CSFF Blog Tour vs Tuesday Tunes

This month the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour is highlighting Beckon by Tom Pawlik, which carries the tag line 'Come. And live forever.' In which spirit it is time to introduce the Top Ten Songs About Living Forever, painstakingly chosen by a mysterious tribe who have been holed up in a cave for centuries with nothing but Spotify to teach them about the way of the world above ground.

10. Jeff Buckley: Eternal Life A song inspired by anger over "the man that shot Martin Luther King, World War II, slaughter in Guyana and that weird millionaire in Beckon, Wyoming who was kidnapping immigrants."

9. The Primevals: Elixir of Life The Scottish garage rock band categorically deny hunting dinosaurs through anomalies. Which is kind of a shame, because taht would be an interesting TV show.

8. Ookpikk: Soda Fountain of Youth Every top ten needs at least five minutes of quality electronica, and, well, who can resist a title like that?

7. Queen: Who Wants To Live Forever? Which is, in fact, the question asked by the book of the month.

6. Arrested Development: Fountain of Youth Unnecessarily catchy and suitably summery funky hip-hop.

5. Madness: Forever Young They just are, aren't they? I mean, Suggs is like 50, but he's still the naughty schoolboy from Baggy Trousers.

4. Dave Davies: Life After Life (Transformation) I couldn't come up with a suitable Kinks song for this month, so here's a 2002 solo offering from Dave. It couldn't be much further from the power chords of You Really Got Me if it tried though....  

3. Pretenders: Forever Young Not a cover of the Madness song. A cover of a Dylan song.

2. Gym Class Heroes: Live Forever [Fly With Me] More catchy hip-hop, of a slightly mellower flavour this time.

1. Evanescence: My Immortal Stunningly, hauntingly, gorgeously beautiful. But enough about Amy Lee, enjoy the music :)

Now Spotify the Top Ten, and pop back to yesterday's post for the links to the rest of the tour.

Monday Review: Afterlife - The Resurrection Chronicles by Merrie DeStefano

Afterlife is a bit of a schizophrenic book. The cover is all neo-Twilight urban fantasy, but the premise is definitely more psuedo-science than traditional fantasy. To explain: Afterlife is set in New Orleans some time in the future, where science has found a way to instantly transport your dead soul into a cloned body. Up to nine times, which seems somewhat arbitrary, and the whole resurrection process was never really explained to my satisfaction (probably should have left it in the realms of urban fantasy, I think). Cue a philosophical sci-fi thriller dealing with cloning, immortality and religious faith (yes, there are nominally Christian characters in there, puzzling these things over). From the blurb:

Chaz Dominguez is a professional Babysitter in New Orleans, helping to integrate the recently deceased into their new and improved lives. Though Fresh Start has always been the only game in town, resurrection isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nine lives are all a person can get—and a powerful group of desperate, high-level Nine-Timers will stop at nothing to possess the keys to true immortality. Now the only hope for Chaz and his family—and the human race—lies in the secrets locked away in the mind of Angelique, the beautiful, mysterious Newbie he must protect . . .

Afterlife presents (insufficient science notwithstanding) an interesting premise, an undoubtedly interesting world, and what should have been an interesting and action-filled plot, but then, at times I just didn't get it. The multiple POV characters I can cope with, for instance, unless you make one of them a dog. And I'm not sure where the 'Resurrection Chronicles' thing comes from, as it was all wrapped up mighty neatly at the end of this book!

So much for the quibbles though; is it any good? Well, it's actually not bad, unless you were expecting Twilight, in which case you'll likely be baffled by all the science-fictiony stuff that sneaks in. If you ignore the cover and take my word for it that this is actually a dystopian story in which the 'ideal' world, where near immortality is available to all, has gone horribly, terribly wrong, then you might get a kick out of it.

A Christian sci-fi/fantasy reader looking for something thought-provoking but non-threatening to recommend to a friend might find the subjects of immortality, faith and science gone bad as covered in this story will provide good copnversation starters. Afterlife is definitely something different; I'm still not quite sure what it is, but it's different, and that's got to be worth something.

Friday Review: The Personifid Project by R E Bartlett

As the sometime author of mediocre novels myself, I take little pleasure in making negative comments on a book. (Except if it’s so bad that it deserves everything coming, of course, but I don’t think I’ve even started anything that bad for a while.)

I am going to do so now, however, if for no other reason than to try and avoid similar mistakes myself.

So, on with the review. The Personifid Project takes place at some unspecified future time when the Pacific has started to dry up and the planet’s human population is joined by various robot and android companions. The Project concerns the transference of human souls into artificial bodies, thus prolonging life indefinitely. Which sounds like an interesting enough premise, and a plot dealing with the potential use and abuse of this technology could certainly provide plenty of food for thought, although I’m not sure soul transference really fits in the sci-fi setting.

More of an issue to me, however, was the logical inconsistency of a world where the existence of the human soul has been scientifically proven, yet religion has become redundant to the point that Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and indeed any one of the three, have been re-named ‘the Tri-une Soul’. I think there was one passing use of the word ‘Christian’ to assure the reader that our heroes aren’t members of some wacky cult, but really, it all seems very unlikely to say the least.

OK, let’s accept that it’s science-fantasy and suspend our disbelief accordingly. Now what? Well, I’m afraid I still have one more gripe: info-dumping. Now I’m prepared to accept a degree of this, because we’ve been transported to a distant future world and things are going to need a little explanation. Just where that explanation was used got a bit confused though: our heroine, Aphra Vessey, explains the the imprint system (which I had worked out, and got the 'Mark of the Beast' reference) like someone in a cheesy radio ad, but the we were left to figure out for ourselves what the luminire does. Having finished the book, I think it is what any self-respecting author of Trek fan-fic would refer to as a transporter, or a near approximation thereof.

And why, for no apparent reason, did Lev suddenly decide to read the testimony she prepared for her baptism? And to her husband, as it obviously hadn't come up any earlier in their marriage? Surely people don’t really talk like that, even in weird far-future religious cults?

OK, gripes over, I will have to admit that the author must have got something right, because, despite all the flaws, I kept reading. I actually wanted to know what happened next. On the level of a pacy action adventure story, it works. On the whole, the future was well imagined. And on top of that, Aphra's gradual acceptance of the Tri-une Cult was believable, and there were plenty of interesting ideas brought up by the story's basic premise.

The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul

Eternal life. Immortality. The fountain of eternal youth.

Humanity's quest for these have been motifs of fiction for probably as long as there has been fiction; mythical adventurers seeking the elixir of life, that sort of thing.

Recently science fiction has offered a whole new way of living forever - in fact, several:

• Vampire legends have allowed a form of eternal life for many years; although this largely belongs in the fantasy/horror genres, there is no reason not to invent a science fiction twist to the original legend (which, in itself, can be seen as a subversion of the Christian communion, but that's another subject).
• In Red Dwarf, Lister extended his life by 3 million years by going into stasis, thus comfortably outliving the entire human race. Despite still being 'mortal', Lister's predicament nicely illustrates one of the less desirable potential side-effects of immortalilty.
• Advances in medical science can be extrapolated or invented to cure almost anything, slow down aging, and extend life for as long as is necessary for the story in hand.
• Probably the most spiritual form of eternal life in contemporary sf is 'ascension'; in Stargate: SG-1, Daniel Jackson ascends to become a being of pure energy, exisiting on a higher state of existence. However, in Jackson's case at least, the process transpired to be reversable.
• Eternal life in cyberspace. I guess this kind of idea was a part of the Cyberpunk genre: the uploading of one's memories and personality into a huge computer system where it can live on long after the expiration date of the physical form.
• Taking the concept a step further, in The Sixth Day, personality and memories can be uploaded into a clone of the physical form repeatedly, effectively extending life indefinitely.
• Douglas Adams, in typical Douglas Adams style, created an immortal character - Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged - who 'had had his imortality inadvertantly thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands.'

And since I can't possibly hope to top that sentence, I shall offer today's poser (borrowed from a cyberpunk story, I think Greg Egan's Permutation City):

If a simulation is perfect in every way, is it still a simulation, or is it the real thing?

For instance, is a clone of you, with your personality and memories, you? If both exist at once, which is the real you? And how do you know?

Perhaps more relavent to the Christian worldview, does the clone have a soul? Does the cyberspace copy of you?

Another interesting point from the Christian worldview is that if you could physically live forever, you wouldn't need Christ's salvation to gain eternal life. Or to put it another way, rather than 'dying to sin', you would have to physically die in order to receive it.