I told myself I was going to read DIALOG WITH TRYPHO for my Lenten reading, but I got derailed. It seems that the author of VOYAGE TO ALPHA CENTAURI (which I enjoyed despite its non-science-fictiony mood and flavor) has written a political thriller about the End Times called FATHER ELIJAH: AN APOCALYPSE.
This was not LEFT BEHIND, albeit it may share some themes and setting.
Michael O’Brian is the author, and since he is not a Science Fiction author, of course I’ve never heard of him. My reading tastes are shockingly narrow.
On the other hand, Michael O’Brian did a masterful job with VOYAGE of portraying character development and addressing spiritual concerns. The depiction of the soft tyranny of Political Correctness once it takes full control of a society is more chilling, at least to me, than George Orwell or Aldous Huxley dystopias, because it is indirect, voluntary, subtle, and disastrous.
Once scene in particular grips my memory with a fearful fascination, just in so how realistic it is: the secular humanists, finding evidence of a horrific dehumanizing culture once existing on the sole planet of Alpha Centauri, and puzzled that they seem to have been humans from our earth, decide to re-enact one of their ‘Nature Worship’ rituals as pieced together by archaeologists, a vibrant ritual of dancing and chants the secular humanists see as beneficial for encouraging group spirit, and adoring the natural world. It involves the worship of snakes, and doing a snake-dance, and a few more things … the main character realizes from examining the archeological records even further, that rebel god-being from the native mythology the rite adores is an enemy of man, depicted as being in revolt against a supreme being. The main character sees the celebrants dancing and writhing and copulating in their life-affirming psychologically expert-approved affirmation of their self-affirming nature-love and ecological earthday values …. and he sees the darkness behind it. The seculars are calling up powers that the natives (and the main character) believes to exist, but the seculars do not.
It was all very subtle, and, in that sense, quite realistic. VOYAGE did not have a dramatic plot, nor was the viewpoint character the driver of the action, nor able to solve either the main conflict of the story, nor the specific technical problem at the end. Indeed, his attempt to solve the problem with gunfire goes badly awry.
So it was not the kind of story I, with my plebeian tastes, would typically enjoy, but the depiction of spiritual dangers was utterly realistic and spot-on.
Especially poignant were scenes in flashback which depicted the main character’s youth. He lived in a poor community, but among neighbors with strong religious bonds to each other whose children would occasionally be taken away by nameless bureaucrats for reasons unnamed.
The contrast between the poor all celebrating Catholic holy days together, and the sterile addictive pleasures of the all-benevolent Political Correction state was chilling indeed, but, again, the thing was done very subtly, not in a preaching way, and not in a heavy handed way.
The characters were realistic: almost like Tolstoy characters for their three dimensional, quirks and realism. But a science fiction reader will not take away from VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS any of the sense of wonder or sober scientific speculation which is the main appeal of the genre. The same events told in the same way could have happened in a base camp of archaeologists in Egypt or Persia with no change to the main points of the plot.
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