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.

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.

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.