Robert Randall

Here's a tidbit I found among Dani Zweig's "Belated Reviews:"

"Also noteworthy is "The Shrouded Planet" by "Robert Randall". (Robert Randall is the name Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett used for their collaborations.) The Shrouded Planet is the cloud-covered planet of Nidor, home to a stable, low-tech culture -- and the only other intelligent beings discovered by Earth. For reasons of its own, Earth decides to set Nidor, willy nilly, on the road to science and technology. Playing the emissaries-from-above gambit, they open a school. Of theology. With a bit of science and engineering thrown in."

The book was first published in 1957. Randall Garrett is better known for his Lord Darcy stories. According to Wikipedia, he belonged to the Old Catholic Church and was ordained in that denomination. According to this witty article by Robert Silverberg, however, Garrett was an Anglican. (As I understand it, Old Catholics are in full communion with Anglicanism, so perhaps both statements are correct.)

The Silverberg article is well worth reading, as he explains his long-time desire to become Pope Sixtus the Sixth, and what sorts of things he would do as Pope. He discusses the intriguing book that first sparked this ambition, a strange 1904 novel entitled Hadrian the Seventh, in which an obscure English layman unexpectedly becomes the Pope and sets about fixing the world.

Speaker for the Dead

"Dom Cristao, the abbot of the Filhos da Mente de Cristo - he says that they must lack the moral sense. He says this may mean they are beasts. Or it may mean that they are unfallen, having not yet eaten of the fruit of the forbidden tree." She smiled tightly. "But that's theology, and so it means nothing to you."

He did not answer. He was used to the way religious people assumed that their sacred stories must sound absurd to unbelievers. But Ender did not consider himself an unbeliever, and he had a keen sense of the sacredness of many tales. But he could not explain this to Bosquinha. She would have to change her assumptions about him over time. She was suspicious of him, but he believed she could be won; to be a good Mayor, she had to be skilled at seeing people for what they are, not for what they seem.

He turned the subject. "The Filhos da Mente de Cristo-- my Portuguese isn't strong, but does that mean 'Sons of the Mind of Christ'?"

"They're a new order, relatively speaking, formed only four hundred years ago under a special dispensation of the Pope--"

"Oh, I know the Children of the Mind of Christ, Mayor. I Spoke the death of San Angelo on Moctezuma, in the city of Cordoba."

Speaker For the Dead, by Orson Scott Card.

I'd forgotten how many religious references there were in this book. I'd also forgotten that it won (and deserved!) both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards.

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.