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Wednesday’s Whatever: Perelandra and Truth

Sep23

Jeanne Damoff, one of the writers at the blog The Master’s Artist, writes about how C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra “Can Powerfully Inform the Practical Application of Truth.”

Part 1: “The plot basically answers this question: “What would happen if God created reasoning beings on another planet and gave them the same opportunity Adam and Eve had in the garden?” Except, in this case, The Fall has already happened on Earth, The Cross stands as a turning point not only in our world but in all the cosmos, and Satan (The Bent One) is determined to thwart God’s desire to establish perfection and experience unhindered fellowship in a new world.”

Part 2 (aka The Post I Do Not Want To Write): “As far as I can tell, same-sex marriage is as much a threat to the traditional family as drinking bleach is a threat to water. God forbids practicing homosexuality for one reason only: because it destroys the homosexual. Our perspective is all askew. We ask how a loving God could condemn any, when we should be asking how a just God can save any. We live as though the world is our playground and God is supposed to bring the snacks, when in reality we were created by and for His glory and pleasure. We make life about us, when it’s about Him.

God is good in what He forbids. That is what the church should be saying. That is what I should be saying. But apparently we don’t believe it.”

You really should read both parts of Ms. Damoff’s post before you read what I have to say. Maybe you should read Perelandra, too

So, I’m asking myself today: do I believe it? Do I believe that homosexual behavior and gossip and hatefulness and sexual immorality and gluttony and materialism and that other stuff God forbids are all really, really evil and destructive both to the sinner and to the society in which he lives? If I do, why do I keep on doing some of those things? And why do I look the other way and smile ruefully when people I love and care for do them?

And why am I afraid to yell, “Poison!” when I see these things condoned and presented as harmless in the context of children’s and young adult literature. I’m afraid to yell, afraid to even whisper, because someone will accuse me of being homophobic when I say that we ought not be giving books to our young people that present homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle. (And those young people ought to throw them back in our faces when we do.) I’m afraid of being called elitist if I complain that Gossip Girls and other bitchy teenage books marketed to teen girls are teaching them that it’s OK to live self-centered, malicious lives, that they can live that way and still avoid the tragedy of broken relationships. I’m afraid that when I call it like I see it and say that these two young people who are having sex outside of marriage in the latest YA bestseller should be headed for disaster, according to all the statistics and according to God’s Word, I’ll be called a prude or a book banner or an old lady who just doesn’t understand the beauty of the writing in this bodice ripper or that scifi macho potboiler.

Who am I to say what someone else should read? Nobody, really, just a blogger and a Christian and a reader. And one who has her own struggles with malice and envy and a multitude of other sins, sins that but for the grace of God would destroy me and mine just as surely as other sins, to which I am, thankfully, not tempted, destroy the lives of other people. But when authors lie and say that black is white and evil is good and that a little bit of sin won’t hurt you, shouldn’t I say something, even if it gets me banned from the next BBAW or from the lit blogosphere in general? We’re talking about real lives here. Kids and adults are reading books that say things that are untrue and harmful, and I’m not even trying to have the poison in these books taken off the market or banned in Boston; I just feel called to warn some of those who are headed for a cliff (to mix my metaphors unmercifully) that “something wicked this way comes.”

God forgive me. When I care more about the opinions of people I’ve never met and may never meet than I do about the Truth, I am a coward of the worst sort. I may get banned in Boston myself, or at least not read, but God help me, I will tell the truth about the books that I review. Because GOD IS GOOD all the time, in what He forbids as well as in what He affirms, in His justice and in His love. And I am being a disciple of Christ when I call evil what He calls evil and good what He says is good.

Now go out and get you copies of C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, especially books two and three, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, and read some True stories. Amazing stuff.

BBAW: Best Speculative Fiction Blog

Sep9

Voting is now open at the Book Blogger Appreciation Week Awards.

Bibliophile Stalker Charles Tan, The Bibliophile Stalker, is having computer issues; I can sympathize. He’s a promoter of Philippine speculative fiction, a niche that hadn’t occurred to me but sounds interesting. In addition to speculative fiction, he enjoys and reports on RPG’s, anime, and manga. He’s a Neil Gaiman fan, and it looks as if a lot of his links are directed toward aspiring authors.

Dribble of Ink Aidan Moher is also an aspiring author of fantasy/scifi, and the emphasis at his blog looks to be sword and sorcery, wizards and witches. He also has a BIG List o’ SF blogs here which would be a fine resource for those looking for more speculative fiction blogs.

Scifiguy.ca I entered SciFiGuy’s Catching Fire promotional giveaway because I’m ready to read the sequel that we’ve all been hearing so much about for months. Doug Knipe, the blogger at SciFiGuy, says he reads and reviews “Urban Fantasy, Paranormal, SciFi, and Fantasy.” Look at these pictures of his library, and you’ll see that he’s serious about the genre.

The Book Zombie Joanne Mosher, The Book Zombie and the first female blogger in this category, is an enthusiastic reader. She says, “I read constantly and I have been known to read instruction manuals, cereal boxes and the YellowPages if I am without a book.” It looks as if her tastes run to zombies, vampires, and mystery/horror with a few other kinds of books thrown in for spice, when those are available to substitute for the phone book.

The Galaxy Express is subtitled “adventures in science fiction romance.” So, probably not my cup of tea, but definitely another niche I hadn’t thought about. Of the many authors Heather lists in her sidebar, I know and have enjoyed books by Anne McCaffrey, Ursula LeGuin, Connie WIllis, Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, and Stephanie Meyer. I have a lot of others to check out.

I’m going to vote for SciFiGuy in this category because he looks like the one with the closest taste to mine, and he’s giving away stuff! No, really, I just enjoyed his blog and his style and will visit again when I get through all the nominees that I’m visiting for BBAW.

Dystopian Reading

Sep3

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff.

The Roar by Emma Clayton.

These two books actually have quite a bit in common, although the tone in each is quite different from the other. Both books are set in a future dystopian England, war-ravaged and poverty-stricken. Both books emphasize the meaninglessness of war, with quite strong anti-war messages. And both books are about teens empowered to live their lives as they see fit, and to even change the world for the better, despite the idiocies and pure evil perpetrated by their elders.

How I Live Now was published back in 2004, and quite a few bloggers and others have reviewed it. It’s the story of an American girl who goes to England to visit her cousins and is trapped there by the outbreak of war. The narrator, Daisy, is annoying at first. She speaks, thinks, and writes in interminable, run-on sentences, and she’s obnoxious, sarcastic, and self-centered. However, her experiences in war time take care of her attitude, not to mention her borderline anorexia. (Daisy says toward the end of the book, “The idea of wanting to be thin in a world full of people dying from lack of food struck even me as stupid.”) Because I didn’t like Daisy and her paragraph-long sentences very much at the beginning of the book, I didn’t know if I’d like the book very much either, but I did. It ends in a satisfying, but solidly realistic, scene of True Love rewarded, and Daisy, surprisingly, has become an adult with the ability to give love by the time that final scene rolls around.

The ending to The Roar, I must warn readers, is not so satisfying. I’m wondering if we should stage a rebellion and tell the publishers that books that feature an obvious set-up for a sequel as pseudo-ending should also feature at the very least a warning label: “YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO FINISH THIS STORY FOR AT LEAST TWO YEARS. READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL.” THe Roar is a very good story but it doesn’t end so much as it stops, in mid-story.

The Roar is reminiscent of both Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. Mika and his twin sister Ellie are children with special abilities who are being trained by a malevolent government official for some sort of mission, but Ellie has been kidnapped and is assumed dead. And Mika is involved in a virtual game/competition called Pod Fighters that becomes more and more dangerous as he wins out over other competitors to go to the final round of the game, a game that may reunite him with his beloved sister or may end in death for both of them. I’d recommend this one to Hunger Games readers who are looking for another read and to video game afficionados who want a story with games and lots of action. Just remember that it doesn’t end . . .

Book trailer for The Roar:

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

Apr28

TSNOTD is a comedy in contrast to the tragedy of Doomsday Book by the same author, which I wrote about last week. It’s a delightful romp in which the fate of the universe may or may not be at stake. However, the course of history and the universe is “self-correcting,” shades of LOST, so the universe is never really in danger of imploding or careening off-track. Probably.

In the meantime, we, the readers, get to travel around in time, mostly to late Victorian England and enjoy literary references to and actual meetings with notables such as Lewis Carroll, Jerome K. Jerome, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Charles Darwin, Trollope, Dickens, Wodehouse, and who-knows-who-else that I’ve forgotten or missed. This time travel comedy of errors is even better than Doomsday Book, mostly because I needed to smile and even laugh as I hope in the Lord (not the self-correcting properties of the universe) despite the seemingly insane and destructive recent antics of certain government officials and business tycoons and Hollywood exhibitionists.

“God is in the details,” as Lady Schrapnell would say. Or to put it in Professor Peddick’s words: “Rarum facit misturam cum sapiente forma.” (Wisdom and beauty form a very rare combination.)

Very highly recommended and my favorite of the three Connie WIllis books I’ve read so far.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Apr23

I have a new author to add to my list of favorites: Connie Willis. And I’m delighted because she’s written and published lots of books, and I’m planning to read all of them (except for the short story collections; I don’t like short stories.) I’ve already read three of her books, and although each of them was very different from the other two, I loved them all.

First I read Doomsday Book. It’s historical fiction and science fiction at the same and entertaining for fans of either or both genres. This book would make a wonderful movie; however Hollywood wouldn’t be able to resist tweaking it to add a bit of romance to a central relationship in the book that is a professor/student, father/daughter relationship and works quite well that way. So no movie. Even though a movie could be a great thing.

Kivrin, a history student at Oxford in 2048, travels through “the net” back in time to the fourteenth century. In the meantime, a virulent influenza virus puts Oxford and its environs under quarantine, and Badre, the tech who set up the program to send Kivrin back in time, is too ill to tell anyone exactly what’s gone wrong with the plan to send Kivrin back to medieval England and retrieve her in two weeks. But something has gone horribly wrong, and Kivrin’s professor, Dr. Dunworthy, is the only one who’s trying to get her back. The others involved in the study are either too sick or too busy trying to deal with the epidemic to help Dunworthy. Kivrin is stranded in an English village in the early 1300’s, and all of her vaccinations and preparations won’t keep her from experiencing the most harrowing and nightmarish time of her young life.

I would assign this book to a class studying the Middle Ages in a heartbeat. However, it’s long, maybe too long for a class assignment. I do think they’d get more information on medieval life and remember more of it by reading this book than by studying a history text. In fact, Doomsday Book made me want to do some research on certain aspects of medieval life. It’s not an exciting adventure novel, and as I said the romance quotient wouldn’t meet Hollywood standards. However, if you love history and good characterization, give it a try.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by the same author uses the same plot device of “the net” to enable the author to tell a much different, more comedic, time-traveling tale. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. Suffice it to say I liked it even better than I did Doomsday Book.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

Feb15

Wow! This book was not what I expected at all. I don’t remember who recommended it, and I didn’t make note of the recommendation in my TBR list along with the title of the book. I had some vague idea that that title had something to do with Matthew 10:29-30, where Jesus said:

“Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows.”

I was right about the source of the title, but The Sparrow ain’t your typical, everyday, run-of the mill Christian fiction title. First of all, it’s science fiction, published by Ballantine Books, mainstream publisher, not an intentionally “Christian” book. A group of adventurers, scientists and Jesuits travel to Alpha Centauri in search of the source of a SETI radio signal picked up in the year 2019 at a small astronomical station in Puerto Rico. The action takes place in two time periods: 2019 and following as the explorers set off for an unknown planet somewhere in the relatively nearby galaxy and the year 2059 when only one of the members of the team returns to earth, the sole survivor of a highly controversial mission.

The book, Christian or not, is distinctly theological in its themes, discussions, and undertones. And the book discusses sex, celibacy, and deviancy in practically all its many permutations, managing to be both provocative and thoughtful at the same time.

The ending is shocking and somewhat abrupt, even if I could almost see it coming. The discussions of God and the universe are, at the very least, good food for discussion and even argument, and nothing seems forced or preachy. In fact, at the end of the book and even after I read an interview with the author in which the interviewer asked some of the questions I had been asking myself, I still wasn’t sure what the author herself believed or what she was trying to say about the beliefs and actions of her characters. I have some ideas, but this book isn’t about certainty.

Here’s what it is about:

“And a lot of the time, even now, I think I must be a lunatic and this whole thing is crazy. But, sometimes—Anne, there are times when I can let myself believe, and when I do . . . it’s amazing. Inside me everything makes sense, everything I’ve done, everything that ever happened to me—it was all leading up to this, to where we are right now. But, Anne, it’s frightening, and I don’t know why . . . ”

She waited to see if he had more but when he fell silent, she decided to take a shot in the dark. “You know what’s the most terrifying thing about admitting you’re in love?” she asked him. “You are just naked. You put yourself in harm’s way, and you lay down all your defenses. No clothes, no weapons. Nowhere to hide. Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it tolerable is to believe that the other person loves you back and that you can trust him not to hurt you.”

He looked at her, astounded. “Yes. Exactly. That’s how it feels, when I let myself believe. Like I am falling in love and like I am naked before God. And it is terrifying, as you say. But it has started to feel like I am being rude and ungrateful, do you understand? To keep on doubting. That God loves me. Personally.”

But I must say that’s not the ending. That’s only the middle. What if you began to trust in God, and then you did get hurt. A lot. What if your choice is between believing in no God at all or believing that God is vicious, vindictive, and deceptive? It’s a question that people ask all the time. Maybe not in those words. But we do ask.

I highly recommend this book IF you like your theology in sci-fi form and IF you can tolerate some language and some sexual content, as they say in the movies. For mature audiences. But well worth the price of admission.

On a related note, I found the link to this Christianity Today article about science fiction and its influence on spiritual beliefs and worldview in our culture at Brandywine Books. I think the score is more even than Professor Herrick indicates in his article: a lot of contemporary and classic sci-fi embodies a faith in evolution and in Space exploration-as-saviour, but a lot of it is dsytopian and cautionary, pointing toward a Christian worldview. I would put The Sparrow in the latter category.

Oh, there’s a sequel to The Sparrow called Children of God. I’m almost afraid to read it since it could be disappointing in several ways and only good in one way that I’m not sure the author can manage to pull off. However, that said, I’ll probably give it a try since The Sparrow was so very good.