John C. Wright's Journal

PERDIDO STREET STATION by China Me Evil– perfectly well written book, imaginative, very dark.

Why could I not finish? I could not finish it because there was simply too much shit in the book. I mean that literally, the s-word appeared at least once per page. Being a father of three children, and have changed a tolerable number of poopy diapers in my life, the constant reference to scat bored and annoyed me.

Also, hated all the characters and wanted them to die.

SYSTEM OF THE WORLD by Neal Stephenson– again, perfectly well written book, at places shot through with genius, flights of wordsmithing that were a delight.

Why could I not finish? I could not finish the book because there were simply too many dicks in it. I do not mean annoying characters, I mean characters who either talked about their penises, or had penis wounds, or dropped their trousers and pulled out their penises, or what not. When William of Orange, a man of all men in history I most admire for his character, drops his trousers and forces a kneeling captive girl to perform a Bill Clinton on him, my threshold of toleration for the number of dicks onstage had been exceeded. Not to mention my displeasure at the anachronistic insult to this historical figure.

ILIUM by Dan Simmons – I cannot believe I could not finish this book. If ever there was a book designed by the Muses of the Hippocrene for me and me alone, this was it. This book was designed for me to love it. A posthuman mystery, a mediation on the nature of the human condition, classical themes, Greek Gods, and the absolute, top-flight best portrayal of John Donne’s Caliban one could hope for. It even starred my favorite wizard, Prospero, who, in my opinion is the Best Wizard of All Time (in your face, Merlin! You too, Atlante!)

Why? This one was harder to explain. More than halfway through, I lost faith in the author. I was deep into the second volume of this big-as-War-and-Peace tome, and I was still waiting for something to get started. None of the characters, even when I was halfway through the second book, had yet to engage me: none of the plots showed any sign of any resolution, and I had yet to see how any of the plot threads were going to make it back to some sort of resolution. Sometimes you can get a feeling that an author has let the reigns slip, and the book is careening out of control toward a cliff. I read a reviewer whose taste and judgment I admire, and said, in effect, that my hunch was right, that the plot was never going to come together in a satisfactory way.

I had faith in the reviewer but not in the author. Why? Because of ‘no clues.’ By the time the reader is more than three fourths of the way through the narrative, there have to at least be some clues, or red herrings, or something, pointing to how the questions raised by the plot were going to be resolved. There has to be some little things that do not fit, so that you know once everything fits together, the various irregular jigsaw-parts will click into place with a satisfactory click. Here there was nothing.

For example, the character of Odysseus, one of my favorite of all characters in all literature, here shows up in post-historical Far Future world. He is surrounded with mysteries. How did he arrive at the place were the heroes found him? What is his mission? What does he want? What is he fleeing, or what is he seeking? But if the character has been onstage for over a hundred pages, and there has not yet been a single clue, not even a false clue, then there is no way for the reader to be surprised when the answer turns out to be something other than what first seemed to be the case, because there is no first case. It was not as if there were three possible origins for Odysseus, and we had to figure out one of them. There was nothing. He was simply onstage, going along with the heroes, doing nothing, adding nothing much to the action. When the action did crop up, it happened offstage. The major battle between the mysterious nonhuman robots and the mysterious posthuman eloi, which could have been the central set-piece of a Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, is just referred to in passing. If the bronze-age military virtues of the King of Ithaca were supposed to have some effect on the outcome of the Eloi-Robot raid, it was not in evidence.

And, of all things, Odysseus, the only man in all of ancient literature it is really easy to like—I mean, come on, he wants to go home! Dorothy Gale understands that motive!—even Odysseus is unlikable. He is described only in passing, showing no emotion. We have nothing from his point of view.

The scholar Hockenby has no motive for what he does, even though, at first, I was fascinated by the concept of what he was doing.

The Eloi fellow whose name I forget should have been interesting—he was a mild-mannered man from Utopia, thrown into a life-or-death struggle and must rise to the occasion; but there is no thought behind his actions. He is not up to anything. He simply reacts, or when he did act, his acts made no sense to me.

And then there were the poetry-loving robots from Saturn. I never wanted what they wanted, or knew what they knew, or saw how or what their goals were.

Too bad. If I had found even one of the characters lovable, or even likable, I would have slogged on through to the end.

Really too bad. I know this author has the knack, has the spark, to be able to make characters loveable– the mad poet in HYPERION, the old man whose daughter grew younger every day, the girl detective, Aenea in ENDYMION, the Shepherd who becomes her unwilling disciple, the evil Swiss Guard super-soldier: all these were great characters. I know Simmons can do it.

One final complaint—I did not like the way the Gods talked. Too much swearing. Too much potty language. I realize and admire what the author was trying to do: he was trying to strip the tyrants of Olympos of their mythic Homeric distance. If you read Homer and see what these beings actually said and really did, and you cast the same into non-poetical, non-elevated speech, you will glimpse what terrifying creatures they actually would be, seen at close range. The author here parted the mists of poetry and time and dragged the sons of the Titans into the sunlight, warts and all. But I did not like it. I think even Mars has a good side. Bloodthirsty killer, yes, coward, perhaps: but if I were portraying Mars I would give him at least one admirable trait. Maybe he loves his mother.

THE WHEEL OF TIME by Robert Jordon — I was crushed on the Wheel of Time like a hindoo sacrifice being crushed by the great god Juggernaut.

Why could I not finish? This one is also hard to explain. The characters theoretically should have been a lovable as the picked-upon orphan-boy in HARRY POTTER, or the smart-but-shy Hermione. I mean, come on, a farm boy with a dread destiny, his honest blacksmith friend, and their friend who is good with dice. Not to mention Aes Sedai and way-cool ninja swordfighting moves and magical gateways and Dark Lords galore. But it never clicked with me: I was slogging halfway through the fifth or sixth book (yes, I stayed with it that long) when I realized that I wanted the main character to die because he was out of his mind, I wanted the gambler fellow to die because he was turning all dark and crooked, and I did not care of the blacksmith fellow lived or died, because he was spinning his wheels not doing much of anything. Somewhere along the way, I had lost all sympathy for all the heroes and all their goals–if they had goals. I mean, I had clambered up a mountain of thousands of gray pages, and I was still waiting for that “Council of Elrond” moment when Some Wise Mage tells Frodo-lite what the quest is. No one seemed to be doing anything and no one had a plan. And I wanted all of them to die.

Now, in all fairness, this last might not have been a fault of the author. I am a cruel and sadistic man, like many readers, and I only read when I am a foul mood, either right before a gladiatorial game or an afternoon of kitten-stomping. So maybe it is just me.

But Rand-al’Thor really did get on my nerves after a while. He seemed a character simply too small for the role. If Ranma Soatome has been the Dragon of that world, the Dark Lord Bumbershoot (or whatever his name was) would have at least been booted in the head before five books ground wearily by. If Paul Mu’ad-Dib had been the dragon, by then would have at least disrupted the spice production. SOMETHING would have happened.

DUNE sequels. Well, I could not get past DUNE MESSIAH, CHILDREN OF DUNE, CHILDREN OF THE MESSIAH OF DUNE, RETURN OF THE BRIDE OF THE CHILDREN OF DUNE’S MESSIANIC RETURN. Bleh. I gave up on the series right after Leto turns into a Sandworm.

DUNE is maybe the best SF book ever. This is because, unlike any other book of its time, and unlike far too few books since, it had an overall idea and theme, a sense of history. The sequels were potboilers: the author revisiting a mined-out lode, having his characters run around with nothing to do. The space-Greek Empire has fallen to the space-Jihad: all the gene breeding programs of the witches have culminated. What are you going to do to top that?

GORMENGHAST by Mervin Peake. What I would not give to have the hours I wasted trying to plow through this tepid piece of pretentious trash back.

It is a book of hate, written by an Englishman who seeks to mock the class system and ritualism of England. Well, first, I am an American, so what do I care if you Brits hate each other? Second, I have seen the same condemnations of human pomposity and class-folly done better, and with with and imagination, by Jack Vance. Third, listening to anyone merely pick at the scabs of this festering hate is unpleasant at best, even when his foes and his faction are also yours. When his foes are meaningless to you, or his faction from another hemisphere, it is like listening to a crazy old lady on the bus, who is rocking back and forth, her yellow eyes unfocused, muttering about how her husband from six decades ago wronged her; and she lists his every flaw for you, even though you never met him.

Why in the world is GORMANGHAST even considered a fantasy book? How in the world did it creep into our section of the bookstore? The only element even slightly fantastical is the sheer grotesqueness of the characters, the sheer size of the giant, moldering castle.

This book personally offends me. Back in the day, back in the Time of Lin Carter, there were only a handful of fantasy books, and we all read all the same ones because that was all that there were. Somehow this ill-smelling troll was shoved in to our small and beloved circle of books, and dropped it bloated three-volume buttocks into the seat next to Hope Mirrlees, William Hope Hodgson and Lord Dunsany. I wanted to like this book because it was the only fantasy book I could find one I had finished reading XICCARPH by Clark Ashton Smith.

E.R. Eddison, Mervin Peake is not. He is not even Edgar Allan Poe.

On learning Greek, and reading Socrates and Thucydides, a friend of mine turned apostate, at least in part because he saw the pagans as noble and upright men; and he could not see how his Mother’s religion could be right if the hell-bound pagans were so praiseworthy.

But the same reading can be read the other way: when I converted, it was precisely because I was impressed with the pagans, and the pagans I most admired (Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus) were deeply religious men: when I looked around at the modern world, the only people I saw acting anything like those ancient pagans, were not the modern pagans (of which I know many) but modern Christians. 

If you want to hear about Aristotle, you are far more likely to come across talk of the Cardinal Virtues of the ancient Greek sages in a Christian Church than you are in the Sacred Circle of King of the Wood. If you want to hear about the role of Reason, the ‘Providence’ of the Stoics, or the sinfulness of ‘hubris’. you are far more likely to hear such things mentioned by the Pope in a circular letter than in the Halls of Academia or the Lobbies of the Great and Powerful. Modern philosophers following Nietzsche or Marx certainly have little enough to say about reason or virtue.

I have nothing against questioning one’s faith, if by this we mean thinking seriously and deeply about the issue. I am a convert: and I did not convert for light or frivolous reasons, but only after years of studying and pondering (and, frankly, a miracle). A man in my position theoretically has less to fear than a man born and raised in the faith, because I already know all the questions a skeptic might ask–I used to ask those very questions.

I do, however, object, as all men should, to mere disloyalty hidden under the cloak of skepticism, and for the same reason one objects to a crooked judge or a fixed jury. A kangaroo court goes through the motions of a court of justice, but there is no justice there. A man who leaves the church because he has sincerely intellectual discontent with the theory of what he is being told is not in the same position as a man who divorces his mother church because she tells him to straightened up and fly right. The first man is a skeptic: the second man is someone looking for a way to shrug off a hard duty. The second man is a Pharisee of Skepticism, someone who goes through the motions of intellectual investigation, but he is not intellectually honest. The second man will not accept the result if his verdict finds the theistic position to be more rationally coherent than the alternative.

Serious, sober atheists I respect: men who call themselves atheists because they have merely transfered their mystical religious devotion to some puny worldly cause, Marxism or Environmentalism or some such nonsense, they earn no respect from me. Real atheists should object to bowing toward the Golden Calf for the same reason they do not bow toward the relics of saints: Men of Reason should not bow at all.

(Men of Reason should not bow at all, that is, until or unless they find themselves in a cosmos where they are not the noblest or best thing in it. When confronted by what is objectively superior, and to which one owes a duty of loyalty and subordination, a bow is a perfectly rational, one might say the only rational, response fitted to the situation.)

It is said writers cannot write what they don’t know. This saying is true of unobservant writers only.

An observant writer, who happens to be a woman, for example, can write a male character very insightfully. I am also told that male writers who happen to be observant can write female characters insightfully, but that is rarer to see. An observant atheist can notice, for example, the joy the Faithful get from the mere act of singing hymns, even though he regards the behavior as odd and pointless: he can write a scene about a psalmist without having an ear for music, as long as he has an ear for humanity.

Now that I am a skeptical, God-fearing Christian (my degree of skepticism has not changed, thank you, merely the topics) I suppose one could ask how I can be a good Christian and agood science fiction writer, if I think the world views do not lend themselves easily to one another? I will merely reply that the question contains two assumptions flattering to me that may not be the case.  If the question were reworded to ask how could I be a writer of hackwork space-opera and a hypocritical, sinful Christian, that is easier to answer: if you write the story for the sake of the story, the question simply does not come up.

You do not have to give your opinion on the Council of Trent when penning an action story about a clean-limbed fighting man from Virginia rescuing a half-naked space-princess from the space-pirates of Lundmark’s Nebula. For that matter, you do not need to give your opinion of the scriptural warrant for Purgatory if you are penning a pirate story where Bootstrap Bill Turner comes back from the dead. For that matter, you do not need to give any argument for or against reincarnation to write a tale where Carter Hall or Mirdath the Beautiful or even Gilbert Gosseyn remembers a Past Life.

If you write the story for the sake of preaching your personal opinions, the reader can smell that from afar the way a dog smells fear. Some readers might enjoy a little preaching, if they agree with it, or tolerate it, if they are in a good mood, but the rest of the story has to be told for the sake of the story to put the reader in a good mood.

By the same token, neither should you make a fetish of hiding your opinions: they will come out in the way you tell the tale whether you want them to or not. Your philosophy, your sense of life, is what establishes not merely your sense of right and wrong, but your sense of realistic and unrealistic.

Let me use myself as an example, not because I am sterling example, but only because I have myself ready to hand.

My guess is that I will never write a story about a happy swinger like James Bond or Captain Kirk, because I do not think the character is realistic: I do not know any happy bachelors; I do not know any women who are happy to be abandoned thoughtlessly after a one-night-romance. Likewise I cannot write a tale about a happy drunk or a cheerful opium-smoker. This is not because I am preaching abstinence and temperance,  but only because my assumptions and observations and conclusions about the way life really works would not let paint a picture so much out of proportion with reality.

An author with my take on human nature could perhaps set a tale on the planet O of Ursula K. LeGuin, where all the humans are bisexual polygamists; or in the Lunar penal colony of Robert Heinlein, where all the humans are incestuous polygamists; or in a slave-pits of planet Gor by John Norman, where are the space-Hoplites are heterosexual bondage fetishists: but in each case that humble-yet-hardworking author would have to come up with some additional bit of science-fictional or pseudo-anthropological explanation to make the people of Planet Pervert seem imaginable.

Real people simply don’t act this way without real repercussions.

Polygamy is realistic, and suffragettes are realistic, and stable families are realistic: but a stable suffragette-run polygamy is not realistic. You at least have to say the Hainishmen or the giant insect overlords of the Sardar or the Lunar Authority put something in the water to quell the natural sexual, paternal, and selfish instincts of homo sapiens.

I am using sexual mores merely because thetopic is outrageous. To use a less controversial example, there was an Isaac Asimov short story (I forget the name) where teleportation technology made everyone is society phobic of going out of doors. In another story, the widespread use of robots made everyone phobic of meeting other flesh-and-blood persons face-to-face. Asimov felt no need to explain the bizarre unrealism of these social taboos, because his point was that all social taboos are bizarre. His readers are expected to accept this point for the sake of the tale, even though not one reader actually believes that the invention of the telephone made people phobic about talking face-to-face, or that the invention of the motorcar made everyone phobic about horses.

 (If Asimov had postulated a society where Political Correctness made everyone phobic about saying “he” and “him”, “mankind”, “manpower”, “fireman”, and “manhole-cover” that, on the other hand, would have been entirely realistic.)

Of course, authors who think that human beings are infinitely plastic, and can adapt to any social order without friction, or that there are neither natural nor economic incentives influencing which social institutions are stable, such authors need give no explanation in such cases because, in their world-view, none is needed. Their axiom is that moral codes are a social byproduct, not a natural reality.

And again, authors who are writing more lighthearted or more phantasmagorical epics need not stick to realistic humanity, because realism is not their point. Larger-than-life figures are not meant to be lifelike, any more than the grotesque figures in a low comedy are meant to be taken literally.

Christianity postulates a rational creator who created a rational creation, and made humans with minds so equipped as to understand it. A metaphysic that postulates mere materialism as an explanation of the universe cannot explain why the logic in men’s minds and the logic of physics just so happen to coincide.

“Eventually claims may appear that certain scientific insights/knowledge is based on religion. All the sudden. You are doing the same thing, but ask a moslimwhere science comes from. He might give you another answer. Same thing.”

Your sentence structure here is not clear enough for me to puzzle out your meaning. I think you are arguing against a straw-man unrelated to my comment.

Read Roger Bacon if you want to find out the historical roots of science. Christianity is more Aristotelian than you are making it out to be:  I mean no offense, but it sounds like you have been listening to propaganda on the topic. 

“Religion brought equal grotesque and cruel things as Nazism and communism did. Nazism was even based on interpretations of biblical passages. Besides that, quite nasty opinions about things did not only live in Nazi Germany and/or the USSR, but were common in many societies. Including handling certain matters in certain ways. Think about how Arboriginals were treated, what used to happened to people with mental illnesses, how gay people were prosecuted, what roles women in society were supposed to have, apartheid and so on.”

Again, your sentence structure defeats your purpose: I cannot make out your meaning. Nazism is not logically possible without a theory of the superman, the next step of human evolution, which in turn cannot be imagined without a theory of Darwinism.

If Darwinism is correct (and I myself see no reason to suppose it false) it inevitably follows that some breeds within a species are less suited to survival by natural selection than other breeds. Not all breeds can be equal in Darwin’s eyes, for if they are all equally fit to survive, there is no evolution. Only a mystic like me, who thinks all men are stamped with the image of God, and are equal, not in their minds and bodies, (for clearly some men are stronger and smarter than others), but equal in their souls, equal in their moral character, can believe in the equality of man without contradicting himself.

The Nazis drew out a perfectly natural, and perfectly perverse, implication of the humanist-Darwinian world view.

As for the Stalinists, they called their system “scientific socialism.” They and their partisans said the same dismissive things about religion you say now. Science was the banner they marched under, the golden cow they worshiped. For details, see Lysenko.

As for the claim that “Religion brought equal grotesque and cruel things…” this is simply contradicted by the facts. I am not even going to argue the point. Google the word ‘Democide’. Look it up.

I will get you started: the Spanish Inquisition has been accused of as many as 350,000 deaths, but more conservative estimates place it at around 2000. Communism: over 100,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. These are not only ‘not equal’ they are not even within the same order of magnitude.

“Insights and freedom are based on many philosophies and faiths.”

I respectfully disagree. Find me a quote from any Hindu or Chinese writing in favor of human political freedom. Name the faith, other than Christianity, which speaks of the merit of the individual, and links the concept to the concept of liberty. Name another religion informed by Hellenic ideas of isonomia, or equal justice. Back your assertion.

“Religion is based on blind faith…”

Is this comment based on some experiment you performed? Where is your evidence? Or is it an article of faith of some dogma of your own?

My religious convictions are based on my reasoning and my experiences. Your comment is meaningless: faith is merely another word for loyalty. I have faith in my God for the same reason that I have loyalty to my wife–she loves me, and I have no logical reason to doubt her, and it would be dishonorable and weakminded to entertain doubts about her.

Science fiction includes more than this, but this is the heart of science fiction. Books written for an audience bored with or simply nonchalant about futurism may well take place in the future, but they will no more be science fiction than NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL (written in 1903, taking place in the far future year of 1984, but the men still wear top hats and travel in horse-drawn handsome cabs.)

Second, the Party or the Umma or Political Correctness might decide that investigation into scientific phenomena is distressing to the social order, an insult to Islam, or a narrative oppressive to women and blacks. One needs a certain degree of freedom and imagination to maintain a scientific and technological culture; if that freedom is not present, the literature which celebrates changes to the social order might not be present.

Third, science might be solved. We might get a unified theory of everything, and technical changes become a matter of changes in technique, not fundamental and radical changes to the nature of human life. The Industrial Revolution and the Information revolution changed many things, even institutions as basic as Church and Family are dazed and reeling from the shock of modernism, in much the same way that the institution hunter-gatherer band was dazed by the agrarian revolution and the rise of the permanent farming village. The implications were wide-ranging and deep. But then followed a long period of stability.

A long period of stability following a sudden and exhilarating period of change would spell the end of science fiction as a separate literature. After the Singularity, when all the Faithful are downloaded into the mainframe of the Earthbrain, there is no reason for the dynamism of an expanding, revolutionary society to linger. The immortals might not have the same feelings about a future that they will live to see that we have about a future we will never see.

Fourth, a change in the theory of art. If society ever comes to the consensus that mere escapism is shameful, science fiction, which has strong elements of adolescent power-fantasy and mere escapism at its core, may be denatured: changed beyond recognition or killed entirely. Science fiction, by and large, is a playground of ideas, a youthful bull session of may-bes and why-nots and what-ifs. A tired or exhausted culture would have no patience for youthful daydreams. We are only now getting into an age touched by the tinge of disappointment with science fiction–I cannot speak for other writers, but when the year 2000 passed, and there was neither flying car nor moonbase nor manned expedition to Jupiter overhead, it influenced my thinking and, yes, my writing. Where is my jetpack? Now imagine a future where one hundred years has gone by, or two hundred, and there is still no moonbase. Science Fiction tales about Dan Dare, space ace, would begin to take on a retro-future bittersweetness that would soon pall. No one would believe it. No one would take it seriously.

Fifth, Christendom might fall. Men of the West, science fiction is your unique brainchild. The scientific revolution and the scientific world-view are compatible with and spring out of the historical and metaphysical roots of Christendom. A bold statement, I agree, but it will have to wait for another day to support. I am not saying that the great literate cultures of the East have no science fiction writers! I am not saying technological civilization could not exist without a Christian world view to support and nourish it. But I do notice that attempts to place civilization on an allegedly scientific foundation—I am speaking of the economic science of Russian Communism and the Darwinian biology of German Naziism—have been the most grotesque and notorious failures of the Human spirit since the dawn of time, exemplars of unparalleled dishonesty, madness, and cruelty. Western thinking without Western religion has so far produced no admirable nations.

I do opine that a civilization based solely on Hindu resignation to the eternal cycle of time, or solely on Buddhist rejection of the material world, or even based solely on Taoist or Confucian notions of a properly-ordered society, would be poorly suited to nourish scientific enterprises or scientifictional imaginings. There is a rebellious dynamic in Christendom that is absent from Oriental quietism, noble or logical as these philosophies might be in other ways.

Islam happens to have rejected the role of reason in human life since the Middle Ages, but I am not sure if this in innate to the religion: perhaps a further prophet or radically different school of interpretation could usher the faithful Mohammedan into philosophical harmony with modern science. They have copied much else from the Jews and Christians in the invention of their religion, there is no reason they cannot copy that. Their famous medieval advances were found in areas where Roman civilization had ruled the south and east of the Mediterranean for centuries: I leave it as an exercise for historians to say whether the Roman or the Islamic component of the conquered territories provided the admired dynamism.

These observations do not lead me to conclude that Christianity  is necessary for science and science fiction; but no historical event bears out the notion that science necessarily must survive its absence, either. Westernized oriental nations could keep science alive if they continued to follow Western models and institutions, but the failure of the West might disincline these Eastern thinkers to follow us. The prestige the West currently enjoys is tied to our honor, glory, wealth, and might. If that fails, why should our ideas be taken seriously any longer? Who wants to chase a lemming over a cliff?

Sixth, if science fiction comes true, the sensawonder might be a matter for newspapers, not pulp magazines. We have seen the beginnings of that all ready, but extrapolate this to a conclusion: The Singularity might happen, and the Jupiter Brain might be so well content with its current situation, that it devotes no resources to idle speculations about the future. The Utopians are all nudists and vegetarians, and are so content with life that they have neither fer nor curiosity about the coming years.

It is as much true if dis-utopian SF comes true as if Utopian SF does. Suppose the Martians invade: it will be no great fun to write about the future once that future consists of being herded and drained of blood by creatures composed entirely of brain. If the  human beings have been reduced by the Matrix into mere battery sources, there is not much fun in future speculations, because there is no future. I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords, and point out that a fiction writer might be able to lull the human serfs toiling in the sugar mines–but somehow I do not think my latest optimistic spacewar saga is what they will be in the mood for. 

 Millenarianism is not confined to Christianity. If you are a good and loyal Marxist, any depiction of the future that did not contain the prophesied socialist utopia would strike you as wrong-headed and perverse.

 Science Fiction’s attitude toward the future is much the same as its attitude toward other planets. Before the industrial revolution, stories of voyages to other planets were trips to spiritual heavens–for example, when Astolfo flies by Hippogriff to the Moon in ORLANDO FURIOSO, he meets St. John of Patmos, who rules over a realm where all the lost memories and vanities of mankind rest. On the other hand, when Cavor flies to the Moon in FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, in an antigravity sphere no less impossible than a hippogriff, he arrives at a material world inhabited by rational beings no less physical than men of the antipodes, or some island visited by Gulliver.

 Likewise here, science fiction in general assumes the future will not hold the New Jerusalem, the new heavens and new Earth of the Apocalypse, but men like us. When HG Wells’ THE TIME TRAVELER traveled to the year 802701 AD, he meets the race that is the outcome of Darwinian evolution acting on current social divisions. The whole appeal of the book is the message that history is a soulless, mechanical force, and that we humans cannot stand above or aside it. In science fiction , if the future-men are changed into immortals or godlike creatures, it is through science and technology that the change is made: even if the change is a spiritual one, the magic power that changes the souls of men must be called “psionics” or “parapsychology” to fit it within the assumptions of the science fiction genre.

 I have not read the popular “LEFT BEHIND” series, but from what I hear of them, it sounds like they are not science fiction, even though they take place in the future. The world-view of the Apocalypse of John is not the world-view of the consensus of science fiction readers.

Now, either he is saying that the people who cannot imagine anything outside monogamy and monotheism are unable to savor science fiction BECAUSE they are unimaginative (which is my reading of the sentence) or he is saying that the people who cannot imagine anything outside monogamy and monotheism and it is merely an unrelated coincidence that they do not appreciate science fiction. In the second case, he is saying nothing at all. In the first case, he is saying people like me, conservative monotheists, don’t like science fiction, a statement that, in my case at least, is simply false. I like science fiction just fine, thank you.

Now, he was careful enough to say “the vast majority” of people from such backgrounds don’t appreciate science fiction. I might be a member of the tiny minority. Fair enough: I do not know what the numbers are on Christian versus non-Christian SF writers and readers. My own experience is that SF guys tend to be fairly non-dogmatic and easygoing on a wide number of topics, and where we are dogmatic, it tends to be on crackpot topics like the Dianetics, the Singularity, the Gold Standard or The Right To Buy Weapons (sorry, crackpots, no offense. I strongly believe in two of the four things listed). The only passkey to liking science fiction and fantasy is a hunger for scenes from somewhere other than the here-and-now.

The writers that openly (Bob Heinlein, Isaac Asimov) or in passing (Larry Niven) mock Christianity garner a lot of attention for their stance, whereas writers who happen to be Christian and don’t make a big deal out of it in their writing (Jules Verne) do not. I will be the first to admit that Christianity and Science Fiction do not blend easily, unlike, say, Fantasy, which, because it lends itself naturally to supernatural themes, either tends to have a European Christian flavor (JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Gene Wolfe) or a European pseudo-classical pagan flavor (Robert E. Howard).

Mr. Modesitt in his rebuttal merely wishes to clarify the first part of the paragraph, which is fair enough, if that is where he encountered adverse comments. Siris points out that these clarifications, in and of themselves, do not support the main contention of the argument, which seems to assume that religious people are too unimaginative to like SF, and, indeed, the closing comment about “true believers” of Mr. Modesitt’s can be interpreted as another sign of disdain for religion. I don’t wish to read between the lines, but it does look as if this condescending tone toward us poor unwashed religious masses is something he is comfortable mentioning merely in passing, as if it is too obvious to merit support.