The Big Idea

Taking advantage of the fact that movie tickets in Mexico (where I currently live) are about a third the cost of those in the USA, last night I saw the science fiction-horror film, "Life." Note the title of the movie in Spanish is actually "Intelligent Life" (Vida Intelegente), which is actually somewhat more appropriate. I'm going to discuss some problems I saw with this film, leading up to a general criticism that applies to many recent movies. A few spoilers follow, though most of what I will mention you can deduce pretty easily from the movie trailer and the poster I shared. I will deliberately avoid telling  exactly how the movie ends and will be rather general about the information I share. Yes, as per the trailer, life is found in a sample of soil brought from Mars to the International Space Station (ISS). The scientists on board, a special crew largely dedicated to studying the Martian samples, nurture this life into a multi-cellular organism, whi...

(the chart above illustrates the updated view of this story classification system) This blog post is inspired by a reviewer of Mythic Orbits 2016 who stated he felt the collection did not comment on what it means to be a Christian author. I disagree and will explain. To set context, more than a decade ago I had a conversation with some writer friends in a critique group. What does it mean to be a "Christian" author of speculative fiction? At one point in the conversation a friend said, "Does a Christian bricklayer lay Christian bricks?" (Johne Cook said that.) His point was that the work Christians do is just that, WORK, and it is not marked by everything we do being what anyone would call, "Christian." In fact, his point raised the question, "Is it even possible for work to be Christian?" I objected, saying something like, "Yeah, but stories are built out of ideas,  unlike bricks. It's possible for an idea to line up with Chris...

This post originated in me wondering if humans like to kiss because the mouth is the part of the face, which perhaps is the part of the body most closely associated with our conscious self, the part of the mind where we mentally abide, our own internal living room  as it were (as if the face, including vision, were the primary window the conscious mind uses to connect to the world, whereas other means are more distant, like windows in a basement you can access but have to move your vantage point to do so). As opposed to your subconscious being more connected to other parts of your body, like your internal organs (things you can feel but normally are not aware of unless you are in pain, like your breathing or how your knee is operating, would occupy a boderline between the conscious and unconsious mind). As I was thinking about this, an image of old Nintendo style game cartridges plugged into a human skull popped into my head, generating an idea that stemmed from that picture. Wh...

So, as discussed in the last post in this blog, what if a specifically Christian story took the many Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of Quantum Mechanics seriously? What if God allowed to happen each and every moral choice human beings could make? So each alternative decision played out in one alternate universe or other? (This would include multiple versions of the Bible existing in different universes, as I mentioned in my last post.) And what if, as I also said in my last post, God created every universe at a common starting point, then deliberately brought them back to a common end? If that were true, if there were only one common heaven where God brought everyone back into a shared eternity, that would have a particular unusual effect. It would perhaps mean that there would be multiple versions of each person who believed in that common shared heaven. The believing you who got married for the first time at 20 and the one who waited until 39. The one who joined the milita...

This post with an odd title will share a set of distinctly Christian story ideas loosely linked into the Many Worlds Interpretation (or MWI) of quantum mechanics. So I feel compelled to explain what MWI actually is first. For readers who feel they understand MWI well, feel free to skip down 7 paragraphs, where I will begin talking again about what MWI means and how that relates to a story idea in  bold print .  In short, MWI sees that all possible alternate histories and futures are real. A way to tie that back into the specific language of physics would be to affirm that this interpretation "asserts the objective reality of the universal wavefunction and denies the actuality of the wavefunction collapse." For those readers who many not understand the phrase I just used above (I pulled it off Wikipedia, BTW), I'm going to put into my own lay terms what I just quoted, using an electron as my example. According to quantum mechanics, the exact position and motion of ...

This blog post commits no real spoilers concerning The Walking Dead season 7 opener. I'll say it's brutal but not necessarily highly realistic, without divulging anything more specific than some general comments on story events which are widely-known and some other comments about head injuries. And I mention that the featured bad guy is surprisingly charismatic and charming. I won't even bother to say his name. That this bad guy kills should be known by everyone even vaguely familiar with the show and all its advertised hype. That he does so with a special baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire should also be known. Also that the killing is brutal should be known, perhaps the most violent actions shown on "regular" television in the USA--all that has been the talk of the Internet of late. I suppose realism would be the justification for showing as much gore as the episode does. However, what was shown actually wasn't highly realistic. It could be argued tha...

(J.R.R. Tolkein's Silmarillion abounds not only with Fantasy magic, it also lists a full set of literary Pagan deities.) My previous two posts on this topic first defined what magic actually is in the Bible (an appeal to spirits or spiritual powers as opposed to seeking God) and also looked at how two millennia of Christianity have affected how the world thinks about magic (primarily it has separated out magic and religion as different things--which was not originally the case in Paganism). I repeatedly refuted the idea that "magic," Biblically speaking, is primarily understood as a quid pro quo exchange, making it fundamentally different from prayer. No, for ancient Pagans, a prayer was a ritual and a spell was too--they were essentially different aspects of the same thing. I also stated in my first post that I believe literary magic--magic in fantasy fiction, poses a real hazard for people but that hazard is not generally where Christians concerned about this...