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The Lightning Thief

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The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1)The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I live in a reading house, a house walled up with books. It’s a gift and a blessing, especially on moments in the summer when I look up and everyone in the house is immersed in one, the boys sprawled out on the couches with hardcovers propped on their chests and legs dangling over the edge of the cushions.

My wife loves YA literature, so she was pleased with the twins started reading Rick Riordan’s series, which has been a favorite of hers for a while. I tend to pass up YA literature, but when my oldest finished The Lightning Thief, brought it downstairs, and somberly handed it to me and said, “Dad, you need to read this,” I obligingly put it in my pile.

I’ve read Harry Potter, and I assumed this would just be something along the same lines. And it was, to a degree. (For the record, by this point every literate member of my family was reading a different Riordan book. We had to visit the library for additional copies.) In lots of ways, I was struck by the similarities to Rowling’s world. There’s a kid with rough luck who is longing to know the truth about his parents (in Percy’s case his dad), a misfit who finally finds a place where he belongs and realizes he’s Actually Quite Important. There are similarities with the supporting cast as well: a trio of three best friends (the main character along with an intelligent girl and a loyal guy sidekick). A quest, a wise mentor, etc. etc.

Another big parallel is the setting. Rowling and Riordan both have tapped into places every kid would be familiar with. The settings lend themselves to episodic adventure. The center of the Harry Potter universe is of course a school that the characters return to each fall. Riordan reverses this: instead of the action taking place during the school year, it’s a summer camp where demigods spend their vacations training to fight monsters. In both cases Riordan and Rowling take something familiar, something kids can relate to, and use it as a springboard for the stories they’re going to tell.

What sets Riordan’s book apart from Rowling’s and makes me think I like it a bit more is that it draws on deeper wells than the Potter universe: in particular, Greek mythology. That’s obvious upon picking up the book, but it’s actually done with some cleverness for the level of a kid-reader. For one thing, Riordan doesn’t spell everything out explicitly. The reader who knows Greek mythology has a head start (and will almost instantly realize who Percy’s father actually is), but the one who doesn’t will learn a lot along the way and have a heavy motivation to learn more if they want to catch all the details of the story. (Seriously, any kids’ book in which the hero’s mentor is his Latin instructor and tells the hero to “Read the Iliad” is on the right track in my mind.) In some cases, yes, the modernizations of mythical motifs get a bit trite and repetitive, especially as the trio of main characters travel westward on their quest, stumbling from one set-piece to the next. But the underlying puzzle is compelling enough to push the narrative along.

With a book like this, it’s difficult to know whether you can complain about the descriptions, which– especially for the monsters– seem pretty shallow and vague. It’s hard to tell whether this is Riordan’s style or a mechanism for making a believable twelve-year-old boy narrator, someone who doesn’t slow down to give much descriptive detail.

A surprising strength of the book is the reverence with which the gods are treated. Riordan does a nuanced job of balancing their childishness and pettiness with respect for their raw power. It makes them more believable. You can imagine this is how they were actually treated in ancient Greece: forces to be respected but not necessarily emulated; aspects of nature that couldn’t really be trusted. Especially poignant is Percy’s ultimate encounter with his father. The angst of an abandoned kid looking for approval from a dad who is powerful but also aloof and satisfyingly alien. It somehow rings true, and it reminds me a little of Lewis’s treatment of Aslan (though with much less warmth and wisdom): he’s not a tame lion, after all.

The gods, Riordan manages to communicate, were not tame. Of course here they’re simplified (though perhaps they were then as well– larger than life caricatures of elemental forces) and in some cases even boring (especially the monsters), but Riordan brings them to life for a modern generation while at the same time being surprisingly (to me) true to their roots and their nature.

Free to Be Bound

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Free to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color LineFree to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s undeniable that we have a history of racial oppression in the United States. But in the context of personal salvation and personal responsibility, so it goes in the mind of many, we need to just let this go, move beyond it, maybe even stop dwelling on it and discussing it so much. Blacks and whites, the argument is sometimes made (usually among whites), have opportunities that are theoretically equal and cultures that are different. The fact that we worship differently, in different places, is simply historical and cultural contingency and doesn’t reflect on the nature of the Christian church itself.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove doesn’t agree. Wilson-Hartgrove is part of a growing voice in evangelical circles calling for the Church to address systemic sins, institutional injustices, things that we’ve inherited and for which we’d like to continue telling ourselves we bear no responsibility. He’s certainly not alone in this. If I had to pick one thing that’s changed or is changing on the evangelical landscape in America it would probably be this: a growing awareness that salvation isn’t a personal issue, that there are a host of things we simply can’t shrug off with an attitude of “Oh that’s too bad but don’t make me feel personally guilty about it because it’s not my responsibility.”

That approach– the understanding of salvation as being this entirely personal thing between me and Jesus– doesn’t work anymore (if it ever did). It doesn’t work for the environment. It doesn’t work for the context and the consequences of consumerism. It doesn’t work for rampant militarization. And it doesn’t work for race. We’ve inherited structures not of our own devising, it’s true, but by accepting them as inevitable or as too overwhelming or entrenched to address– be that environmental degradation, a disposable economy, a self-perpetuating War on Terror, or the racial injustices that continue to create a stratified society– we add our culpability to their perpetuation.

This is a book about one of those systemic sins, racial prejudice and segregation, but it’s also a book about how to understand Christianity. As Wilson-Hartgrove argues, there are two strands in Christianity relevant in talking about race: one that says to live quietly doing good works, and another, revolutionary strand that says the Kingdom of God exists in opposition to racial injustice now, not in some apocalyptic hereafter. The battle against principalities and powers, according to this second strand, is the battle against systems in which lives are devalued, exploited, and destroyed because of skin color.

Of course Wilson-Hartgrove’s position (in as much as he takes a position in this work, which is largely a narrative of his own experience in a black community and congregation in Durham, North Carolina) is a bit more nuanced than simply a call to arms or a condemnation of the Church’s implicit acceptance of these power structures in our history. Indeed, he talks about the danger of believing that we as privileged white Christians can rush in and fix things with programs and good intentions, especially things as thorny as racial injustice. Usually our best intentions find us simply making the problems worse or perpetuating the hierarchy of power.

What then is to be done? This is where the author’s position becomes truly radical and hard to swallow– not so much because of its enactment as its implications. The book is Wilson-Hartgrove’s story of becoming a part of a black church, of a white boy from the south living, worshipping, and serving in a black community not in an attempt to fix anything apart from his own view of Christianity. He is there (with his wife) simply to learn. The idea, he would say, of successful racial reconciliation, of “crossing the color line,” is to do so in a spirit of submission, to be powerless and humble, to simply live in community and learn.

I think he’s right, and It’s clear he’s done this, both through his own scholarly work at Duke (though this book is an entirely accessible popular account) and his experiences. The text is filled with episodes from his life in Walltown and with history and literature from the black experience in America. It’s not a “how to” book, as the author admits, on anything. It’s simply an account of one person’s attempt to understand race and what it’s meant for the Church.

What’s harder to accept though are some of his conclusions from his experience, namely that Christianity in America has been defined by the question of color, that there is truly a black Christianity and a white Christianity, and that the most genuine Christian experience in America– the experience that has been closest to persecution, abuse, and brokenness– is the black experience. White Christianity, Wilson-Hartgrove maintains, lost its credibility by participating, perpetuating, and even justifying first slavery, then segregation, and now enduring prejudice and systematic injustice. The true miracle of Christianity in the New World is that blacks took from their oppressors the genuine parts of Christianity while rejecting the hypocrisy. If you want to know real Christianity in America, the place where Christ has been and remains with the despised, outcast, and down-trodden, you have to go to the black church.

This book makes me sad like the rich young ruler who wanted to follow Jesus but went away because he was very rich. I’m the young ruler, and I’m very white. And though I can see the truth in what Wilson-Hartgrove is saying, I resist an exclusionary interpretation of his claims. He seems to be saying that it’s all about black and white, that in the American church this is the problem, and that in America this particular instantiation of Christianity (the black church) is most genuine. That seems dangerously reductionistic. What about the Christianity of the reservation? What about the Old World liturgy of the immigrant– be it Greek, Armenian, or Hispanic? An uncharitable reading of this book might be that you have to be black to genuinely know Christ in America, or at least be bound to a black community and congregation.

I hope this isn’t true. If it is, it’s something I’m going to have to wrestle with for a while. For now though, it’s enough to accept a weaker version: that at the very least we need to know the black experience, that we need to learn it– ideally through relationship with people who have lived it– to understand a very large and an enduring piece of the puzzle of Christianity in America today.

Called to the Fire

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Called to the Fire: A Witness for God in Mississippi; The Story of Dr. Charles JohnsonCalled to the Fire: A Witness for God in Mississippi; The Story of Dr. Charles Johnson by Chet Bush

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After graduating with my bachelors at Olivet Nazarene University, I wound up in a graduate program at the University of Mississippi. There, in Oxford, Mississippi, my wife and I started attending the single small Nazarene church in town. We hadn’t been members there long when a young pastor and his family arrived. Chet Bush quickly became a great friend and mentor as well as my all-time favorite pastor, for a lot of reasons.

One of those reasons was that he didn’t want to preach.

That’s not to say he wasn’t a good preacher. He was. He was a great preacher, but he was a great preacher because it was clear he wasn’t doing it because he loved speaking or loved being in front of people. He was doing it because he felt like he needed to. More than that, it was clear he was doing it because he wanted to teach

And perhaps most important of all, it was clear he was doing it because he wanted to learn.

Fast forward a few years. I’m back in the Midwest, teaching at my alma mater, and Chet, after a brief peregrination to Tennessee, has returned to Mississippi as a graduate student in the history department at Ole Miss. Along the way, he’s written a book that I think captures a lot of what Chet himself is about. More than that though, in a weird way I found this book on the life of a Nazarene minister active in the Mississippi Civil Rights movement a call to the entire denomination regarding what learning, scholarship, and ministry can really mean.

If you grew up in the Nazarene church, like Chet and I did, you probably remember missionary books. They were an attempt to pass on the denomination’s history and heritage. They were usually stories of the heroes of the denomination (often but not always foreign missionaries), how they came to faith, and what they ended up doing with their lives. I don’t remember the specifics of any of them, but I remember how they felt.

With Called to the Fire, Chet has written something more than a Nazarene missionary book. In some ways though, it has that familiar feel. The book is the story of Charles Johnson, the African American pastor of a Nazarene church in Meridian, Mississippi, and the role he played as a leader in the community during the height of the Civil Rights movement, during which time Johnson briefly took the national spotlight as a witness for the prosecution during the famous Mississippi Burning trial.

Johnson’s personal journey took him from growing up in rural Orlando and coming to faith in a Nazarene revival there (which is where the book feels most like those missionary books I remember from my childhood), to school at the Nazarene Bible College in Institute, West Virginia (more on this in a moment), to his first ministerial posting at ground zero of the Civil Rights struggle. A major portion of the narrative is the young pastor’s wrestling with God to accept what he felt was God’s calling to overcome a young black man’s fear and take his family and his life into the heart of the country’s most segregated state during one of the most violent periods in its history.

The book is brief but covers the pastor’s career up to the present day, retold by Chet and built on interviews with Johnson, whose direct quotes pepper the account. Because of its brevity, the work is of necessity cursory, not delving much into the politics of a segregated denomination or the broader context of Johnson’s personal experience. Much of Johnson’s years in Meridian are passed over quickly, with the narrative coming into focus on events like Johnson’s first day in Mississippi, his days at the trial on the brutal murders of three Civil Rights workers outside of Meridian, his experiences with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Johnson’s final reconciliation with one of the defendants in the trial.

It’s a good book (though, as Chet admits, looking back on it with the historical training he’s already received at the University of Mississippi, there are things he’d do differently), but most importantly it captures the story of someone whose life and actions might have gone largely ignored or been forgotten in his own church. This is where the book for me was a doorway into understanding something bigger regarding my own denominational heritage. (And yes, I’m going to consider myself culturally and contextually a Nazarene for the following discussion, even though I’m no longer a member of the denomination.)

Here’s the thing: Charles Johnson’s story opens onto a history that’s either been ignored, forgotten, or was simply never told. My first clue was the mention of the Nazarene Bible College in Institute, West Virginia, where Charles Johnson studied. I know a bit about the history of Nazarene higher education, and I had never heard of this school. It was clear from Chet’s account that this was a historically black college, which Johnson attended because Trevecca Nazarene College was closed to black students at that time. (I hadn’t realized Nazarene schools in the south were segregated.)

In the book, Chet talks about how Johnson was assigned to the church in Meridian, Mississippi, by Warren Rogers, who was superintendent of the Gulf Central District of the Nazarene church, which encompassed sixteen states. Now, I admit that I didn’t read this portion of Chet’s narrative carefully enough, because I only realized the importance of this in a later conversation with him by phone. I was asking him about there being a single superintendent over such a large district and said that I hadn’t realized the entire southern half of the United States was basically one district at this point in time.

It only slowly dawned on me in speaking with Chet that I had misunderstood, and I actually stopped the conversation to make sure I was hearing correctly: this wasn’t the only Nazarene district in the South. This was a segregated, separate black district, geographically overlapping several white districts.

I had to let that sink in for a minute. Up until (I think) 1968, there was a separate district in the south for black Nazarene churches. Their ministers went to a separate Nazarene college (which no longer exists), and they had a separate superintendent.

What floored me most about this was not the implications for race and reconciliation in our own denomination. What floored me most was that I simply didn’t know. I didn’t know the history of the church I’d grown up in. And in asking around since then, I get the idea that no one else knows this either.

Here’s where it comes home for me, and in this context it’s not about race. It’s about learning, scholarship, and ministry. Because Chet, I’m sure, is going to go on in his academic career at the University of Mississippi and do good work. I hope he does scholarly work on the history of the Nazarene church in the South, especially the history of the Nazarene Bible College of Institute, West Virginia, which apparently has no archive and knowledge of which exists now only in the memories of aging African American ministers across the country. That’s a story that has broad implications apart from its importance to the denomination and deserves to be explored.

My fear though is that as a denomination we don’t have a scholarly forum on which work like this can be disseminated and discussed. Sure, we have individuals at individual institutions who are doing good work, and Chet’s book has found a welcome audience at, for instance, Trevecca Nazarene University (where Charles Johnson was eventually awarded an honorary doctorate).

But I don’t see us as a denomination having a place to dialogue with relevant, important, ongoing work by Nazarene scholars like Chet (or, for instance, Tom Oord) in a pan-Nazarene academic context. That seems a shame, especially for a denomination with a rich history, a tapestry of vibrant institutions, and a host of issues from our heritage—from racial segregation to science and faith topics to gender and sexuality to our stance on alcohol to our understanding of holiness—that are begging for dedicated, sophisticated academic thought and dialogue at a denominational level.

A modest proposal: what about a society for Nazarene scholars and those pursuing scholarship in Nazarene contexts? It would be open to anyone, with a small annual membership fee that could sponsor the publication of a (for now) annual peer-reviewed journal. The pages of the journal would be a place for Nazarene scholars to pursue and explore these topics. I want to read informed scholarship about the history of the Nazarene church in the South (and throughout the world). I want to know more about the relationship between holiness theology and higher education. I want a place where scholarly voices in the Nazarene denomination can interact.

Heck, maybe we could even get together once every four years or so.

The thing is, our denomination has the resources and it has the need. As Chet’s account shows, there’s lots of good work being done and still to be done, but I don’t feel right now that we have a place to share this at a denominational level. Speaking from my own experience, I feel fairly disconnected from the scholarship happening at other Nazarene schools outside my own particular discipline.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

The Road to Little Dribbling

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The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in BritainThe Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Bill Bryson is probably the luckiest writer alive, for a few reasons.

For one thing, my wife adores him. This should give me abundant hope, as it implies that as I get older and grouchier, so as long as I remain bumbling, mildly humorous, and appropriately annoyed at the grammatical foibles of young people, she will continue to find me endearing. (She might even start reading my books.)

But he’s also lucky because the man has made a successful career of traveling about investigating interesting places and writing about what he finds. He gained all the credibility he’ll probably ever need doing this and doing this very well in his excellent articles for National Geographic. But now that he has this credibility, he can do whatever he wants with it. He can go where he pleases and season his accounts with whatever historical anecdotes strike his fancy and as much griping about litter, economic depression, or kids these days he feels inclined to include. At this point, he could conceivably return to the United States with the intention of writing a book on highway rest areas, and it would be an immediate success.

I hope it’s clear here how much I envy this guy.

Yet I also at times—and especially in this, his most recent work—find him quite frustrating. His bits of history on the places he visits, for instance, are presented without any real context. Of course, in this book he’s under no obligation as a historian or sociologist (which, to be fair, he never pretends to be) to build these observations into any thesis or use them as arguments toward anything beyond comments like “England is absurd and delightful” or “Things are getting pretty crummy here.” The Road to Little Dribbling is just Bryson ambling about Britain, sort of traveling from the far south to the far north, and also sort of retracing some of his steps from his great work, Notes from a Small Island. Really though, it’s just him being his familiar, garrulous, and somehow endearing self.

Now, Bryson has done fine work—let’s get that straight. I’m rereading his science book right now, and it’s solid. More than that, it’s written with what makes him so appealing: eyes wide with genuine wonder and delight. “This is your universe,” he says. “Pay attention.” I remember Notes from a Small Island being similar: exploring the wonder of a new and genuinely wonderful place. But a lot of that seems to be lacking in Little Dribbling. This is an older, more tired, grouchier Bryson taking us on an aimless tour with sidetracks to wait for a new baby’s arrival or attend a soccer match with the grandkids. Maybe that should make it more endearing, but instead it gives the sense that this whole thing is an afterthought, an excuse to write a book in which he can comment on whether shops have opened or closed since the last time he was in town, whether the village he’s passing through has a good high street, and how rude the clerk in the hardware store is.

In places it’s quite maddening, both for Bryson, clearly, and for the reader. It’s maddening for the reader because Bryson could do so much more. In some places, for instance his visit to Avebury, he gives wonderful and astonishing context on the standing stones. Yet in other places his comments are simply throw-away lines about certain museums being nice, pleasant, or interesting without any details. In one instance he explains the remarkable situation of the manor of a dwindling family being finally donated to the National Trust and turned into a museum and tells how some rooms hadn’t been opened for decades, but we get very little insight into what this place actually was like. (It was musty, according to Bryson.) Or where he points out the oldest public park in the world and explains that it’s a model for pretty much all other city parks, but then does nothing to actually take us there in his prose.

Maybe that’s my primary complaint. I’m used to Bryson taking me places. Here I just felt like I was getting an account of Bryson going different places and how they affected his emotional state. There’s some irony here too. Bryson apparently has become something of a patron saint for landscape conservation, walking paths, and eliminating litter in Britain. And yet in this book we spend a good deal of our time with him in the car, zipping from one sight to another, along the way getting updates about the things that annoy him about politics or culture or long expositions on the downfall of proof-reading followed by imaginary dialogue of what he’d like to tell people who are unpleasant to him.

A final complaint: we know he’s well-read, but it taxes even the most charitable reader’s patience when Bryson approaches a place like Blackpool and offers a solution to its economic and social woes in less than a page. I don’t begrudge him offering a solution, but it would be wonderful to have had some suggestions on where to dig deeper for information on Blackpool or any other interesting place Bryson finds himself. Bryson knows a thing or two about every place he visits. Where does he learn all this? He’s been my guide for the book, I’d like some guidance on where to go next to learn more. I’m not asking for footnotes or endnotes (okay, maybe I am), but at least a list of suggested reading would have been helpful.

Yes, my annoyance is probably primarily motivated by jealousy: I want to be there seeing those things and writing (or complaining) about them. In fairness, I’d likely be just as grouchy (hopefully to my wife’s delight). But I’d certainly have less credibility and undoubtably do a much poorer job than Bryson has done here.

Sandman: Overture

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The Sandman: OvertureThe Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was the Dream of the first created things: those that sleep in the sleep beneath space.

Neil Gaiman is the Sandman, can we all agree on that? In as much as the character has created him and he has created the character, Morpheus—he of the brooding visage and the black shirts—is in some sense certainly Gaiman’s idealization of aspects of himself. And it’s also true that Gaiman gets to create the world of Dreaming, gets to guard and define it, just as the Sandman does. It’s a narrative artistry that works here. On the canvas of a comic embellished with incredible artistry, Gaiman’s strength in creating idealizations of form and dialogue is untouchable. Lines like the one above float on pages of color and wonder. They are, I think, much harder to carry off in a novel.

They say every story must be told at least once, before the final nightfall.

As a kid I loved Marvel’s Infinity War, in which cosmic forces like Order, Chaos, and Infinity went to war in full color spreads across the panels. This is more or less what we get in Sandman: Overture, a six-issue collection that is faster and more epic but with less subtly and texture than was developed in the full seventy-five issues of the Sandman series itself. Of course, this prequel lacks the scope of the entire series, but it also plays for higher stakes. Gaiman was relatively unknown at the start of his run in Sandman; now he’s a legend returning to his homeland.

These stakes are reflected in the narrative: Dream has to save reality itself. Yet the collection of powers at play here teeters on the baroque: the enigmatic First Circle (should I know who they are?), Dream’s parents, the Endless themselves, and the potential death of the universe. I read the original Sandman series years ago, so this straightforward read was more for the epic wonder and beauty of the thing; a closer reading would probably bring to light all the nooks and crannies Gaiman has filled into the texture of the original Sandman. Even the lapsed fan though can appreciate finally learning how Dream came to be captured at the very beginning of the series.

Dream attempts to save the universe, with the help of a little girl named Hope. Trite? A bit, if it wasn’t so gorgeous. Only Gaiman, aided and abetted by the overwhelming artistic genius of J. H. Williams III, can get away with lines like this, Dream explaining his situation to his mother:

I was expelled from the universe, by stars caught up with rhetoric and infection. I’m currently inside a black hole.

Does it work? Of course it does; it’s Gaiman. But it works because Gaiman gets to make his own rules. In a story that deals with embodiments of psychic principles projected on a cosmic scale, you don’t have to worry about self-consistency. Not matter what finality with which Dream is cast into a black hole at the end of one chapter, his mother can stop by for a chat and his brother can tug him out with relative ease a few pages later. How did the ship get into Destiny’s garden? The simple answer is magic, and it’s the magic bleeding off the pages of this work that makes it all right.

There is (of course) a dreamlike quality to the whole thing. It hangs together while you’re reading it but upon waking the logic starts to unravel and—like a dream—you’re left with only memories and images of beauty.

Which is probably the point.

Invaders

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Invaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of LiteratureInvaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature by Jacob Weisman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What does it mean to write science fiction? On some level, it means writing stories that get published in magazines featuring artistically-depicted spaceships and robots on their covers. It’s creating content involving science or at least scientific ideas playing out in new and interesting directions. It remains relevant because of the ways science continues to inform who we are, what we’re doing, and where we’re going.

Who’s writing important science fiction today? Things get a bit fuzzier here, because though there are certainly people (a lot of people) doing wonderful, interesting things inside the genre universe, sometimes it seems very few of them bleed out into more mainstream or “literary” waters—by which I mean publishing works in broader magazines or winning literary prizes not named after celestial objects or science fiction editors.

It’s a bit easier to see things going the other direction: important literary or mainstream authors venturing into genre territory. That’s what makes a collection like Jacob Weisman’s Invaders possible. If you think you know science fiction, or you want to get to know science fiction, or you want a new, sophisticated take on some of the angles you’ve poured over in the pulps, here’s an anthology to note.

Invaders encompasses twenty-two short stories, only a few of which are by established genre writers or originally appeared in genre magazines but all of which explore familiar aspects of science fiction in original ways. The tropes are all here—mad scientists, alien encounters, post-apocalyptic wastelands, sex-bots—borrowed from the pages of the pulps and filtered through the imaginations of some of the top mainstream writers working today. (I started to make a list of all the different awards listed in these author bios—because a guy likes to dream, you know?—and had reached forty before the list was complete.)

These stories are better than good. They’re sharp, subtle, and unfailingly well-crafted. Sure, some lack the excitement and straightforward pizzaz you might expect from magazines in which the editors are tasked primarily to entertain. Yet even these, such as J. Robert Lennon’s “Portal,” Max Apple’s “The Yogurt of Vasirin Kefirovsky,” and Kelly Luce’s “Amorometer” are still lovely and mysterious. There are think pieces in here as well, like Rivka Galchen’s “The Region of Unlikeness” or Steven Millhauser’s “A Precursor of the Cinema”. There are also two stories that take what may be the most tired science fiction trope of all, the alien encounter, and make it something new without actually doing anything different but by writing with a style that makes them positively luminous. I’m thinking, of course, of “Lambing Season” by Molly Gloss and “Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover” by Robert Olen Butler.

This stuff is science fiction as literature. These are stories written by artists who have abducted the genre for their own designs. They’re haunting, pristine, and sometimes devastating.

And then there are the pieces that are a whole lot better than good. Even if every other story in this collection had been a dud (and none of them are), four stories in here would still make Invaders completely worth the read. I’m thinking here specifically of Julia Elliott’s “LIMBs,” which tells a smart and heart-breaking story of geriatrics and technological advance, as well as love and aging; Deji Bryce Olukotun’s “We Are the Olfanauts,” a piece about personal sacrifice and the cost of success in a bizarre but strangely believable interpretation of the internet; and “Monstro” by Junot Diaz, which is somehow Akira meets Attack on Titan set in the Caribbean and told with a linguistic flare I could never hope to emulate or capture.

Finally, there is George Saunder’s “Escape from Spiderhead,” which wherever it was published (it was the New Yorker), genre or not, embodies what makes both great science fiction and great storytelling. It’s clean, simple, and as brutally efficient as a razor. I think, from now on, my writing prayer might simply be, “God, help me write a story as good as this one.” “Spiderhead” is the story of an idea just over tomorrow’s horizon taken to its unexpected and yet in retrospect unavoidable conclusion in language spare and merciless with characters simple and agonizingly real.

If you like science fiction that makes you think, and if you like stories told by writers who are masters of their craft, who use language as both a tool and a palette, this is the anthology you’ve been looking for.

If you’re already familiar with great science fiction authors who fit this description but are looking to expand your horizons further, you’re also looking for this book.

Now, my question: would it be possible to do this trick backward? That is, could you create an anthology of “genre” authors, writers who primarily work in science fiction and are not well known beyond it, that contains works of theirs falling outside the traditional boundaries of science fiction? Invaders is an anthology of literary authors writing science fiction; could we have a similar anthology of science fiction authors writing literature? (I think we could, and I can name a few writers who would almost certainly be in it, but I’ll save that for another post.)

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Orsinian Tales

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Orsinian TalesOrsinian Tales by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The cover of this one is a bit of a cheat. Orsinian Tales is a slender paperback I found lurking on one of my sister’s crowded bookshelves. The front features a tall, snug castle with a medieval town nestled at is base. It’s pretty clearly a stock image, though a case could be made that it illustrates the penultimate story in the collection. The author is Le Guin, and if you didn’t know who that is the cover helpfully points out she’s the author of the Earthsea Trilogy and the winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards. It’s clearly marketed as a fantasy, though to be fair a careful reader of the back cover would notice that these tales are explained as Le Guin bringing “to mainstream fiction all the power and enchantment” that have made her so well known for science fiction and fantasy. Be warned though, if you pick up this book hoping for the magic of Earthsea, you’re not going to find it in the way you expect.

This is a collection of Le Guin’s literary (“mainstream”) fiction. There aren’t dragons, old gods (despite what the cover says), spells, or enchantments of the ordinary, speculative kind. The stories in this sense are unexpectedly mundane. People grow up, fall in love, quarrel with their siblings, watch their country change, and have long conversations.

Yet to call this mundane or lacking magic because it’s not genre fantasy misses the point entirely. What Le Guin is doing here is something a lot deeper and more beautiful because of, not in spite of its everyday nature. She convinces you of the magic of her fiction—basically showing you the wellspring of her own speculative work—in stories that are straightforwardly not fantastic literature.

There are eleven stories in this collection, and they all loosely follow the history of a vague, eastern European country from the early days of Christianity to a long, indeterminate communist winter in a meandering, non-chronological fashion. None of them seem to explicitly fit together apart from their general locale, though there may have been deeper links that I missed. (Who was the defector of the very first story, and did the castle keep of the medieval murder reappear in the Lady of Moge?) None of them have any hint of science fiction or fantasy tropes. But all carry the magic of simple, real things lifted up and celebrated by the beauty and clarity of Le Guin’s prose.

She’s saying something important here, something she lays out most clearly in the final story of the collection, “Imaginary Countries.” Once upon a time, she seems to be telling us with these tales, stories were written simply to be beautiful. They didn’t have to have a hook or an unforeseen twist. They didn’t have to turn the world on its head or capture the reader with a completely unexpected concept or angle. They only had to be lovely and draw on a magic that was history and humanity itself.

These are what the stories in Orsinian Tales do, and they do it very well. They are stories with magic, but the magic is the deep and dangerous magic of the every day. Deep because it surrounds the characters she creates and dangerous because they’re all swimming in it, surrounded by it, and swept away. Dangerous because we’re in the midst of it as well, and we ignore it to our peril.

Sometimes fiction— especially fantasy— is passing through the looking glass. Le Guin doesn’t do that here. Instead she does something more difficult.

She opens a window.

Against Infinity

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Against InfinityAgainst Infinity by Gregory Benford

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked up Gregory Benford’s Against Infinity at a used book store a while ago and then put it away to save for portable airport reading on my recent trip to Italy. (Pocket editions like this are truly the best books to travel with.) The book was an effective escape, staving off my growing impatience with multiple delays out of Chicago’s O’Hare because of high winds in New York City.

Against Infinity had more heft to it than I expected, and more beauty as well. Benford had been on my list for a while as a practicing astronomer who wrote science fiction, and I hadn’t been disappointed with his Great Sky River. This one was an interesting fusion between an Arctic survivalist story and the wonder and ecological trappings of Dune. On top of this, it offers a scientifically realistic view of what Ganymede and the Jovian system might look like as a legitimate frontier for settlement. The characters are scouring a living on the surface of the moon, clawing for minerals and slowly tipping the biosphere toward something that can sustain life.

Overlain on this is a hunting tale in the tradition of Jack London and the Yukon, complete with super-intelligent biomechanical dogs and a meaningful coming-of-age narrative. A boy is growing up, forging a bond with an older, wiser hunter, coming to terms with his father, and learning his own limits. The object of the hunt that provides the context for this growth is men venturing out of their settlements into the icy, shifting landscape to cull the mutants of the genetically engineered species that have been introduced to help terraform the surface. The actual object of the hunt though—and ultimately the lynchpin of Benford’s narrative—is the Aleph.

The Aleph is an ancient device or creature that pre-dates man’s arrival on Ganymede and continually burrows through or over the surface of the moon, heedless to its pursuit by men, unaffected by any of their weapons or devices, and sometimes killing them in its passage. The concept, especially in the haunting descriptions provided by Benford, is a compelling hybrid of the raw power and immensity of the sandworms of Arrakis and the alien inscrutability of the monoliths of Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey. Benford’s prose becomes positively electric in describing the various ways this enigmatic thing chews through the shattering and slowly thawing terrain of the moon. He can (and does) spend multiple pages on all the glorious details of the behemoth exploding through a hillside, for instance, taking its pursuers unaware.

The first two-thirds of the book hinges on one boy’s growth to manhood and fixation on hunting the immense and elusive Aleph. It reads very much like a science fiction tribute to Jack London: the boy learning the ways of the hunt, training a tracking dog (of sorts), and learning to appreciate the unique bond between man, animal, and the unforgiving wilderness. But whereas a reader of London can take the ecology of Alaska for granted, Benford the astrophysicist gives us a fine-grained detail of the geology and young ecosystem of the moon, a realistic look at what terraforming and its effectives might look like physically as well as psychologically.

But the true hinge of narrative is the Aleph, and the resolution of its pursuit changes the trajectory of the novel about two-thirds of the way into it. After this climax is reached, the narrative jumps in time and expands in scope. The Aleph moves from being a cypher for the great unknown on a boy’s horizon to a much larger unknown of the evolution of humanity. Like the dissected Aleph itself though, this final portion of the novel seems more segmented and less organic than what came before. Benford touches briefly (and a bit randomly) on ideas regarding the evolution of society, including socialism and capitalism essentialized against ecological catastrophe. In this all, the Aleph’s role (and ultimate nature) becomes more vague and less satisfying.

Dispatches from Pluto

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Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi DeltaDispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta by Richard Grant

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My wife and I lived for a couple years in Oxford, Mississippi, and there was much that I, having been raised in the Midwest, did not understand. This was more than the accent, though the first time I had to get a vehicle inspection sticker I could only stare in incomprehension at the man behind the counter when he asked if I had “tents on my windows.” My confusion must have been obvious, because he repeated it with more insistence. When that didn’t work, he asked if I had windows that were “tented.” If I did, he informed me, we’d have to do a “tent test.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. This was, after all, Mississippi, so I assumed maybe a tent was some kind of slang for broken windows that had been repaired with plastic. It wasn’t until he spelled it out, obviously running out of patience for this clueless Yankee, “TENT, T-I-N-T,” that the lightbulb came on.

I spent most of my time during that period of our lives in the physics department at Ole Miss, so interactions like this didn’t take place very often. My wife, however, taught in the county high school. At our first high school football game, I asked why her incredibly polite and cheerful students were constantly greeting her with the strange call “Muh-Kay!” She explained this was “Miss Case.” (She had spent her high school years in Texas, so she had a jump with me on the accent.)

But Oxford was great. The town was beautiful, the people were lovely, and you could get pimento cheese or fried hotdog sandwiches at the same place you fueled your car. The weather was wonderful, and in the summer there was air conditioning.

In Oxford, we heard stories about a strange place called the Delta, and one day I convinced my friend Chet, who was also the pastor of the tiny Nazarene church we attended, to take a road trip with me through a small portion of it. We must have stuck out like sore, idiotic thumbs: two skinny white men in my blue ’99 Firebird gawking, photographing, and trying to make small-talk with locals in the tiny towns we passed through. But images of that day trip stay with me: especially the tiny town of Friar’s Point on the Mississippi River, a place like a closet that you backed into with nowhere to go; the ruins of St. Cecilia’s Catholic church, empty and decaying; the Seventh Day Adventist we chatted with in the parking lot of a closed historical museum. We drove over the river to Helena, and finished with a gander at the spillway of the Sardis Dam, the largest earthen dam in the world. (Chet has stayed, learning the story of the Mississippi civil rights movement and telling its narrative.)

I thought of that trip reading Richard Grant’s account of his time in the Delta, Dispatches from Pluto. The work is a loose chronological narrative of how he fell in love with an old plantation home in the tiny hamlet of Pluto in the middle of the Delta and convinced his girlfriend to uproot from New York City and start a new life there. To him, it was as though he had discovered a new, foreign country called Mississippi and then an even stranger hidden kingdom within Mississippi called the Delta. (For confused Midwesterners: the Mississippi Delta is not the delta of the Mississippi River. It’s the confluence of the Yazoo River where it runs into the Mississippi, a low, swampy and incredibly fertile land only drained for farming after the Civil War. It makes up the northwest corner of the state, stretching along the western side of the state to Vicksburg.)

Dispatches from Pluto is Grant’s exploration of the culture, history, twisted and bizarre politics, and complex race relations of this isolated portion of our country’s poorest state. Race is a big theme in the book, with Grant (originally from London) continually frustrated and ultimately bemused in his attempts to categorize the relations between blacks and whites in the Delta in any meaningful way through the relationships he builds with his neighbors.

The book is not a travelogue, and Grant is at times frustratingly vague on the actual geography of the Delta. Nor is it a straightforward history or any sort of systematic survey of the social trends or economy of the region. And that’s fine, as the book doesn’t attempt to be this, but a section on “suggested reading” or at least some leads given in the narrative of what Grant’s reading in his attempt to understand his adopted home would have helped an interested reader know where to go to learn more.

Dispatches is instead a colorful, rambling account that makes this strange but charmingly enigmatic backwater come to life through Grant’s own discoveries. More than an exploration of a place you may never have heard of before (with a history and certain traits that are indeed troubling and often horrifying), it’s more importantly a testimony to understanding, hospitality, and neighborliness that transcends regionality and (in some cases) even race. To know a place, Grant seems to be saying, you have to know its people. And to know the people, you need to live beside them. Doing this with an openness and a genuine desire to learn and then writing about what it teaches him is where Grant succeeds admirably.

The Uncontrolling Love of God

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The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of ProvidenceThe Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence by Thomas Jay Oord

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The world of Nazarene higher education was rocked not long ago by news of the controversial dismissal of Thomas Jay Oord from his teaching position at Northwest Nazarene University. Though I don’t know Oord personally, I know he was generally regarded as a respected and active theologian inside and outside the denomination and someone who was doing important work. He also had a certain amount of controversy about him, primarily as he was considered a leader in the field of process theology.

Not knowing much about him or about process theology in general, I was anxious to read his most recent work, which is an accessible and non-academic introduction to this school of theology and in particular an explanation of how Oord’s particular flavor of process theology can provide what he sees as a solution to the problem of evil. In the work, it’s clear that Oord has read and engaged extensively with wide fields of contemporary theology across denominational traditions as well as the work of scientists at the forefront of the dialogue between theology and science. If you want to know what Oord in particular and process theology in general are about, this is a good place to start, as Oord’s discussions engage much of the current literature and his extensive footnotes give lots of directions of various places to go to learn more.

The goal of Oord’s work is to apply his brand of process theology to the issue of evil in the world. That bad things happen is undeniable. Oord calls this “genuine evil” and begins the book with several examples, from a random death caused by a rock through a windshield to the story of a woman who was raped after her family was murdered. Any theology, Oord maintains, that attempts to say things about the nature of God needs to give an account of these evils, and Oord outlines several possible responses. Any response, however, that says that God is all-powerful and could have prevented these things but did not, Oord believes, leaves God culpable for the evil and is thus unacceptable. If one has the power to prevent evil and the knowledge that it will happen but allows it to happen anyway, Oord argues, one is in some respect responsible for the evil.

Here is where Oord’s process theology comes into play. In his brand of process theology, God knows all that can possibly be known in principle. However, because Oord believes modern science has shown randomness and uncertainty as fundamental properties of the universe, the future is in principle unknowable. God does not know the future. He is presently omniscient, in that He knows all that happens in the unfolding of time, but He does not know the future because it does not yet exist. He experiences the unfolding of time along with Creation. In a sense, He learns as certain potentialities close and others become actualized.

This takes care of the foreknowledge issue in the problem of evil. God simply does not know for sure what is going to happen. But what about the divine power to prevent evil? Here is where the crux of Oord’s argument lies, as outlined in the title of his book: Oord argues that the primary, essential, and logically prior characteristic of God is uncontrolling love. This means it is always God’s nature to give freedom to his creation—from animate, intelligent beings to inanimate rocks governed by the law-like properties of the universe. Everything that God does flows from this kenotic, self-emptying love that preserves the freedom of all creation. Because God cannot deny his own nature, He cannot violate the freedom of either a person bent on evil or the trajectory of an errant stone. It’s not simply that He choses not to intercede (in which case He would still be culpable in Oord’s eyes). It is instead that the nature of God means He cannot.

If this feels like a risky, limited vision of God, it is. But it’s not one that’s completely without precedent in the Christian tradition. The old analogy of God creating a rock so big He can’t lift it points to the long-held Christian belief that God cannot do things that are logically impossible. Oord believes what someone might think is “lost” in this view of God is more than made up for by replacing a God who seems to allow evil with a deeper knowledge of the essential aspect of God—love.

To some extent, this is a view I can sympathize with and find much attractive about, especially the portions that deal with God’s nature in respect to human freedom. But there are places where I remain unconvinced, primarily related to ideas about God’s foreknowledge or lack thereof, Oord’s definition of “genuine evil,” the perception of God we’re left with, and a few other issues that Oord may clarify in later work or perhaps has already addressed elsewhere.

The first issue is something I’ve never understood, and perhaps someone can explain it to me at more length. I’ve never understood how divine (or any) foreknowledge is incompatible with free will. The explanation usually goes that knowing exactly what someone is going to do would mean they didn’t have free will in making the decision. But consider this: if Doc Brown followed me around for a week (undetected) observing and recording everything I did and then got into his DeLorean and went back in time a week, he would now have foreknowledge of every choice that I made. But would that mean I didn’t have free choice when I made them? I don’t understand how his knowledge would be incompatible with my freedom.

I’m also not convinced by the concept of a God that experiences time along with creation. For one thing, I’m not ready to give up on the concept of time travel, nor am I as married to a forward-only causality as Oord is. (I’ve even published a story about causality working the other direction.) Oord believes science indicates this is the way the world works, but I don’t think science has shut the door on the world working otherwise. Indeed, relativity shows that time is as fluid as space itself, that the geometry of space causes time to flow at different rates in different locations. I’m not sure how this maps onto Oord’s view of a God learning in time along with us. (And, as a friend pointed out, this view of time is inherently Western. Other cultures view time in very different ways.) More generally though, if God’s essential nature is uncontrolling love, I’m not sure we need to give up on his extra-temporal nature to maintain Oord’s central argument.

Too much, in my mind, is given up if we give up the concept of a God who transcends time. For one thing, I like don’t like the idea of a God that can in principle be surprised or a God that functions like a divine super-computer, reduced to simply making (very good) predictions about the future. I like to think at least someone understands and foresees the intricacies of my own personality moment to moment, or the personality of unborn kids. I’m also rather married to the idea of certain events (like the crucifixion, for instance, which the Orthodox like to talk about as happening in some sense “before the foundation of the world”) as being eternal and having backward as well as forward consequences.

I also have concerns with the way Oord defines “genuine evil,” which touches on his ontology of choice. In essence, he’s classified the genuine physical harm that comes about from an errant rock with that coming from the choices made by murders and rapists. I don’t think an accidental death can be a “genuine evil” in the same way as the result of a conscious choice can. I want to maintain a distinction between the two, even though both in my mind can have “genuinely bad” or “genuinely harmful” results. Obviously an explanation of providence needs to encompass both, but Oord seems to be on very different ground philosophically when talking about the rock versus the rapists.

In the case of the human actors, I think I can agree with him: if God’s essential nature is uncontrolling love, then it would result in a logical inconsistency for God to violate His own nature to override the freedom of choice in humans—even to prevent genuine harm. The evil that results from human actions or inactions are the responsibility of humans alone; God is not culpable.

But what about harm that results from the law-like processes of nature, including random actions that result in death and destruction (like a tornado or a stone through someone’s windshield)? Here choice doesn’t seem to be an issue, and Oord recognizes that there’s still a lot to be worked out in this respect. But he claims that because the law-like regularities in the world are themselves a form of grace, God cannot withdraw His presence or override the freedom inherent in physical processes themselves because to do so would also violate His own nature of kenotic love.

This is a bit harder for me to follow, though I again resonate with the idea that the spirit-filled presence of God throughout the physical order means that everything is sustained by God and that law-like regularities (Oord is careful to not call them laws of nature, being sensitive to contemporary philosophy of science) are themselves a form of God’s grace. But in maintaining that the freedom to self-organize is an essential property of nature and that there’s a continuous spectrum of choice from humans down to much simpler forms of life, he has to assume a teleological evolution to the universe in some sense. I don’t know all the implications here, but it seems like Oord is on much shakier ground.

I also wonder if Oord’s prioritizing of self-emptying, uncontrolling love as the essential and logically prior nature of God doesn’t overlay a Western, contemporary view of love on God in the same way that his linear conception of time does. Would this view of love have been one understood throughout history, or even in non-Western contexts today? Note that Oord’s version of process theology does not say that God is evolving; the traits of God remain eternal. But the concept of love seems to be one that has changed throughout history, which makes it potentially problematic to posit as God’s essential nature, at least love qualified in the terms that Oord gives it.

Finally, it seemed like the door was wide open at several points throughout Oord’s account to bring in trinitarian theology, or to at least acknowledge that his work has important implications for our understanding of the Trinity as well as the Incarnation. In his work, however, these implications seemed to take a backseat to Oord’s logical grapplings with qualifying God’s properties.

The idea of a God who suffers along with us, who takes risks, and who is defined and perhaps even bounded by His own self-emptying love is a strong one. I think Oord is on the forefront of important thought on these ideas in evangelical circles. I can follow him a good distance along this road. But especially as relates to issues of the nature of God in time I remain unconvinced, and in questions of God’s presence in the physical world and the implications it has for physical harms (as opposed to those from human or creaturely choice) I need more explanation.