The Fredösphere

In an earlier post I commented with pleasant surprise on a Swedish composer's attempt to create an opera on a science fiction theme.  Commenters assured me this was hardly the first composer to attempt such a feat.  Daniel Wolf cited as ancient an example as Haydn, which impressed me to no end.  Those of you familiar with my Haydn animus won't be surprised my mental picture of Haydn as a space opera-tor is that of the salt vampire of Planet M-113.

Anyhoo, I'm pleased to add another work to this growing list:  Jacques Offenbach's adaptation of Jules Verne's Le Voyage dans la Lune.  Wikipedia has the details, including a wonderful photo showing costumes and a set from the original lush (but to the modern eye, goofy) production.  Kudos is due (hey!  I conjugates that verb real good!) to io9 for dredging up this information (especially considering that deep historical perspective is not what you expect from a Gawker-related site) in a terribly interesting roundup of info on Georges Méliès' groundbreaking 1902 SF film A Trip to the Moon, which itself was recycled in a trippy music video by The Smashing Pumpkins called Tonight, Tonight:



And I suppose I'll have to comment on The Man that Fell to Earth if I ever get up the courage to watch it.

Space.  And opera.  What else have I overlooked?

Labels: Composition, Culture, Futurism, movie, Opera, sci-fi, VideoClip

I am so looking forward to Prince Caspian.  First, because it's my favorite of the seven Narnia books.  Indeed, the opening sequence--when the Pevensie children dig through ruins to learn that their own castle, and even their own past lives, are now relegated to half-forgotten legends--is the spookiest, most melancholy thing I've ever read in all of fantasy literature.  It is my sword Rhindon; with it I killed the Wolf.  Ooooh, yes!

I'm also hoping this movie will not disappoint as the previous one did.  I'd like to see a little more compelling performances and a little less cringe-making dialog (but the trailer does not inspire a lot of hope along those lines).  I'd also prefer no more of the kind of scene we saw in the first movie, where Aslan comes to the underground lake, and the White Witch emerges from the water wearing little more than stiletto heels and a thick layer of gold paint, and I'm like, whoa, dude, I don't remember this being in the book.

Watch the trailer and hear our hero introduce himself:  "Ah im Printz Gespian!"  What's with the vaguely continental accent?  Is it an artifact of the trailer, or does he talk like that all the time?  Here, the ugly head of linguistic nit-picking opens its Pandora's box:  how is it that 20th century English is spoken in Narnia--over a period lasting many centuries?  Did the filmmakers decide to throw in a little weirdness in the Narnian accents to slightly cover their hienies on the issue of linguistic drift?  I really doubt it, but it's fun to imagine they did.

Labels: movie, VideoClip

Via SF Signal, it's High Noon exactly as you remember it.  Well, as I remember it anyway:



Via Ionarts (who got it from Boing Boing, who got it from Laughing Squid), it's a cat playing a theremin.  I definitely detect the influence of Messiaen, although I'm thinking not so much the Turangalîla Symphonie as some of the more pointillistic moments in Des Canyons aux Etoiles:

Labels: fun, movie, VideoClip

Frankly, if you're going to email me asking for my help and you can't even be bothered to do me the courtesy of placing your apostrophes correctly, don't expect me to call 911 for you.

Here are two excellent a cappella groups to sample.  First, via A Capella News, it's Naturally 7:



This group is so hot, they make their tour bus burst into flames.  Meanwhile, Chicago A Cappella is equally caliente--listen to samples of them singing Mata del ánima sola by Antonio Esévez, Son de la loma by Miguel Matamoros, arr. J. Castillo, and Salseo by Oscar Galian.

My hoary custom of playing Bach's St. Matthew Passion every Good Friday has gradually given way to Golijov's La Pasion Segun San Marco.  I switched because I figured the hot Latin rhythms would be more compelling to my kids ears (plus, they have enough Spanish that they can translate most of it).  What I didn't anticipate is the way the music sets their feet a-dancing.  We compromise, and I make them wait a decent interval, then let them cut loose.  Watching them dance to the Death of God is disconcerting, but their urges are innocent and I think it would be wrong to suppress them completely.

Labels: Choral, SoundClip, VideoClip, vocal

I've been writing reviews of SF books for Starship Sofa.  My latest reviews cover The Jewels of Aptor, the first novel of Samuel R. Delaney (written when he was only 19), Neil Gaiman's instant-classic youth novel Coraline, and most recently, Space Vulture.  This last is an ambitious attempt to recreate the raw energy of the great pulpy space operas of 40-60 years ago, written by the creator of Roger Rabbit and his childhood friend, the archbishop of Newark, NJ.  Yes, we're talking about a confluence of very odd factoids.  If you want to find out if Space Vulture achieved it's authors' high ambitions, head on over to the Starship Sofa Reviews page.

Labels: sci-fi

Ambigrams.  Wow, and double-wow.  Plus, a bearded dragon named Fred.

Today's post is about religion in science fiction.  I wanted to write something that aspired to comprehensiveness, but that vain hope was quickly dashed.  These days there is so much fiction being written and commented on that fits that description.  Just finding all the blogs devoted to R & SF is too big a task.

Ted Chiang, author of the excellent (and award-nominated) The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate displays the stereotypical SF author's attitude:

All science fiction is fundamentally post-religious literature. For those whose minds are shaped by science and technology, the universe is fundamentally knowable. Faith dissolves, replaced by a sense of wonder at the complexity of creation.

Yet Chiang's alternate realities subvert that belief, out of a playful sense of adventure, if for no other reason:

In "Tower of Babylon," a group of miners climb until they reach the vault of heaven, hoping to find God on the other side of the carapace of granite that enfolds their world. "Hell is the Absence of God" tells the tale of one Neil Fisk, whose wife is killed in a visitation by the angel Nathanael to a downtown shopping district. In Neil's thoroughly contemporary world, God exists beyond a doubt. Angels behave like weather phenomena, the miracle of their appearances tracked, quantified, and reported on the nightly news.

Another point of view is represented by this expert who correlates belief in aliens with Jesus and going to the bathroom while employing logical rigor to a degree I don't recall ever encountering before.

Whole blogs devote themselves fully or mostly to religious SF.  Old Testament Space Opera is the first to come to mind.  An impressive list of websites and more impressive steampunky graphics are maintained at Christian Science Fiction & Fantasy Central.  I also found a list of recommended titles and a list of authors by religious affiliation.  (The latter really needs to do some wheat-chaff sorting; I suspect a lot of these guys are nominals, which is a far more important distinction than how they fall out in the dreaded Congregationalist-Methodist schism.  For example, calling that Olaf Stapledon a Quaker is ridiculous in light of the letter he wrote to his unborn great-grandson urging him to fall off the religion wagon without delay.)  Finally, the unfortunately-named topic of "Christian science fiction" has its own Wikipedia page, wherein this tragedy of the publishing business is documented:

Christian bookstores, like some of their secular counterparts are often unsure how to deal with such stories, and may shelve what few they carry under the rather generic and somewhat unhelpful label "futuristic literature".

Catholics are everywhere in SF and speculative fiction generally--call it the Chesterton Effect.  For example, Insidecatholic.com likes the hard-to-categorize Tim Powers, author of Declare.  This link recommends other authors, and makes this observation:

That's a curious thing when you think about it. Science fiction is a genre whose founding fathers and mothers tended very often (though not exclusively, of course) to be the sort of people who were hard-boiled atheists of the Arthur C. Clarke/Isaac Asimov mold -- people who spoke the word "Science" either with a sort of religious reverence or with the sort of stentorian triumphalism of a Thomas Dolby tune. Some of them, like H. G. Wells, managed to achieve both science worship and stentorian triumphalism in their work, writing books which were combinations of fun narrative and some of the preachiest, creakiest, antiquated prophecies in print.

Outgrowing God is indeed a favorite theme of science fiction and fantasy. Evolution/technology/aliens/time travelers from the future/computers/whatnot are always just about to prove that God does not exist, life after death is a fantasy, the soul is a function of matter, man is but a sophisticated meat machine, Jesus never existed, etc.

And yet the astonishing thing is that science fiction and fantasy are absolutely awash in theological speculation. Lots of it is pagan, in the Chestertonian sense. That is, it is an attempt to reach God through the imagination, hampered by the inability to conceive of something truly outside of the created world. The result is a sort of quasi-supernaturalism that acknowledges planes of existence beyond the human, but refuses to entertain the notion of angels and demons.

I'd like to give more attention to religious themes other than Christian ones in SF, but I lack the knowledge or the time.  Once again, Wikipedia is a (meager) starting point.  I tend to hear about mostly the scandalous examples, like the rise of the Jedi Knights in the UK, or (most deliciously) graven images of Kirk and Spock.

SF Signal's symposium on the question, "Is Science Fiction Antithetical to Religion?"  One participant was John C. Wright (see him at livejournal.com) whom I have blogged previously.  John is an interesting case; he's an adult convert from skepticism to Christianity who nevertheless is pessimistic about inserting religious characters into fiction.  Does the new retro-space opera Space Vulture prove him right, or wrong?  Mostly right, I'd say, but there is plenty of contrary evidence from writers with higher ambitions and, frankly, better skill.  Take C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, for example.

Nevertheless, he's right to be skeptical.  Blending religion and SF does go wrong sometimes.  Oh yes, terribly, terribly wrong.

UPDATE:  Calvin College joins the party.

Labels: sci-fi, VarietiesOfReligiousArt

Composers, watch out!  Tell your congressman to include you in the next round of protectionist legislation.  You're about to be replaced by a computer!  And, talk about matchstick men--via SF Signal, it's the Matchstick Minas Tirith.

I attended a composers' forum at the University of Michigan School of Music last night.  It's the first time in several years that I've gone.  I used to find these concerts painful, but last night's show boasted a few genuinely well-written pieces, and even the dogs had something to recommend them.  Is it possible that the kids are better than they were in the good old days?  I definitely recall the forums from way back, from the time I was a student there, were very informal and low on the spit & polish.  Not much was taken seriously back then.  Now, the kids seem terribly sophisticated--sophisticated in a real way, as though some of them are already moving beyond youthful gestures of pseudo-profundity and pointless complexity.

Either the UMSM composition department is recruiting better these days, or maybe I'm getting better at listening.  I suspect the answer is, some of both.  No question I have finally begun to learn how to pay attention to what is not immediately compelling.  I'm still bad at listening, but I now realize I was absolutely, dreadfully terrible at it in my younger years.  (Having a son with the same tendency has made me more aware of the problem.)

While I was at the forum I reintroduced myself to Evan Chambers, who recently emailed me to thank me for blogging his new work, The Old Burying Ground.

Labels: Composer, LovableOddballs

Here's an enticing subject line from some spam I received today:

Stalin took this pills two times per day before food

I'm tellin' ya, spam is the art form that modern poetry anticipated and aspired to become, but could not.  Spam is the authentic voice of our time!

Labels: fun

Is three times in one day enuf fer ye, Lynn?

(And, in a slightly more gracious tone, let me say thanks for the nomination.  Sorry I don't have the energy to continue the meme.)

Labels: Meme

It's amazing how the existence of something like Lulu Titlescorer--its mere existence--can expand one's creative boundaries.  After playing with this thing for just five minutes, I suddenly knew (knew!) that a book with the title The Truth of Lies would be a hit.  Lulu agrees, giving it a 69.0% chance of becoming a bestseller. 

Lulu loves titles with abstract nouns and figurative meanings.  She also likes the "The __ of __" template.  I think she would have preferred my title have a proper noun in it too, but sorry Lulu, you are a harsh mistress and I cannot give you everything.  (But I notice The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has a mere 26.3% chance of being a bestseller.  Back to the drawing board, Robert A. Heinlein!)

Now, to the obvious question:  did I find The Truth of Lies first?  Not...exactly.

Labels: Fiction

Lingering after- (and fore-) shocks of the Day of the Fools:  Charles T. Downey celebrates the Ahn Trio (hey, they're not that bad, are they?), Harriet Klausner has a bad day (more context here), "Virgle" makes you an offer, the Blogger Complains, the Writer Creates and the Highway refuses to stay Lost (sadly).

Labels: fun