Parable of the Sower: A new religion born from societal collapse Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Parable of the Sower (1993) is the first book iParable of the Sower: A new religion born from societal collapse Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Parable of the Sower (1993) is the first book in Octavia Butler’s PARABLE (EARTHSEED) series. It is one of her most well-regarded novels, along with Kindred (1979) and Wild Seed (1980), and depicts a near-future United States that has collapsed due to environmental catastrophe into roving bands of thieves, drug addicts, rapists, murderers, scavengers, corporate towns that impose wage slavery, and gated communities protected by armed guards that strive to survive amidst the chaos.
It is an unforgiving world in which the strong, violent, and ruthless dominate the weak and powerless. The story centers around Lauren Olamina, a 17-year old girl born to a Black Baptist preacher and Hispanic mother. Due to drugs her mother was taking when pregnant, Lauren has ‘hyperempathy,’ which makes her feel the pleasure or pain of those around her. In a world of violent social collapse and anarchy, she is subjected almost entirely to the latter.
This story has all the familiar dystopian themes of post-apocalyptic stories, and it reflects in its relentlessly grim tone Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The first two thirds of Parable of the Sower depicts a steadily-escalating series of violent incidents that show us JUST HOW BADLY people behave when the only rule is that of power and violence. As frequently happens in Butler’s novels, it is the women and children that are frequently victims of men who have become predators.
Her young protagonist, Lauren, is definitely a tough survivor, but when a new drug called ‘pyro’ grants pleasure greater than sex to those who set fire to things, society truly begins to disintegrate. And Lauren’s small gated community outside Los Angeles, which has survived repeated attacks by thieves and roving thugs, finally succumbs to a raving band of psychotic addicts who slaughter almost everyone. Lauren writes down in her notebook a stark description:
When apparent stability disintegrates. As it must — God is Change — People tend to give in to fear and depression, to need and greed. When no influence is strong enough to unify people they divide. They struggle, one against one, group against group, for survival, position, power. They remember old hates and generate new ones, they create chaos and nurture it. They kill and kill, until they are exhausted and destroyed, until they are conquered by outside forces. Or until one of them becomes a leader most will follow, or a tyrant most fear.
Lauren and two others survive the carnage through foresight and luck, but are then forced to go on the road and head north in the hopes of finding some vestiges of civilization in Oregon, Washington, or even Canada. They join a steady stream of refugees shuffling along the highway, fighting off human scavengers that prey on the refugees. Lauren, however, has been quietly assembling thoughts in a notebook that she calls Earthseed: The Books of the Living. They begin as her observations of the world around her, and the central belief is “God is Change.” Once she shares her teaching with other refugees, it takes on the shape of a religion, one suited to the grim new conditions of a collapsed civilization. Here are the main tenets of Earthseed:
We do not worship God. We perceive and attend God. We learn from God. With forethought and work, We shape God. In the end, we yield to God. We adapt and endure, For we are Earthseed, And God is Change.
In this new and brutally anarchic world, Lauren has reconciled the evils around her by discarding her Baptist father’s belief in a just God, who looks after his creations, rewarding good behavior and punishing bad. She rejects the idea of a God that responds to prayer or faith. Instead, she embraces Change, for that is what surrounds her, and it is those who can shape Change, i.e. those that can adapt to even the most brutal conditions and survive. It is a stripped-down philosophy, in which only those who help themselves can continue to prosper and live.
It would be easy to say this is not a religion at all, measured against the existing religions of the world, but supposedly it brings her and her followers some measure of succor. In essence, Earthseed suggests that people stop expecting God to come to their aid in a careless world — they need to take care of themselves. Given the relentless brutality with which Butler pummels the reader and her characters throughout the book, perhaps this is what is needed for survival, but it strikes me as hardly any different from atheism — i.e., we are on our own.
Nonetheless, Parable of the Sower ends on a note of hope, as Lauren and her followers find a place to found a new community, where “The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.” The story of Lauren and Earthseed continues in Parable of the Talents, which won the 1999 Nebula Award for Best SF Novel, and Butler planned to write a third installment, called Parable of the Trickster, but struggled to finish this and wrote Fledgling instead. Sadly, that was Butler’s final novel, as she passed away far too early at age 58. So we can only judge her EARTHSEED series based on the first two books, well before the series could “take root among the stars.”
There are many admirers of Parable of the Sower, but I struggled to derive much reading satisfaction from it. While the community and family relationships in the first third of the book are depicted with care, we know that it is just a matter of time before this small bubble of peace and stability will be shattered by the violence and chaos of the outside world. Witnessing the inevitable tide of anarchy engulf Lauren’s world is emotionally draining, and Lauren often seems resigned to the death and misery that surround her despite her ‘hyperempathy.’
Perhaps Butler wanted to show that Lauren’s strength of spirit could survive even the depths of hopelessness, but I began to feel numb as the atrocities mounted. The small victories towards the end, particularly Lauren’s gathering of followers, did not provide any inspiration. If we could see more of Butler’s vision of taking Earthseed to the stars, perhaps this would have been more rewarding, but as things stand, I don’t really feel any enthusiasm for reading Parable of the Talents.
The audiobook is narrated by Lynne Thigpen, an American actress. She does a good job as Lauren, showing both her resilience amid horrific circumstances and growing belief in Earthseed. However, the story itself is so grim that there’s no way for her to inject any levity or variation in emotional tone without betraying the source text, which I blame on the story itself....more
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer: Explores madness, suicide, faith, the occult Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Philip K Dick’s Radio Free AlThe Transmigration of Timothy Archer: Explores madness, suicide, faith, the occult Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Philip K Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth (1985) and VALIS (1981) were strange but moving attempts to make sense of his bizarre religious experiences in 1974 when a hyper-rational alien mind contacted him via a pink laser from space. He then wrote The Divine Invasion (1981) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), both loosely connected titles in the VALIS TRILOGY, although the latter was posthumously substituted for the unfinished The Owl in Daylight. Sadly, these were the final novels that PDK wrote before his death in 1982. The Divine Invasion is a complex retelling of the second coming of Christ to an Earth dominated by the fallen angel Belial. If you crave deep philosophical discussions of Gnosticism, anamnesis, and salvation, you’ll be entranced. Otherwise, you may be completely lost.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) is a much more controlled, almost mainstream novel narrated by a female protagonist in the first person (perhaps the only example in PKD’s oeuvre?) about the complex relationships between an eccentric but extremely erudite Catholic Bishop named Timothy Archer, his lover Kirsten Lundborg, her schizophrenic son Bill, the Bishop’s son Jeff Archer, and his wife Angel Archer. The book delves into despair and suicide, questions religious faith, and shows the damage caused to loved ones who try to save troubled souls. It’s a big departure for PKD, and it’s sad to see that he didn’t have more opportunities to explore this direction.
The story is told by Angel Archer, the wife of Jeff Archer, who himself is the son of Episcopalian Bishop Timothy Archer. The Bishop is a highly-educated former lawyer, a Renaissance man who challenges many key Catholic doctrines, questions segregation, favors the ordaining of women, enjoys debates on controversial topics, reads Latin and Greek, and is a well-known public figure due to frequent public appearances. In fact, PKD based this character very closely on the real life of James Pike, the Episcopalian Bishop of California from 1958-1966, whose story very closely resembles that of Timothy Archer. In fact, PKD was close friends with him, and he officiated at PKD’s marriage to Nancy Hackett, the step-daughter of Maren Hackett, a woman who Pike was romantically involved with after his second marriage collapsed. This complex interweaving of PKD’s personal life and friends with his fiction is a trademark of his later period, as he increasingly used it to explore his own troubled life and departed from his earlier pulp SF origins.
In the novel, Angel Archer is married to Jeff Archer, the Bishop’s son. Angel Archer initially works at a small law office in Berkeley run by two political activists who represents drug pushers. She pays the bills since Jeff cannot, and eventually becomes manager of a Berkeley record store, something PKD did in real life. When Angel introduces her feminist activist friend Kirsten Lundborg to Tim, he agrees to give a free lecture for Kirsten’s feminist advocacy group. But unknown to Angel, Tim and Kirsten begin an affair as well. When she confronts the Bishop about it, he easily deflects her accusations with his legal skills, pointing out that he himself is not married and Kirsten is a single mother, so they are not adulterers. However, Angel is concerned that this romantic relationship with Kirsten, who becomes the Bishop’s personal secretary, will damage his credibility as a public religious figure.
Meanwhile, Angel’s husband Jeff Archer develops an attraction to the older Kirsten, and when he discovers she is having an affair with his father, this causes him severe psychological trauma. As time goes on, he begins to suffer from depression and signs of madness. Eventually he commits suicide, causing intense feelings of guilt in Tim and Angel. Subsequently, Kirsten develops cancer and starts taking barbiturates for the pain. She gets increasingly hostile and paranoid, suspecting Angel and Tim having an affair behind her back, and becomes very bitter and angry at life.
Events further devolve as strange ghost-like phenomena occur to Tim and Kirsten, such as objects in the house falling and breaking, Kirsten feeling the pain of pins being pushed under her fingernails, and finally they visit a spiritual medium who reveals in a séance that Tim’s son Jeff is trying to communicate with them and warns Kirsten that her life is in danger. To Angel’s dismay, Tim believes these supernatural explanations and decides to write a book about their experiences. Angel knows this will destroy all Tim’s remaining credibility, but he is determined to see it through. Eventually Kirsten kills herself with an overdose of barbiturates. This not only confirms the psychic’s prediction, but also adds further guilt and pain to the lives of Tim and Angel. They struggle to understand why their loved ones chose to take their own lives and why they could not prevent it.
Tim then learns that an archaeological dig in Israel has unearthed Zadokite Gnostic scrolls that refer to many of Jesus’s famous statements, but over two centuries before the birth of Christ. This throws most of Tim’s beliefs in Christianity into question, particularly the core doctrine of Jesus Christ being the son of God and not just a prophet. He is determined to go there himself to investigate these claims, and goes out into the Judean desert to recreate the experience of Jesus wandering in the wilderness. Alone and disoriented, he falls to his death and is not discovered for days.
Saddled with tragedy after tragedy, Angel Archer seeks spiritual help from a guru named Edgar Lightfoot, whose teaching focus on Zen Buddhism as a form of psychotherapy and healing. There she encounters Kirsten’s schizophrenic son Bill, who has survived all these deaths without feelings of guilt. As they spend time together, Bill one day reveals that the spirit of Timothy Archer now inhabits his mind, and divulges details about Tim that would not be easily known, and also speaks in tongues, quoting from Dante’s Divina Commedia, one of Tim’s favorite literary and religious works. Angel realizes that his mind has completely succumbed to madness, but is still drawn to the possibility of reconnecting with Tim’s spirit. The book ends on this ambiguous note.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer represents perhaps the most personal of PKD’s works other than A Scanner Darkly, Radio Free Albemuth and VALIS, and is the most mainstream of his later novels. Despite the painful and depressing subject matter, I felt it was a very courageous attempt to search for the reasons behind madness, despair, suicide, religious faith, and whether there is anything that can be done to prevent such tragedies. The sense of inevitability in the characters runs deep, and yet avoids cheap sentimentality. As you might expect, he does not arrive at a life-affirming realization at the end, but he has taken the readers for quite a ride. This book in not really SF or fantasy at all, and would not likely appeal to many genre readers, but for those PKD fans intent on knowing his final thoughts on life, it is an important work and well worth reading....more
The Divine Invasion: A dense gnostic allegory about salvation Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Before his death, Philip K. Dick wrote several booThe Divine Invasion: A dense gnostic allegory about salvation Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Before his death, Philip K. Dick wrote several books about suffering, redemption, and the divine in the contexts of Christian Gnosticism, Jewish Kabbalism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, anamnesis, and the dualistic nature of the ultimate divine being. After writing two books that explored his personal religious experiences in 1974, Radio Free Albemuth (written in 1976 but not published until 1985) and VALIS (written in 1978 but published in 1981), he wrote The Divine Invasion (written in 1980 but published in 1981), The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (written in 1981 but published in 1982), and an unfinished novel called The Owl in Daylight. Radio Free Albemuth was the first version of what was rewritten as VALIS, and The Divine Invasion and The Owl in Daylight were intended as a thematic trilogy. However, after PDK’s death in 1982, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was substituted for the unfinished The Owl in Daylight and grouped together as the VALIS TRILOGY.
The Divine Invasion is dense religious allegory that begins with some of the familiar SF elements frequently in PDK’s earlier novels but quickly delves into his ideas about gnosis (finding knowledge, enlightenment or salvation by recognizing a higher spiritual realm separate from the material world), anamnesis (the process of “losing forgetfulness” or regaining knowledge), and the dualistic nature of the divine Godhead, which was separated in the Fall into a superior supreme being and a lesser creator god (a “demiurge”) who shaped the material world that humans live in.
The plot is very complex, but here goes. Herb Asher lives a solitary life on a planet called CY30-CY30B, where colonists live in isolated domes. Herb is contacted by a local deity named Yah, who contacts him in a vision and demands that he help his neighbor Rybys Rommey, a woman who is sick with multiple scleroisis and also is pregnant with Yah’s baby via immaculate conception. Herb has been a recluse content to listen endlessly to the pop music of star Linda Fox and handling communications for the colony.
With the help of a bearded beggar named Elias Tate, who is the immortal incarnation of the prophet Elijah, Herb agrees to serve as husband to Rybys (like Joseph to Mary), and they travel to Earth along with Elias, ostensibly to cure her illness. However, the Earth is ruled by a Christian-Islamic Church and a Scientific Legate who are warned of the arrival of this reincarnation of Yahweh (by an A.I. system humorously named the Big Noodle) and consider this a “Divine Invasion” and threat to their dominion of the planet. But in reality, it is the fallen angel Belial who rules this world and enslaves humanity in the prison of the material world.
The authorities pursue Herb and Rybys, seeking to kill the unborn child who will be Yahweh. They escape various attempts but finally are involved in a fatal car accident which puts Herb in a coma and kills Rybys. Herb’s body is placed in cryogenic storage while waiting for a spleen replacement, and the child Emmanuel survives but suffers a head injury that causes amnesia. Meanwhile, Elias Tate manages to save the child and smuggles it to safety. Emmanuel grows up in a special school with another girl named Zina, and she gradually helps him remember his divine origins through the process of anamnesis. It becomes clear through a series of dense philosophical discussions that Emmanuel and Zina are both aspects of the divine Godhead that was split asunder in the Fall, and that it is up to both halves to unite again and heal a sick and corrupt world.
Zina reveals to Emmanuel a more idyllic parallel universe in which both Herb and Rybys are still alive. Even more strangely, Belial is nothing but a baby goat in a NY zoo. Feeling bad for it, they innocently free the goat, but Belial seizes the opportunity to regain control of this parallel world. In this world, Herb works at a high-end electronic sound system store, and encounters a beautiful young aspiring singer named Linda Fox, who he knows will become a huge star in the future. He falls in love with her, but is tricked by Belial the goat into confronting her. Eventually, Linda Fox fights and defeats Belial, freeing the world of his evil and saving Herb in the process.
Though very dense and confusing at first, The Divine Invasion reveals itself as an allegory of how the two separate aspects of the divine being, in the form of the creator Yahweh (reborn in human form as the child Emmanuel) and the feminine aspect that remained in the material world to look after and protect mankind (represented by the girl Zina Pallas and Linda Fox). The two riven parts of the Godhead must recall via anamnesis that they are one entity, and thus united confront the fallen angel Belial, who controls the material world and keeps mankind subjected to his corrupt vision of reality. The conflict between the divine and Belial also represents the struggle for salvation of individual human beings, who must live in the corrupt material world and choose between the baser pleasures of the material world ruled by Belial and the higher spiritual plane of existence beyond our world of illusions ruled by the ultimate divine being, whose various aspects include Yahweh the Creator, Christ the Savior, the feminine goddess Diana, etc.
It’s difficult to view The Divine Invasion as a SF work, because it’s really an attempt to put PKD’s extremely complex and convoluted religious and philosophical beliefs into fictional form. And unlike the more auto biographical Radio Free Albemuth and VALIS, this book takes a much broader and more allegorical approach to his still-evolving Gnostic ideas about suffering and evil in the material world, the dual nature of the divine, and the possibility of salvation through gnosis. If you are interested in these ideas, especially as they relate to PKD’s own religious experiences and life story, then you will be able to appreciate how many of his early stories questioning the morality and reality of our world evolved into his much more convoluted thinking after his religious experiences of 1974. And while he flirted with madness and schizophrenia in Radio Free Albemuth and VALIS, he seems to have found a more coherent philosophical framework for his thoughts in The Divine Invasion. It is still a difficult book to understand, and may be very unsatisfying as a work of fiction, but it remains an essential read if you are a serious PKD student who wants to achieve ‘gnosis’ by diving down his rabbit hole.
There are also several biographies of PDK that would shed more light on his life and ideas, and I will have to make time for them someday. These include Lawrence Sutin’s Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (2005) and Emmanuel Carrere’s I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (2005), and of course the rambling, obsessive notes of PKD himself, meticulously edited and boiled down by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem in 2001 as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. If you have read all these books, consider yourself a truly dedicated scholar of the most complex, troubled and fascinating personality to have ever been part of the SF genre....more
Radio Free Albemuth: Divine messages via a pink laser from space Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Radio Free Albemuth was written in 1976 but onlRadio Free Albemuth: Divine messages via a pink laser from space Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Radio Free Albemuth was written in 1976 but only published posthumously in 1985. Even for Philip K Dick, this is a bizarre and partly deranged book. It’s a deeply personal autobiographical attempt for him to make sense of a series of bizarre religious experiences he collectively referred to as “2-3-74”. So if you are only a casual fan of PKD’s books or movies, this is probably not for you. However, if you love his novels and know something of his troubled life, it will provide an absolutely fascinating picture of a man struggling to extract meaning from it all, using every resource his powerful, wide-ranging and increasingly unstable mind can muster. It may be a confounding mess for many, but what a gloriously courageous attempt he makes. For me this book and his later complete rewrite VALIS (1981) provide a window into PKD’s mind that no other books can (other than the massive and unreadable Exegesis of Philip K Dick), and is a moving and profound experience if you go along with it.
The story starts out quite simply. Part one is narrated by none other than Philip K Dick, a struggling science fiction writer and friend of Nicholas Brady, a Berkeley dropout who works at local record store. It is the late 1960s, and the book humorously depicts the growing counter-culture in Berkeley, with its legions of anti-establishment intellectuals roaming the streets and coffee houses on Telegraph Ave. It turns out that this is an alternate history United States where despotic right-winger Ferris F. Freemont has become President after Lyndon B. Johnson (think a sinister amalgam of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy). He is determined to crush liberals, free speech, and communist conspiracies. There is also a citizens militia of sorts called “Friends of the American People”, which serve to investigate anti-government groups including a (perhaps fictitious) organization called Aramchek dedicated to overthrowing Fremont’s government.
Nick’s career at the record store is going nowhere, though he has an encyclopedic knowledge of music. He begins to receive strange visions that he believes are signals from VALIS, a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. These signals come to him at 3am at night, delivered by a near-earth satellite firing a focused pink laser beam (I’m not joking here) straight to his brain. At first he is not sure what is happening, but gradually he understands that VALIS is a super rational alien collective mind that has chosen him (and a select few others) for a mission to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of President Freemont. This revelation is of course quite disturbing to his wife Rachel, but when VALIS warns him that his infant son Christopher has an inguinal hernia, something that did not show up in any medical exams, they rush him to the hospital and the doctors are shocked to discover his diagnosis was right, and do an emergency surgery to save his son (this actually happened to PKD in real life apparently). This causes their belief in VALIS to grow.
Eventually VALIS grants visions to Nick that he should move to LA and become a record producer for folk musicians. He moves his family to LA and very quickly finds success in his new job. VALIS then reveals that this is all part of his mission to embed secret anti-Fremont subliminal messages in the songs he produces, in order to overthrow the totalitarian regime and bring freedom to the masses, who do not realize they are trapped in the Black Iron Prison that is representative of the evil Roman Empire that persecuted early Christians and has never ended. We also learn that VALIS has made previous attempts to heal the world of its madness, including various early Christian Gnostics, Elijah from the Old Testament, Jesus, etc. However, the Empire has continued to prevail, but VALIS has not given up the struggle. PDK provides dozens of pages explaining the philosophy of VALIS and all the obscure historical clues as to why the world is ailing. He dives way down the rabbit hole into cosmogony and cosmology, explaining how the creator of the universe is irrational and separate from the Logos, or rational mind, that is the ultimate source of wisdom. VALIS has sent homoplasmates to bond with certain chosen humans and impart this secret wisdom. HAVE I LOST YOU YET? ONLY PKD COULD COME UP WITH THIS STUFF, AND HE ACTUALLLY BELIEVES IT TOO.
One day Nick has a vision of a folk singer named Sylvia, and soon after this she shows up at his office, asking for a clerical job. He hires her but convinces her she should be a songwriter instead, and they reveal to each other that they have been having similar dreams from VALIS. Having finally discovered a kindred spirit (which turns out to be part of the Aramchek movement), they seek to put VALIS’s plan into action, recording a hit song with the message “Join the party”, a subliminal appeal to revolution. His relationship with his wife is strained by his friendship with Sylvia (whose real last name turns out to be Aramchek). However, his good buddy Philip K Dick stays true to him despite being skeptical of this craziness. For some reason a lot of this weird 1960s conspiracy stuff and obscure underground societies reminded me of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).
Nick and Sylvia think they have successfully produced the song that will launch their revolution, but the FAPers (Friends of the American People) have actually been spying on them the entire time, and seize both of them along with PKD and throw them into a secret confinement facility outside the justice system. The FAPers reveal that they know about the plot, and that it has been foiled. There are some final events I won’t spoil, but suffice to say that the real PKD was clearly VERY PARANOID about the Republican Party, the FBI and CIA, and right-wingers in general. As everyone knows, they really are out to get us all.
Whether or not you buy into any of PKDs paranoid fantasies or strange religious experiences, it’s undeniable that he wrote this book with searing honesty, pathos for the struggles of his characters (himself, really), and out of a genuine desire to understand what exactly was happening to him with all these visions and hallucinations. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this book and its successor VALIS is that PKD separates himself into two characters, Nicholas Brady and PKD in Radio Free Albemuth, and Horselover Fat and PKD in VALIS. This essentially allows him to have an extended dialog with himself, as the Nick and Horselover characters undergo the strange visions and hallucinations, while the PKD characters are separate from this and serve as devil’s advocate. I’ve never seen a clearer fictional depiction of schizophrenia, but the fact that PKD could control the process and explore his own mental breakdown in a fictional narrative is simply incredible and to me was quite moving, particularly in VALIS. You can feel his struggles with sanity, even if you don’t believe in his gonzo religious philosophy. It’s a unique literary experience for any hardcore PKD fan, though it may make no sense whatsoever to most readers.
Film Version (2010): I was surprised to discover a film version of Radio Free Albemuth had been made as a low budget indie production back in 2010 starring Jonanath Scarfe as Nicholas Brady, Katheryn Winnick as his wife Rachel, Shea Whigham as Philip K Dick, and Alanis Morisette as Slyvia Aramchek. With great trepidation but irresistible curiosity I watched it on Netflix. Basically all the dream sequences are laughably bad, and the actors struggle to deliver all of PKD’s bizarre dialog with straight faces, but that is really due to the source material itself. Frankly, I don’t think this book was ever meant to be filmed, and is almost impossible to make convincing. So I don’t blame the filmmakers, but I think this would be impossible to watch except for die-hard PKD fans like myself who’ve read the book already. It seems the producers also have the rights to VALIS as well, but I sincerely hope they don’t try that one. It makes Radio Free Albemuth seem downright conventional. I do give kudos to Shea Whigham for portraying PKD as a smart and somewhat cynical SF writer, but the real PKD was actually a combination of both Nick Brady and SF writer PKD, which makes for a much more complicated and unstable personality....more
Stories of Your Life and Others: Sadly I couldn’t connect with these stories Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is one of books that receive Stories of Your Life and Others: Sadly I couldn’t connect with these stories Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is one of books that receives such universal praise and accolades from readers, critics, and award committees that it represents a real risk for a book reviewer. After all, if you love the book, you’re merely contributing to the overwhelming chorus of praise and not really adding much to the discussion, but at least you are “on the same page” as everyone. The alternative is much more frightening. If you didn’t like or connect with a certain book, then you are either 1) too insensitive to recognize genius when it confronts you, 2) a perverse contrarian who takes pleasure in criticizing what everyone else likes, or 3) clueless and have no credibility as a reviewer.
Well, despite repeated listenings to the stories of Ted Chiang’s collection, I just didn’t get why they were so amazing and brilliant. I can certainly recognize their careful crafting, intellectual rigor, rationalism, and serious thought about religion and faith. But did I care about the characters or say “wow, amazing” at the end of each story? Not really. Instead, I found the heavy role of mathematics, theoretical physics, language theory, and cool rationalism to be an obstacle to developing an emotional connection to the characters.
This was particularly true of “Story of Your Life”, which is all about mathematics, quantum physics, alien linguistics, sequential vs. simultaneous time, but overlays this onto the very human story of a mother recounting the various events of her daughter’s life from a unique perspective. This should be EXACTLY the type of story that I love, given that I find all those topics fascinating. So in terms of story DNA, it should be a perfect story for me, but I’m afraid its like a painting I can appreciate for its technical brilliance and delicate structure, but it didn’t move me.
Since this story not only won awards but also served as the inspiration for the 2016 Academy Award-winning SF film Arrival, starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker, it is certainly a story that gained plenty of attention. I’ll have to watch the movie now, since many of the book reviewers also rave about it as “that rare creature, a SF film that relies on intellect rather than CG and space battles.” Again, usually exactly my cuppa tea, so I’m at a loss to understand why I didn’t care all that much for it.
“Understand” is my favorite story in the collection, very much in the “Flowers for Algernon” mold but much more intense, about a man who in the process of being treated for a terrible accident is granted super intelligence, and his growing understanding of what it means to be smarter than the rest of the human race. The ending is quite dramatic and memorable.
There are also several stories that examine religious faith, specifically Biblical themes like “Tower of Babylon” and a literal vision of a world in which Heaven and Hell are real, “Hell is the Absence of God”. Both of these stories take a famous religious idea like the Tower of Babel or Heaven/Hell and then treat it in the most literal and magic realist terms.
“Tower of Babylon” describes that famous structure reaching into the stratosphere, and the construction workers who toil for generations to built it and what happens when they finally reach the Dome of Heaven. It is clearly a story about faith, but the conclusion and message was opaque to me. I tend to not respond to stories with religious themes, not being a believer myself, but still, I just didn’t get the point.
“Hell is the Absence of God” was a much more pointed story about why people go to Heaven or Hell, whether God is just or capricious, and whether good deeds and thoughts go rewarded or not. It is actually a fairly interesting exploration of “why do bad things happen to good people, and vice versa”, but I have never heard a convincing explanation of this that involves divine will, the conclusion of this story only confirmed for me that rewards and punishments have no connection with belief or actions, though I don’t think that was the intended message. Again, I just am not wired to understand these things.
“Seventy Two Letters” was a strong story, a very steampunk story of an inventor who creates a Golum that forms the basis of an alternate Industrial Revolution in England, and also has some interesting parallels with computer programming. It also raises some questions about creating life and the responsibilities that come with that. I’d say this was one of the stronger stories of the collection.
“Liking What You See: A Documentary” is about our human obsession with physical appearances and what would happen if this could be removed via a medical procedure. What would happen if you no longer perceived others as “beautiful” or “ugly”? Would you then judge them for their character or actions, and would this create a more just society? Again, an interesting thought experiment that Chiang explores via a series of journalistic articles and snippets of college students’ opposing views of this procedure, much like a pro-anti type debate. It was a good idea, but I thought it dragged on far too long and I lost interest partway through.
Overall, I think this collection will probably please more readers than not based on all the rave reviews and awards, even though I didn’t like it all that much. The audiobook was ably narrated by Abby Crayden and Todd McLaren, who convey the cool, cerebral tone of the stories....more
This is another of Robert Silverberg’s ambitious novels from his most prolific period in the late 60s/early 70s. In those he was churning out several This is another of Robert Silverberg’s ambitious novels from his most prolific period in the late 60s/early 70s. In those he was churning out several books each year that were intelligent, thematically challenging, beautifully written stories that explored identity, sexuality, telepathy, alien contact, religion and consciousness. At his best, he produced some masterpieces like Downward to the Earth and Dying Inside, as well as some dreadful books like Up the Line, but his unfettered imagination and prolific energy was undeniable.
Unfortunately, a wealth of ideas can sometimes overwhelm even the best books, and I think Tower of Glass is a perfect example. It is the story of Simeon Krug, a brilliant genetic engineer and industrialist who develops androids with human-like intelligence who he nevertheless considers mere tools to serve human interests. Krug’s driving ambition in to build a massive tower of glass in the Canadian tundra that will extend into space and allow FTL tachyon communications with NGC-7293, a nebula which has been emitting intelligent alien signals.
At all costs, Krug wishes to establish contact with these aliens beings, and assigns his top engineer android, Alpha Thor Watchmen, to oversee the construction. Meanwhile, his decadent and unambitious son Manuel uses the “transmat” matter transporters to shunt people across the world to enjoy a global 24-hour party. Manuel has a love affair with a beautiful android named Lilith Meson, who wants to enlist his support for the growing android rights movement. Unbeknownst to Krug, the androids have formed an elaborate religion built around Krug the Creator, and expect to receive salvation from Krug sometime in the future. They have actually created an Android Bible and complete set of rituals, services, etc. As the story develops, Krug gets increasingly obsessed with building the tower even at the price of android lives lost in the construction. When a android-rights activist is killed accidentally, he shows little sympathy.
The book introduces enough ideas for at least 5 or 6 full-length novels, so it’s inevitable that each story line doesn’t get full shrift. For example, the technology of instant teleportation around the world recalls the great SF classic The Stars My Destination (1954) by Alfred Bester, but there aren’t enough pages devoted to exploring the implications since the entire book is 194 pages long. There is also the technology of shunting, which allows the swapping of identities (machine-assisted telepathic exchange) for a period. This sharing of minds was more fully explored in Dying Inside and A Time of Changes, but gets only passing mention until the end of the novel.
There is also a very lightly-sketched sub-plot about Krug’s other side-project to build a generational starship to visit NGC-7293, which would be manned by androids. In yet another side-plot, Silverberg explores the social problems encountered by the three tiers of android society (mirroring Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World), broken down into alphas (the most intelligent), betas (the middle caste), and gammas (the lower proletarian class of androids). The main characters visit a gamma ghetto, which resembles an ethnic ghetto in a major city, complete with crime, drug abuse, discontent, and resentment. Finally, Silverberg devotes a great deal of time to exploring the religious conflicts of the androids’ religion of salvation via Krug. There are quotes from their Android Bible that sound just as fully developed as the human Bible. The painful irony is that Krug himself dismisses the android’s worship of him, and he has contempt for their misplaced aspirations.
The story reaches a climax when Krug and his android engineering chief Thor Watchman share a telepathic link in which Watchman discovers Krug’s contempt for the androids, crushing his religious belief and his faith in the merit of Krug’s Tower of Glass. There are all kinds of metaphors involves, the most obvious being the Tower of Babel, as well as the conflicted relationship of creator and creation, which we see in the confrontation between replicant Roy Batty and Dr. Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner (1982). Though the android religion is the most fully-explored of themes in Tower of Glass, it is battling for space with all the other ideas.
In the end, I felt like Tower of Glass simply had too many good ideas to be properly explored in under 200 pages. Normally I really appreciate the brevity of SF novels from the 1960s/70s, this is a rare case where Silverberg should have cut down on the number of ideas or devoted full novels to them instead. Nowadays, Tower of Glass would probably warrant a 1,000 page door-stopper, but Silverberg’s real genius was in creating fully-developed novels with exciting ideas and lyrical writing in a tight, fast-moving story. Unfortunately, this novel is a case of too much of a good thing....more
Echopraxia: Nowhere near as good as Blindsight Originally posted at Fantasy Literature I was extremely impressed by Peter Watts’ Blindsight (2006), a diEchopraxia: Nowhere near as good as Blindsight Originally posted at Fantasy Literature I was extremely impressed by Peter Watts’ Blindsight (2006), a diamond-hard sci-fi novel about first contact, AIs, evolutionary biology, genetically-engineered vampires, sentience vs intelligence, and virtual reality. It is an intense experience, relentless in its demands on the reader, but makes you think very hard about whether humanity’s sentience (as we understand it) is really as great as we generally think it is.
The short answer, according to Watts, is no. It’s an evolutionary fluke, was never necessary for survival, and will actually be a hindrance when we encounter more advanced alien species, most of which may have developed high levels of intelligence without wasting any precious brain capacity on sentience, self-awareness, or “navel-gazing.” It’s a very depressing idea, but he drives home his argument with such force that you at least have to acknowledge his points, even if you disagree with them.
So I was pretty excited to pick up Echopraxia (2014), thinking it would continue the story of Theseus crew member Siri Keaton. Despite the climatic events at the end of Blindsight, the story lacked resolution. It even hinted at events back on Earth that whetted my appetite for more.
Imagine my disappointment as I discovered that Echopraxia takes up a different but parallel storyline, so you will not learn anything about the aftermath of the previous story. I can understand that Watts wants to explore in more detail the future he’s created, but it seems willfully contrary to not reveal anything further. If he’s eventually planning a third volume that ties the two previous books together, I can understand it, but I found this very frustrating.
Halfway through the book, I feel as if nothing of interest had happened after the initial action set-piece when an army of zombie soldiers led by a vampire attack a desert religious enclave of ‘Bicamerals.’ Then without much warning, old-school ‘baseline’ biologist Daniel Bruks is whisked into space on the Crown of Thorns. The crew is a mix of modified humans who are vastly more advanced than him. Essentially, the plot grinds to a halt in space, and neither the characters nor the writing captured my interest the way Blindsight did.
I got through half the book, gave up and tried a second time to no avail. There are none of the mind-bending discussions of alien biology or consciousness that made Blindsight so good. It’s still very dense, scientific jargon-laden writing, but without the central First Contact plot driving events forward, it’s hard to digest. While I found Synthesist Siri Keaton so bizarre and disturbing in Blindsight, he had a human past that was slowly revealed in flashbacks. In contrast, I didn’t find anything of interest about Daniel Burks.
After deciding to give up on this one, I felt a flood of relief and excitement at the idea of starting a new book. I don’t like DNFs (Did Not Finish), but couldn’t see any benefit in slogging on further. If anything, I would much rather go back and listen to Blindsight again, which was an amazing book all the way through....more
His Dark Materials: Works on Many Levels, A Modern Fantasy Classic This is a trilogy that is best enjoyed as a single epic tale with three parts, much His Dark Materials: Works on Many Levels, A Modern Fantasy Classic This is a trilogy that is best enjoyed as a single epic tale with three parts, much like The Lord of the Rings. It may have a superficial resemblance to Chronicles of Narnia in that its protagonists are children in a fantasy world, but its explorations of morality, consciousness, and its subversive view of the Catholic Church and religious dogmatism make it an anti-Narnia tale that must have C.S. Lewis turning cartwheels in his grave. It also has a lot more dark elements, especially in the portion set in our world, which reflects the far more conflicted and morally-confused world of today.
I won't describe the plot or characters as that's been done by many others well. Suffice to say that I think the books work equally well as YA fantasy in terms of the plot and adult fantasy in terms of the cosmological and religious and moral themes. The story is absolutely packed with ideas and challenging contents that elevate it far beyond a mere fantasy adventure. It also manages to take many familiar fantasy tropes like magic, witches, talking animals, quests, and a massive war in the heavens for the fate of the world, and somehow make them feel fresh and reinvented, rather than derivative.
I listened to the trilogy on audiobook, and have been watching the BBC miniseries His Dark Materials, which certainly has captured the tone of the books better than the earlier film The Golden Compass. It's a high-quality work of the imagination that has captured modern readers like the Harry Potter series, and is much superior in my opinion....more
Since moving to London I've been getting a better grasp on dry and sarcastic English humor (along with a taste of the dark and gray winter, which wasnSince moving to London I've been getting a better grasp on dry and sarcastic English humor (along with a taste of the dark and gray winter, which wasn't bad at all, and the summer, which can be glorious when sunny and never overly hot and humid like Tokyo), and I had never gotten around to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens, so it was high time to do so, and it was a delightfully written story that skewers every aspect of Armageddon, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Witch Hunters, the Anti-Christ, and the cozy relationship of Angels and Demons who actually like the world of humans and don't want to see the Apocalypse bring it to an end. There are plenty of plot details along the way that weren't that important to me, since the greatest pleasure of the book is without question the steady barrage of jokes, puns, and humor directed at archaic religious beliefs of the past and present, all in a light-hearted but incisive way, not mean-spirited but certainly not holding back either. It is expertly narrated by Stephen Briggs, who captures all the characters and humor with aplomb....more
Terry Pratchett's DISCWORLD series has been incredibly popular for many decades, starting from The Colour of Magic in 1983 all the way to installment Terry Pratchett's DISCWORLD series has been incredibly popular for many decades, starting from The Colour of Magic in 1983 all the way to installment #41 The Shepherd's Crown, published posthumously in 2015. Apparently he sold over 80 million copies in 37 languages over that span (thanks Wikipedia), so I hardly need to bring it to the attention of other readers. Rather, I'm a bit embarrassed that I am so incredibly late to the party. I actually remember getting the first few books in the series in paperback in high school and really likely the incredibly busy and distinctive artwork of Josh Kirby on the cover of The Light Fantastic, and yet I never got around to reading it once I got to college.
So over 20 years later, having just moved to London this year, and needing something fun to read after going through herniated disc surgery, I decided it was time to give it a try. Having done some checks of reviews, I knew that #13, Small Gods, was a stand-alone that was not just fun and whimsical, but actually was also a very intelligent examination of personal faith, fanaticism, and the dogmatism of religious institutions that have taken the place of real faith, to the point that the gods themselves dwindle to just a whisper on the breeze for lack of true believers.
It is probably one of the most thoughtful examinations of what real belief is and the co-dependent nature of humans and gods. While it seems that humans invariably need gods to believe, according to Pratchett gods are equally dependent on human believers for survival, and their strength waxes and wanes depending on the number and fervor of their believers. Frankly, this explains the multitude of current and defunct religions of our world throughout human history FAR BETTER than any of those religions themselves do, as they cannot adequately explain how the world got by before their religion and prophets arose.
So with tongue firmly in cheek and almost every other line rich with British humor and irony, Pratchett tells the story of the Great God Om, who finds himself a tortoise falling from the sky after being snatched up by an eagle, and landing in the courtyard of a temple devoted to him. He finds himself in the care of the simple-minded novice Brutha, who as it turns out is the only person in the sprawling organization who actually believes in him. Brutha then gets swept up in a series of adventures with Vorbis the Exquisitor, a ruthless and power-hungry man who has complete belief in the rightness of his own actions and who revels in torturing and "cleansing" non-believers. The various discussions of Brutha and Vorbis as they travel different lands and get entangled in a rebellion and religious war are the means by which Pratchett can pose a series of very simple but profound discussions on what religious faith is, and how it differs from a fanatical observance of forms and structures, and how gods can dwindle to nothing just as their religious institutions grow to the heights of power. It's a lot of food for thought, but extremely entertaining throughout, which is quite an accomplishment. Brutha is such an innocent and pious man that it doesn't even occur to him to question his church strictures until he sees Vorbis in action, and of course his many discussions with the hilariously snappish and ill-tempered god Om, who is not at all happy to be trapped in a tortoise body, fighting off thoughts of lettuce and melons.
All told, it's a great entry point to the series, and now I have to figure out which books in the series to tackle next, either those focused on Rincewind, the witches, Death, the city watch, or the wizards. Lots to choose from, but I guess the simplest thing is to start at the beginning....more
A Brilliant Alternative History That Skewers Catholic Orthodoxy and Stagnification I would never have know about this book were it not selected by DaviA Brilliant Alternative History That Skewers Catholic Orthodoxy and Stagnification I would never have know about this book were it not selected by David Pringle in his Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels as it's by a famous author of mainstream literature like Lucky Jim, and was one of his few forays into the fantastic. If only he had dabbled more often - his subtle but devastating depiction of a European world where the Reformation, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolutions never happened (along with WWI and WWII, to be fair, along with slavery in the New World) brilliantly captures the stultifying intellectual stagnation of Catholic Orthodoxy and suppression of science, independent thought, sexuality, and artistic freedom.
It's a horrific but perfectly extrapolated thought experiment where are the details are in the background, just below the surface story of a young choir singer whose voice is so sublime that the Church is desperate to trim his family jewels to the greater glory of Church and God. It's a hilariously subversive novel, with tons of clever details, not least of which is an alternative version of that most famous alternate reality novels, PDK's The Man in the High Castle. It often reminded me of my two other favourite classics in this mold, Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee (1953) and Keith Robert's Pavane (1968). ...more
A charming story with a fascinating nested narrative structure that features the unreliable narrator much like Gene Wolfe's stories, but more light-heA charming story with a fascinating nested narrative structure that features the unreliable narrator much like Gene Wolfe's stories, but more light-hearted. The story is about Pi, who grows up in Pondicherry, India, spending most of his time on his father's local zoo, and who is fascinated and drawn to three major religions, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. Being an innocent and open-minded young boy, he doesn't see anything wrong with worshiping all three in equal measures, but this doesn't go over well with his religious mentors when they find out.
The story suddenly segues into a survival tale as Pi is stranded in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, orangutan, zebra and hyena. He endures tremendous hardships for a long time on the open seas, but his will to live prevails where many others may have given up, partly due to his faith.
Early on, the narrator (the adult Pi) claims that "this story will make you believe in God," and while this is a bold claim, especially for those already skeptical or outright hostile to organized religion, he is such a charming and earnest character that even a resolute atheist like me gave him the benefit of the doubt.
The story (and movie by Ang Lee, which is very beautifully rendered) ends by offering two alternative versions of the story, one fantastic and the other grim and unpleasant, and proclaims that the reader may choose which tale they prefer to believe.
So do all the fantastic events and Pi's stubborn insistence on religious belief make a case that logic alone is not sufficient to live a emotionally rich and fulfilling life? I think that depends on the already-held beliefs of the reader, and this book won't likely sway anyone except those teetering on the fence already. But this is perhaps the first book I've read that presents an open view of faith that isn't irritating or condescending, and if indeed the author is suggesting that one can and should worship all religions like the innocent Pi, well I would hazard a guess that it would certainly be an improvement on the long human history of religious intolerance and bigotry.
Did it make me believe in God? No, not really, but I certainly enjoyed the story nonetheless....more
Sam Harris is essential reading for those who fear the influence of religious fundamentalism in the world, particularly Islamic fanaticism, and is alsSam Harris is essential reading for those who fear the influence of religious fundamentalism in the world, particularly Islamic fanaticism, and is also an appeal to reason as the basis for ethics and treating our fellow human beings with respect and compassion. His strongest argument is that the three major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, have a long and violent legacy of intolerance for each other and any non-believers. He also questions the validity of religious moderates, who must willfully ignore all the unpalatable aspects of their professed beliefs. Lots of good arguments that these religions are impediments to a more peaceful and rational world society, and that we should aspire to better....more
Perhaps it suffered from my having first read Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion and Sam Harris' The End of Faith, but I found myself having to make anPerhaps it suffered from my having first read Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion and Sam Harris' The End of Faith, but I found myself having to make an effort to finish this book. It's not like I disagreed with his contentions that the religious impulse has plagued mankind since the very beginning, engendering ignorance, fear, repression, intimidation, and endless religious disputes. It has also wasted the mental energies of generations of thinkers, and one can only speculate what great discoveries could have arisen in religion's absence. Hitchens takes a hatchet to all the absurd contentions of the world's three major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, but certainly doesn't spare the older pantheistic religions, along with the Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, and some bizarre modern offshoots like Mormonism (a religion no more credible than L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology, which has somehow amassed great power despite being founded by an obvious crackpot).
Hitchens hits all the right notes if you are an atheist, and I understand he is a fierce and convincing debater regarding religion and faith. Of course he is preaching to the choir (irony fully intended), and I doubt many religious believers could get through the book unless the plan on challenging each of his arguments. And the title should make it clear that he has an axe to grind; the tone of the book is sour and exasperated as one might expect from "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." And he draws upon a never-ending stream of examples of absurd, contradictory, and repressive ideas from the various religions that hold sway over a good portion of the planet's population. He knows his stuff, and I commend his efforts to delve into religious texts and use them to undermine their credibility.
Perhaps I am simply saddened to think that despite both the common sense arguments he puts forward and more technical philosophical points, mankind continues to remain in thrall to religion. And since the book relentlessly catalogs all the failings and fallout from religious beliefs, it's all a bit depressing. So I can't blame Hitchens for that. But it still becomes a chore to read. Dawkin's approach is more closely linked to his scientific research into evolutionary biology, while Sam Harris just seems more focused and fierce.
Nonetheless, I appreciate the efforts that Hitchens has made to counter the foolish arguments on behalf of religion's benefits to society and mankind. I certainly wouldn't want to slog through all those old religious texts, and am glad he's done it for us. Yes, it would be more convincing if everyone were to read the texts they believe to be wrong, but frankly I can't imagine wasting my precious time struggling through the Old and New Testaments, Koran, Talmud, Book of Mormon, etc.
One thing I've learned in life is that debating politics and religion get you absolutely nowhere, and create a lot of bad feelings, so I have great respect for someone like Hitchens who has dedicated himself to doing that very thing, unpleasant and exhausting though it must be....more
A refreshing and welcome attack on religious dogmatism, fundamentalism, and the particularly odious evangelical Christian movement in the US representA refreshing and welcome attack on religious dogmatism, fundamentalism, and the particularly odious evangelical Christian movement in the US represented by people like Anne Coulter and Pat Robertson that threatens the political, intellectual and personal freedom of all Americans. Dawkins also explores the origins of religious belief from a biological and evolutionary perspective, which lends strength to his argument that religious belief is fundamentally opposed to reason and science....more
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