This won’t be as argumentative as the last time I linked to a Mind Meld, but there’s some argumentation here.

The question posed in the Mind Meld is this: “Is science fiction antithetical to religion?”

There are some good answers behind that link. (Also some long answers.) They expose, among other things, the vagueness of that question. You can take it in the sense implied by the lines that precede it: “Two of the most highly regarded fantasy authors – Tolkien and Lewis – were also Christians, whereas the fathers of science fiction were atheists, and SF itself, it could be argued, grew out of Darwinism and other notions of deep time.” In that sense, it seems to be asking whether you can write science fiction while also being religious, and the subsequent answers have comprehensively blown the “SF was founded by atheists” premise out of the water.

But there are other aspects to the question. Are the aims of science fiction incompatible with those of religion? That depends on how one views the aims of both; there are both “yes” and “no” answers at various points in the discussion. Adam Roberts almost seems to equate SF with Protestantism and fantasy with Catholicism. ??? James Wallace Harris’s answer reminds me uncomfortably of the things I was ranting about in “Frazer’s Goddamned Golden Bough” — that you can create that kind of pseudo-evolutionary path for human thought. (At least he allows for the transgression of his categories, instead of assuming we outgrow the older ones.) Several people touch on fundamentalism versus other approaches to religion, and how that relates to religious thought.

Almost all of them, though, assume “religion” = “Christianity” — or, at most, the Religions of the Book. On the one hand, this is fair; most of our genre tradition has been written by Westerners. On the other hand, if we want to talk about the compatibility or lack thereof between SF and religion, we should address the existence of other faiths. John C. Wright’s the only one who really does so (in an answer that is also the longest there, since he discusses three or four novels along the way). He talks about Ursula LeGuin’s Taoist influences and the Zen Buddhism in Spider Robinson’s Variable Star, and speculates interestingly on our different attitudes toward Eastern and Western religion. I’d love to see more discussion of that, especially since I disagree with Wright that swapping out a Buddhist for a Catholic priest is a change of “one detail.” But that kind of discussion requires a good working knowledge of Buddhist theology (or Hindu, or any other non-Book religion) that I don’t pretend to have. (Heck, I wouldn’t even claim my Catholic theology is up to snuff.)

Interesting stuff any way you slice it. And it successfully got my brain to work shortly after waking up, which is in its own right nearly a miracle sufficient to prove the existence of God.

back.

It was hailing when I left Indiana, and snowing when I returned.

And then I walked into the house to find our thermostat is busted.

We are not amused.

Greetings from sunny Florida!

Yesterday I went swimming, then sat out in the sun to let my hair dry. *^_^*

I do so love ICFA. Even if it makes me get up at 7:30 in the morning to do a reading (and many thanks to the few hardy souls who came by to listen to us). Anyway, by a lovely coincidence of fate, my reading fell on the same day that I was planning to post my next excerpt from Midnight Never Come.

That’s the second part of what I read (and be sure to click past that initial page; there’s more to be had). The first part was, of course, the prologue; for the third part, you’ll have to wait a while, as it won’t be posted until shortly before the book comes out.

Which is far too long from now. <sigh>

AAL Book Report: The Great Plague, A. Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C. Moote

The full title of this book is The Great Plague: The Story of London’s Most Deadly Year. And boy, is that some truth in advertising. For those not aware, in 1665 — the year before central London burned down in the Great Fire — approximately one hundred thousand of the London metropolis’ five hundred thousand inhabitants died in a horrifying plague epidemic. At the height of the outbreak, the week of September 12th-19th, between one and two thousand people were dying every day.

Not cheerful stuff, but very, very interesting. And I can’t imagine a better pair of people to write about it than this husband-and-wife team. A. Lloyd Moote is a political historian with a seventeenth-century focus whose interests eventually broadened to include socio-cultural history; Dorothy C. Moote is a microbiologist with a special interest in disease epidemics. Is that perfect or what?

Even better is the approach they took. The epilogue describes the eventual disappearance of bubonic plague from Europe (but its persistence in Asia), through the early days of microbiology and the discovery of the Yersinia pestis that causes the plague, to modern scientific interpretation of just what was going on in the various plague pandemics broadly and the 1665 outbreak specifically. But that’s the epilogue: for the body of the book, while they apply historical methods to understanding the events of 1665, they restrict their medical discussion to the views and understandings of the period. Which is exactly what I need. I like knowing the modern explanation, but I’m glad I don’t have to strip it out to write from the contemporary perspective.

The book isn’t flawless. It somewhat awkwardly combines a chronological approach with a topic-centered one, dropping in discussions of the medical community’s response or the crash of London’s economy at the points in the plague’s progress that they seem most relevant. (The economy, for example, gets its moment in the spotlight around the description of October, when it hit its nadir.) Possibly as a consequence, it tends to repeat certain things in places, like telling me about how John Allin in St. Olave Southwark was a dissenting minister, or the Guildhall manipulated economic mechanisms to try and keep parish relief afloat, or Pepys was profiteering off his naval contracts in a kind of despicable way while a third of the population that didn’t or couldn’t flee the city dropped dead around him. (He started the year with £1300 in net worth, and ended with £4400, and very proud he was of it, too.) I also could have used more attempt to recreate the experience of living in London while everything fell apart, though I recognize that such descriptions weren’t really what the Mootes were aiming for. Defoe, I assume, will be the place to look for that. But overall, very good indeed.

Four more books arrived today. The research marathon has begun . . . .

linky

This month on SF Novelists, I speculate as to what makes writers dream of movie adaptations, in “Stars in Our Eyes.”

Also, Daryl Gregory had a fantastic post yesterday about the process by which book covers happen, using the example of his own upcoming novel Pandemonium.

While I’m at it, too, I should mention that I when I posted recommending Goblin Quest by Jim Hines, I was under the mistaken impression that Goblin War, the third book of the series, was already out. It just hit the shelves recently, so now’s a good time to go looking if you were thinking of picking the series up. (Maria Snyder also just put out Fire Study, the third book in the series with Poison Study, so there are follow-ups to more than one of my recommendations.)

aaaand . . . . switch!

What’s obnoxious: writing 1761 words of a story and then deciding they really needed to be in first person, rather than third.

What would have been more obnoxious: making that decision even later, so I had to re-do even more of it.

(This is not, for the record, And Ashes Lie. It’s something else that I’ll talk about later.)

AAL Book Reports: Restoration London, Liza Picard; By Permission of Heaven, Adrian Tinniswood

My book reports for Midnight Never Come proved useful to me in the longer run, so you’ll have to put up with them again, I’m afraid. I won’t motivate myself to write them if I can’t pretend they don’t have an audience.

Restoration London, by Liza Picard

What can I say? It’s Liza Picard. Who is awesome. She does a great job of presenting the details of lived experience in historical London, and her commitment to primary sources is great. I also love that she considers things like home decoration and female health just as interesting (or moreso) than the usual topics of history. I don’t think she positions herself actively as a feminist scholar, but her attention to otherwise neglected areas like that would certainly get a thumbs-up from that perspective.

By Permission of Heaven, by Adrian Tinniswood

This was the second book I read for AAL only because I had to wait for it to be shipped to me; I already had Restoration London on the shelf. It was recommended to me by Tyler of Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, and it’s a godsend: a detailed account of the Great Fire, including a chapter devoted to each day, telling me what was burning when, and what people were trying to do about it. I could not possibly write my novel without it.

But he also goes further afield, starting with a bit of the context leading up to the fire and the efforts to deal with it afterward; the latter plays better than the former. I understand why he felt we needed information about the Dutch wars, given religious tensions and also the question of when to recall General Monck, but it felt less than entirely relevant. The after-the-fact material is probably less useful to me, mind you, since I don’t expect the book to go past 1666, but it’s still good to know, especially for future installments in the series. (It’s honestly fascinating, comparing the aftermath of the Great Fire to, say, Hurricane Katrina. Seventeenth-century Englishmen did a remarkably good job of putting their city back together again in a fair and even-handed fashion.)

I’ve got a book on the Great Plague to read next, and a bunch more on the way.

wiktory

I have chosen my ICFA reading. And I’m getting good at eyeballing these things; my selection, when test-read, turned out to be twenty minutes on the nose.

For the record, everything in this selection will eventually be posted on my site as part of the teaser excerpt. But you’ll have to wait a while for it, so what you really want to do is get up at 8:30 in the morning on Friday to come hear me read it. Right?

Right?

Yes, that is officially my time slot. <sigh> Beggars can’t be choosers and all, but still — I’ll have to hope some of Alex Irvine’s and Judith Moffett’s fans stick around, or I’ll be reading to my co-panelists and Farah, who’s moderating.

next tidbit: evidence of my insanity

I honestly meant to do this months ago, but only got around to it now. Which means that instead of doing it the easy and sensible way (noting things down as I got them, or at least while I still had them), I’ve had to recreate the whole mess mostly from the photograph I took back then.

Your MNC Countdown entertainment for today is my research bibliography. Not as exciting as the prologue I posted the other week, but hopefully useful to two types of people: those researching similar topics, and those wanting concrete evidence of my insanity. It’s as complete as I can make it, though I keep remembering and adding in odd books that weren’t on my shelf. (Plus there’s that one Marlowe book I just can’t recall. I can see it in the photo, but not well enough to make out the author, and the title on the spine unhelpfully says only “Marlowe.” Very annoying.)

Anyway, collating the list was interesting, because Jesus Christ I did more work than I thought. And that’s not counting all the random internet resources I never marked down.

Enjoy!

ICFA

(There are too many potential icons for this post, so you just get the swan.)

Attention anybody going to ICFA! I’ll be there, of course — proud attendee since 2003; I can advance both sides of my professional life by flying to Florida every spring, so what’s not to like? — and it turns out I’m going to be doing more than I thought.

At 10:30 a.m. on Thursday I’ll be donning my academic hat (and my legal name) and participating in an interdisciplinary panel about fan studies — a panel of the discussion type, not the “we all read our at best tangentially related papers” sort.

Also, at some point — I don’t know my time slot yet — I’ll be switching to writer-hat and writer-name, and reading in the creative track. I’ve been squeaked on to it due to other peoples’ cancellations, so I suspect I won’t be listed in the program, but they always post the errata next to the reg desk, so look for me there. (Yes, in my sixth year, the worst has finally happened: I’m on the program twice, under two different names.) I will, as you might expect, be reading from Midnight Never Come.

And lastly, I’ll be bringing some small number of ARCs with me, to sell in the book room. My ego loves the mental image of a slugfest over the last copy between a rabid fan and a dusty old academic in the narrow, book-strewn aisles, but since the universe is unlikely to oblige me with such a scenario, you can probably guarantee your receipt of one simply by looking early in the con.

Hope to see some of you there!

Who’s cool?

I built Midnight Never Come partly on the principle of “list everything awesome in that time period, then cram in as much of it as you can.” Which isn’t a bad method. So I’m going to repeat it again, and ask: who and what is cool in the seventeenth century?

I already know I’ll be using the Great Fire, the Civil War, execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and Restoration of Charles II. Maybe the Battle of Worcester, too. Other things springing to mind include Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, John Milton, the Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Restoration theatre, and the Dutch wars.

What else?

People, events, neat places, whatever. The broader a range of things I’m steeping in my head, the better this book will be.

Guess what — I lied.

Decision made; now I can stop being cryptic.

What I said a few months ago? Yeah, change of plans. This is the book I’m writing next.

AND ASHES LIE

September, 1666. In the house of a sleeping baker, a spark leaps free of the oven — and ignites a blaze that will burn London to the ground.

Six years ago, the King of England returned in triumph to the land that had executed his father. The mortal civil war is done. But the war among the fae is still raging, and London is its battleground. There are forces that despise the Onyx Court, and will do anything to destroy it.

But now a greater threat has come, that could destroy everything. For three harrowing days, the mortals and fae of the city will fight to save their home. While the humans struggle to halt the conflagration that is devouring London street by street, the fae pit themselves against a less tangible foe: the spirit of the fire itself, powerful enough to annihilate everything in its path. Neither side can win on its own — but can they find a way to fight together?

There’s the requisite few paragraphs of handwaving, to give you a sense of what this novel will be. The Victorian book will still be happening, never fear; it just won’t be happening now. For a variety of strategic reasons and a few serendipitous ones, we’ve decided it would be better for me to do this one first.

Yes, this does in fact mean I’m switching tracks after four months of research on what is now the wrong time period. Yes, this does mean I’ve got barely more time to prep this book than I did for Midnight Never Come. Yes, this does mean I’m crazy. But I think the Victorian book will benefit from having more time to cook in my head; nineteenth-century London is so big and complicated that I won’t say no to working up to it more slowly. In the meantime, this one has had a number of factors swing in its favor, until it jumped up the queue and put itself at the top.

So. Great Fire. My, um, Restoration faerie disaster fantasy, I guess I’ll have to call it. London go BOOM.

Kind of like my head.

. . . .

The thing about potentially head-exploding developments is that they usually don’t give you any warning before they hit.

That’s why they’re head-exploding.

No, I’m not going to tell you what I’m talking about. Not at the moment. But I promise I’ll say in a week or two, once it’s decided — whichever way it goes. Suffice to say it isn’t a good-or-bad split; both possibilities are good.

for a few of you

Most of you can disregard this. Or rather, follow the link and marvel at the existence of a recipe for apple dumplings that involves Mountain Dew. (Apparently the result is fabulously tasty. We may try it at some point.)

But the real purpose of this post is for the old Changeling folk.

Check out the top of the left-hand column on this page.

If you need me, I’ll be having an aneurysm in the corner.

movie time!

<grumble mutter need to pick a damned Victorian icon already>

Okay, folks. Give me movies! Specifically, movies that depict the gritty underbelly of Victorian London. Think Sweeney Todd or From Hell. Or Gangs of New York, except not about America. Things far, far away from the prettified Oscar Wilde side of London.

What’s out there?