So I'm adding stuff to my bookshelf, and in the process, I'm going back through my blog searching for books that I've discussed. I came across a mention of Ender's Game, and -- when will I ever learn -- went browsing through recent news about Orson Scott Card.
It looks like Hack Neocon Fundie Blogger Card is once again going around the space-time continuum desecrating the works of Talented Sci-Fi Author Card. This time he's writing a fanfic sequel to one of my other favorite TSFA Card novels, Pastwatch.
The original Pastwatch is a very enjoyable yarn about some Africa-based time travelers who are reluctantly driven to fix the past by interfering with the "Columbus discovers America" event. The story of Noah's flood is touched upon, but treated appropriately as the origin of a myth -- it appears to be a local flood and the Biblical details are greatly exaggerated.
Now Card tells an interviewer:
What we have planned for further books in the Pastwatch series (yep, series) are books that take place sort of in the midst of the Columbus book. There's the Noah book, which tells Kemal's story as frame but Noah's story and the flood as the main tale, and then there's the Garden of Eden story - yep, the hoariest cliche in science fiction, but I have no fear, the artsy types couldn't possibly despise me more, and I think there's a reason why it is the most-written cliche story in the field. People are hungry for a rational treatment of that story in science fictional terms. So ... I mean to give it a try. We'll see if anyone but me likes it.
I suppose it's remotely possible that HNFB Card will treat TSFA Card's source material with the respect and appreciation it deserves, and not turn stories about Noah's flood and the Garden of freakin' Eden into some obsessive religious rant. However, I have my doubts, given that he can't even get through one question about it in an interview without making some lame, smarmy swipe about mean liberal critics.
Oh c'mon.
ReplyDeleteActually, framed the right way, it's just fine from an atheist perspective.
God didn't exist. None of that shit really happened. Then fundies from the future go back in time to set it up so that the Bible beCOMES true, ex post facto.
Reinvent the past literally. As they're doing figuratively with the Founding Fathers / Christian Nation myth.
Can't recall who this was said about, but there's a quote "if blank didn't exist, we'd surely have to invent it/him" or something like that. Zaphod Beeblebrox maybe?
So, just as on Jethro Tull's Aqualung cover, "And Man made God in his own image. And it was good." Well...except for the good part.
Bruce,
ReplyDeleteIf you had been reading what Card's been putting out for the last few years, you would probably share my high level of confidence that he will certainly NOT "frame it the right way."
And it was Voltaire, who said: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."