actually he's somewhat ambivalent about it, feeling that science fiction can lead a person away from reality just as much as a religion can. In the previous post, The Children of Science Fiction, he mused about the way reading science fiction can shape a person's worldview: Åka contributed some comments to that one. These are profound questions (I personally think there's more overlap or synthesis between systems) but frankly I don't feel I have the spare brain cells to wrestle with them right now - or perhaps I should say wrestle with again, right now.

Lately when I haven't been reading about literate medieval heretics, politics, or Guatemalan atrocities, I've been privileging comic books over science fiction or fantasy. It's really astonishing how many comics you can read when you should be doing homework. It's also amazing how many trade-paperback comics you can get from the Winnipeg Public Library system, too. (Libraries = cheap as free!) One great source of recommendations (besides Holy Heroes!! of course) has been Say It Backwards, a blog devoted to all things Superman. Check out this post on the ten most important stories for understanding what Superman's all about. Also the best Superman stories since 1985.

When I do get around to reading science fiction again, Anathem is at the top of my list. Here's Gabriel's glowing review, subtitled "all books should be about monks that live inside a giant clock." Right on, brother. Just don't forget the space princesses.

PS: Here's some fascinating news. Black holes are not scary things that are trying to kill us, but are in fact a stabilizing force on galaxies. "The powerful black holes at the center of massive galaxies and galaxy clusters act as hearts to the systems."

Other news: An eleven-thousand-year old temple has been discovered! Paging Indiana Jones!

Speculative newspaper

This qualifies as speculative fiction: as you may have heard, a 'special edition' of the New York Times was released yesterday. Hundreds of thousands of copies were handed out in New York and Los Angeles, and an online version has been put up. Readers were astonished to discover that American troops would be pulling out of Iraq immediately, that the "United States National Health Insurance Act" had been passed, and so forth.

Of course, none of these things are actually true - at least, not yet. The paper and website were put out by a large alliance of activists, spearheaded by those infamous pranksters The Yes Men (I believe Gawker.com was the first to offer evidence of this). The fake Times is something like the Google News good news page, except that it offers (indirectly) more concrete proposals as to how the changes described might actually be achieved (usually grassroots organizing is involved.)
To tie this speculative newspaper into the theme of this blog, here's an article with a religious connection:

American Evangelical Churches Announce New Policy of Sanctuary for Iraqi Refugees

The author? One "W. Wilberforce!" Well, William Wilberforce, the devout Evangelical politician, is long dead, but his fame as a mighty and tireless campaigner for abolition, animal welfare, and other social causes still lives on. I imagine most of the by-lines in the newspaper are of this nature. One public statement about the special edition came from a "Bertha Suttner," who is also a long-dead activist.

The "ads" in the online version are also worth a close inspection: apparently ExxonMobil is adopting bold new environmental and social policies, American Apparel is unionizing its half-naked waifish models, and GM is bringing back its electric car, the EV1. I particularly liked the ad for a dermatologist who is putting aside his 'superficial services' in order to collect donations for rebuilding Iraqi schools. The slogans: "Be beautiful on the inside as well as on the outside!!!" and "Now you can have... A BEAUTIFUL CLEAR CONSCIENCE."

Harry Potter to be investigated?

Yes, another overly literal person has become mighty suspicious of that no-good Harry Potter and similiar characters. He hasn't actually read any of the books, but he thinks they may very well have a "pernicious" and "insidious" effect, because they may teach children to believe in magic. He is a bit better than most other fundamentalists in that he admits that he doesn't know for sure... yet. But like a good evangelist, he intends to write his own book for children to instruct them in the orthodox way.

I'm not sure what he'll think of the magic if he does get around to reading the Potter books. He'll probably approve of the magisterial British academics portrayed therein, but he'll likely be unhappy with the fact that the children spend much of their time disobeying said academics. And if he makes it to the final book he'll probably get very angry when he comes across the Christian symbolism it contains. (My thoughts on The Deathly Hallows are here.)

Alan Jacobs comments snarkily here.

The Blob, harbinger of theocracy

I don't think I've ever seen this (sort of famous) monster-from-outer-space movie. Apparently a recent book by Jeff Sharlet connects it with a shadowy world of theocratic fundamentalism, Cold War anti-communism and American neo-imperialism. Rudy Nelson, who worked on the film, thinks Sharlet makes some good points but that he's wrong about The Blob (and some other things).

Well, I haven't seen it, and this kind of thing is not exactly in my purview. It's more B-Movie Catechism territory (although The Blob might be too upscale for his tastes...!) Anyways, I'll just leave you with this amusing quote from Nelson's article:

But now it was high time for us to fill a serious scripting gap. We knew how the film would end (for sure, not by blowing up the town). An Air Force cargo plane would drop the frozen, cut-up carcass over the Arctic ice cap. But as yet we had not written any closing dialogue for the main characters. We decided on a line for Dave, the chief of police, the voice of official authority: "I don't think it can be killed, but at least we've stopped it." That didn't quite do it. No one said anything for a moment or two. Then, in a rare moment of inspiration, I suggested a closing line for Steve McQueen: "As long as the Arctic stays cold." The term "global warming" hadn't yet entered the environmental lexicon, nor had any of us entertained the thought that the Arctic would ever be anything but a solid ice pack. But there you are. My chief claim to Blob Immortality over the years has always been that I wrote that prescient last line. And since I was (as you may recall) Third Assistant Director in Charge of Daily Script Revision, who is out there to argue the point? I rest my case.