jameswharris

Biblical Documentaries

I’m not religious, but I’ve been watching a lot of TV about the Bible lately. National Geographic Channel, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel and even PBS have been showing some fascinating shows about the Bible in recent years. Last night I watched “Jesus’ Tomb” from the National Geographic Channel’s Mysteries of the Bible series. Mysteries of the Bible is an entertaining series, but their episodes are no match compared to “The Bible’s Buried Secrets” that appeared on PBS’s NOVA a few weeks ago. All these documentaries vary greatly in quality, and that’s what I want to talk about.

It’s hard to discuss shows about the Bible without ruffling religious feathers. I love science and history shows, and these biblical documentaries combine archeology and anthropology with history, to explain the origins of western civilization. So, when I analyze these programs, I’m not dealing with the related spiritual issues, and for the most part, that’s how the documentary makers work too. They often try to compare what is written in the Bible with what we know from historical research and from scientific studies.

If you watch these shows you’ll learn a lot, but if you hold certain religious beliefs dear, some ideas presented might annoy you. Don’t get me wrong, I think religious folk are the intended audience, because atheists who like Bible history, like me, are not that common. But I’m guessing most of these shows try hard to walk the razor’s edge when it comes to controversial issues of faith.

When watching any documentary you have to analyze the producer’s motive. Many filmmakers start with a cherish idea of their own and do all they can to document the proof of their belief. Others pick an interesting mystery and try very hard to be impartial. One way to judge a film is if it examines the obvious questions that come to your mind while watching. Last night’s show, “Jesus’ Tomb” avoided several issues that popped into my head while watching.

Another way to measure the quality of these TV documentaries is track how often they repeat images or ideas. These one-hour shows actually have about 45-50 minutes of show-time versus the remainder of an hour to fill with commercials. Some shows are stretched by constantly repeating material both visually and verbally. I don’t know if it’s because the show’s producers don’t have enough content, or they think we’re stupid and their viewers need constant reiteration to actually comprehend their discoveries, or they figure most viewers are channel surfing and they want to make sure those drive-by watchers get hooked with the high points.

If repetition is because of the channel flippers, I hope TV producers stop that practice quick. It’s not fair for the serious viewers of their shows to have to be bombarded with sing-song phrases, and psychedelic video flashbacks. I don’t mind shows repeating a complex concept in different ways to help people to understand, but to flat out say and show the same words and pictures over and over again is just damn annoying. One reason PBS documentaries often seem head and shoulders above the documentaries on all the other channels is because they don’t have commercials to interrupt their flow, so PBS shows don’t do that say it five times song and dance crap.

Another thing commercial driven channels do is spend too much of their times before and after commercials presenting teases for what’s to come. Last night’s one-hour show, “Jesus’ Tomb” could easily have been a nice 30-minute documentary. If they had put in 20 more minutes of genuine content, it would have been a very good hour show even with commercials. And all my criticisms could have been answered in those twenty minutes too.

One thing I love about these biblical documentaries is they show video of where historical events took place. Seeing all the various kinds of tombs cut out of rock in last night’s show was a great way to illustrate the Bible. The filmmakers interviewed scholars about Jewish burial practices of the time, checked with what archeologists were finding, quoted related biblical verses, and showed how various beliefs came down through history in stories, paintings, and religious beliefs. Last night’s show did a pretty good job of exploring why and how Jesus might have been put in a nearby tomb, but I was left with a bunch of questions for the filmmakers, even at their simple level.

How common was it to put people in those small tombs cut into solid rock? If it was very common, wouldn’t there be millions of them in Israel? To the spiritually minded, the important issue is the resurrection of Jesus. For that story to work a tomb is a good stage, but would a common criminal be buried in a tomb? (That’s what the Romans and Jewish leaders thought of him.) The show spent a lot of time exploring how and why Jesus’ body could have been removed from the tomb, but they didn’t explain two ways that popped into my mind.

Could some his followers have removed him and buried him elsewhere, not telling the women who found the tomb empty the next day? And were there no grave-robbers in that time, even Romans who wanted to get rid of a martyr’s body? Of course, for the spiritual story to work, Jesus’ body had to disappear, so does it really matter how?

And here’s the part of the show that the filmmakers avoided, but I wanted explored. In the early parts of the Bible the concept of afterlife is missing. The show did interview one scholar that said Jews of the time believed in the resurrection, and wanted their bodies gathered in ossuaries, but they believed all people would be returned to their bodies at the end of time. For centuries Christians believed something like this too. So when did the idea of dying and immediately going to heaven come about?

The point of Jesus’ tomb story is about resurrection. Why couldn’t the show’s filmmaker spend twenty minutes on the history of this idea rather than repeating so much of the other information. At what point in the history of mankind did people start thinking about living after death? And is the story of Jesus and his tomb the pivotal point in history when this idea was born? I’m not asking the filmmaker to state whether resurrection is possible or not possible, I just want the history and archeology of that idea.

Many of the biblical documentaries are quite timid on exploring the depth of an idea. They love to bring up startling ideas, like another show that dealt with apocryphal stories of Jesus, including one where Jesus killed a child when he was a child himself. They are not afraid to have National Enquirer headlines, but they don’t want to have scholarly expositions because that might bore people.

On the whole I find these shows very entertaining because of they usually give me a good deal of history I haven’t known about before, along with some nice video of archeological digs, science labs pursing arcane mysteries of ancient evidence, and interviews with fascinating scholars. However, sometimes I think they throw in some interviews with wild-eyed theorists and fanatics too.

Studying the Bible is like studying the founding fathers of America, but the people of the Bible are the founding fathers of Western civilization. So far these Bible documentary makers examine artifacts and compare them to Bible stories. What I’d like to see is for them to examine the history of the mind of the people. A history of psychological development. Please show a history of the common ideas that arose during biblical times. The NOVA show, “The Bible’s Buried Secrets” is a step in the right direction.

Understanding the early history of mankind is like researching our childhood to figure out how we came to be who we are. Every age interprets the Bible anew, reinventing religion. Most people ignore that or never knew that, and assume that current religious beliefs have always existed as they do now. I want these biblical documentary historians to show how beliefs were different century by century and how the people were different because of their beliefs. Some Christians hate the word evolution, but all the concepts we hold in our head are a product of evolution too.

God, Satan, Heaven, Hell, sin, redemption, charity, faith, etc., all started out as tiny one cell ideas in the mind of man and over the centuries have evolved into the dinosaur ideas they are today. This season’s shows about Bible history barely touch on this, but I expect the biblical documentaries to evolve too.

JWH 12/17/8

Surviving Bad Times

I have lived through six previous recessions, but I only remember four of them. Bad economic times are downers, for the economy and our state of minds. Even knowing those six economic downturns only lasted 1-2 years each, it always feels like we’re on the brink of doom when we go into one. It doesn’t help that the talking heads constantly bring up the Great Depression, which lasted 10 years, and peaked with 25 percent unemployment.

I’m glad those commentators don’t know about the Long Depression, 1873-1896 that lasted 23 years. I wonder how many people remember the survivalists back during the early 80s depression, when people bought land and guns thinking the end of civilization was around the corner. It’s very easy for dark economic clouds to bring doom and gloom that make us all a little paranoid and crazy. What we need is light therapy for our economic depression.

My favorite movies were those made during the ten years of the Great Depression, including both the gritty social ones focusing on the bad times, and the glittery ones that help people escape their daily woes. Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation tells us how greatness came out of those bad times. If we’re entering into long years of hard times it might help to study that decade.

If we’re lucky, times won’t get that bad. And how bad are bad times anyway? The worst is losing a job and your home – check out The Grapes of Wrath for insight into that kind of bad times. I remember my parents and grandparents talking about the great depression and how bad it was, but they also had lots of fond memories from those years.

Things are much different now than back then. We have social security, medicare, unemployment checks, food stamps, and all kinds of other social programs and charities to help people. I don’t think we’ll see hobo jungles outside our large cities, or hordes of men riding the rails looking for work, or long bread lines. We are going to see a lot of people out of work. We’ll probably see a lot of people sharing apartments and homes, and a lot of two family incomes become one. I expect a fair number twenty-somethings deciding it’s a good time to move in with their parents awhile and finish up that college degree.

Back during the depression the number of people in a household was much higher than it is today, sometimes including three or even four generations. We live in times when everyone wants their own house or apartment and that’s an extravagance. Bad times cause people to band together and share expenses, and everyone learns to be frugal.

Of course, everyone suddenly concentrating on the value of a buck only causes more layoffs and worsens the recession and makes people talk about depression. Recessions are psychological as much as economic. If you’re afraid for the future you won’t spend money, but consumer confidence and spending is how we get out of a recession.

A recession is when the economy pulls back from a boom, and business and families decide to cut the fat and go on a spending diet. Recessions are a readjustment period where we excise the excesses and get practical. I expect a lot of people to cancel their $100 a month cell phone plans, cut their Netflix plan from 5 discs to 2 out at a time, trim a lot of cable television options, stop buying toys they just have to have but only use for a week or two before thinking about new toys, or rethinking $50 dinners that are wolfed down like fast food. People who used to brag about drinking $25 dollar bottles of wine will now brag about the $12 great discoveries they are making.

Folks shopping at Target who have been loyal brand users will suddenly notice store brands have the same chemical compositions for dollars less. When people realize that $400,000 houses are really worth $150,000, they will start wondering about the value of a $50 video game or $10 movie tickets. Women with husbands making six figures will strangely discover coupons and thrift shop clothing.

My advice is if you’ve been living paycheck to paycheck, now is the time to learn how to manage money. But if you’ve always managed your money well and have savings, now is the time to be patriotic and go shopping.

If you’ve got money to spend, it’s a great time to do green remodeling. Read Hot, Flat and Crowded to get an idea of what Thomas Friedman calls ET economics. Friedman predicts America could get out of this economic slump and create a world-wide boom by focusing on environmental technology, ET, that will rival the IT boom, caused by information technology.

I hope Barack Obama uses the recession to redesign the growth economy into a green steady-state economy. The NY Times is reporting that bad economic times is pushing global climate problems out of the news. Reengineering our society to be green, will cost jobs and create them. Now is the time to remember that.

What I hate about recessions are the funding cuts to big science as if the quest to understanding reality is one of our most wasteful extravagances. How many jobs and spin-off technologies would be created if Congress took that $34 billion they are thinking of giving to the Detroit Big 3 and put it into the colonization of the Moon and Mars? Or at least starting a renewable energy industry.

I don’t know why I write these essays about economics. They get no hits. I think they are therapeutic. We really could be on the brink of a terrible economic collapse and my writing Pollyannaish blog posts of hope help me get through the chills of economic ghost stories.

JWH 12/7/8

My Poor Man’s Sonos

Sonos is considered the Mercedes of the music media servers, but I have had to make do with my Toyota-like SoundBridge. What makes the Sonos system so deluxe is it’s $400 hand controller, which has a LCD screen to aid in locating songs. The Roku Soundbridge has a tiny handheld remote which controls the SoundBridge device that has a 280×16 pixel LED display for selecting songs. For this to work I need to stand in front of the SoundBridge because the remote may work across the room but I can only see the LED display if I’m right in front of it.

In my La-Z-boy laziness, I wanted to kick back in my recliner and play songs with fat-butt staying-in-chair ease, which the Sonos controller was designed for I’m sure. Now I’ve discovered RokuRemote, a iPhone/iPod touch app. My iPod touch is now my Sonos-like controller to my SoundBridge, bringing me to near nerdvana.

I say near, because complete bliss would only be achieved by voice command to a house controlled computer. I would say telepathy song control was the absolute ultimate, but I have to be realistic sometimes. Voice control is possible, but it would be far more expensive than even buying into a Sonos system, and so I make do with my $2.99 RokuRemote app.

For those people who only listen to music via white ear-buds, you will never understand the nature of my problem. I have a computer in my man-room with 18,000 mp3 songs on it. I have a stereo receiver with floor standing Infinity speakers in my den. My computer also has access to Rhapsody music, with a library of millions of songs. Any album I own, or one that I tell Rhapsody to save in my library, can be played on my den stereo system through the SoundBridge.

The X-Prize problem is to sit in my den chair and tell my computer what to play on the stereo with the least amount of hassle. Now you can understand why I wish I could just say, “Computer, play ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ off of Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.” Since that isn’t possible, I launch RokuRemote on my iPod touch, and pick my SoundBridge, and then say I want to search by albums, and type in “Everybody” and hit search, and then punch on the title of the album, and the poke the song and it plays. Pretty damn easy.

When you connect to the SoundBridge you have the choice of searching by artist, album, song or playlist. Since my collection is large, there a good size pause before seeing whichever listing I choose. This is probably due to the limitations of the SoundBridge, and not the RokuRemote program. If the SoundBridge had some memory and extra CPU processing power, it could maintain the information about my music collection and periodically talk to the computer for updates.

In the old days you have to find the LP, decide which side to play, and then place the stylus on the particular track you wanted to hear. CDs were a big step forward. Only one side, and you used a remote to select the cut number. We are living in the 21st century now when all the music is in a database and it’s only a matter of retrieving it. The song access time has gotten very short, but wouldn’t it be living a dream to be able to say a song’s name and album and hear it instantly?

If you own a SoundBridge and an iPhone or iPod touch, just go to the AppStore on your device and search on Roku. It’s $2.99 well spent. If you don’t own a SoundBridge but want a media server, Sonos now works with a free iPhone/touch app, so all you have to buy is the $349 Zone player.

JWH 12/2/8

10,000 Hours to Greatness

What was your adolescent dream ambition? Rock star, football player, violinist, chess master, actress, master chef, writer, film director, video game programmer, reporter, politician? I wanted to be another Robert A. Heinlein on most days. On other days, I pictured myself competing with Bob Dylan or Neil Young, but during those rare moments when I thought I was being down-to-Earth, I figured I’d become an astronomer. I became a computer programmer, and not even a very exciting kind of programmer, like those guys who program artificial vision or Mars rovers, but a name and address kind of database guy. Probably all of us, in our teenage fantasies, expected to do a whole lot more with our lives than we actual did. So why didn’t we become rock stars?

Malcolm Gladwell explains why in his new book, The Outliers: The Story of Success. To learn about one of the factors of success, read a significant extract in The Guardian. Gladwell makes the case that successful people, the kind that become rock stars or computer programming billionaires, succeeded because they all have devoted at least 10,000 hours of practice to their craft. That figure has been reported for years, but Gladwell explores the idea further and wider. Want to be the next Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen or the Beatles, then practice a lot, a whole lot, for about 10,000 hours and you’ll be ready for Carnegie Hall.

I must be a genius at television watching because I’ve probably logged more than 25,000 hours watching TV. Ditto at listening to music and reading novels, but those passive activities really don’t count. And I know I’ve put in 10,000 hours at work programming computers, but I’m no Bill Joy. I’m nowhere near as good a programmer as my friend Mike. Mike has spent thousands of hours studying programming after work. I seldom do that. My guess, the 10,000 hours Gladwell is talking about, are those hours where you’re pushing your brain to learn something new, where you’re constantly trying to get something right, where you stay on the cutting edge of discovery.

Another factor I wonder about is age. Many of the examples Gladwell covers deal with people putting their 10,000 hours in before they were 20. That’s practicing 2.7 hours a day from the time you’re 10 till 20. What kind of kid has that discipline? Bobby Fischer, Bill Gates, John, Paul, George and Ringo.

To test this concept, we should start teaching about the rewards of 10,000 hour of practice to every kid that begins kindergarten and remind them every day until they finish high school. What if we all gave copies of The Outliers to every tiny tot expressing a desire to be famous, could we create a super ambitious next generation?

Would every seven year-old that was actually able to grind out his 10,000 hours of practice become a major success? If I could time travel back to my younger self and convince him to pick something and stick with it, would I have been able to become a rock star or science fiction writer? We like to think winners are big successes because of lucky genes, or the lucky bastards were at the right place at the right time. Malcolm Gladwell suggests it isn’t always so.

The answer I am seeking is whether or not I can use this knowledge now, at age 57. I’ve tried to play the guitar more than once in my life, but I doubt I’ve put 20 hours of solid effort into the endeavor. If someone had shown me this article before I bought my first guitar at a pawn shop when I was a teenager I might have saved myself $25. Then again, maybe I would have bought the guitar with more realistic expectations. But do the math. Let’s say I was disciplined enough to practice 1 hour a day. That’s 365 hours in one year. Ten years of study will log me 3,650 hours of practice time. That’s almost three decades to mastery. Gee, I could become a studio musician by the time I’m 97. I could speed up the process by practicing 2.7 hours a day and be looking for music work by the time I’m 67.

Are old dogs too old to become virtuosos. Gladwell said that music students who only gotten in 4,000 hours of practice were destined to teach. That makes me ask: How many hours until I’d be a competent hobbyist? Let’s say I wanted to take up the guitar again. How many hours would it take to learn 10 of my favorite songs, and be able to perform them for my friends so they could 1) recognize the tunes, 2) endure listening to all ten songs, 3) be willing to testify that I could play the guitar without smirking, and 4) be able to play those songs in time with other musicians? I’m not talking about being great, but being able to play like people used to do back in 19th century, when friends would play for fun because back then, if you wanted to hear music you had to make it yourself.

I can think of several hobbies I would like to be moderately accomplished at. I’ve recently taken up digital photography. I’m better than most snapshot shooters, but light years away from the good amateurs that I see presenting their work in online galleries or selling photos at arts and craft fairs.

I’d also like to be a better web graphic artist and master Photoshop. At work I develop web pages, but mostly for data entry and reports. I’d like to have the skills to create better looking web sites. This desire overlaps somewhat with the digital photography because people wanted more photos on the web pages I maintain.

Would 1,000 hours of applied practice make me a skilled amateur? There’s a chance I’ve already put in 100 hours at digital photography, and I can already feel a great deal of improvement. Would 1 hour a day of dedicate study and practice get me a quantum leap ahead by next holiday season? I think it would, despite the fact that I’m 57. I went and shot some friends yesterday for about 2 hours. Before I left I studied my camera’s manual and picked out a handful of new techniques to try. Knowing about those tricks didn’t magically make me shoot better pictures, but I was seeing different looking photos than what I’ve been shooting before.

Taking MFA writing courses helped me improve my fiction writing. Where I failed was the daily practice. If only I had developed the discipline to practice one hour a day since Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in 2002, I would have logged 2,200 hours of practice. I think I have put in 600 hours on blogging since last year, and I see improvements there. To be honest, I would be much better if I consciously studied creative non-fiction techniques and applied them in a systematic disciplined way. I should dissect great essays for practice. To work, I think practice means pushing the envelope.

January 1 is still over a month away, but an interesting New Year’s resolution experiment for 2009 would be to apply the techniques I’m learning from Gladwell’s book to see how far I can take this old dog brain of mine. If I really wanted to scientific, I should pick the guitar, something I’ve got about zero skill with and see how far I can get in one year. Does the 10,000 rule apply to everything? Or does it only apply to a person’s natural inclinations to pursue certain skills? If we all put an hour a day into juggling, would we all reach the same skill level after a 1,000 hours of practice?

The only song I can remember the words to is “Happy Birthday,” and I still stumble on that third line. I’ve listened to “Like A Rolling Stone” at least a 1,000 times, but I can’t recite the lyrics, nor could I hum the tune. A friend once taught me the chords to that song, and I got so I could play them through consistently, but few people could ever guess what I was playing. Logic tells me since I’m rounding the bend towards the home stretch to the social security years, I shouldn’t waste any of my practice hours chasing skills that have little chance of paying off. Would any number of hours of practice help a tune-deaf person lacking any sense of rhythm learn to play music?

The only endeavor I’ve stuck to in recent years has been this blog, and piddling around with my three other web sites, The Classics of Science Fiction, Lady Dorothy Mills and Classic Booklists, which are all extremely homely when it comes to web design. Let’s see what 400-600 hours of disciplined practice would do for these existing efforts.

To be honest, I’d still like to be great at something, but I think I’m too old for that. How many late bloomers make a success at 57? Sounds silly, doesn’t it? But is age really the factor? If success is dedicated focus and discipline, could it be those traits always show up by the adolescent years not because those are they best years to learn, but because if you’re going be focused and disciplined person those traits would have shown up by then?

I was never great at anything because I never wanted to pick one thing and stick to it, pursuing that one skill like an idiot savant. What would be fascinating to know if I could somehow discipline my brain to focus on one pursuit and ignore all other interests, would mastering that skill be any different at 7 or 57? If I was 27 or 37 or even 47, I think I’d try hard to find out.

JWH 11/29/8

Defining Science Fiction

This is my 185^th post for my WordPress blog and my 51^st that will be filed in the science fiction category. I started out as a late middle-aged guy wanting to reinvent himself by pursuing a new hobby and ended up doing way too much naval gazing. I need to break out of that loop, wrap up what I’ve learned, and move forward. Because I have spent so much time on the subject of science fiction, I’ve decided the way to find closure is by being my own Freud and define the term “science fiction.”

Hundreds of people have tried to define the phrase science fiction. It’s as slippery a definition to pin down as pornography. Among the billions of people that ride planet Earth through space, there are probably several million that would describe themselves as science fiction fans. That implies that science fiction is an art form, like there are fans of jazz or impressionistic art. But if you were given two jazz songs to listen to, one by Benny Goodman, and one by Miles Davis, could you define jazz? To say that Galaxy Quest and Red Mars are both science fiction is true, but one is a parody of science fiction and the other is hard-core science fiction. It’s like looking at all the breeds of dogs and then coming up with a definition that describes them all but doesn’t include cats and other animals.

After pursuing hundreds of hours of meditation on the subject, I want to define science fiction as a belief system rather than an art form, and when we label something science fiction we’re doing the same thing as when people call something Christian music or a religious novel. Religion is an approach to defining reality. Science fiction is an approach to defining reality. So too are philosophy, science and journalism.

If you watch the Christmas classics The Bishop’s Wife, It’s A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol, you are seeing a religious definition of reality put into fictional form. Viewers are asked to believe that angels exist as part of our reality, and that the spirit of Christmas is as fundamental as gravity.

For the viewers who choose to watch Star Wars or Star Trek movies instead, they see a much different reality defined. Both belief systems suggest aspects of our reality that science has never seen. And even though the word science is part of the phrase science fiction, and the implication is science fiction uses science as part of its belief system, science fiction is no more scientific than creationism or intelligent design philosophy.

Personally I have always wanted “real science” fiction to exist, and some writers try, but such works are rare and they are not the works that people point to when they use the phrase science fiction. It is possible to sidestep the philosophical issues and just lump religious fiction, science fiction and call it all fantasy fiction. I love movies about angels, but I don’t believe they exist. I also love movies about faster-than-light travel, time travel, and magic like in Harry Potter stories, but none of those things exist in reality either.

It’s easy to use the fantasy-for-fun escape clause, except that too many of our homo sapiens billions do believe in those fantasy concepts. That’s why I define science fiction as a belief system like religion.

What we need to define now is fiction. Is fiction no more than shared fantasies that have been made into an art form? Films and television shows have become the most popular art form of all time, with some stories embraced by millions of fans. Fiction becomes an escape from reality, and the different forms of fiction appeal to variations in belief systems. We admire what we believe, or want to believe.

I chose not to believe in a religious system when I was a child probably because I had already been imprinted with science fictional beliefs before religion had a chance to imprint on me. By age four or five, Topper, Invaders from Mars, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Superman, Target Earth and a host of other science fictional and fantastic stories got to me before Bible stories could. Instead of believing in God, gods, angels, devils, and miracles, I took up beliefs in space ships, aliens, robots, time travel, invisibility, telepathy, and what not. Is it any wonder that the fundamentalist religions of the world want to protect their children from popular culture?

If I wanted to, I could write a book about how science fiction affected people in the same way a social scientist could write a book about how religion affected people. If I had the time, that might be a fun project. Part of the fun would be to show how various science fictional ideas were introduce into the culture through the evolution of science fiction. The roots of Star Wars could be taken back to E. E. “Doc” Smith and Edmund Hamilton. Tracking the seeds planted by John W. Campbell Jr. or Robert A. Heinlein would take years.

The difference between the belief systems religion and science fiction is we can track down who introduced a belief concept into reality with science fiction, but we have no idea who invented the concept of angels or gods, but rest assured, humans in the distant past thought them all up.

I now feel like I know where I got my science fictional beliefs and how. What do I do now? If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. I’ve gotten to this realization many times before in my life. It’s like a heroin addict finally seeing that injected bliss is false bliss – it doesn’t mean he’ll stop shooting up. Religious teachers often use the metaphor of sleep to describe the condition that exists before enlightenment. There is both religious Buddhism and atheistic Buddhism, and the same must be true for science fiction.

As long as readers can stay awake and remember the concept of “real science” fiction, ordinary science fiction falls into the black hole called opium for the masses. My constant struggle to define science fiction is merely my struggle to stay awake and fight my addiction to science fictional beliefs. The only way to save fiction from escapism is to define true art as that which exposes belief systems.

The trouble is most citizens of our reality prefer escapism to reality. Harry Potter books will always be more popular than the stories of James Joyce or Edith Wharton. This makes the role of the book critic to define a novel as being realistic or escapist, and if the work is fantasy, rate the quality of the opium. Harry Potter books would be primo smoke. A book like The Life of Pi by Yann Martel is a fictionalized version of this essay. It uses fantasy to trick the reader into seeing reality, and then admits that most readers will want to go back to sleep.

I know I will go back to sleep now, and return to my science fiction beliefs to while away the hours while I wait for death. I should reject all fantasy fiction, but I know the power of my addiction, and if I reread this essay from time to time, I’ll even remind myself of where it comes from, and wake myself up for a moment or two. I know I will spend the afternoon watching WALL-E with my wife and friends, and this evening watch the twelfth and final episode of True Blood with another friend. Tomorrow night I’ll watch The Big Bang Theory and Heroes. If I could understand why I prefer entertaining fiction to seeking a deeper understanding of reality I would really find enlightenment.

JWH 11/23/8