Michael A. Burstein

Through the discussion over at SF Signal I learned that sf writer Michael A. Burstein is an Orthodox Jew.

His story "Sanctuary" is about a Catholic priest, a pregnant alien, and, well, sanctuary! The first part is available online. It opens with a quote from Jesuit astronomer Guy Consolmagno.

A collection of his stories is coming out in September, entitled I Remember the Future. The subtitle is "The Award Nominated Stories of Michael A. Burstein." Burstein has been nominated for many Hugo awards but has not yet won any.

Ancient tech

Build your own personal Stonehenge*, using just rocks and branches!

And while you're at it, you could make your own Shroud of Turin imitation!

(That second one is fairly old news, but it's still good stuff. And he's added more information to the FAQs over time.)

*That wasn't an intentional pun but it does remind me of this.

David Martin on science, religion, and sociology

Martin is an esteemed British sociologist of religion and an Anglican priest. In 2005 he gave a lecture on the question: Does the Advance of Science Mean Secularization? He thinks that, historically speaking, the answer has been "For the most part, no" and explores the many other factors that affect how religious or secularized a society is. The sociology of religion is a fascinating and very complex topic. The lecture displays Martin's dry British-academic wit and vast learning.

A must read on sf/f and religion

Hurry on over to SF Signal to a new discussion on the question:

Is Science Fiction Antithetical to Religion?

The question as a whole is: "Two of the most highly regarded fantasy authors - Tolkien and Lewis - were also Christians, whereas the fathers of science fiction were atheists, and SF itself, it could be argued, grew out of Darwinism and other notions of deep time. Is science fiction antithetical to religion?"

The participants are sf writers, critics and commentators: Mike Resnick, Lou Anders, Ben Bova, Gabriel McKee, Jay Lake, James Wallace Harris, Carl Vincent, Adam Roberts, Larry Niven, Andrew Wheeler, Michael A. Burstein, D.G.D. Davidson, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., John C. Wright, and James Morrow. Along the way some identify as atheists, others as religious, and still others don't say, choosing instead to focus on the question.

I'm deeply impressed by the maturity and nuance of the responses. Nobody argues that science fiction is, has been, or must be, automatically antithetical to religion. Many different aspects of the question are discussed. Some respondents do grind their favourite axes a little, but they mostly stay on track. Quite a few interesting treatments of religion are listed, and the names of a number of sf authors who are personally religious are mentioned.

This kind of thoughtful, balanced discussion is very encouraging to me.

Many thanks to Aka for pointing this out!

The Blogger's Complaint

Or at least one of them. I'm irritated by novel titles that use this format:

The [Profession/Position/Identity]'s [Relative]

Say, for example:

The Time Traveler's Wife

Over the past five or six years I've come across far too many books that march in tight fashionable lockstep title-conformity. The first few were fine, but after awhile they multiplied and it became more and more precious and pretentious. Maybe the publishers are saying "Look, this is a good book, but if we change the title to this vaguely post-modern literary-sounding format that stresses relationships we'll make an extra $50K." I came across yet another one in the new books section at the library today, and felt like tossing it out the window. I'd thought the trend was over.

Let me just make some random ones up to illustrate what I'm talking about - though I'm sure that some of these are real titles:

The Butcher's Daughter
The Assassin's Son
The Beekeeper's Niece
The Dictator's Friend
The Spy's Nephew
The Traitor's Lover
The Diplomat's Wife
The Musician's Uncle
The President's Husband
The Astronaut's Wife
The Torturer's Daughter
The Transvestite's Son
The Explorer's Great-Aunt
The Grandmother's Monk
The Writer's Second Cousin
The Magician's Apprentice
The Killer's Aquaintance
The Nephew's Uncle
The Niece's Journeyman Locksmith
The Hearing Impaired Lesbian Farmer's Adoptive Maternal Grandfather's Second Cousin

Dreamers of the Day

Today I received my copy of Dreamers of the Day, which is Mary Doria Russell's latest book!

[grins madly and rubs hands together excitedly]

OK, so it's not science fiction or fantasy. It's historical fiction, rather like A Thread of Grace. When I thought about how intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually stimulating her previous three books were (sometimes painfully so), I decided I must own the latest. And, hey, it's historical. I'm a history major. Easy sell.

The Road to Cana

The second volume of Anne Rice's Christ the Lord has come out! It's reviewed here. I quite enjoyed the first volume, Out of Egypt.

Rice's pre-conversion work isn't exactly sf/f, but hey, again I say 'close enough!' And this is interesting... Rice writes: "Yes, I am contemplating one last novel involving the Vampire Lestat, and the Talamasca, the fictional organization I created years ago in the Vampire novels. The novel, if ever written, would be entirely Christian in framework and would involve Redemption."

I haven't read anything by Rice aside from Out of Egypt, so I really have no idea what a redemptive Vampire novel would be like.

Katherine Paterson

Today I came across a book entitled The Light of the World. It's a picture book about the life of Jesus, written by Katherine Paterson, and illustrated by Francois Roca. Paterson is the award-winning author of A Bridge to Teribithia, Jacob Have I Loved, and many other books. One recent book is about the famous Bread and Roses strike in 1912, which I only learned about last month, from a different source.

Paterson's a Presbyterian. The jacket blurb for The Light of the World quotes her: "The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress." I haven't read any of her books, but I did see the recent adaptation of Teribithia and was moved by it. I wasn't aware of her religious background: this quote puts a new slant on the film for me. I do appreciate stories that address grace and hope, not lightly or cheaply, but in the context of profound human pain.

Looks like she's like Madeline L'Engle in that she's a thoughtful, complex Christian writer whose YA books have been banned and railed against by certain conservative Christian moralists. Good for her.

(I don't know if Teribithia counts as fantasy or not, but it's close enough for me to post about it on this blog.)

Back, and Mainspring

Sorry for the quiet around here. I've been in sunnier climes. I just got back and still have a sunburn and sand in my hair. The next four or five weeks will be fairly quiet as I will be quite busy indeed with schoolwork.

I did manage to read Mainspring, by Jay Lake. It was recommended to me by Aka. It's an exotic adventure-romp/salvation-history. Natural philosophers and theologians used variations on the God-as-clockmaker metaphor for centuries, until, of course, Darwin threw a spanner in the works. Mainspring is an entertaining science fantasy set in a clockwork universe, as Lake takes the metaphor literally to see where it winds up. (Pun intended.)

I was rather surprised to discover that it doesn't just stick with that natural-theology backdrop but actually has a lot to say about the redemptive power of faith, love and Christ-like self-sacrifice. I was even more surprised that it didn't take a predictably "subversive" tack either. It's unorthodox and probably post-Christian, but it doesn't follow all the usual modern orthodoxies either. I suppose you could say it's both post-modern and post-secular.

I think it was definitely influenced by Gene Wolfe - the main character is named Hethor, which could conceivably be a coincidence, but I'm pretty sure I caught echoes of events in The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the New Sun. There's also some Ringworld in there, mixed into an alt-universe, steampunk, high-seas boy's adventure. And don't forget the theology. Overall, it's a lot of fun. I'll try to do a proper review at some point, but my track record on proper reviews has not been great lately. You may just want to go ahead and read the book.

I see Lake has a short story available online that has religious elements, but I haven't read it yet. And apparently a new novel set in the same universe, entitled Stemwinder, is on its way.

Practical Mystic

Matthew Stanley writes:

"The secular scientists engaged in the debate could not conceive of a religious scientist; conversely, their religious colleagues could see no barrier between their faith and their work. During the debate, the first group was startled to see a significant strength of religion within their ranks when religion had been so successfully driven from the content of science. How had this fifth column penetrated the fortress of science?

The answer is that it had never left."

That's in reference to a 1988 debate on religion & science that broke out in the pages of a scientific journal. It's a quote from the introduction to a new book by a historian of science:

Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A.S. Eddington, by Matthew Stanley. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Eddington was a famous astrophysicist, science popularizer and devout Quaker. Stanley argues that there really is no such abstract entities as "religion and science." Thus he takes a fairly nuanced approach that stresses the importance of context, in looking at the relationship between a specific field of science and a unique, individual scientist representing a particular religious tradition.

In a related note, remember that article I posted on awhile back about the relationship between religious views and genetic engineering? The molecular biologist in question argued that North American resistance arose from Judeo-Christian beliefs, while European resistance came from airy-fairy New Age beliefs. I came across an interview with Michael Pollan today in which he touched on European resistance to GMOs and gave a few secular reasons why some Europeans are understandably leery of the whole thing. Based on that and a few other arguments I've seen, I get the impression that this particular biologist likes to dismiss any and all resistance to his field of science as stupid, rank superstition, regardless of the arguments the people are actually making.

Gamer prophet

Maybe this is old news, but I just learned that Ezekiel is the patron saint of gamers! Click to find out why.

Now I'm imagining Ezekiel moving plastic trays full of Warhammer models around a table covered with a green tablecloth and miniature terrain. He'd probably be playing against Jeremiah, or possibly Isaiah. The minor prophets would be off at another table playing Magic: The Gathering and getting into heated debates about rules.

Habbakuk: Look, obviously my Tetragrammaton card trumps your Admantine Colossus card.
Malachi: Yeah, well, I have a Tetragrammaton too.
Assorted Minor Prophets in Unison: Me too!!
Zephaniah: That's it, I'm going home to eat pizza and play Warcraft.

I remember a line in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, in which the programmer character speculates about a heavy-duty card gamer friend of his, who he sees is eyed with respect by other card gamers. The programmer imagines that his friend probably has super-powerful cards in his breast pocket, like "The Nuclear Arsenal of the USSR" or "YHWH."

SF Mass

Usually 'mass' in science fiction is used as a scientific term. But here's the other kind. [via Sci-Fi Catholic]

I'm trying to think of other examples of sf Masses, but all that's coming to mind are the ones in Gene Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun. They're not technically Masses (nary a Catholic priest in sight), either, but they are definitely Eucharistic celebrations with bread and wine (or water), and even words that come close to the Earth version. Horn (or Silk? hard to say) performs them twice. Once out in a wilderness on the planet Blue, on a stone altar left by departed aliens, with only his horse to participate. (Though during it Someone Else makes his presence known.) The other time it's with a young female robot (no, really) in an obscure room in a fancy hotel in the city of Viron, inside of the giant generational starship the Whorl.

I suppose there are Masses in Eifelheim and Doomsday Book. But those aren't futuristic.

World of Warcraft pacifist

What a brilliant idea!

Here's an interview with a World of Warcraft pacifist. He's trying to level up his characters without killing anything.

Q. Tell us about the concept behind Reinisch, your first pacifist character.

A. I started him from a roleplaying point of view, based very loosely on a real German priest, Franz Reinisch, who refused to serve in Hitler's army and was executed. My undead priest's back story is basically the same, and he still refuses to kill.

He even keeps his two pacifist characters equipped with fishing rods, so that if they accidentally hit something it won't do much (or any?) damage. And he doesn't seem to join groups that are killing things, either.

OK, so it's probably not all that much fun to play WoW without killing anything, at least for the conventionally minded gamer. But I have to admit the idea had (briefly) crossed my mind too. I started getting interested in WoW around the same time I got interested in Quakerism. The irony was not lost on me.

I recall reading an article where someone pointed out that many video games are designed so that your main (or only!) interaction with the world is a violent one. Particularly in first-person shooters, where your chief control and point of view is basically just a floating gun, mowing down your enemies. Ever since I read that I've been thinking about it, and the way video game design dictates your options. Now, video games are not going to automatically turn you into a bloodthirsty monster in real life,* but I believe they do have an effect on the way you think. Thank goodness for people like Rand Miller, and the WoW pacifist, who deviate from the norm and get people thinking about what we do for fun.

PS: A quick Google didn't reveal much about the historical priest, but this article on another martyred conscientious-objector-priest mentions in passing that Reinisch was an Austrian.

*Some people do seem to go completely insane. The Ufa Russian murder case sounds like the Stanford prison experiment or "When I Was Ming the Merciless." There are others, such as the infamous Chinese incident.

Winter term

The recent lack of posts is because of winter-term assignment hell. My mind is too full of history to think about science fiction: the Hudson's Bay Company in the 1930s, second wave feminism, pre-Columbian art and architecture, Nixon and Mao, the Canadian Left, the Emperor Justinian... and so forth. I'll be back someday...

L'Engle remembered

Writer Luci Shaw eulogizes her friend Madeleine L'Engle. Well worth reading.

Next time, don't let medievalists anywhere near your terrible "medieval" movies

Got Medieval, (a medievalist), reviews Kingdom of Heaven. And it is funny:

"Orlando does get knighted, and he acquires a rival in the person of Guy of somewhere-or-other, a snooty French Templar who's in line for the throne of Jerusalem. We know Guy is a bad person, because he's rude and French and talks about God a lot. In fact, anytime anyone talks about God a lot in the movie, they're bad. Orlando, who is struggling with religious doubt brought on by the death of his wife and child, is good, but not really very good at making you understand that he's struggling with religious doubt unless he says outright, "I'm struggling with religious doubt," but he does say it, so don't worry. Then his dad dies, and they all decide to go see his lands in Jerusalem.

...it only gets worse when the Archbishop of Jerusalem instructs people, fearing they're all about to be captured, to 'covert to the heathen faith and repent later'. This is supposed to show that he's a craven fake, but not five minutes ago when Orlando was telling us, 'all religions are bunk,' we were supposed to see him as a champion of "the people" and a crack theological thinker."

Read the whole thing! His remarks on Orlando Bloom's macho-speech-giving abilities are priceless. He somehow found the time to also review Beowulf, and even the Footwear in Beowulf. I particularly liked this part:

"I put the blame mostly on Neil Gaiman, because he has a solid track record for taking well-worn cliche's, stock characters, and stale plots, adding some black-eyeliner, and calling it Deep, Dark, and Meaningful. He thinks that he's some sort of revolutionary for making a movie where the evil woman is a slinky seductress and the virtuous woman is an ice queen."

Yes! It's true! Thank you!

[via the Sci-Fi Catholic]

Moon on politics & religion

SF writer Elizabeth Moon has a recent post up on her blog about politics & religion in America, mainly about the importance of the division between church and state. From what I've read of her blog, she doesn't usually write about such abstract concepts in that space. It begins:

Men of faith have made excellent elected persons in this country before...let me start there, because it's true. Religious faith, in itself, is not a sign of mental instability, stupidity, ignorance, dishonesty, malice, bigotry, or any other impediment to participation in our government. Religious faith is also not a guarantee of sanity, intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, fairmindedness, honesty, goodwill towards all, or any other virtue necessary for governance.

and concludes:

As for me, I'm a Christian...the other kind. The kind who thinks "feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, visit the sick and imprisoned..." will keep me busy enough to let other people go their own way (unless they don't want to let me go mine, and others go theirs, and in that case...I'm firmly behind the Constitution.)

Gibson and the high-tech occult

Noted Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey reviews William Gibson's Spook Country.

Reading the review takes me back to the enjoyment of reading Gibson's books. I really should check out his latest two. Shippey takes issue with the failure of many of Gibson's specific predictions, but seems to me that Gibson's style, the way he evokes a cyberpunk vision, has always been far more important than specific predictions. Particularly interesting is the way he shows human beings making sense of a confusing high-tech world, creating new mythologies, new societies, new hopes, hidey-holes and homes. (Though sometimes I felt that he was putting too much undigested sociological theory into his books.)

I think the most interesting (and most relevant to this blog) part of the review is this:

"In the background, too, are thoroughly non-modern forms of occultism. This too is something which stems from and seems to fit the "cyberpunk" universe, the inhabitants of which tended to think from the start that the real world, or the significant world, was the one inside the computer, the one which did not function in physical space, which was also the world inside their minds. They had in fact become, in a way, creatures of the spirit, who frequently expressed their contempt for the brutal blundering physical world the rest of us live in—as they called it, "the meat." It's not a long way from that sentiment to belief in more traditional spiritual powers, and sure enough, in this novel (as with earlier Gibson characters) Tito thinks he gains his abilities from the voodoo-deities who protect him, whom he calls the Guerreros. Throughout the novel, too, Milgrim is reading his pilfered book about the 12th-century heresy of the Free Spirit, which he connects with modern government agencies as "a secret religion of mutually empowered sociopaths." What is a modern celebrity-figure, asks Bigend, if not a "tulpa," which he explains as a mystic Tibetan term meaning "a projected thought-form," like "cyberspace" itself a consensual mass-hallucination? That's why people keep seeing Elvis. Not very plausible, one may say. But in a world where other people's wi-fi comes through the walls and cellphone towers keep us all in an electronic net, a world where we are deluged with information, much of it wrong and most of it uncheckable, a world where celebrities are omnipresent but invisible except as pixels—well, there is a case for saying that the occult looks more and more realistic."

This has always been one of the things that fascinated me about Gibson's work. I don't think he believes occult and religious ideas refer to any objective supernatural reality. But he does a great job of illustrating the ways they can and likely will provide useful words and concepts for describing the new world human beings are creating; particularly when 'rational' 'modern' concepts fail.* This is especially true for people from the lower echelons of society, who he tends to write about.

*Here's a very limited example. Much has been made of the recent, dramatic spread of Pentecostalism around the world, which can seem counter-intuitive to modern people who think modernity equals secularization. But scholars of Pentecostalism have argued that its growth is linked to the very modern phenomena of globalization and international immigration. And if you think about it, is it any wonder that the story of Pentecost, in which the fragmented people of all races and languages come together to receive gifts of healing and spiritual power, would make a lot of sense, and be appealing to, a migrant worker? Of course it's much more complicated than that - but that's partly the kind of thing I'm talking about.

The Bible and Race

Here's a highly interesting review of a book which explores the way the Bible has often been used against racist ideas, as well as in support of them.

The book is entitled: The Forging of Racism: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000, by Colin Kidd. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006.

"Moreover, far from this being the incidental implication of a few verses, orthodox Christians have consistently recognized the solidarity of the human race as a core theme of both the biblical narrative and formal Christian theology: the image of God in humanity, the Fall, and original sin are predicated on the understanding that all human beings are bound together in a single, common origin, lineage, and family. The Christian tradition has consistently discerned that this doctrinal teaching has substantial implications when it comes to the issue of race. To take a typical example, the 18th-century conservative biblical scholar Nathaniel Lardner averred: "all men ought to love one another as brethren. For they are all descended from the same parents, and cannot but have like powers, and weaknesses, and wants … . For notwithstanding some differences of outward condition, we have all the same nature, and are brethren."

...

The Bible, therefore, has actually been a roadblock in the way of racists—although a barrier that all too many Christians, alas, have managed to find their way around. Kidd forcefully explains how it would have been so much easier for white southerners to have defended their "peculiar institution" ideologically if they could have accepted polygenesis. A few voices made the tempting argument that blacks were closer to soulless beasts than blood brothers but, as southerners were not generally ready to throw away their Bibles, they did not win out. The truths revealed in Scripture remained present to bear witness against them: African Americans were their brothers and sisters, co-recipients of the plan of redemption in the one, human family that is made in the image of God. The Bible was even an obstacle when it came to the stand against miscegenation: for example, was it not patently clear from the scriptural narrative that Moses had married a black woman? Even the pro-apartheid Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa was forced to concede that the Bible permitted interracial marriages."

A new fan

Hmm! Barbara Nicolosi of Church of the Masses has become a huge fan of Battleweb Galaticon... oh, sorry, Battlestar Galactica:

"I choke this out as a life-long, confirmed despiser of all shows in which people have dogfights in space ships, wear vinyl clothing and do the ER style fast dialogue only about anti-matter hyper drives instead of IV pushes. I hate sci-fi. But I love this show."

Check it out. She has some interesting things to say about the series.