They’ve gone too far. It was bad enough that the creationists treat science with such contempt, but now…the fundy kooks hate science fiction, too!
Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists. Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!
Hey! Sagan was a physicist, and Asimov was a chemist; of the other evil science fiction authors listed, Heinlein, Clarke, Vonnegut, and Roddenberry, not one is a biologist! I think I’m offended.
we’re gonna fight, for our right, to make science and fiction!
Isaac Asimov played a crucial role in my learning to think critically and escape religion. If it weren’t for him, I’d probably be going over sermon notes for next Sunday right now. So they sort of have a point in their own twisted way.
Asimov was a biochemist. /pedant
Well, they hate every fiction that is not in the bible, it was a matter of time for they to attack the literature of the new ideas, in fact, why take them so long?
Wait, fundies can read? Or at least branch out away from that insipid Left Behind series?
Color me surprised. I was unaware they went to any bookstore besides a Christian one and could therefore identify authors outside of their approved genre.
Clearly time to link to this again then, if Sci-Fi killed god !!
http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Rash/misc/wet/sartrek.gif
It’s official.. creationists have now band imagination.. well specifically imagined scenarios based on realistic physical limitations.
Imagining sky daddies and tri-une self molesting father/son/poltergeist orgies is still acceptable and entirely in line with the thoughts of a godly moral mind.
back to my evil revelation space novel. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Oh this is wonderful! I’ll be sure and gloat about it gleefully over at my science fiction review site. I’m so thrilled they noticed at last!
This is great news. It seems as if the religious nutjobs are going out of their way to piss off even more people. Excellent niche strategy.
Enjoy.
They have difficulties distinguishing science from fiction and vice versa, small wonder they would find science fiction confusing/objectionable.
Science fiction must be from the devil, I mean, just look at me. I’m currently reading through the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy anthology and – gasp! – re-reading the God Delusion. Perhaps I just like British literature. Or maybe they’re completely unrelated and the fundies are just batshit insane, as usual.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Have they already started confusing Science and Scientology? I’m looking forward to that.
It does say a little something special when you’ve got Creationists feeling it’s extra special to inform their followers that Sci-Fi isn’t real.
damnit I meant banned not band.
also on a side note I’ve decided to write an astro-jesus slash fic set on gorblon seven. where all the animals evolved from creationists… and as such spend all their time tutting and trying (and failing) to tell their arses from their arm bendy/twisty things.
I have the first paragraph.. already jesus is nekkid and knee deep in alien fluids and lubricants.
I hope their are no typo’s in this or I’ll never get to leave this page.
From the linked article:
Consider ROBERT HEINLEIN, called “the dean of science fiction writers.” He rejected the Bible and promoted “free sex.” His book “Stranger in a Strange Land” is considered “the unofficial bible of the hippie movement.” Heinlein was a nudist and practiced “polyandry.” He promoted agnosticism in his sci-fi books.
So apparently agnosticism is about as evil as atheism. Good to know. I’m puzzled by why polyandry is in quotation marks. Heinlein made up terms but that’s a pretty standard English word.
Wait, you mean The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline was fiction?
I love love love the name of their newsletter: The Fundamental Baptist Information Service, aka FBIS. I think they need to invert the order of the “B” and the “I”, and they’ll have it right.
Well, at least they didn’t list that unimaginative hack L. Ron Hubbard as a science fiction writer. I don’t think the fundumbmentalists would dare take on Hubbard’s religion – but I wish they would, it would be great fun to watch.
Wait. As we all know, engineers are more likely to be creationists than scientists. Likewise they are more likely to be science fiction writers. Seems to me that somewhere out there is creationist science fiction.
Besides, I think the only evolution science fiction that I’ve read was by Stephen Baxter. Certainly, Isaac Asimov doesn’t deal with it at all, nor do any of the other great science fiction writers of the golden age. So which orifice did they pull this one out of?
Silly me, it must have been a revelation — the other way of knowing.
Obligatory blasphemy — Jesus — the other white meat.
Of course they hate Science Fiction, it shows other ways of looking at the world/universe/life that isn’t restricted by the hellish babble.
There are many different ideological tendencies among science fiction writers, but no fundies.
Next up: Detective stories. :)
I guess it’s all fantasy all the time for them. Don’t they ever overdose on magic and Bible?
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Well they are using ‘evolutionary’ in that stupid way they sometimes do, that includes the Big Bang and other such things. But once you ‘translate’ that quote into normal language (evolutionary scientist means mainstream scientist), I can’t really disagree. SciFi is dominated by atheists (with notable exceptions of course, eg Orson Scott Card).
Not unoften they even present naturalistic methods that something deity-like could exist (eg The Last Question by Asimov), which always seemed to me to be the height of heresy.
Anyways their complaint is one of the reasons I’ve always like SciFi. SciFi is often an exploration of the potential wonder of a godless universe.
‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ is one of the worst books I’ve ever (almost) read. I read four-fifths of it then gave up since I was bored out of my mind. It is a mystery to me why it is even classified as science fiction – there is an alien guy from Mars who looks just like a human, and all the events happen on earth (as I recall). Guy has sex with earth women and humans come to stare at him. Rubbish.
Big fan of all the others listed, especially Asimov, but Heinlein SUUUCCKKSSS.
Btw, the only evolution that I have ever noticed in SciFi/Fantasy is that of Emma Watson throughout the Harry Potter movies…..:P
The problem is that Fundie rubes like this think “Science Fiction” is a redundant phrase.
@11: Skip book 5.
Didn’t Johannes Kepler, a devout Christian if there ever was one, write a SF novel about a voyage to the moon back in the 16th century?
Sagan did write one, mediocre, sci-fi book.
There is fair amount of decent sci-fi that riffs on religious mythology. One of the best is BEHOLD THE MAN by Michael Moorcock, which explains the ressurection of Jesus with a time traveling trick.
Evolution == Anything in science that contradicts the book of Genesis.
My late fundie m-in-law hated sci-fi. Whenever someone would watch a sci-fi movie or show, she’d go on and on about how it all insulted her intelligence. How could we believe that there were actually “people” that looked like that? When I tried to explain that we didn’t actually believe that Worf really existed, that it was just a story, she told us we were simply too stupid to realize that the only decent stories were in her bible.
About an hour after one particularly insulting blow up, I asked her if she read fairy tales when she was a child. “Oh yes! Loved my fairies and leprechans!” Did you believe they really existed?
*Silence*
Come on, Fundies! Admit that science fiction is way, way better and pleasurable to read than the unscientific nonsensical fiction called the bible! Isn’t that why you continue to seek after the veneer of science for all your weak, addle-brained, evidence-challenged ideas?
Admittedly the most ridiculous, cringe-worthy, horribly written science fiction was Dianetics/ Scientology, but Intelligent Design surely comes a close second.
@24 haha,. SciFi is about describing the setting, the plot and characters come along only because you need them to explore the setting. Heinlein is different from other scifi author’s since he was more interested in describing the cultural setting (especially the kind of culture without much clothes), rather then technology.
But checkout “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress”, it’s where the term “no such thing as a free lunch” comes from. And is rather interesting from start to finish.
Is there a lack of sci-fi written by biologists (especially among the most famous bits of sci-fi)? If so, that might explain why the fundies are reduced to whinging about non-biologist writers of sci-fi. We already know that they can’t tell the various scientific disciplines apart, nor distinguish science from non-scientific nonsense and pseudo-science. So that aspect is nothing out of the ordinary.
However, my impression was that sci-fi doesn’t intrinsically have an “evolutionary worldview” at all. Some of it doesn’t even have aliens. Though some does have rival gods (ie not the preferred imaginary being of the particular fundy whinging there) doing the creating.
The way science is often conflated with technology (the only aspect which excites many people, including UK PM+MPs, and ensures a market) would tend to mean there is more chance of sci-fi being about the more tech-oriented sciences (remember that biology was previously stuck in mere stamp-collecting mode with nothing making sense before the discovery of evolution) and hence being more likely to be written by techy scientists.
Can’t forget to implicitly gay-bash either
Non-sequitor, thy name is fundie.
@sparky-ca: If the fundumbmentalists are in Australia they can get their woo-woo in any bookstore; no need for a specifically jesus cult store. In the nation’s capital in particular, possession of intellect seems to be a crime worthy of capital punishment. The science and mathematics sections of bookstores not only continue to shrink, but are infested with bullshit by imbeciles such as Rupert Sheldrake. That’s why I continue to import books from the USA; I often wonder if Australia is not a lost cause like many of the south Asian nations – maybe I should pack up and head back home – such a pity really since Australia reminds me a lot of the USA back in the 70s (oddly, that’s about the era of the prevailing technology in Australia too – it would be worse if not for the voluminous imports).
So, what good SF have Pharyngulites read with a strong biology angle? One of my favorites was Destiny’s Road, by Larry Niven (a master of hard SF) – this may be his only novel that has a stronger focus on the biology than on the physics.
Polyandry? Heinlein was married simultaneously to multiple men? Really?
Well…biology is applied chemistry, which is applied physics, so…if you define “evolutionary scientist” broadly enough, they count.
Like so many others here Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke were important to my development first as an agnostic and eventually to atheism. They not only showed the ultimate futility of religious belief, but in many cases the absurdity of such beliefs.
My feeling is, if the fundies don’t like it, it’s got to have something going for it!
And PZ, wasn’t Asimov a BIOchemist?
To a fundie, this is not a non-sequitur. The connection being that homosexuality and evolution are both of the devil.
They might have at least included H.G. Wells: student of Thomas Henry Huxley; used evolutionary biology as the background of at least two different novels (The Time Machine: separation of breeding populations and differences in environment leads to divergence of humanity into Morlocks and Eloi; evolutionary selection for increased intelligence and tool manipulation in the context of a long machine-based technology leads to the Martians in The War of the Worlds.
And of course there is this passage from WotW:
“These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things–taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many–those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance–our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.”
So how does the sf classic “I, Christbot” figure into this?
A couple that I liked (FWIW):
Evolution by Stephen Baxter
Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear, did not like the sequel, Darwin’s Children
There have been few biologists in SF history (and please, it’s SF, not scifi—scifi is George Lucas, Hollywood, silly, etc), but one was/is Joan Slonciewski. A couple years ago a very good novel came out from Barth Anderson, The Patron Saint of Plagues, that treated epidemiology fairly well. And Greg Bear tackled an idea of evolution in his pair, Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children.
FYI, Heinlein has been on the Don’t Read list of organizations such as Campus Crusade for Christ as long as they’ve been around, simply because of his insistence that people think for themselves
Arguably, Edgar Allan Poe invented science fiction as we know it (“Hans Pfall,” Pym, “Some Words with a Mummy,” etc.), so its appearance on the fundie cultural horizon is about on schedule.
I have to say, though, if ever a book scared the hell out of me it was Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven … but I guess it was the wrong kind of hell. Wait ’til they get wind of “She Unnames Them”… or, perhaps more appropriately, J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”…
Peter Watts, the dude who was roughed up by the Border Patrol recently, is a biologist who has written some strong hard SF. Making the rounds right now is a terrific little piece he has up at Clarkesworld in which he’s rewritten John Carpenter’s The Thing…from the POV of the Thing! A must read.
@43: hah, is the “Don’t Read” list for campus crusade on the net anywhere?
(and: scifi scifi scifi)
I liked reading Jurassic Park. A brief google turns up that Michael Crichton was probably an atheist.
But their precious C.S. Lewis wrote science fiction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Trilogy
Can anyone spot some biologists in the wikipedia list of science fiction authors?
What about Christians? Are the whinging fundies discounting C.S.Lewis altogether (for not being the right sort of true fundy or not writing the right sort of true sci-fi)?
Given the right-wing’s lust for all things marital, how could they hate Heinlein? Starship Troopers is a beloved book in the allegedly hardcore branches of the US military.
David Gerrold’s War with the Chtorr series has a strong evolutionary biology component. Strong hints in this still-unfinished series that the invasion represents the colonization of Earth by a biological entity of a level of interaction and integration beyond terrestrial life as multicellular organisms are beyond unicellular ones (or maybe even as far as we are compared to individual prokaryotes).
Robert Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax series incorporates a fair amount of physical anthropology, neurobiology, and the like.
Niven’s Known Space universe–and especially the hominid diversity of Ringworld itself–plays on some interesting ideas of biological divergence.
I guess if I was uber religious I would hate Sci-Fi to.
In Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier after meeting God, Captain Kirk proceeds to beats the tar outta him.
There were several episodes of Star Trek that made it clear religion was not dead and most people had some kind of religion. The most obvious was the Roman Empire planet. The slaves were all (apparently) followers of “the sun”, until at the end it was revealed to really be “The Son”.
While Roddenberry may have been a humanist, he did not make it very explicit that “everyone was an atheist”, though he did present most religion as human (or alien) invention.
IIRC, wasn’t Jules Verne (along with Poe, also considered one of the fathers of SciFi) a French catholic?
Thanks. For a moment there I felt worse than usual for not having read him.
People who believe in the end times nonsense also don’t like science fiction because much of it promotes the idea of a cosmically long, secular future without any rapture, Armageddon or second coming. Some stories even show “Jesus who?” societies in the future, or else portray alternate realities where christianity never came into existence.
In other words, the thoughtful and well read people who write the better SF tend not to privilege the christian world view in the greater scheme of ideas.
They can’t even take a little time to research the people they want to insult.
Yes, Arthur Clarke was gay. No need for that “probably.”
<pedant>If Heinlein’s wife was married to him and one or more other men at the same time, you could say that they all practiced polyandry. But I doubt that’s what they meant to suggest, and I have never heard it claimed.</pedant>
Hmm. Does The Handmaiden’s Tale count a SF?
It has a lot in common with Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100.
Not really “God”, but an alien pretending to be God. This waas a recurring theme in Star Trek, many “gods” were demonstrated to just be powerful aliens pretending to be gods.
Heinlein seems to have gone through a “phase-change” with Stranger…, everything after that pretty dreadful. …Troopers was from the “juveniles” which seem to be overall much better stories and much better SF.
Oh, the old conflict! Fantasy vs. Science-Fiction, revisited.
I don’t see a problem here. For “them,” any non-creationist person who holds a degree in any scientific discipline whatsoever is an evolutionary scientist. It makes perfect sense, considering that by “evolution” they mean any part of any science (astronomy, physics, astrophysics, cosmology, geology, paleontology, archeology, and so on) that as much as hints to a cosmos older than ~6000 years.
Wait a minute…isn’t raising someone from the dead and turning water into wine science fiction? These fundies and their invisible sky friend drive me nuts. I truly wish our founding fathers had used the phrase Freedom From Religion and not of religion.
Given the right-wing’s lust for all things marital, …
interesting typo, “marital” for “martial”, the statement is true with either word :-)
Hmmm… I wonder if they include C. S. Lewis’ Cosmic Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Voyage to Venus, That Hideous Strength) given that Lewis was a christian apologist…?
…ok, so, C.S Lewis is all right?
Actually in Asimov’s book “The End of Eternity” there is mentioned evolution.The irony is that the creationists can easily use it in their favor(He suggests that the mankind would be evolving very little through thousands of years,i.e. in the creationists terms Asimov believed only in micro evolution).But for them to use this argument they should read the book and after all the the bible gives them all the answers and they don’t need to read books written by mere mortals-they aren’t the word of GOD.
Not really anything new. My devout baptist grandmother used to say that I was going straight to hell because I read Sci-Fi novels and played D&D.
What a pathetic group of people the fundies are. With all their professed strong faith and beliefs in their sky pixie, it is necessary to issue warnings to their sheep, telling them not listen to or read a whole variety of materials that, in some way, challenge such beliefs. Their weak minds are apparently incapable of processing new ideas without altering their beliefs in gawd and jebus.
Fossil Hunter by Robert J. Sawyer is all about the development of a theory of evolution, and the main character goes on a journey that loosely parallels that of the Beagle. The story is set on a moon in a tidally-locked orbit around a jovian planet, and all the fauna (including the main characters) are the evolutionary descendants of transplanted dinosaurs. The moon’s intelligent species is, specifically, a distant daughter species of a genetically modified population of nanotyrannus. (No humans to be found anywhere in the narrative?!)
Even better, the book’s setting actually favours a creationist-style theory at first, as the moon in question was devoid of life until it was transplanted. Lo! There exists a “bookmark layer” in the geological column, where below there are no fossils and above all major “kinds” suddenly appear fully formed!
My only quibble with the book’s science was that the theory of evolution was developed and widely accepted in a very short time span, though I recognize that doing so was required for the narrative pacing. Of course, their society had just been shaken up in the previous book (Far-Seer) when they discovered their Land was not the centre of the universe and the dire predictions that followed, so maybe they were more motivated to accept such a theory than we comfortable humans have been.
Okay.. enough’s enough!
They can bash away at Darwin and Dawkins all they like, but if they wanna take mean shots at Asimov… we’re gonna have problems here!
*drops 3kg leather bound edition of the Foundation series into a tube sock…. swings it menacingly*
Hey, A.C. Clarke wrote fiction that was *EXPLICITLY* pro-religion.
Check out “The Star,” for example. (Available online, IIRC) And “The Nine Billion Names of God.”
If *THEY* don’t inspire a deep sense of religious feeling, I don’t know what would
If they hate science fiction, then why do they borrow stuff from Jurassic Park and Dinotopia and incorporate them into their made-up dinosaur dogma? Totally mind boggling, isn’t it?
Re: SFChemist
Nope. It’s fantasy. To be SF, it would need the raising and the turning to be made with some machinery, or at least explained in some sciency-sounding way.
Oh, about the article referenced by PZ. I guess the author didn’t know what Asimov wrote, since the worst thing he found was that Asimov declared himself an atheist. Otherwise, I doubt he would have missed mentioning “The Last Question,” or Asimov’s constant caricaturing of religion in his novels or, horror of horrors, his article “The ‘Threat’ of Creationism”.
OT: I thought this was kind of neat.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00654/Climate_through_the_654853a.jpg
Didn’t Johannes Kepler, a devout Christian if there ever was one, write a SF novel about a voyage to the moon back in the 16th century?
Posted by: Bad Albert
Kepler did indeed write such a book, called “Somnium” (The Dream) about a guy who travels to the moon. As I recall, lots of it is about what astronomy would be like from the vantage point of the moon (!! imagine the squiggles in the sky that Mars would take from there), and how the creatures there would adapt to the long days and nights. So maybe that’s proto-evolutionary and so fundies would hate it.
Kepler was also smart enough to make sure his voyager took off from the earth and headed, not straight up to the moon, but at the point where the moon would be when he got there. Now there’s a brain in action.
Kepler had run ins with the fundies of his day, who tried to have his mom burned as a witch, and it was only with his personal intervention that saved her.
@#24 Quagmire,
but Heinlein SUUUCCKKSSS
I reread a lot of Heinlein, but never Stranger. If you ever feel like giving the man a second chance with his actual “sci-fi,” you might try Starship Troopers (not a thing like that goddam movie), or even Farmer in the Sky (technically one of his “juveniles,” but long on accurate science).
Which goes to show that being atheist, by itself, does not make you capable of thinking clearly or understanding science. And it reinforces the dismissive attitudes of those with earned doctorates in biology toward those with professional degrees in medicine.
They meant polyamory, but (I’ll be charitable) their spellchecker didn’t recognize it as a word, or something.
Not really surprising that fundies hate science fiction; it’s a competitor that’s usually better written and more believable than their Bible.
But as always, they’ve got their facts wrong. You can trace sci-fi all the way back to Lucian of Samosata’s “True History” in the second century. Of course, he made fun of dopey and gullible Christians in his day, too.
By the way, my atheist grandmother was the one who introduced me to the books of Heinlein. I was 10. She didn’t censor. :D
Maybe they should read Hamilton’s (utterly appalling, hideous time-waster) Reality Dysfunction.
Free Lunch, what was your problem with Jurassic Park?
So it goes.
“If you ever feel like giving the man a second chance with his actual “sci-fi,” you might try Starship Troopers (not a thing like that goddam movie), or even Farmer in the Sky (technically one of his “juveniles,” but long on accurate science).”
I’ve been interested in the Starship Troopers novel since I learned it’s not like that horrible piece o’ crap movie. Is his puke inducing misogyny toned down enough that a feminist wouldn’t want to piss on that book? I’d like to read it, but if I have to sit through another piece of ‘women love rape and subservience’ bilge pretending to be sci fi, I will puke.
Carl Sagan must have believe in an afterlife by 1997, when he allegedly gave a quote to Parade magazine despite the handicap of being dead.
Apologies if someone’s already mentioned this (I haven’t completely worked my way through this thread yet), but perhaps the classic science fiction evolution story is Roy Lewis’s What We Did to Father, also known as The Evolution Man (the title I know it as, which I bought because it had an introduction by pTerry), and Once Upon an Ice Age.
Mr Lewis wasn’t a scientist or a fiction writer; he wrote mostly for The
Economist. His Wikipedia entry suggests The Evolution Man is his only(?) work of fiction.It’s a comic science fiction novel. And it’s brilliant. I don’t have my copy at hand right now, but one thing I remember from pTerry’s introduction was a story about a highly experienced palaeontologist(?) reading it whilst crossing the Sahara Desert by camel. This expert wrote to Mr Lewis complaining about a few errors, but then added (paraphrasing from memory) “They don’t matter in the slightest, as I was laughing so hard I fell off my camel.”
C.S.Lewis was buddies with Tolkein, and you know how evil that is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inklings
I actually much prefer the Starship Troopers movie over the the book, but that’s because I see the former as largely a satire of the latter’s unthinking militarism.
Free Lunch, what was your problem with Jurassic Park?
Don’t mean to speak for FreeLunch, but I think “his problem” is not so much with Jurassic Park but with Crichton himself. Read the body of his work and his vocal anti-AGW screeds and you will find a man deeply hateful of science and scientists.
G. G. Simpson (American paleontologist) wrote a sci-fi novel called The Dechronization of Sam Magruder. I haven’t read it, but it reviewed well on Amazon.
The SF book “West of Eden” by
Harry Harrison asks the question,
what would have happened if the
Earth had not been hit by an
asteroid 65M years ago?
The major point being, “evolution”
has no preferred direction.
kalibhakta #44,
Arguably, that title goes to either Cyrano de Bergerac
(Voyage de la Terre à la Lune and Des états de la Lune et du Soleil) or Kepler (Somnium), both 17th century authors.
Here is Carl Sagan on Kepler’s persecution by the Church for having written what he calls the first work of Science Fiction.
PZ,
Evidentently, religious fundies’ hate for SF is nothing new, it started with the very first SF work written, 390 years ago !
–
Please sign this petition to fix the broken comment registration system
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Haven’t read all comments, but searched for this and didn’t find it – so…
I really enjoyed Brin’s Brightness Reef – first (?) of the “uplift” series (I could be a bit wrong there, but it was the first I read)
I am certain there are many more but I will have to crank the brain back a larger number of years than I am comfortable with.
I really won’t much bother with Fantastic Voyage….
JC
@80, I kinda liked the reality dysfunction; however, although it took place in space, I’d have to classify it as fantasy. Dan Simmons Hyperion series is also irrational and should be likewise classed as fantasy to my mind. They both took suspension of disbelief a bit far though.
M31,
Very much so ! For writing Somnium, he was persecuted by the fundies, they took away his mother, and it took him 6 years to get her liberated…
#50: “Starship Trooper” is the only piece of fiction you can find in the Marine Corps Book Store.
I, too, wasn’t aware that Bob Heinlein had co-husbands. (Many of his fictional characters did.) Yes, he practiced nudity, and advocated non-marital sex, and pushed for the gold standard, and was a (relaxed) agnostic, and…hey, I wish I’d known the guy.
On the other hand, I’d classify the Left Behind books as s-f. Bad, cheesy, poorly-written, crappy s-f. Almost as bad as the Gor series. Or L. Ron’s stuff.
My favourite Star Trek anti-religion episode was The Return of the Archons. Here’s the blurb from memory alpha:
“The Enterprise discovers a planet where the population act like zombies and obey the will of their unseen ruler, Landru.”
ESPness
you mean that stories about robots from space playing pool with green aliens are not working according to the bible?!
FUCK.
Blast! There’s another science fiction book I read yonks ago tinted with evolution (and cretinism), but I cannot recall the title or the author, and my Google™-fu isn’t working…
It’s the story of black anthropologist at the Smithsonian, who whilst visiting her family’s plantation in The South for holidays, stumbles upon the a previously-unknown diary by her great(?)-grandfather, who was a slave on that plantation. (The great-grandfather earned enough money after the Civil War to buy the plantation from its (and his) former owner.) The diary contains an odd story about an unusual new “breed” of African slave being used on the plantation. The description in the diary is so odd the scientist decides to investigate further…
What she finds is there’s still a small group of Homo something-not-sapiens in an isolated part of Africa (enslaved to an isolated nasty tribe of modern humans).
The novel has a fairly convincing description (at to someone who’s not an expert) description of an excavation and (as I now recall) studying of the remains found on the plantation. There’s also an expedition to Africa, a reporter working for a cretinist editor (as I recall, this was the first time I’d come across the spelling evilution), and so on.
I vaguely think the book was called something like Daughter of Creation, but I cannot fecking recall. I have no recollection at all of the author’s name. ;-(
For all those looking for SF by Biologists, I urge you to check out the ‘Futures’ section in the weekly Nature magazine. Many of those one page stories are written by practising scientists, and a lot of them are a pleasure to read.
One of Heinlein’s books that surely must have pissed off the fundies was Job, A Comedy of Justice.
Givesgoodemail@95: Damn, I came in here to say “Left Behind”. Atrociously written and morally contemptible (see Slactivist’s Left Behind series RIGHT NOW if you haven’t already: http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/left_behind/ ), but IMHO it’s clearly science fiction. It’s even a member of a specific SF subgenre, the postapocalypse story.
Oh yeah, West of Eden (@90). Another evolution-tinted science fiction novel.
Weirdly, that happened to be the first science fiction novel I read after moving to France; as I recall, I bought it for the trip but never got around to reading it until after arrival. Then it took forever for my stuff to arrive, so I wound up reading it multiple times out of sheer boredom. (Actually, since it’s a decent story, I didn’t mind—too much—re-reading it rapid succession.)
Mark@43 – Thanks for that info on Slonczewski – I had actually just moments before found her listed in a google search – seems she may be worth a read.
Heinlein was an old military-minded writer with an odd beginning and a strong philosophy, and one of the outright best writers of the time. If you read him looking for lots of SF whiz-bang, you are missing the point.
I have trouble with some of his concepts at times – particularly some of his early female concerns and his Libertarianism – but it wasn’t hard to see past those bits to the larger story.
I just recently re-read “Puppetmasters”. Damn – to hell with a flying car. Why aren’t we all walking around naked? ;-)
JC
I’d say that the Left Behind series is religious fantasy, and not science fiction.
As for biologically-based SF:
Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson
Evolution’s Shore by Ian McDonald
and has been mentioned, the Rifters series by Peter Watt, starting with Starfish.
‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ is one of the worst books I’ve ever (almost) read. I read four-fifths of it then gave up since I was bored out of my mind. It is a mystery to me why it is even classified as science fiction – there is an alien guy from Mars who looks just like a human, and all the events happen on earth (as I recall). Guy has sex with earth women and humans come to stare at him. Rubbish.
Big fan of all the others listed, especially Asimov, but Heinlein SUUUCCKKSSS. – Quagmire
I’m no great fan of Heinlein, but you’re misremembering SiaSL. “Mike” (the Stranger) was biologically human, but raised by Martians. There is a ridiculous thread of the book that identifies Mike with the Archangel Michael – maybe that offends the wooists?
SF with evolutionary themes, other than those already mentioned:
Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos: all humans except a tiny group on the Galapagos are killed by an epidemic: the survivors evolve into seal-like animals.
Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, and Starmaker. Events in both take place over billions of years, and involve extensive evolutionary change, both natural and artificial. The “Last Men” of LaFM are immortal giants divided among 96 sexes: 96-way sex brings about mental unity among the participants. (Unfortunately the sex is not described in detail: Stapledon was writing in the 1930s.)
Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy: humanity colonised by aliens who travel the universe hybridising with other species.
Stephen Baxter’s Destiny’s Children sequence, of which I’ve only read the first: human subgroups evolving into a colonial form, like social insects.
Björn Kurtén’s Dance of the Tiger, and a sequel I can’t recall the name of. Borderline SF, because it’s about the prehistoric past, specifically interaction between anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals in late Pleistocene Scandinavia; but Kurtén has obviously studied the paleoecology so deeply he can imagine the landscape.
eeanm wrote @32 “But checkout “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress”, it’s where the term “no such thing as a free lunch” comes from.”
Not to change the subject, but my SWIOTI acted up.
The phrase, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” predates Heinlein by a few decades.
It was used as an prohibitionist rallying cry.
According to my great uncle, long since passed away, it was common around the turn of the last century for bars to put free lunch counters out in order to attract trade around noon. (They would advertise such free lunch counters.) Of course, while the sandwich fixings and pickles were free, it was expected that a person would purchase a beer or two. Expected to the point of being a requirement in some places. No beer, no lunch.
Which resulted in the prohibitionist’s pointing out that a lunch that is only free to those who purchased something else isn’t really free.
And wouldn’t you know it, there is a wiki page on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_lunch
blf@98,
I was trying to remember that too! It’s Orphan of Creation by Roger MacBride Allen – your use of “of Creation” jogged my memory.
skeptical scientist –
As SteveM says, it’s not Jurrasic Park that is the problem, Crichton only took a few relatively minor liberties with science to make that story work well (though we can see the “science will destroy us” theme that he loves to warn us about in many of his books), but in his more recent writings, he had become even more anti-science, capped with his anthropogenic climate change denialism.
Do any of the stories by my wife’s favourite author, Diana Gabaldon qualify at all? I don’t read them, but she loves them and I usually get a play-by-play. Seems Diana is at least triple-degreed – zoology, Marine Biology and Ecology (does that even count? ;-)
I keep hearing in the (somewhat SF) stories, the heroin (who has managed to duck behind a rock and find herself some hundreds of years in the past??) is always doing things like growing penicillin, and injecting it into her Past-Lover with a needle made from a snake fang – or some such thing.
Not my cuppa – but it seems to qualify… maybe?
JC
Every Sci-Fi novel contains less fiction than the bible.
YES! That’s the one. Thanks, Knockgoats.
Because he is human. He was the offspring of two crewmembers of the first Earth expedition to Mars (all of whom died after his birth). He was raised to young adulthood by the real Martians — who look nothing whatsoever like humans.
There’s more to it than that.
Among other things, the book has some critical comparisons of religion and religious morality, and has a scene that mentions the bit with Lot offering his virgin daughters to the people of Sodom if they would just leave him (and his guests) alone — and Lot being called “righteous” in other parts of the bible. And also the bit with Elisha, the 42 children, and the bears.
There is always Julie E. Czerneda. The main character of one of her series is a population biologist who studies salmon.
Owlmirror – MUCH more most definitely. I have never really managed to find the time, but IIRC, even all the names used (Jubal, which I do know, Miriam and all the other folks) all have a more or less biblical “reason” to be there.
Stranger really is much deeper than a casual reading reveals.
Not to mention the cannibalism….
JC
Well, according to the Church at the time, Giordiano Bruno’s ideas about multiple worlds in the cosmos was mere fiction. Of course, he was burned at the stake for his trouble. Hopefully modern Christians won’t go quite that far…
Another SF classic featuring human evolution would be Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, set in a world where humans have evolved to be almost completely androgynous. I would expect it to be very disturbing for fundies.
“Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction.”
WHA-WHA-WHAT????
Science fiction is a product of the human imagination, it is entertainment and does not present itself as fact, hence the term, “fiction.” Evolution is the product of hard, scientific research that is tested for veracity and based on demonstrable evidence – it is FACT, not fiction. How hard is it to make that distinction??
They are dumber than I thought… It’s Science FICTION…. various authors do some research and try to be realistic, but generally it’s still fiction.
I am really surprised that they don’t use on their side like “Science Fiction shows that Science is wrong because it’s fiction” or just some other stupid conclusion.
@18 “Wait. As we all know, engineers are more likely to be creationists than scientists.”
Really? A little statistical evidence for that would be nice. I’m an engineer and over many, many years I’ve met hundreds more and not one of them was a creationist to my knowledge. Given the inability of creationists to keep their mouths shut about it, it would be hard to keep secret. Such strange beliefs are just as damaging to one’s professional reputation in engineering as in any science.
Clearly, doorstoppers are not yet sufficiently thick.
One more engineer here, and NOT a creationist. A really bad and silly assumption.
Endor @83 re Starship Troopers (the book)
To answer your question I have to say, “Sort of.” Mostly by virtue that there aren’t many females mentioned period in the book. There’s a shore-leave planet with some women and women pilot the starships, but the interactions in the book with the protagonist are minimal.
Sorry to continue the tangent, but this has become a pet peeve of mine. All these advertised offers of “Buy this and get this other thing free!” No, it is not free since I have to buy something to get it. What you mean is “…at no additional cost”, that is not the same as free.
I think it was Steve Wright who said that with these kind of offers he would call and ask them to just send the “free” one.
What a load of crap. We have Farmer’s Riverworld series which is very religious. The Princess of Wands deals with demons, same with Omens. Zelazny has had multiple books with religious ideas, Eye of Cat being very explicitly religious, but many others were highly religious including Western demons, Cthulu and eastern mythos.
I, Gezheh is a lubbovitcher’s wet-dream of sci-fi…
Stranger in a Strange Land was one of many Heinlein books to be explicitly religious. Same with Job…
And there are a lot, lot more. Many of which I have stored in my attic. And, surprisingly, some treat religion quite nicely. A lot nicer, frankly, than religion would treat them if the religious could get away with behaving like they’d LIKE to behave…
But one for which there is some evidence.
(I also work as an engineer and certainly am not a cretinist. I also don’t like the glib characterisations of engineers as cretinists—albeit admittedly no-one says all engineers are cretinists—but I also know enough not to dismiss uncomfortable things simply because they are uncomfortable.)
@#18 is referring to the Salem hypothesis, FWIW.
Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse deals with evolution. It was called “utter nonsense” by James Blish but mainly for multiple physics and astronomy errors.
Oh, for the record, the first fully realized science fiction novel is regarded to be Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, published in 1818.
Thomas Moore’s Utopia, published 1516 is consider science fiction. But not fully realized. Keppler wrote science fiction. So did Godwin and Voltaire.
We have Gulliver’s travels and other “hollow earth/lost world” genre science fiction in the 1700’s.
OTOH, Origin was published in 1859… Over a hundred years later than most the early proto-science fiction and 41 years after the very first “true” science fiction novel.
That Darwin, what a wiley fellow. To have written a book that was so powerful that it went back in time and gave spawn to the Devil’s playground of science fiction.
Fewking ijits…
Maybe someone can help me with the title of this classic short story:
A group of young people travel in “deep freeze” from Earth to another planet and start reproducing almost immediately, presumably to start populating the place. But the babies are “changed” by the environment, so that they are less and less human. In the end, alien beings appear in the sky and form a double helix.
There’s more to it than that, of course, but as I recall, this book was written before Watson and Crick published their discovery of the structure of DNA.
And, of course, it’s SF about evolution!
How about A Canticle for Leibowitz?
Science fiction is one of our greatest weapons. Heck, with science fiction, dinosaurs, and rock ‘n’ roll on our side, how have we not totally destroyed religion yet?
The best biologically inspired SF novel I’ve read in years was Schaetzing’s “The swarm”. Also not a book popular with the fundamentalists.
As for Heinlein, I never grogged Stranger in a strange land either (couple years too young I guess), but I thought Starship Trooper was an interesting book. And unlike the ridiculous movie people didn’t get their legs bitten off because they forgot about armor.
I don’t think Frank Herbert’s Dune has been mentioned yet, and it has a great deal of ecological and biological inferences in it. Hmm, I wonder if the spice eyes had any influence on Cameron’s latest foray onto the big screen.
KG:
Oooh, if you think of the sequel’s title, please post it. I loved that book, and never knew there was a sequel. IIRC, it was published roughly simultaneously with Clan of the Cave Bear, and much was made in a couple reviews about the distinction between the latter prehistoric potboiler (which I manage to refrain from reading) and the former thoughtful, scientifically accurate (as far as what was known at the time, anyway) fictionalization of prehistorical people.
Mebbe I should dig out my copy and re-read, eh?
All three require imagination and a willingness to challenge Teh Rules (suspending disbelief, life in a world unlike today, and what constitutes music).
Religion requires nothing but your money.
Just FYI, there may be a remake of the Dune movie in the works?
Cat Ballou@129
I think I know this story, although I can’t name it nor the author. It will take some digging through my old paperback anthologies…
If I’m thinking of the same one, the ship of humans was actually intercepted by the aliens and rerouted to a special planet where the aliens somehow “distill” down and collect the DNA of all kinds of space travelling species, in the process “devolving” each subsequent generation. The story ends with a group of another species being transplanted. The trees are filled with silver-haired apes (decendants of the humans). Does that sound like the same story?
Actually, Heinlein was pretty pissed about how people took all that. Heinlein was clear, the novels were stories and each story had it’s point-of-view and please don’t project his values into them.
For example, in Rocket Ship Galileo, the protagonists claim the moon for the United Nations and discover an ancient lunar civilization and Nazis… Tunnel in the Sky dealt with a Malthusian catastrophe averted through emigration to various planets through some teleportation scheme. Things go awry for the protagonist who taking some sort of alien planet survival test and we get sort of a “Lord of Flies” plot.
Stranger in a Strange Land was a, frankly, garden variety “nice” messianic-themed story with a bit of sex thrown in since it was the 60’s. Starship Troopers was a quasi-facist alternate history earth under existential threat.
Farnham’s Freehold was post-apocalyptic/alternate universe with both overt-racism (black on white in this case) and libertarian influences. It was a fairly complex novel and, ultimately, explored “master and slave” dynamics in a sci-fi world and only used the “reverse” slavery, I think, to beat-down some of the audience’s preconceived notions… (Remember, it was written in the 1950’s…)
Anyway, I’m rambling, and people taking from Heinlein’s books to say what Heinlein was… Like I said, it pissed him off. He was quite clear about that in the autobiographical section in one of his last books… Maybe The Cat Who Walked Through Walls or To Sail Beyond the Sunset… I really just don’t remember any more… Except for Starship Troopers,
One of the books I bought with a birthday gift card is Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts, which one or two people here had recommended a while ago. I don’t know if that counts as bio SF since I haven’t yet read it.
Damn. I might have to start it now, even though I’m in the middle of something else…
:)
Speaking of apes, Planet of the Apes of course involves the evolution of non-human primates.
SC,OM@139,
War on the Newts is absolutely brilliant, but nothing to do with evolution – pure satirical SF, mostly aimed at militarism and power politics.
MosesZD #138 – much as I have sympathy for Heinlein, I’ve got to wonder how good an author he actually was if everyone kept misunderstanding his books. I’ve never met anyone yet who reads Starship troopers for the first time as showing anything other than aint it cool to be in the military and fun to blow stuff up to defend us humans from horrible inhuman threats. And then at a certain point in the 70’s or so it seems like he got an oedoipus complex and went a little mad.
Or maybe he was just a very complex human with a somewhat fractured outlook on things. Citizen of the Galaxy was one of my early SF favourites, and I quite understand that Rocketship Galileo was written the way it was because of the time of writing. Yet as I grew up I realised that Heinlein seemed insufficiently substantial, and many of his characters seemed mired in their own superhero characteristics and the women were too much like someones fantasy.
Alexi Panshin seems to sum things up much better than I can:
http://www.enter.net/~torve/critics/lounge.htm
More reasons for fundies to hate Heinlein:
“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.”
“One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.”
– Robert Heinlein
He also wrote one of my favorite short stories “And He Built A Crooked House” about an architect who builds a house in the shape of an unfolded tesseract – an earthquake shakes it into folding up, and cool stuff ensues.
As to why they hate SF? Jealousy methinks.
Rey Fox@ #131 – Love it!
And my next comment is about Frank Herbert. More important to me than Heinlein, he was not a scientist. But he did a good job (I think) of integrating scientific knowledge of the period into his stories and of teasing out themes about humans and their societies.
He also wrote some bad short stories and pretty poor novels, but can you name me an SF write who hasn’t written some rubbish?
So, in Dune and its sequels we have discussion and exemplificatin of religion and its place in human life, ecology and its importance to our existence, power and its many ramifications of action and reaction, and the impact of technological changes on society. Some of this was discussed in a very subtle way, others in perhaps a somewhat coarse and ineffective manner.
Other stories such as The Green Brain were more clearly about ecology and were a bit too didactic, or there’s the two different versions of the priests of PSI, the short story one and the novel one. Either would be high on the list of burning that a fundie would compile.
re MosesZD@138:
Just to be clear, I was not projecting anything about his books onto Heinlein. I just think the later books suck pretty bad compared to the earlier ones. Number of the Beast was particularly terrible.
Bill Dauphin, OM,
Amazon finds it!
Singletusk: A Novel of the Ice Age.
I have read it, but can’t remember much about it, so possibly it’s disappointing compared to Dance – Shelk is a character (or two) that would be hard to live up to in a sequel!
Ah, OK. You may actually have been the one who recommended it, which would explain why I wrote it down. :)
…*returns to page 14*
The fundies have it the wrong way round anyway – science fiction is about evolution, not evolution is SF. The wholepoint ofmuch SF is to explore changes in people, societies and humanity as a whole with the impactof new technologies, to explore what if in a specifically technological and scientific way. It also often carries with it utopian ideas of heaven on earth and suchlike which would be anathema to fundies.
Authors who have written near SF specifically involving religion include James Blish, and actually thats all I can think of. There must be more somewhere?
I know Zelazny riffed offof Indian mythology in Lords of Light.
And I’m sure many SF authors must have been religious in some form or another. Can anyone think of any?
OK, that tears it! General PZ of the first atheist Mech-walker brigade (the ‘Blazing Geeks’) has given the order. The fundies have crossed the Rubicon. Charge the Mass Drivers, hand out the Lightsabres and summon our tentacled overlord Cthulhu. This means war!
Still, their attitude is not surprising. When you base your entire life on a peice of really badly written fiction, better written fiction that bears a closer resemblence to a possible future might indeed seem to be a threat. Being fundies, anything they don’t understand (which, lets be honest, is a lot) they see as a potential threat, and their response to any potential threat is to try to destroy it.
That’s Lord of Light (singular) (one of the best SF novels ever, BTW). He also did Egyptian mythology with Creatures of Light and Darkness and I believe several others that I can’t remember right now.
I was not aware of that side of Crichton.
And I’m sure many SF authors must have been religious in some form or another. – calcinations
Some have already been identified on this thread: C.S.Lewis (Anglican), Orson Scott Card (Mormon). Arthur C. Clarke would have liked to be at least a deist I think, and Olaf Stapledon was a kind of Teilhard de Chardin-like evo-mystic. Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz includes a heavy dose of Catholic propaganda. Then of course there’s L. Ron Hubbard… Religion is a common theme even for atheist SF writers like Vonnegut.
If you want a sci-fi book that deals, at leas to some extent, with evolution, check out Wayne Douglas Barlowe’s book Expedition. Rather than a story, it is written from the perspective of a human artist writing about a joint human/alien scientific expedition to an untouched alien planet appropriately called “Darwin IV”, trying to drum up public support for a second trip. Most of the book deals with his descriptions and drawing of various creatures, stories about his encounters with them, and how they fit into the planet’s overall ecology, along with some instances of speculation regarding how various features, interactions, and patterns evolved. It is a good book, with a lot of magnificent artwork. It is written from a very pro-environmental perspective, with the “author” often contrasting the rich and varied life on the planet with the nearly dead Earth from his time.
Barlowe did the creature design for Avatar, actually. I suspect his work on Expedition, and the Discovery Channel pseudo-documentary based on it (called Alien Planet), must have got him the job. The creatures in expedition are completely different than those in avatar, not just individually but in their shared traits as well. However, the general feel of his creatures is distinctive enough that I was able to identify him as the one behind them (he also did the creature design for Hellboy II, something I could also tell just from their appearance, although that was based more on preliminary artwork from a sci-fi book called Thype that he has been working on).
SteveM,
I agree on Lord of Light, although it is distinctly woo-ist – Rild, the assassin whom Sam converts to his fake Buddhism, turns out to be a real, enlightened, miracle-working Buddha, remember. But I do like it that the lord of the zombies, Nirriti the Black, is a Christian!
What with all these recommendations for Heinlein’s Starship Troopers – excellent read, a thoughtful military utopia with a line of argument for capital punishment thrown it – remember it really must be read together with Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero, similar plot but much more realistic and funny.
Someone wanting an overview of Heinlein could read his first novel, “For Us, the Living,” which was published posthumously. It’s *ALL* his other novels, nearly, in one story. With a two-page footnote.
I really enjoyed Brin’s Brightness Reef – first (?) of the “uplift” series (I could be a bit wrong there, but it was the first I read)
It was the first of a trilogy, but there were earlier Uplift books like the fluffy “Sundiver” and the somewhat more substantial “Startide Rising” and “The Uplift War,” which features interspecies sex and interesting biology.
I’m envisioning a T-shirt that says:
“Do you know who I am, you miserable peons?
I’m an obscure midlist science fiction reader!!!”
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=974#comment-13640
Next, they’ll say that romance novels are porn.
Oh, wait, I heard James Dobson say this very thing. I thought about telling my Catholic mother (who reads romance novels incessantly) and my born-again sister (who has started to read my mother’s books) this, but thought better of it.
I guess anything that takes the believer away from the “good book” is considered bad by the true believer.
Apparently not everyone in Fundieland has gotten the message. Over on Fanfiction.net there’s a crossover between Stargate: SG1 and the Left Behind series. From reading the reviews(I’m too chicken to read the actual story) it seems the writer takes the Left Behind scenario as legitimate, even though Left Behind was created by guys whose beliefs contradict the ancient universe presented in Stargate. The Rapture is real in the story, not a plot by some alien baddy to use the foolish beliefs of much of the US population against them. A good writer could do something fun with that idea.
dave Souza – there’s also Gordon R Dickson’s counter blast, I forget what it was called. As far as I can tell a bunch of more liberal minded SF authors were so outraged by Starship Troopers that they decided to write books to dismantle parts of it.
… a discussion of anti-theist science-fiction and we had to get to 159 posts before somebody mentioned the Stargate franchise?
… sure, it got a little Christian “collaboraty” in the last few years of SG1, but those first few years were golden “we ain’t buyin’ this god crap”.
I’m almost scared to check timguegen’s suggestion. If it had been the other way around, I’d leap at it right now…
Recently finished James Blish’s “A Case of Conscience,” in which the protagonist is a Roman Catholic priest faced with the devil on an eden-like planet.
He saves them from their awful fate. Kinda.
Starship Troopers was written by someone intimately familiar with the military but not with war. Heinlein graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1929 and was medically discharged from the Navy in 1936. He spent World War II as an engineer at Philadelphia Naval Shipyard (where he worked with Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp).
IIRC, the punchline in Stranger in a Strange Land was that god was real and ted haggard (or contemporary equivalent) was right. I mostly liked it but for that, and the ending. Our hero became a kinda jesus figure, and messed it up by making the same mistake as the other jesus; thinking that sacrificing himself would bring people to their senses.
“Next, detective stories”
Oh noez! There’s been a murder!
Goddidit.
OK. Case closed.
Any list of outright godless SF should include Greg Egan; his “Oceanic” (winner of the Hugo and Locus awards) is about as uppity-atheist as a story can get.
Rey Fox #131- I’m so stealing that.
No. And this is actually message #14
Exactly; stupid claims like this do nothing useful.
There may well be more creationists that are entitled to describe themselves as engineers that scientists (remember, lots of definitions of ‘engineer’, ranging from train driver through car repairer to degree holding specialists that wouldn’t recognise a spanner) because there are a lot more of them. Ratios would take more analysis.
CatBallou – I think that story is “The Golden Helix” by Theodore Sturgeon.
Re: CatBallou @129:
I just re-read a short story that’s almost exactly on the mark, except for the double-helix aliens in the sky. Larry Niven had the idea, but wasn’t happy with his results. He was assisted by Steven Barnes in 1979 and “The Locusts” was the result.
(Just re-read in Niven’s “N-Space” collection.)
KG:
Yah, I knew I was setting myself up for some LMGTFY action; I was at work, though, and reluctant to hit Amazon from a work computer. Thanks for the pointer.
‘Tis:
Well, not with combat; as you point out, he served with distinction during the war (during which service he met the love of his life), but nowhere near a combat zone. I can’t recall off the top of my head whether he, Asimov, and de Camp were in uniform or in civilian dress, but they were entirely in service to the war effort in any case.
My own take on Heinlein is that his fiction is mostly thought experiments, playing out ideas he’s interested in, but not necessarily ones he supports. I think you can figure out what Heinlein was curious about from reading his work, but not which of those ideas he was committed to (if any).
And people do project their own prejudices on him: Militarists claim him as their own because of Starship Troopers while libertarians do the same because of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (in both cases seriously misunderstanding the books, IMHO), all the while sublimely ignoring the UK-style parliamentary empire he lovingly (and apparently approvingly) describes in Double Star (one of his best and least known works), or the various iterations of communal societies found throughout his ouvre, or the UN-style global bureaucracies of Stranger or The Star Beast. Hell, even in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the revolutionary cabal that frees the lunar penal colony (modeled on Australia?) includes (IIRC) a technocrat, a Jeffersonian democrat, a royalist, and an anarchist, who spend a nontrivial part of the book arguing over the proper political form of their new nation should adopt.
The point is, his work strikes me as exploratory more than polemical. It’s funny that the two books that best define the extremes people claim about him — Starship Troopers, often cited in calling him a hardnosed militarist, if not an outright fascist, and Stranger, which others use to call him a commie sex pervert — were written almost simultaneously!
To date, no comprehensive biography has been published, so it seems to me that anyone who didn’t know him personally but claims to know what he believed is just guessing.
I really enjoyed Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi. Evolution as such isn’t central, but genetic modification is a key technological component.
As an anime fan, I am insulted that creationists failed to recognize Hideaki Anno for his work on Neon Genesis Evangelion.
That’s blasphemous sci-fi right there.
How come you guys get all the hate?
Bill Dauphin @171, I doff my hat to you; your take expresses much my own opinion on (early) Heinlein.
He excelled at time-travel ideas (By His Bootstraps, —All You Zombies—) and even introduced technologies and vocabulary as Clarke did — (e.g. Waldo).
That said, I regretfully think his latter work (post-1980 ish) is basically Mary Sue wish-fulfilment and self-derivative.
The fundie problem with SciFi is that it so often postulates other worlds filled with other beings. Wasn’t the Universe created for humans? Doesn’t it revolve around us?
While they may realize that it is possible that the Universe contains non-terrestial life (it’s really really big out there!), they don’t want to think about what that implies. Other beings created by God or life arising by natural processes.
SciFi rubs their noses in unpleasant possibilities.
Twin-Skies, they know that if you’ll read stuff with pichurs written by a foruner that there’s already no hope for you. Japan is well-known to be either Godless or to have too many, depending. One of the reasons I live here — plenty of woo, but it’s not Goddist woo.
Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia Trillogy is set on a planet orbiting one star which is in an eliptical orbit around another, brighter star, and which has evolved life to cope with centuries long and extreme seasons.
Robert L Forward’s Dragons Egg features life which has evolve on a neutron star.
And Greg Bear’s Legacy features a world in which life has evolved according to Lamarckian rules.
No, the punchline was that God was real and they are us. Pantheistic solipsism, or something like that.
“Thou art God and I am God and all that groks is God”
There was an entry in the “Notebooks of Lazarus Long” that I think was a condensation of the notion:
“God split himself into a myriad parts that he might have friends. This may not be true, but it sounds good, and is no sillier than any other theology.”
In SiaSL, I think that the “Church of the New Revelation” (Fosterites) was a riff on the “Church of Latter-Day Saints”, possibly crossed with the “Church of Scientology”.
No, I don’t think that was it.
They talked about MVS’s planned death as though it was a deliberate stunt; they even used the carnival slang term “blow-off”.
I think the whole point was to excite greater public interest in the Church of All Worlds.
I seem to recall someone (and I want to say Vonnegut, though it may have been someone writing about Vonnegut or neither) once writing something to the effect of, “It is a great mistake to ascribe to an author the opinons of his characters.”
Harry Harrison is a vocal atheist.
‘Make Room! Make Room!’ is a call for contraception; when they filmed it as ‘Soylent Green’ they made it about cannibism so as not to offend anyone!
@Miki Z
Them foruners also aired the “Flying House” series a couple of decades back as well.
Regarding v.rosenzweig @57’s comment that Arthur C. Clarke was homosexual, it would be more correct to describe him as bisexual.
In an interview he had with Playboy, he spoke of having bisexual experiences and said that he sees everyone as being bisexual.
http://www.playboy.com/articles/arthur-clarke-playboy-interview/index.html?page=2
Asimov wrote a terrific essay around 1980 which I read (I think) in F&SF, The Armies of the Night, about superstition and other forms of bad thinking. I haven’t read Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World but I suspect the themes are similar.
… but now…the fundy kooks hate science fiction, too!
Move along now, no news here.
Here’s one I snagged from (ahem) the motherlode of the Pharyngula Random Quotes side feature:
@61 and 72,
I’ve read an elegant definition of SF vs. Fantasy: SF is anything known to be possible (or not impossible), whereas anything impossible, ie violations of natural laws, is Fantasy.
Based on this, FTL travel and going backward in time may arguably be either genre – I don’t know what physics currently says about them.
This definition is handy but ignores the tropes: Space travel or Time travel are almost always considered SF and a story about dragons would be Fantasy, except who can say dragons never existed?
Dragons never existed. There.
Okay, now prove it. :-)
I can see why they’d be concerned about SciFi. I’m surprised there was so much fuss over Harry Potter (Fantasy not SciFi). No one believes the Harry Potter stories could happen*, so where’s the problem?
Science Fiction on the other hand, that’s stuff that might be possible some day. That’s something to be concerned about.
*Except that Christians believe in witches, ghosts, etc, so maybe I’m all wrong about this.
Orson Scott Card’s Planet Called Treason is about former masters from a overthrown intergalactic government imprisoned in a planet by the new government. The planet lacks enough materials to build a spaceship to escape. Besides, each tribe divides the planet by countries and each tribe has evolved special trails, like regeneration, mind manipulation and time control.
So, in a sense, it supports evolution. :)
@#148:
This is an interesting link, if you want to track religion in SF, both writers and story/character references:
Adherents.com – Religions in Literature
(where literature appears to mostly refer to SF)
mazement@169 & Cat Ballou
Thats it! Sturgeon’s “The Golden Helix”! I salute you – you guys are great! I haven’t thought about that story in years. I have it in an anthology “Three Times Infinity”, the date given is 1954, just a year after Crick and Watson. Wow I had no idea it was that old – Sturgeon was incredible.
Another “ahead of their time” story (novel actually) that I like is “Dragon Island” by Jack Williamson, 1951 – he coined the term “genetic engineer” in that one.
“Sagan was a physicist”
Uh, PZ, Carl Sagan was an astronomer.
I’m surprised that 190 comments have gone by without someone pointing that out
He was sometimes also called an astrophysicist, but astrophysics is a branch of astronomy.
dsmccoy@192
Thank you! I was biting my tongue on that (educated as one myself way back when).
Its easy to get ‘m confused. Most college & universities either have a “physics and astronomy” department, or the astronomy program is part of the physics dept. See the breakdown in Minnesota for example. Cornell (where Sagan was) is one of few which have a separate department.
Huh. Interesting.
You might want to find the text and send it to Malcom Farmer (collecting earliest citations of words and phrases used in SF)
The earliest reference they have for “genetic engineer” is a story by Poul Anderson from 1954.
Although I see under “genetic engineering“, it appears to reference Dragon’s Island, and presumably Jack Williamson himself is being cited.
Ah! And I just checked the online OED itself for “genetic engineering”, and I see that Jack Williamson is cited — but he’s not the earliest one to use the phrase.
___________________________
OED citations for “genetic engineering”:
1949 Science 26 Aug. 208/2 In the future..genetic and eugenic counseling will become the foundation of human genetic engineering.
1951 J. WILLIAMSON Dragon’s Island xxiii. 180, I was expecting to find that mutation lab filled with some sort of apparatus for genetic engineering.
___________________________
OED citations for “genetic engineer”:
1954 Astounding Sci. Fiction Oct. 22/2 Meanwhile giant pulverizers were reducing barren stone and sand to fine particles which would be mixed with fertilizers to yield soil; and the genetic engineers were evolving still other strains of life which could provide a balanced ecology.
1966 New Scientist 23 June 762/3 The culture of embryos in the laboratory, destined to develop into adults whose physical and, possibly, intellectual characteristics had been chosen in advance by the genetic engineers.
Owlmirror:
I got that factoid from wikipedia-clearly Oxford trumps it! Pretty neat. I’ll try to track down the Science issue in the library tomorrow. From what I can find, the Poul Anderson story is “The Big Rain”, which I’ve not read. I will now! Thanks for the info!
JackC | January 6, 2010 2:29 PM:
The series really starts with Sundiver. Streaker and her crew are introduced in Startide Rising. Another aspect of the conflict is covered in The Uplift War. Brightness Reef can be enjoyed without the 3 earlier novels (which, in turn, can each be enjoyed alone), but if you go back and read those 3 novels, you’ll realize there’s more to Brightness Reef than you thought. There are many interesting background threads gradually developed across several novels.
(For those who haven’t read any of the books, despite the fact that David Brin was a working physicist while he wrote the first 3 novels, biology plays a strong role in all of them; the multi-galactic civilization in which the novels take place is built around the idea of sentient aliens making other aliens sentient.)
Yes. Zelazny wrote quite a number of good stories.
One I particularly like, although to say it has anything to do with evolution would be stretching things rather far, is A Night in the Lonesome October, which has The Elder Ones, werewolves, Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, and other assorted characters from the implied Victorian-era Europe (none of the characters is identified by name, but it’s obvious who most of them are). And the villain is the clergyman.
(According to Wikipedia, A Night in the Lonesome October was Zelazny’s last book.)
lewelly@196
Personally, I thought Startide Rising was one of the greatest books ever written. The whole Uplift War series is great.
If people are making a list of biological science fiction, there’s a whole bunch of bio-apocalypse novels I didn’t see mentioned. For starters, there’s Vitals and also Blood Music by Greg Baer, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Oh yeah, and Frank Herbert’s The White Plague.
Joan Slonczewski is well worth reading, my recommendation being totally unaffected by the fact that she was a colleague of mine when I was a visiting prof there and had several of her students in my classes. :)
If you go to the website you can almost see the stick up that guy’s ass at the top of the page.
I read Stranger in a Strange Land while living in San Francisco in the 1970s. The fundie nutbars in that book were called Fosterites, and I swear Heinlein knew about Foster City on the peninsula south of SF – it was a “planned community” of row after row of identical houses, all lined up with military precision, the most soulless (and therefore religious) place in the country from what I could tell.
Heinlein did live in the Santa Cruz area (at the same time I did, albeit I never (knowingly) met the man), so it’s entirely possible he knows of Foster city (no relation).
Notice that PZ invites comments on his writing, but for some odd reason Way of Life Ministries does not. Wonder why?
= = = = = =
One way to tell indoctrination from education: Does the person at the front of the room invite questions from the audience?
Before anything else, I think Heinlein was a dedicated advocate of Social Credit. I’ve just read “For Us, the Living” (a phrase from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address). It was Heinlein’s first novel, or rather a lecture wrapped in a sugar-coating of plot. It has rather more plot than another author’s
Like many SF books, it’s also a good source for scientific and anti-religious quotations.
One has to wonder, how do criticize Asimov from a fundumbmentalist POV and leave out “Last Question”, Heinlein and ignore “JOB”. How is it possible they can ignore Harry Harrison (The Streets of Ashkelon), Philip Jose Farmer (Riverworld), Douglas Adams, Clifford D Simak (City – Those evolved talking dogs) completey?
Sci-Fi more correctly begins in the early 19th century with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (how did they miss that one?)
Not only is this idiot an idiot, he’s a poorly read idiot.
Oh wow, I had forgotten about the flying house series. I was a bit too old to have been subjected to them by my parents, but they were a source of amusement. The current prime minister’s wife has visited venus on a UFO, blood type is considered a reliable indicator of personality, and construction will be delayed to not begin on inauspicious days, so Japan is not hostile to superstition. It still struggles with issues of sexism, racism, and other social problems, but the number of people looking to God to solve those problems is wonderfully small.
Perhaps we might send some polite mail to this address ([email protected])pointing out all the obvious stories he missed.
“Before anything else” meaning when he was relatively young.
Oh, it did also have an early sketch of what would become parts of his whole “Future History”.
I recall *facepalming* partway through because some of the political naïveté, among other things, was just too much.
Quagmire @24
He was not alien, he was a human adopted (no, he was nod abducted..) by alien, he learned their ways and in the earth had a cultural show with the human society.
I did not considered a “real” SF novel (i am fan for hard SF)… but it was an amusign allegory, of a society that create a cult from something they could not understand.
It was recomended to me by a friend who was a new age follower, ironically I interpreted it as a caricature of the new age fad, and how they adopted oriental religions, just because they could not understand them.
it was an amusing book, but probalby a bit outdated by now.
elnauhual,
Nah. You just have to grok it. :)
PS elnauhual, is your pseudonym related to ‘Nahual’?
(I read Castaneda when I was a lad; shame his books were woo.)
Yep, it’s called the bible.
I had noticed that too.
That brings Stephen King to mind, The Stand in particular but also his alien invasion stories such as The Mist and Dreamcatcher. You can also always count on King to have at least one crazy religious loon thrown in to catastrophically shake things up and move the plot forward.
I wonder how they feel about Zenna Henderson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenna_Henderson
She was a science fiction/fantasy author from the 50’s. Popular in her time as a short story writer, she is mostly forgotten today. She was a recovering Mormon. Her best known stories are about The People. Very religious aliens stranded on earth. They have supernatural powers and that sometimes gets them labeled as withces.
I think that’s offensive.
To SF writers.
I’m pretty sure it was Heinlein who said, “I hardly ever answer the door naked, unless it’s Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking. Then I fling it open and invite them all in for some whiskey and cigarettes.”
Star Trek: The Next Generation’s show titled “Who Watches the Watchers” had a magnificent rant by Captain Picard about his dread of inspiring a religion when a society of pre-scientific humanoids they were observing discovered their existence and wanted to worship them.
Vanilla creotards might hate SF but the IDiot variety could really like the beginning of H.P. Lovecraft’s novella “At the mountains of madness”: first the scientists of Miskatonic University find the equivalent of Haldane’s Precambrian rabbit in Antarctica, and latter conclusive evidence that all life on Earth was intelligently designed! But I don’t think they’ll enjoy the part when the nature of the “designer” is disclosed. Whoops!
Randomfactor and llewelly (sorry, I can’t type that without thinking I am talking to Kryton!) – Thanks for the reminders regarding the Uplift wars. I have read Sundiver and Brightness Reef – maybe 8 years ago – and remember that I was somewhat dissappointed that they were not more direct continuations of The Uplift War – which I found both fascinating and interesting.
But all were good and all stand on their own very well, and at least the first (Uplift). It also was my very first thought when Skeptical Scientist asked the question (way back at #36). I may have to go back and revisit them, as I am doing now with Heinlein and Pratchet.
Actually, there are quite a few listed in this thread that I may have to go back and re-read! I was recently at the local Borders and wow – Heinlein’s old stuff seems to be commanding a premium. Paperbacks of the likes of Starship and others were going for over $12 – where many similar-sized books by the likes of Clarke and others were about $8. WTF?
JC
Not the first time the religious right has targeted science fiction. Jerry Falwell, in the 1980s, was quoted in the news media, for example.
Joan Slonziewski is one SF writer who is a practicing biologist.
If you care to know more, search “Biology in SF” on Amazon for a listing of several books that relate.
Check the blog: Biology in Science FictionMy most exciting project: The Free Science Fiction with Biology directory sciencefictionbiology.blogspot.com
If you are interested to see what SF critics say about biology in sf, go to Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database (http://sffrd.library.tamu.edu/) and search “Biology” as a Subject. Under the listings BIOLOGY and BIOLOGY IN SF, there are about 125 articles and books listed.
A bit of research will reveal even more.
I loved Oryx and Crake and Handmaid’s Tale, even though they are a little depressing.
Zombie bio-apocalypse is coming back in vogue these days. One of the best I read is World War Z by Max Brooks – written like an history book pieced together with the interviews of survivors. It’s a really fun read. As realistic a zombie story as can be written.
I love threads like this. Helps me update my book shopping list.
Atwood apparently doesn’t consider her future set works as science fiction. I presume that’s because she thinks the genre is limited to lantern jawed heroes with ray guns mowing down moustache twirling alien villains.
How many cross sections of people can these wackaloons alienate?
Godspeed my creotard friends!
I think she realizes that they are dystopia, but she calls them “speculative fiction” – things that could really happen. But then most Sci-Fi (and most especially if you go back to the first Sci-Fi stories that were written), except the space-opera/comedy genre, is about things that could really happen. Extrapolation about technology and science and its effects on societies. Thus I think dystopia is a subset of Sci-Fi.
Apparently, she is of the opinion that Sci-Fi is about “talking squids in outer space.” (her words).
Oy! In a discussion about (in part) evolution themes in SF, how could I have forgotten my favorite Sturgeon story: “Microcosmic God” is the story of an inventor who develops these tiny ultra-fast-living creatures, and then forces them to evolve by manipulating the closed environment in which they live, ultimately turning them into a highly advanced civilization (with himself as their “god”) off whose technology he profits.
I’m sure this version of evolution is simplified/cherrypicked to the point of extreme bogosity, but it’s at least a story that takes the concept of evolutionary change as its core principle.
Owlmirror:
Yah. Many of the ideas in For Us, the Living are, in fact, recapitualted in some form or another in RAH’s later works, but to suggest that it reflects any sort of immutable core philosophy he held is teh bunkum. In fact, he seems to have been as “exploratory” in his own life as he was in his fiction: We’re talking about a guy who campaigned for Upton Sinclair when he ran for California governor (as a Democrat, but actually more resembling a bonafide socialist than any of the so-called “socialists” in the Democratic Party today; Sinclair had previously run for Congress as a declared Socialist) and campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964. Anyone who claims to know what Heinlein thought [a] had better specify what period of his life they’re talking about and [b] is probably just guessing even so. IMHO, of course.
Finally, re the distinction between SF and fantasy, I disagree that the inclusion of an “impossible” technology makes a work fantasy rather than SF. Instead, I think the distinction is one of approach: If the story takes a fundamentally rational, science-and-technology approach to its events, it’s SF; if it takes a supernatural approach, it’s fantasy. If a fictional universe operates according to physical laws, I accept it as science fictional, even if those physical laws deviate from the ones we know in the nonfictional universe. FTL travel (for example) that’s based on some plausibly rational mechanism is (by my lights) SF, even if that mechanism doesn’t exist in reality.
Of course, this leads to some blurring at the edges. Some critics, for instance, have suggested (though I disagree) that the Harry Potter books take a too-technological approach to “magic.” I once read a clever inversion of Clarke’s famous law WRT Harry Potter: Any sufficiently well described magic in indistinguishable from technology.
Another example is Larry Niven’s “The Magic Goes Away” and its related tales, in which magic is enabled by “mana,” a naturally occurring (and, critically to the stories, depletable) property that eventually gets completely exhausted, explaining why there are wizards in old stories but none in present-day real life. These stories are full of fantasy tropes — wizards and dragons, spells and sea monsters — but deals with them in an essentially science fictional way. It’s been a long time since I last read it, but IIRC Heinlein did much the same thing with his “Magic, Inc.,” which was collected in the same book as “Waldo,” the story in which he introduced… wait for it… waldoes.
Something in one of the above just made me think of Chalker’s Soul Rider series. Not exactly “biological” change I think, but pretty cool nevertheless.
Then again, that could just be my occupation.
I am pretty sure I have read other Chalker books – but can’t quite locate them – either in searches, or in my mind. That could be indicative of … something….
JC
Except that it’s all about artificial life and artificial selection.
It actually seems to me that this, and a lot of SF, is in support of “intelligent-design” scenarios — not because the writer necessarily believed it, but because it makes for interesting premises or stories.
In the Uplift universe, the whole point is that no species has reached technological sapience alone except for the ancient and semi-mythical founders [“semi-mythical” because they are for whatever reason no longer on the scene], and humanity (who are suspected to be an abandoned project rather than true self-starters). It’s “ID” at the highest level, rather than all the way down, but it’s still there.
Calculating God by Robert Sawyer, which posits that many of the things that are pointed to as being part of the anthropic principle are in fact the result of an intelligent entity making them that way. This entity is so very much not at all the God of any human religion. It is utterly indifferent to humans on an individual level, by and large. It has been raising intelligent species as a breeding project for its own purposes.
I just now remembered that Stranger in a Strange Land has Jubal pondering internally at some point that humanity just couldn’t have arisen as it is on its own (this may be more of a failure on Heinlein’s part), which, as we see in the end, is apparently a correct hunch — in that universe, at least.
Any others?
Owlmirror:
Hmmm… I’d say it’s more about artificial natural selection, in that the Neoterics aren’t specifically bred in the way that we breed dogs and horses. They adapt to environmental challenges… it’s just that their environment is artificial, and being artificially manipulated.
In any case, writing about artifical selection doesn’t inherently support creationism or ID: Plenty of evolutionists (I think of Jerry Coyne, whose Why Evolution Is True I recently listened to in audiobook format) have used the success of artificial selection as evidence that the underlying mechanisms of natural selection actually work. It’s hard for me to see the artificial “god” of Sturgeon’s story as any sort of argument for the existence of an actual, metaphysical god.
#98 – Orphan of Creation – Roger MacBride Allen http://tiny.cc/SrYgy
But it wasn’t just artificial selection; he designed and created the wossnames in the first place, didn’t he? (I forget if they were entirely de novo or if there was some source stock).
Oh, I don’t think it is, in that story. I’m just noting the ID concept being used.
MosesZD @ 128
Oh yeah, Gulliver’s Travels. Book 3 with the flying island of Laputa especially.
Overall that book is far more of a political satire then anything else but Swift certainly had at least half an eye looking at the application of science in society.
230 commens (so far) on SF & religion and no mention of P K Dick*? Shame on y’all!
I’m a lifelong atheist and I LOVE the completely insane and religious PK, but I (unlike Charlie Manson and some people here) HATE Heinlein. I don’t give a shit about any author’s beliefs, just give me a good story that doesn’t leave a nasty taste.
* If anyone with an interest in Dick hasn’t read Emmanuel Carrere’s biography of him (“I’m Alive And You Are Dead”) get it immediately. Hair raising, and almost weirder than his writings.
#225 Bill Dauphin, OM
The Sturgeon story: “Microcosmic God” sounds like the inspiration for “The Sandkings” in the new Outer Limits – starred Beau Bridges. Sigh, why are the revivals of these series usually so bad?
RTL (@232):
Oh, nice. At the risk of having someone call Godwin on me, this sounds like some sort of corollary to the “Hitler liked Darwin” argument, the general form being:
“Unlike [horrifying criminal madman] and you, [self-congratulatory first-person writer or speaker] don’t like [putatively controversial writer or thinker].”
To which I’m honor-bound to reply: Bite me, asshole!
Damn, I somehow hit “send” before finishing (and editing). I mean to add re Dick ~ mad as a hatter he may have been but “Eye In The Sky” has a really funny putdown of fundies.
Spoiler Alert!
In the novel six people fall into a Bevatron and end up in a shared consciousness where each in turn mentally creates the world they inhabit. They find that each person’s world is a nightmare for the others and the only escape is to kill the “creator”. The fundies creates a world where people have no genetalia and swearing means you get hit by lightning. A truly humanist novel, but that’s what I love about the man, his love for ordinary “little” people overcomes his religious hangups.
Damn, I somehow hit “send” before finishing (and editing). I mean to add re Dick ~ mad as a hatter he may have been but “Eye In The Sky” has a really funny putdown of fundies.
Spoiler Alert!
In the novel six people fall into a Bevatron and end up in a shared consciousness where each in turn mentally creates the world they inhabit. They find that each person’s world is a nightmare for the others and the only escape is to kill the “creator”. The fundie creates the sort of world where people have no genetalia and swearing means you get hit by lightning. A truly humanist novel, but that’s what I love about the man, his love for ordinary “little” people overcomes his religious hangups.
@ Bill #234
Er, it was a joke, a little tease. Relax. Anyway it was “SIASL” that Manson said he liked, not the fascistic (IMHO) “ST”.
Aploogies for double posts. I cancelled the first one imediately, but what’s the point of “cancel” if it doesn’t work?
The original Outer Limits did a version of this story also. I don’t remember the name of the episode nor whether Sturgeon was credited.
The story of the Sandkings was originally by G. R. R. Martin; the TV show obviously took liberties. I don’t think it really matches the Sturgeon story other than that the Sandkings move rapidly (they don’t have lifespans orders of magnitude faster, as in “Microcosmic Gods”)
Yes, the fallacy of guilt by association.
What’s particularly amusing is that Philip K. Dick is on the record for loving Heinlein …
In the introduction to the 1980 short story collection The Golden Man, Dick wrote: “Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him—one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don’t agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn’t raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to the haircut. He knows I’m a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love.”
(cited from Wiki, but I’ve seen it before elsewhere)
re 240:
[wow, totally messed up the html tags, let me fix it]
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch touched on the issue of “transubstantiation” and whether it is “real” or just a “belief” and whether it really matters which.
Owlmirror:
Neoterics
Yah, I can’t recall either whether they were artifically created or just artificially evolved. Either way, though, the reference to “god” in the title is purely metaphorical: The story itself is all hard SF, with no woo on offer.
RTL (@237):
So? Are the ; and ) keys on your keyboard broken?
Hrmph. Sorry if you think I overreacted, but I’ve been a Heinlein fan since middle school, and over the intervening three or four decades, I’ve got just a bit weary of suggestions that something more sinister than my (apparently poor) literary taste is at work. De gustibus non disputandum, of course, and you’re perfectly free to like (and hate) whoever and whatever you choose. Just please don’t equate me to figures of historical evil because I don’t hate the same stuff you do.
Here is the Outer Limits episode I was thinking of:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667852/
Season 2, Episode 8: Wolf 359
Star Trek trivia: “Wolf 359” was the name of the battle where the Borg destroyed most of Starfleet before Picard/Locutus was able to put them to sleep.
The Evolution Man‘s subject is evolution, that’s what the entire story is about. See my previous post @85. It’s not a serious story, but a comedy. Admittedly, the story’s not possible, so I suppose it’s more fantasy then science fiction. But it’s very much about evolution.
@ Bill, #242
Yes, and everyone who likes the “White Album”, (and “Helter Skelter” in particular), is also the equivalent of a leader of a mass-murder cult. Sheesh.
I didn’t put in a smiley because a) most people I know have a sense of humour (and proportion), and b) imho text smileys look stupid, and confusing, immediately before a closing bracket.
I have absolutely no desire to bite your, or anyone else’s, “ass”. I’m afraid you’ll have to find someone else if you like that sort of thing. :) <------- smiley @ Steve M, #240 So THAT'S what "TTSOPE" is about? That was one of the few Dick novels I never "got". Doesn't he have just the best ever titles though?
Real life trivia: Wolf 359 is a real star about 8 ly away. It’s a red dwarf that occasionally flares up.
When it flares up, the flare pulses decode to “smeghead!”.
OK, that last might be a lie.
RTL:
WRT Heinlein (as with the Hitler/Darwin thing), that sort of invidious association is made seriously far to often for anyone to just assume “everyone knows it’s a joke” (which is always a risky assumption in any case, especially in a text-based medium devoid of nonverbal cues). Say out loud that you’re a Heinlein fan in any sizable group of people who are not all also Heinlein fans, and I guarrantee someone who is not joking will quickly call you a fascist… and then moments later, someone else (probably someone who actually is a fascist) will call you a goddam pinko sex freak… and then both of them will call you a misogynist. (There are, IMHO, valid responses to these accusations, but unless they occur in the context of a class or book club, a lengthy literary disquisition is usually not welcome.)
It’s not that I particulary care about these opinions, but occasionally, having to not care gets a bit wearying.
BTW, not for nothin’, but who said anything about “ass”? Go back and check, ‘kay?
Speaking of books with evolution, what about Terry Pratchett’s The Last Continent? The wizards of the Unseen University meet the god of evolution himself! Of course, the god of evolution doesn’t have and doesn’t want any worshippers, and even professes to be an atheist. (“Don’t go around believing in gods – you’ll only encourage ’em!”)
OK, so it’s fantasy and not SF, and in no way even close to “hard” SF…
Ooh, I’ll take “More SF trivia” for $500.
Who is Bender in Futurama, who told humans to bite his shiny metal…?
@ Bill, #247
Ah, can’t find my glasses today and missed the comma. I misread “bite me, asshole” as the common English dialect usage of “me” as the possessive “my”, giving “bite my asshole”. (I still don’t want to bite you anywhere on your body, sorry).
So you were attempting to be more insulting to me than I thought? That makes this ridiculous dialogue between us even sillier, and funnier. Don’t you think you are overreacting just a little?
Sorry you’ve had so much stress in your life because of superficial literary critics. (Your taste in the people you mix with is obviously as poor as your literary taste ;)). See how stupid that smiley looks?
Mebbe so; it happens to the best of us on occasion, and perhaps I’ll be feeling cheerier tomorrow.
OTOH, tossing out gratuitous drive-by insults1 is toxic to the discourse here, even if you do retroactively claim you were just joking. And this business of guilt-by-association-with-murderous-madmen really is something we’re too familiar with here (i.e., from the ubiquitous anti-Darwin association) for it to really be funny, regardless of your intent… so I’m not really sorry I called you on it.
1 Note that I have no objection to insults per se, if they’re at least arguably deserved and have some vaguely meaningful purpose in the conversation.
Bill Dauphin and Owlmirror et. al.
Microcosmic God, even if it was artificial selection, was truely awesome. Sturgeon was SO far ahead of his time. However, to look for natural evolution, one need look no farther than his novel More Than Human about the appearance of the next step in human evolution. And THAT book was epic – a must read for anyone.
aratina cage@214
I actually left The Stand off the list after some thought because the superflu only shows up at the beginning and most of the story is the good v. evil battle afterwards. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the story – its my favorite book by King. I recall the Baer books getting more into the microbiology & biochemistry.
timgueguen@222
I guess that puts Atwood kind of in the same group as Vonnegut. Personally, I subscribe to a defining test of science fiction that one of my friends in college attributed to Sturgeon:
If you remove the science element, you can’t have the story.
I like that – it marginalizes space operas like Star Wars and includes things like the movie “Twister” (the goal of the story was to place the scientific instrumentation INTO the tornado).
I like the idea of making science the critical component.
You guys are all great – great thread!
Hypatia’s Daughter@233
Yeah I thought that was a shameful and bad ripoff of MG too.
SteveM@238,243
That episode terrified me as kid (many of the old OL episodes did,actually).
and be advised: Hulu.com has season 1 of the old series
http://www.hulu.com/the-outer-limits-original?c=Science-Fiction
(hopefully they’ll add season 2).
and a lot of the remake too:
http://www.hulu.com/outer-limits?c=Science-Fiction
@ Bill, #251
Ok, that, I suppose, illustrates the difference between us. You imagine insults from me where none are intended, and I fail to spot your actual insult to me. Is life as an atheist in the USA so much more difficult than in the UK that a bit of paranoia is required for you to survive?
Interesting, your use of “drive-by” :). By that should I presume you are attempting to further insult me? Are you also implying that, as I am not a regular poster here (although I come here every day or two to read) I must hence behave quite differently from those who (another tease) seem to live here 24/7?
Sorry, I thought a free-thinking, intelligent atheist could take the occasional leg-pull (and without it having to be signposted as such). My mistake.
You say you’re fed up with being told that some of Heinlein’s work has an unpleasant, quasi-religious, militaristic, mysoginistic etc tone*, but many others brought that up long before I posted and you didn’t respond to them at all. I suppose they were “regulars”?
* Any author (eg Heinlein in “Troopers”, Tolkein and his orcs, or the Babble and the Philistines) that depicts the “enemy” as an individually indistinguishable, homogenous “evil” horde is, imho, half way to fascism. (“They all look the same to me”). Plus it’s bad art. One dimensional. Even the ancients realised that. Grendel and his family in “Beowulf” are not mindless, motivationless cyphers but thinking beings with personal histories and reasons for their actions. “The Iliad” doesn’t have Saintly Greeks V Evil Trojans. It would be boring if it did.
I’ve never been able to get into Dick. Lots of people say he’s a great writer but he’s not to my taste. I’ve started several of Dick’s novels. I’ve never got past page 40 in any of them.
My nephew is not only a meteorologist, he’s a tornado chaser. He loathes Twister.
The fundie Baptist info svc. I just laughed and laughed…
My next novel, entitled Trenekis of Hiera, due out before summer 2010, addresses this issue.
I dismantle Mr. Cloud’s argument that his genocidal god is needed, wanted or necessary in anyone’s life.
‘Tis Himself, OM
THAT I can understand. The science in science fiction is often bad – and that goes double if its in your field!
I see Stephen Baxter was mentioned above, but not his Evolution novel???
I’ve read seveal P K Dick novels, and I think all of the 5 volume collected short stories. Thanks for reminding me of him.
The thing is, I’d kindof pushed him to the back of my mind because he’s a bit depressing and I’m getting a bit depressed about the state of the world.
So anyway, evolution – I think several of the short stories involve human made war machines evolving intelligence and getting very good at killing people, including humans. They made a film out of one of them…
(I think they’ve made 5 films out of PK Dick short stories and novels by now. Or is it 6? Surely its some sort of record?)
PZ shame on you! Don’t you know that SF is konglish (i.e words or phrases that Koreans use that are actually incorrect English)? Where did you get SF from, one of your Asian grad. assistants?
See for example:
http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/tesol/konglish-a-to-z/
elzoog, when I was a lad, I and other hard-core science-fiction fans spoke of SF. ‘Sci-fi’ was pabulum dressed-up as SF, and we sneered at that term and its instantiations.
From Wikipedia:
John Morales: I was being facetious. I have told other English teachers that SF is not necessarily konglish, but have had a hard time convincing them.
A question though. In normal conversation when you are speaking (and not typing on a blog) would you say SF (i.e. “ess eff”)? Or would you say “science fiction” or “sci. fi.”?
elzoog, I generally say “science fiction”. SF I typically reserve for written media, but yes if I use the term for whatever reason it’s “ess eff”.
PS re: I was being facetious.
Oh good! I was hoping you were. :)
Of course, it’s a trivial issue — but as I said, when I was a lad it a kind of nerd code, our little shibboleth.
John Morales: Yes, on that basis I try to tell other English teachers in Korea that SF is not wrong (although admittedly less common). My reason for saying it’s not wrong is that intelligent native speakers use it. Although native speakers might use the word “ain’t”, in general, intelligent native speakers don’t use it.
I posted here telling PZ Myers that he is using konglish as a way of showing up how silly it is to correct people based on your own limited understanding of something. Most teachers in Korea think SF is incorrect because most people in the regular world would use “sci. fi.” instead. Because they never encountered SF in their own limited experience, they think SF is wrong. So I answer that by saying “shame on you” to PZ Myers since PZ Myers has probably never been to Korea. And it’s unlikely he has ever been that much influenced by an Asian grad. assistant to the point of using SF instead of sci. fi.
So, I hope that PZ Myers realizes that he is using konglish and corrects himself. After all, if he uses SF, what’s to stop him from using “hand phone” (instead of cell phone), “eye shopping” (instead of window shopping) or “arbeit” (for part time job)?
@ Randomfactor #70:
A.C.Clarke’s The Star is certainly not pro religious. Indeed, it strikes me as powerfully anti religious! After all, it’s the story of a deeply pious fellow whose faith gets severely shaken because he has looked through the telescope…
(You’re right about The Nine Billion Names of God, though.)
Negentropyeater #91:
Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516) also includes a trip to the moon.
Admittedly, that’s a fantasy episode in a comic romantic epic poem. Still, given the influence of the work, this may well be the literary ur-trip to the moon.
RTL:
One last try…
I suppose it’s inevitable that you would take it that way, but I prefer to think of it as criticism rather than insult. Indeed, the distinction between the two is primarily what I’ve been trying to get at.
No, you misunderstand. I say I’m fed up with being told that I am “unpleasant, quasi-religious, militaristic, mysoginistic[sic] etc” simply because I enjoy reading a particular author.
My degrees are in English Literature; arguing over the merits and faults of authors (including the faults of my favorite authors) is entertainment for me. I have no objection to sparring over the ideas contained in fiction; in fact I enjoy and encourage that. But surely you can spot the difference between critically engaging an author’s ideas, on the one hand, and suggesting, in a parenthetical aside, that people who “like” Heinlein’s work are somehow akin to a famously crazy murderer. Your comment was neither serious nor necessary to the ongoing conversation (ergo gratuitous); it was made in an oblique way, so as to discourage “return fire” (ergo drive-by); and it was directed at people rather than ideas (ergo insult). Thus, my characterization of it as a “gratuitous drive-by insult” was precise, and I stand by it.
My reaction has nothing to do with disagreeing with you about Heinlein, nor does it have anything to do with you not being a “regular.” Rather, it’s that I found your mode of discourse toxic, and your ex post facto assertion that you thought you’d get a laugh (regarding which I take you at your word) doesn’t really make it any better.
There are good, interesting, thought-provoking arguments to be had about whether Starship Troopers is militaristic, or sexist, or racist… but simply saying “yeah, you and Charlie Manson” over your shoulder on your way to kissing Phil Dick’s ass doesn’t get at any of those interesting ideas, does it?
Alwimo #182,
I gave myself a little pat on the back after reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Playboy interview because I was thinking the same thing about immortality on the Mr. Wiggles is happy thread:
And perhaps non-stamp-collecting is a very apt analogy to atheism for people like Arthur C. Clarke. He says:
elzoog (@various):
I don’t think SF is really konglish at all. I see that it’s on the word list you linked to, but apparently only because of the variant pronunciation — esu-efu versus ess-eff — but the same would be true of many English-language initialisms, owing to the two languages’ different sound sets, so it seems incorrect to single out SF in this way. In a similar manner, loan-words from English often are pronounced in a distinctly Korean way (e.g., taxi ends up sounding like taek-shi, and that’s also how it’s transliterated into Hangul), but that’s essentially just a matter of accent, not the linguistic mash-up that truly deserves the term konglish.
Also, while it’s admittedly been more than two decades since I was an English teacher in Seoul, I can’t recall any of my students ever using the term SF. OTOH, it’s been in common usage among SF fans as long as I’ve been one (i.e., just short of four decades). During the height of the New Wave, when SF authors were trying to escape the genre “ghetto,” and to deal with less explicitly technological themes, there was an attempt to rebrand SF as meaning speculative fiction… but that doesn’t seem to have ever really stuck. Sci-Fi has always been somewhat disdained by authors and hardcore fans, and using the term is considered by some insiders to be the mark of a rube. Others use the term to distinguish media “sci-fi” from literary “SF.”
Let’s hope C.S.Lewis doesn’t get stricken off the read list. Oh, hang on, he was undecided on the issue… (recognized that he was unqualified to comment on the biology)
Hadn’t you heard? As long as you call it “Syfy”, it’s all hip and cool again.
Well its all the old formula and a stupid desperate appeal to the scared and subjugate flock.
The message is in two parts
– Be scared or SCI FI ( fear used for control)
– Give us your money ( note the PayPal line)
The crippling carry on by churches and other renegade fear merchants cashing in, is not new but their age of domination is passing as education and better communication across the world becomes free to more people.
The disgusting wealth of the minority supports any church initiative to divide and keep people scared and confused.
Well its all the old formula and a stupid desperate appeal to the scared and subjugate flock.
The message is in two parts
– Be scared or SCI FI ( fear used for control)
– Give us your money ( note the PayPal line)
The crippling carry on by churches and other renegade fear merchants cashing in, is not new but their age of domination is passing as education and better communication across the world becomes free to more people.
The disgusting wealth of the minority supports any church initiative to divide and keep people scared and confused.
Well its all the old formula and a stupid desperate appeal to the scared and subjugate flock.
The message is in two parts
– Be scared or SCI FI ( fear used for control)
– Give us your money ( note the PayPal line)
The crippling carry on by churches and other renegade fear merchants cashing in, is not new but their age of domination is passing as education and better communication across the world becomes free to more people.
The disgusting wealth of the minority supports any church initiative to divide and keep people scared and confused.
Well its all the old formula and a stupid desperate appeal to the scared and subjugate flock.
The message is in two parts
– Be scared or SCI FI ( fear used for control)
– Give us your money ( note the PayPal line)
The crippling carry on by churches and other renegade fear merchants cashing in, is not new but their age of domination is passing as education and better communication across the world becomes free to more people.
The disgusting wealth of the minority supports any church initiative to divide and keep people scared and confused.