science fiction

The Month in Reviews: September 2015

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This month’s list of books reviewed clearly is a reflection of my (odd, eclectic?) reading tastes. A good dose of biblical studies and theology with books on Mark 13 and Ephesians, universalism and substitution. Books on restoration and renaissance–topics of interest for one who hasn’t given up on the possibility of Christians having a truly redemptive influence in society. There’s historical fiction, a book by an environmental writer and the late Oliver Sacks on music and sci-fi based on Mars. In case you missed any reviews in September, they are all here, with links to the full review and publication information in the book title:

AgincourtAgincourt, Bernard Cornwell. Through the eyes of Nicholas Hook, we see the massacre of Soissons, and the English invasion of France under Henry V including the frustrating seige of Harfleur, and the miraculous victory at Agincourt.

Evangelical UniversalistThe Evangelical Universalist, Gregory MacDonald. This book provides the biblical, philosophical and theological arguments for why the view that all will finally be saved is consistent with evangelical theology and also includes additional appendices responding to issues raised since the book’s first edition.

Wild IdeaWild Idea: Buffalo & Family in a Difficult Land. Dan O’Brien. Dan O’Brien continues the story begun in Buffalo for the Broken Heart, describing the growth of the Wild Idea Buffalo Company, the move to a new ranch, and the challenges of a maturing daughter, an aging friend, and the struggle to build an ethical and ecologically sound business on the ever-challenging Great Plains.

Jesus the Temple and the Coming of the Son of ManJesus, The Temple, and the Coming Son of Man, Robert H. Stein. This commentary on Mark 13 sorts through the complex interpretive issues concerning the fall of the temple, apocalyptic events, and the return of the Son of Man.

Restoring All ThingsRestoring All Things, Warren Cole Smith and John Stonestreet. This book narrates the impact of mediating institutions and efforts by Christians in bringing restoration into some of the most challenging situations faced by our society today.

Drama of EphesiansThe Drama of Ephesians, Timothy G. Gombis. This book approaches Ephesians as a drama of the victory of God over cosmic powers in opposition to Him through Christ and through a redeemed and transformed church that acts as Divine Warrior. I also posted an interview with the author here.

MusicophiliaMusicophilia, Oliver Sacks. Renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks chronicles the neuroscience of music–the various ways music affects the brain, and the unusual effects of various neurological conditions on our perception, performance, and experience of music.

RenaissanceRenaissance, Os Guinness. Against the doomsayers speaking of the darkness of the times, Guinness remains hopeful for a spiritual and cultural renaissance in the west, rooted in the power of the Christian message; and he charts the tasks of faithful witness that precede this and the contours of such a renaissance.

Reading C.S. LewisReading C.S. Lewis: A Commentary, Wesley Cort. This book provides an undogmatic look at C.S. Lewis, considering the influences upon his life and writing, and a commentary on Lewis’s major Christian works.

Defending SubstitutionDefending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul, Simon Gathercole. Gathercole defends the oft-maligned doctrine of substitutionary atonement, responding to the criticisms and challenges raised and demonstrating from key biblical texts that it can be argued from scripture that “Christ died in our place.”

The MartianThe Martian. Andy Weir. Mark Watney, left by his crew for dead on Mars, survived a potentially fatal incident and must find a way to survive on Mars alone until he can be rescued.

Beyond AwkwardBeyond Awkward: When Talking About Jesus is Outside Your Comfort Zone, Beau Crosetto. Talking about faith with others often feels awkward and is why most of us don’t do it. This book explores how to press through that awkwardness to important and life-changing conversations.

Best Book of the Month: I rarely choose a religious book as my best book of the month but I found The Drama of Ephesians by Timothy Gombis particularly compelling for its fresh perspective on Ephesians that highlights the spiritual warfare aspect of the book. I also appreciated that Gombis combined good scholarship with clear writing that could be grasped by any thoughtful student of the Bible and applications set in the life of real congregations.

Best Quote of the Month: This is from The Drama of Ephesians:

“In the logic of Ephesians, the two groups are not the saved and the damned, the in and the out. The two groups are those whom God is transforming by his love and those to whom the first group is sent in order to embody God’s love” (p. 77).

Among the things I’m currently reading are a couple books on environmentally sustainable agriculture by an early exponent, Ohio novelist Louis Bromfield, a book seeking to reconcile the philosophy of Ayn Rand and Christianity, a thoughtful work on ways we abuse scripture, and an account of Robert Kennedy’s last campaign by David Halberstam. Last month,I mentioned the Zaleskis’ book on the Inklings. I hope to start it before the month is out. Whether I do or not, isn’t part of the fun of reading the anticipation? At any rate, happy reading!

Review: Old Man’s War

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old mans war“Growing old isn’t for sissies.” Usually this is the complaint of those who simultaneously battle the bureaucracy that doles out benefits to elders and struggle with a body that served well for decades until reflexes slow, joints ache, teeth crack, and a myriad of other things start going wrong. Meanwhile there are other losses–meaningful work, and sometimes those nearest to one that you’ve shared a life with.

Imagine signing up to be in the infantry at age 75. If enlistment came with the promise of a rejuvenated body and you are facing the battles and losses I’ve described, you might just enlist–even if you’ve no clue what lies ahead. This is the premise of John Scalzi’s first science fiction novel and the first of a four part series based on this premise.

John Perry and his wife Kathy both agreed to sign on at age 65. Only Kathy didn’t make it. At 75, the enlistment age in the Colonial Defense Force, John is inducted, which means leaving Earth never to return. He will fight to defend colonists from Earth on distant planets. And so begins a journey of discovering a cosmos he could never imagine, and that what you can’t imagine could kill you before you knew what hit you.

But the first surprise is a strange and delightful one. Enlistees are not repaired and rejuvenated versions of their former selves, but in fact transferred into new green versions of themselves in the prime of life cloned from their genetic material with significant biological and robotic enhancements including an onboard computer wired into their brains, aptly named BrainPal. Of course these people quickly discover that they are sexual athletes with incredible endurance who are incapable of getting pregnant.

Things get serious quickly enough with a drill sergeant that fits all the stereotypes. Recruits are told that most of them will be dead in two years. Survival depends on recognizing what can kill you before it does, including in one instance an intelligent and malevolent slime. Somehow Perry manages to lead a squadron and gain Ruiz’ reluctant admiration, a recurring pattern as he exercises quick, out of the box thinking in devising a novel firing solution in a battle against the Consu and even manages to be the lone survivor (barely) at Coral when the Rraey succeed at destroying a whole force by being able to pinpoint where ships will appear when they come out of skip drive.

As he loses friends and survives by killing many others he encounters the war weariness and questions faced by every infantryman. But in his near death experience on Coral, he encounters something else when rescued by Special Forces, the mysterious “Ghost Brigades” who fight separately from the rest of the Colonial Defense Force. One of the rescuers has the reconstituted body of his wife Kathy. The intersection of these two lives will determine the outcome of the war with the Rraey, who have become their most dangerous enemy.

In a first novel, John Scalzi manages to combine the exploration of perennial themes such as the Faustian bargains we make to extend our lives, the justifications of war and the toll fighting takes on even the victors. Scalzi portrays the human race’s perpetual propensity to colonize, to take from others, and justify this as defense. He weds this to an imaginative exploration of the implications of biotechnological developments already foreshadowed in university labs. In a plot that literally jumps to parallel universes, Scalzi holds up a mirror that makes us take a look at our own “brave new world.”

What If We Sent Old Men To War?

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That’s the premise of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s Warold mans war, which I’ve just started reading. Scalzi envisions a time in the future when people from earth have colonized distant world, and presumably have encroached on the space of others, precipitating wars in space. The colonists, whose technology is far in advance of those living here on earth have a unique recruiting strategy. You cannot enlist until you are 75, and if you do, you can never return to earth. You have died and gone to the heavens. Why then do people do it? It is because the colonists have figured out how to rejuvenate the old bodies who have nothing and maybe no one left on earth to live for and are tired of living in old bodies.

I’m really liking the book so far, and not just because of the author’s Ohio roots and references. It raises all kinds of questions for me. Will old people, who become more their own people as the years go by, be able to live under military discipline? Will the reprieve from aging make them more or less courageous in the face of death? Will they have more or less to lose? Can we have the potential for endless life without entering into some form of Faustian bargain?

Why would a government want old people in young bodies to fight it wars–all kinds of people, not just the intelligent ones? I could see that this might be a great alternative to Social Security and Medicare.

What is more interesting yet is that this explores the fear so many of us have in growing old. Sooner or later, we face the losing battle of failing bodies or minds. Better to risk a battle one might win than battles that we always in the end lose, and often in great pain, or in utter embarrassment to our sense of dignity.

The question this book raises above all is whether there might be good reasons to warrant the choice not to pursue a rejuvenated body–to accept the indignities of physical or mental decline with grace. Grace indeed, I wonder, the grace that in John Newton’s words “has brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home.”

I’m looking forward to seeing how Scalzi works this out. At any rate it is a fascinating alternative to old men and women deciding to send young men and women to fight and to die. Should not the old die for the young?

I’ll keep you posted.

Review: American Gods

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American Gods
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

American Gods is a hard-to-classify book. Most consider it sci-fi or fantasy and the book has won Hugo and Nebula awards often given to books in these genres. Yet Gaiman himself described the book as “a thriller, and a murder mystery, and a romance, and a road trip” as well as a book about the immigrant experience.

Whatever this book is, and I think it could be argued to be all these things, I was enthralled. I don’t read many in this genre but numerous friends had talked about it so I decided to take the plunge.

The narrative begins with Shadow, the central character in the story, as he is about to get out of prison. He is released early because of the death of his wife Laura in an auto accident that occurred with a mutual friend with whom she was sexually involved at the moment of the accident. As he absorbs this news and his changed future, he meets up with “Wednesday” who wants to hire him as a personal assistant and driver. He’s given a gold coin, which he tosses on his wife’s grave, and because of this she becomes one of the walking dead, dogging his steps through the narrative, and rescuing him at several points including the climactic episodes of the story.

Eventually Shadow discovers that Wednesday is a god (Odin) and traveling about the country to mobilize other gods in a battle between the ancient gods that came to America with the various immigrant peoples and the modern, high tech, material gods of the culture. None of the ancient gods seem particularly noble and Wednesday makes his way through petty “grifting” where he tricks people out of their money. Much of the first half of the narrative is a series of roadtrips around Midwestern America, and a few other locations, enlisting the gods in the coming battle. Eventually, Shadow is hidden away under the name Mike Ainsel in an idyllic community in northern Wisconsin by the name of Lakeside, idyllic except for the fact that a child goes missing from the town every year and is never found.

Part of the reason Shadow is hidden away is that we discover that he is considered important to both factions of this war for a reason he does not understand. Laura rescues him from one attempt of the moderns to seize him. Eventually he is arrested and then rescued as war clouds gather. Wednesday is killed and Shadow fulfills a commitment to keep vigil over his body even though it means his probable death. Action moves between physical reality, dream sequences, and the “backstage” reality as events move toward the climactic battle in a tourist location, Rock City (a real place).

This is definitely an “adult” book in terms of violence and sexuality. Unless there is more to such books than this, I’m not terribly interested. There was to this book. It explores the American landscape and the replacement of the spirituality of the various immigrants to the country with gods of technology, machines, media (one god bears this name) and more. It also explores the dark realities that often lurk behind our ideals and idyllic representations of American life–sordid and violent realities that belie the image we would project of ourselves.

Most fascinating to me was the character of Shadow. Gaiman only references Christianity in passing in an overt sense yet Shadow is one of the most striking “Christ figures” I’ve come across in contemporary literature. He is central to the conflict and yet hidden. He has a surprising identity (which I won’t give away). He embraces motifs of death and sacrifice (he is in fact hung on a tree at one point) and a mediatorial role on which everything comes to hinge in the plot.

This is definitely a “long read”. The edition I read 12,000 words longer than earlier editions and the author’s preferred edition. I could be wrong, but I think this work will be around for some time as an exploration of the American mythos and part of our cultural parlance. Not bad for the work of a U.K citizen, as Gaiman is!

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A Review of Stanislaw Lem’s Tales of Pirx the Pilot

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Pirx

Stanislaw Lem is a Polish science fiction writer who died in 2006.  His writing is set in a futuristic, space travel setting but really explores the inner world of his characters.  With Pirx, he explores in separate chapters that could more or less stand alone, phenomenon of lateral thinking and problem solving, sensory deprivation, the fatal mental errors we can make in stress situations, our urges to avoid anything associated with death and dying (Albatross), and the ways we (projected in this case upon a robot, Terminus) we carry around bits and snatches of significant dialogues.  I don’t know if there is a category of psychological fiction but Lem’s work might fit here.  One also feels at times that he writes with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.  There is a zany or quirky element to his stories that keep readers engaged.

Didn’t really say what I thought about this book when I first posted this, probably because I’m still trying to make up my mind about Lem.  I guess I find him strangely fascinating at times, and just odd at others.  But I have several more titles of his on my Kindle and so will probably come back to him and some point in the not too distant future.