The whole review was interesting, but this passage stood out to me:

Hubbard had frequently compared life to a game, and he didn’t want to be ‘playing some minor game in Scientology. It isn’t cute or something to do for lack of something better.’ The game hinged on the idea that we can choose what we perceive to be ‘true’, and discard everything else as an illusion. Yet soon Hubbard’s postmodern religion strove to become a ‘real’ one. His followers – among them hippies as well as educated and ambitious young people – surprised him with the intensity of their belief. Hubbard told a group of doctoral students in Philadelphia in 1954 that his followers were more convinced of Scientology’s cosmology than he was. ‘I’m just kidding you mostly,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe any of these things and I don’t want to be agreed with about them … All I’m asking is that we take a look at this information, and … let’s see if we can’t disagree with this universe, just a little bit.’

That’s a very different way of looking at Hubbard than I’m used to, and that quote is very telling. I’m used to seeing Hubbard and his followers as either scammers, lunatics or dupes. But if you are (for lack of a better word) postmodern enough to believe that you can create your own reality, then what better way to shape this new reality than by creating a religion?

And this might go some way towards explaining why so many of Scientology’s most prominent followers are actors or authors. These are people who work at creating a new reality for their audience.

New library in Stuttgart © DieterJL

Anne McCaffrey wasn’t just the inventor of Pern, the world where a whole society is based on dragon-riding. She was also an incredibly influential author who helped transform the way science fiction and fantasy authors wrote about women, and the way all of us thought about bodies and selfhood. She was the first woman to win a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award, as well as a Grand Master of science fiction.

Besides the Pern books, McCaffrey wrote the classic space-faring novel The Ship Who Sang, in which a severely disabled girl becomes the core of a starship, or Brainship, with her mind controlling all its major functions. McCaffrey’s novel provided a startling new way to think about personhood and the nature of the mind/body connection, but also helped pave the way for a whole subgenre of posthuman space opera, in which heavily modified humans explore space.

During high school, I consumed everything that McCaffrey wrote: Pern, The Ship Who …, the Pegasus books and the Rowan series, all of them. She’s one of the few authors that I read during high school that still seems to hold up in later readings.

You can see America’s “Bible Belt” fairly clearly: the south eastern states are the most religious, with a swath going up the middle.

This image comes from Goodreads.com, and shows which states liked the Twilight series. The red states are where readers rated it highly, blue states lower.

The Bible belt is remarkably similar to the Twilight belt. This means something. I have no idea what.

No big surprise then that O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln, which he co-wrote with Martin Dugard, has been a critical flop. For starters, O’Reilly wasn’t doing original research. According to a review at the Washington Post, the book doesn’t directly cite its sources, and seems to have come entirely from secondary works. So that’s how O’Reilly and Dugard avoided the lengthy stages of research, they synthesised the works of previous historians.

That’s not a killing flaw – or even a flaw at all if you admit that’s what you’re doing. Since O’Reilly is apparently doing commemorative “great man” history, he can probably get away with it. It doesn’t require much original research at this point to extol the virtues of Lincoln; there are libraries of books doing that already.

What has killed the book are the mistakes. There are tons of little mistakes, like incorrect measurements and confusion about dates. These could be slips of the pen, but they’re not encouraging. Jason Colavito sees them as the result of the poor state of editing in modern publishing. He’d know better than I, but I still suspect that O’Reilly has protection from editors. [Warning: TvTropes link]

There are tons of moderate mistakes, like mentioning the Oval Office, which did not exist yet. Here there really is no excuse, and yet it doesn’t seem to be a case of bias. Just pure sloppiness.

What is more disturbing is that O’Reilly has resurrected some old myths. The authors suggest that Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, was somehow involved in the assassination. They acknowledge that there is no concrete evidence for this, but insist that “circumstantially, he was involved,” a nice little hand-wave that allows them to assert without proof.

There are also some weird ideas that don’t seem to be grounded in anything. Every great man needs a villain, so the authors enlist Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson. Now, Johnson was in many ways an embarrassment, but O’Reilly apparently wants the long time Democratic stump speaker to be a fire-breather hostile to the south. Would that it were so, but Johnson was far more lenient towards the south, and far less interested in black equality, than the Radical Republicans.

Again, I don’t know what possessed O’Reilly to set himself up for this. It doesn’t seem to be a partisan work, just a bad one.

The 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, is known in philosophical and political circles for presenting a cogent argument advocating a society driven by rational self-interest. On the back of the film’s retail DVD and Blu-ray however, the movie’s synopsis contradictorily states “AYN RAND’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life…”

That should be self-interest, not self-sacrifice. Revel in the irony.

In my mind, the idea of science fiction as myth raises a question: where does that leave the self-consciously mythic genre of fantasy? This question has recently sparked a conversation across the blogosphere.

I think D.G. Myers started things off by suggesting that Fantasy is a Genre of Christianity. Right off the bat there’s some strong evidence that he’s right, given how many fantasy series draw from Christianity: Lord of the Rings, Narnia and even Harry Potter to some degree. Myers further draws a direct line between the “other realm” of magic and the “other realm” of heaven.

E.D. Kain at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen disagrees, suggesting that fantasy is not inherently Christian, but rather has been rooted in a certain Anglo-Saxon tradition as an accident of its birth:

Perhaps the confluence of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton – all men with a peculiar aversion to first and middle names – gave birth to contemporary fantasy as we know it in some lucky stroke of happenstance. Perhaps we should blame the Anglican Church for the rise of fantasy. While Catholics were busy burning witches and Lutherans and other protestant groups were busy taking all the fun and mysterious things out of Christianity, Anglicans were busy walking the tightrope between. Tolkien was Catholic, true, but a Catholic in a distinctly Anglican setting.

Kain later clarifies and expands a bit on this, acknowledging that the effect is partially market driven:

I think it’s basically true that fantasy as a genre of popular literature was born and raised in the Anglosphere, and that the form has been adopted in other non-English-speaking cultures – for whatever reason and perhaps simply because of the respective economic empires of the UK and USA.

Meanwhile, Adam Serwer wants to clarify that the discussion is about “high fantasy,” which is a fair point. The other major fantasy sub-genre, Sword ‘n Sorcery, is much darker. Not surprising, since its father was Robert Howard, part of Lovecraft’s circle.

There’s an old story that Tolkien considered an Arthurian setting for his stories, but discarded it as “too Christian.” He wanted a darker world where he could have huge wars and lots of violent adventure, so he set his Christian epic in a pagan setting. I think he got the balance right, by which I mean that the pagan elements swamped the Christian elements. Far better than Narnia.

Maybe what gives fantasy it’s strength is this balance between the high-minded messages and the visceral adventure. There are mythic elements, but they are balanced by gosh-wow magic, sword fights, chainmail bikinis and loincloths. Any thoughts?

Via Amazon: “In this one-of-kind approach to teaching about sin, grace, and salvation, The Christian Zombie Killers Handbook tracks the fictional life of Ben Forman and offers solid Bible teaching to help readers understand the gravity and consequences of life without God, of life as a zombie.”

Interestingly, Geds at Accidental Historian and Michael Mock of Mock Ramblings are both reviewing Night of the Living Dead Christian, which is another work of Christian fiction to use zombies. Trend? Maybe.

The author of Night of the Living Dead Christian, Matt Mikalatos, seems a reasonably cool guy. He’s joined the discussion over at both blogs now. One interesting thing is how different his use of zombies is from Kinley. In Mikalatos’ work, zombies are a metaphor for a certain kind of Christian; the kind who doesn’t want to think but just wants to follow the herd. In Kinley’s work – just judging from reviews – zombies are a metaphor for our sinful nature.

When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression. And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate. The last decade provided corroborating if not conclusive proof that we are in the Indian summer of our civilization.

TPM calls many of these quotes racist – which they are – but it’s a tired, whinging, resentful kind of racism:

The white population will begin to shrink and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear. Hispanics already comprise 42 percent of New Mexico’s population, 37 percent of California’s, 38 percent of Texas’s, and over half the population of Arizona under the age of twenty. ……. Mexico is moving north. Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, the verdict of 1848 is being overturned. Will this Mexican nation within a nation advance the goals of the Constitution—to “insure domestic tranquility” and “make us a more perfect union”? Or has our passivity in the face of this invasion imperiled our union?

… because, you see, only white folk really understand freedom.

It’s always irritating to see a Catholic like Buchanan talk like this. I’m sitting here in New York, where the first State Constitution would have made Buchanan ineligible to run for office. Buchanan’s presidential runs would have been unthinkable for most of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But Buchanan, having finally been welcomed into the fold of “real Americans,” is now willing to turn around and gripe about those other Catholics from Mexico who just don’t understand what America is all about.

“The Anointed” refers to those people who have been tapped as authorities within the Evangelical community on various subject, such as history and science. The authors ask, “Why do tens of millions of Americans prefer to get their science from Ken Ham, founder of the creationist Answers in Genesis, who has no scientific expertise, rather than from his fellow evangelical Francis Collins, current Director of the National Institutes of Health?”

One way or another, the book has shocked Ken Ham and his group Answers in Genesis. Ham has already suggested that Stephens and Giberson are sheep in wolves clothing. Stephens was particularly amused by this part of Ham’s self-defense:

The authors also asserted that ICR [Institute for Creation Research] and AiG argue that evolution is “responsible for much of what’s wrong with the world” (p. 36). Answers in Genesis has never stated or implied this. We have both—in countless articles and even in the 2008 online debate between Ham and Dr. Giberson—declared instead that the teaching of evolution has caused many to doubt or disbelieve the Bible.*

To which Stephens replies with this image from the AIG website:

This one’s even better than the evolution tree picture. Of course, given how incompetently the “creation” side is firing, I’d almost think this was one of ours.