Taking Religion Seriously

I've started a re-read of Eifelheim, Michael Flynn's 2006 Hugo-Nominated novel, which I pitched to my book group & discussed on Sunday.  The book flits between 14th century germany and modern grad students (a theoretical physicist and a mathematician essentially trying to do reverse-psychohistory explaining 14th century settlements), and includes alien intruders.  I had forgotten that the main character in 14th century germany is a priest and natural philosopher.  When mysterious lightning crackles through the town, a minorite monk and most of the villagers fear demons and the devil, but it's the priest (Father Dietrich) who remembers the generation of static electricity with fur and amber, and seeks natural explanations.

I commented during my read of Ancillary Justice that I was very happy to see the religious rituals in Radch culture, rituals which did at times play out in how people viewed the world.  Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon features an older ghul-hunter whose magic works as an expression of his faith and knowledge.  Books (speculative fiction and otherwise) that take religion seriously as an important feature of the world not necessarily in opposition to science exist, but they can be hard to find.

So recently, enthused by the natural philosophical ruminations of father Deitrich, I tweeted out:

In all seriousness, working hard at reconciling faith and science is more difficult & rewarding than trying to sever them.
— Jonah Sutton-Morse (@jsuttonmorse) September 8, 2014

I know that there's a long history in western thought that aligns science and religion as polar opposites.  I'd be interested in having someone who knows more than I do outline where this came from, what sustains it now, and whether this dichotomy exists in cultures outside of the western european tradition.  There are a few books (Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow comes to mind, and maybe A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, though it's been a while since I read it) that take on the roles of religion and ritual pretty directly.  The (few) arab-inspired books I've read (Throne of the Crescent Moon mentioned above, When Gravity Fails and Desert of Souls) all show practices, garb, and beliefs as elements of the worldbuilding.

This post is, I guess, an invitation to discussion if anyone's interested.  Where does the notion that religion and science must be at each other's throats come from? Are there speculative fiction books that bridge this divide? Harden it? Why are so many books simply silent on either regular weekly rituals or religious beliefs and practices? Is there a place in speculative fiction to bridge the divide between science and religion? And do non-western books and stories do this better?

I'll dive back to the question from time to time, but if anyone else wants to chime in, I'd love to see a conversation about this.

A few thoughts on Ferguson

No bookshelves tonight. [actually, book thoughts at the end]  I've been on Twitter following coverage of the protests in Ferguson, and I have a few thoughts.  In no particular order.

First, there are people smarter than me writing about this.  If you're on twitter, I'd suggest looking for faces that aren't white. Also Saladin Ahmed for general notions about the experience of being nonwhite in America (plus a great book and information on old comics!).  Also this article: "America is not for black people".  But mostly I'd suggest that if you want thoughts about how a white cop shot a black kid and the police came out as basically a paramilitary force to suppress a community venting it's frustration and anger there are people who can express and inform better than me.

Second, the FAA closed airspace around Ferguson, MO to press helicopters.  So there's some level of federal cooperation with what I understand are primarily county police and officials.  That's terrible.  Especially because it's primarily directed at preventing coverage of what's going on.

Third, early Twitter response (for me) to this came from people of color.  Then women who I typically associate with social justice activism.  Only more recently have I seen privileged white men (primarily in the tech space) getting interested in what's going on in Ferguson.  That seems telling to me.

Fourth, there's a lot of deliberately inflammatory information floating around.  Quips about how Ferguson cops don't have dash cams but do have military equipment are obnoxious.  City policy aren't leading this crackdown, the county is.  Separate government agencies.  What's going on is bad enough, why should such misleading comments seem necessary to rile up anger?

Fifth, this is a really good reminder (for me) that the heat of the moment is a terrible time to make policy.  Because a common point being made is that this is a great argument for putting dash cams in every policy car and cameras on every officer.  And that's true.  And from what I understand, cameras have been shown to reduce overall complaints of police misconduct and police violence and have also (anecdotally) protected policy against false accusations of abuse.  It took a reminder from Twitter to me that there are serious privacy implications to putting cameras everywhere: with a few minor tweaks that turns our society into an essentially unprecedented surveillance state.  There are downsides.  Privacy protections are essential, and any sweeping structural changes shouldn't be made in the heat of the moment.

Sixth, police harassment of journalists brought a bunch of journalists to complain on Twitter in ways I hadn't seen previously.  (And by "harassment" I mean: ordering journalists to leave a McDonalds, stop recording officers, assaulting the journalists, arresting them, releasing them with no paperwork, record, or obvious means to seek recourse, and denying information about the officers' identity.  All of this is awful).  Journalists are right that if police feel entitled to act this way towards journalists supported by national organizations, what are they going to do to people without such a platform, but it still looks pretty bad to see them coming to the defense of two white men when paramilitary forces are shooting rubber bullets, sonic cannons and tear gas at a black community.

Seventh, there's something here about how this wouldn't have been reported even a few years ago and the incredible power of social media.

Eighth, it seems to me that there's a lot of very sophisticated tactics going on, with no real strategy supporting them.  I'm guessing that the FAA no fly zone was triggered by a request from local authorities.  The SWAT forces with military equipment have probably had a lot of training on specific scenarios, including riot suppression.  With no particular information, I'd speculate that probably the majority of crowd interaction training for these cops has been related to crowd control, and probably most of the focus has been on violent riots.  Tactically, I'm guessing the cops on the ground are doing what they've been trained to do and drilled on.  Strategically, it appears no one is seriously considering press freedoms, freedom of assembly, the possibility that legitimate grievances can be aired in nonviolent ways, or the ways in which this response is waving a red flag in front of a bull.

Ninth (and here's where we get to books), this tactics-no-strategy approach seems related to an increasingly militarized policy force.  I read an excerpt of Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop.  It's absolutely worth a read.  The military-industrial complex has moved from the military to local police forces.  And that leads to certain types of responses to situations like what's going on in Ferguson.  (Let's also make no mistake - there's gotta be a lot of money in providing equipment and training to all of these police forces).  Similarly (and again at least partially driven by capitalist concerns), we as a society have very specific repressive approaches to policing communities of color and specifically black communities.  (Here I'd suggest Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow which I have read and found incredibly enlightening.)  I was perhaps most shocked to learn that a generation ago the trend was away from incarceration and towards other approaches to crime.  Now, of course, the incarceration rate of the US is the highest in the world.  The school-to-prison pipeline is a thing, as is the prison-industrial complex (because of course incarceration is increasingly being handed to private organizations.  As with local police forces, basic constitutional rights aren't high on their list of priorities).
This isn't a case of "evil" as I've seen mentioned in a few places on twitter.  There are powerful societal and commercial forces that have worked to make sure that police forces in black communities are focused on repressing people especially young men.  These forces laid the seeds for a white cop to shoot a fleeing black kid.  These forces trained the paramilitary organization in St. Louis County to respond with military tactics and equipment when a community gathered to protest this murder.  We don't get to say "look at those bad people over there".  Our society laid the foundation for the events in Ferguson.  Individuals, policymakers, authors and others have warned us.  We (collectively) did not stop the trends in place.  And so Cliven Bundy and his friends can point sniper rifles at federal agents and escape unscathed while SWAT teams point sniper rifles at a grieving community.

Tenth (and finally, but here are more books), we need to get over our obsession with dystopic fiction.  We have had the warnings about what happens when language is redefined so that imminent danger is months or years away (1984).  We know what happens when patriarchal theocracies take charge (Handmaid's Tale).  We know what happens when corporations and the profit motive are allowed to infiltrate such levels of government (Neuromancer, among others, although I will admit that here my ignorance of dystopias is showing).  We aren't going to find outlines of the incredible power of the government to create a racist society that the indictments located in Ta Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations or The New Jim Crow.  What we need now are more books that wrestle in a positive way with the implications of our technology.  Governments have listened.  They have learned.  Science Fiction has the power to inspire.  Inspire us to ensure privacy while empowering citizens in an age of always-on communication.  Inspire us to change subconscious prejudices and assumptions so that we can expand our idea of community.  Inspire us to challenge the powers of centralized capital with decentralized outrage.  I'm tired of dystopias.  I can see them wherever I look.  Show me a Utopia.

OK, now I'm done.

Reinvigorated

A few years ago, I was ready to be done with new SFF. I still loved the genre, but Sanderson, Rothfuss and Martin were disappointing me, and every time I tried to strike out on my own based on a review or a blurb I was similarly frustrated.  I enjoy rereading books, and I was ready to just dive back into my bookshelf again and again while exploring new genres and hoping another would grab me the way Tolkien and Le Guin and C. S. Friedman had.

In fairly short succession, I read Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon and N. K. Jemisin's 100,000 Kingdoms, and my interest in SFF was renewed.  I was so happy to meet a character like Adoulla who inhabits a distant but enchanting realm (full of tea!) and wears his religion comfortably, side by side with the Zealot Rasheed bas Rasheed and the tribeswoman Zamia.  The horror of flesh ghuls (I almost set aside the book early in the prologue) set against the banality of Adoulla's life in the city was like a breath of fresh air.

Either just before or just after reading Throne, I also read N. K. Jemisin's 100,000 Kingdoms, which is to say I was swept away in Nahadoth's arms and enjoyed every minute if it.  If Throne showed me that there were still characters I'd like to adventure with, the Inheritance Trilogy (in particular the gods) restored my flagging interest in being transported into another author's imagination.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the two authors who renewed my interested in a genre that felt increasingly stale are both people of color, though I also don't want to read too much into this (or at least I don't want to hold them up as two identical and interchangeable diverse authors.  They are emphatically not).  I suspect that I was unconsciously reacting to some of the sameness in the genre that each is consciously writing against.  Because of their books, I began following each on social media, and they led me to a community of people working towards a more diverse community of SFF writers, authors, and fans, a community I'm still exploring and learning from.  But when I first encountered Throne and the Inheritance Trilogy I was a much less critical reader.  Each of these books grabbed the me who grew up on Tolkien and Dragonlance and C. S. Friedman, who was growing bored with the SFF I was finding, and they gave me a good shake and said "this genre that you enjoy so much, it's still awesome. So if you can't find something you want to read, go look harder."

N. K. Jemisin and Saladin Ahmed restored my interest in reading fantasy, and reassured me that's there's new and exciting stuff being written in a genre I'd feared was becoming stale. (And yes, this has a lot to do with the authors I was looking at and the places I was looking for recommendations).  They also led me to the discovery of authors and editors and writers in the SFF community who are committed to more diverse books.  I'm grateful to both of them for a lot of reasons, but mostly because if I hadn't read Throne and Hundred Thousand Kingdoms I might just not be reading many books right now, and that would be sad.

I don't know how to read this

Scott Lynch's Republic of Thieves punched me in the gut recently, and made me aware of just how much I've grown accustomed to the tropes of fantasy.

Partway through Republic of Thieves (oh, um, spoilers.  Blanket policy: I'll be spoiling the books I'm talking about. This one is not ruinous to the book), our protagonist Locke is traveling with his companions including Sabetha who he's had a crush on since he was about six.  Locke wants to talk about feelings, and since he's told her he likes her, wants to hear that reciprocated.  Sabetha is interested, but she's also the only woman in this band of thieves, which she's been in charge of until Locke took over. She's also probably the more ambitious of the two, and Locke has had her up on a pedestal all this time.  It's complicated. Sabetha sees this. Locke doesn't. Over the course of a few scenes, Sabetha guides Locke, and the reader through this.  She doesn't use the terms "male gaze" or "male privilege", but the concepts are there.  She doesn't call herself a feminist, but her message is recognizable to a modern reader.

I don't know how to read these scenes.  And that's empowering, rather than a problem.

I can read the words and process the ideas.  I even often agree with them.  But they're outside my reading experience.  I grew up on the generations following Tolkien, and studied Medieval History in college. I can read a pseudo-Medieval European Epic Fantasy with a man at the center that only exposes it's social agenda by reinforcing the status quo like nobody's business.  

And when I do, I yell at anachronisms, and I yell at "message" passages that might illuminate the author's views, but break me out of the story because I don't believe the character would say that, dammit!

MedievalPOC has been busy challenging my belief that I actually understood what "the reality" of medieval and early modern Europe was.  Scott Lynch just challenged my belief that I understand how to create a believable secondary world that the reader is immersed in.  I'm still reeling a bit.  (In other recent readings, Kate Elliot's Spirit Walker series, written intentionally and emphatically in the head of a female protagonist also knocked me out of my comfort zone on a number of occasions).

I've been learning, slowly, and primarily from authors and critics on Twitter, just how many assumptions I've let pass unchallenged as I grew up on Epic fantasy.  And for a while I started to walk away from Fantasy and Science Fiction because all I was seeing was more of those assumptions being fed back to me.  (I'll save the story of being brought back to the fold by Saladin Ahmed and N. K. Jemisin for another time).

I'm also learning, slowly, how powerful "I don't understand" is.  I could read these scenes that aren't what I'm used to and reject them.  Bad writing.  Not for me. Political/Message fiction.  Or I can read them and ask why the author includes them.  I can use these scenes that I don't understand as jumping off points that expand my view of the world.  I can take Kate Elliot's Spirit Walker series as an invitation to the (a?) female gaze.  A gaze I rarely look through.  I often say that one of the reasons to read SFF is to be exposed to new worlds and new ways of thinking, and to see our own world in a new way.  I'm learning, slowly, that every scene that makes me say "I don't understand" is an invitation to do exactly that, and to learn to understand.

A final note: my current reading pile:

(Lightspeed Magazine's "Women Destroy Science Fiction" #wdsf, which is definitely bringing some "I don't understand" moments, and The Annotated Dragonlance Chronicles, which is about as comfortable a genre read as I can think of)

**Unfinished - how I came back to fantasy.