June Christian Science Fiction/Fantasy Blog Tour: A Reflection

Thus ends another month's Christian Science Fiction/Fantasy Blog Tour. Thanks to everyone who came to the blog, read the posts, and commented. Thanks also to all my fellow tour participants.

This blog is sort of the black sheep of the tour, as you may have been able to tell. I can't exactly claim that I cultivate that image intentionally. This is a fan site, not an author site, and generally speaking it's geared toward publications in what might be called the "mainstream" of sf and fantasy, but I'm much interested in seeing more Christian voices in the science fiction and fantasy market, and have an interest in the work being published in Christian sf/fantasy, which is independent of the "mainstream."

When I opted to review The Restorer, I made a decision to review it in the same way I review other novels, though I planned to give it a little extra care and attention. Some of the responses to my review have led me to reconsider the way I write negative reviews.

Reviewers are not the same as critics. Critics are people with degrees who actually know what they're talking about, and though they're opinionated, they can make extensive comparisons and analyses of literature and film. Reviewers, by contrast, are people whose job it is to summarize a book or movie and then tell you if it's worth your time. Sometimes reviewers put in a little extra effort above and beyond that. Reviews with that extra effort are my goal for this blog.

It is customary for negative reviews of books and movies to involve some amount of humor and sarcasm. I have taken this for granted, and have written my reviews accordingly. Because I thought The Restorer was a bad novel, I gave it the usual treatment, nor do I believe it would have been honest to give a positive or neutral review to a book that I thought made so many mistakes; that would have been to shirk my job as a reviewer. But nobody pays me to do this and nobody asks me to do this, so my position becomes precarious: every reviewer is like that jerk who wants to tell you his opinion about everything, but in my case, that jerk's opinion is entirely unsolicited. [I just reread this sentence and realized it could be misunderstood; the hypothetical "jerk" here is me because I'm the one who's giving unpaid and unsolicited opinions. This does not refer to people who comment on this blog: I encourage comments of any opinion.]

For that reason, some commenters who characterized my review as overly harsh have led me to reconsider the voice I adopt when writing negative reviews. I haven't decided yet how I will write them in the future, but I do not wish to come across as angry or mean-spirited, though I also don't wish to soft-soap the opinions that, solicited or not, I sit down here to write.

Though the majority of the posts do not go through an extensive editing process, the review for The Restorer did. I tried to soften my words as much as I thought was reasonable, but I may not have succeeded. It's a precarious balance to strike, and this month's tour has given me food for thought. I suspect some tour members or visitors left this blog with a bad taste in their mouths, and that's no good. We are, after all, talking about fiction here, not world peace or ending poverty. The discussion ought to be fun, and no one should take it too seriously, including me.

Science fiction has been characterized by different authors as a "ghetto," which they differentiate from the rest of the world of fiction. A few years ago, in an interview with Locus, Terry Pratchett suggested that the walls of the ghetto were crumbling. He characterized sf as a wrecked spaceship that people were scavenging for parts. He mentioned two authors by name who are not characterized as sf writers, but who nonetheless write science fiction: Michael Crighton and Margaret Atwood. In particular, he had harsh words for Atwood because of her novel Oryx and Crake. I have read this book and consider Pratchett's assessment correct: it is unoriginal, retreading ground that sf authors have already tread almost to exhaustion. But Atwood and her critics don't know that because they don't read the "ghetto" sf. So instead of writing original fiction, Atwood is reinventing the wheel.

Now that Christians have begun their own niche market of Christian sf separate from the "ghetto," I fear they are doing the same thing. The Restorer demonstrates only a rudimentary understanding of fantasy. Laudatory quotes in the front promise originality and plot twists, but the story is conventional and free of surprises, taking place in a world that is underdeveloped. I don't think the laudatory quotes are intentionally misleading; I think they are from people who are unfamiliar with fantasy literature. Perhaps it is not necessary for Christian sf writers to join the "ghetto." To say that may be too elitist. But Christian sf writers must be familiar with the ghetto's contents or I fear they will never interest readers other than themselves, and they certainly won't write the quality books they could have written. As a result, a sharp divide may form between religious and non-religious sf: the two will simply ignore each other, something I don't want to see happen because it would put me out of an unpaid and unsolicited job.

June Christian Science Fiction/Fantasy Blog Tour Day 3

If you blog tour it, they will come.

Post is early today because I’ll be in the field all day tomorrow. By the time I have a chance to post again, the blog tour will be pretty much over.

This month’s Christian Science Fiction/Fantasy Blog Tour features Sharon Hinck’s novel, The Restorer. See Sharon Hinck’s blog here.
Yesterday, I discussed Hinck’s use of the female warrior motif. Today, I indulge myself by hanging a brief essay from a few sentences in the novel. I promise it will be very brief.

At the end of The Restorer, on page 447, the protagonist, Susan, looks back on an earlier worship experience in Lyric’s temple (called a “tower”) and wonders, “Would I ever again feel the presence of the One in such a tangible way as I had on the Feast day?” (p. 447).

The society of Lyric is meant to be similar to that of Israel before Christ. Hinck is writing this as an Evangelical. Here she seems to be indicating that the tangible presence of God, “God with us,” is something belonging primarily to the past: Israel had it in the Ark of the Covenant, the Tabernacle, and the Temple, but the modern church has no such place where the presence of God can be found continually in a “tangible way.”

In The Restorer, the focus of religion is entirely on scripture, with the exception of the worship service in the tower, which includes a vague mystical experience (the one Susan refers to in the quote above). Through it all, the book conveys, perhaps unintentionally, a strong dissatisfaction with Evangelicalism and a sense that something important is missing, but the book never offers a solution to this problem.

The presence of God belongs to the past, Hinck is telling us. Such is the nature of the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura. God revealed himself in the past, but no longer, for the revelations are all written down. In its most extreme Calvinistic forms, the Holy Spirit is in Protestantism effectively muzzled; his role in the believer’s life is reduced almost entirely to that of a memory aid, calling to the believer’s mind scripture passages the believer has read. Otherwise, the Holy Spirit is unable to speak.

And so in this kind of Protestant thought, the New Covenant with the Church, at least after the apostolic age, is in some ways a lesser covenant than the Old, during which canon was a fuzzy concept if it even existed, and during which scripture was being actively written.

Similarly, I’ve had a few Catholic friends who have attended Protestant worship services. While they agreed the worship was nice, they also added that something was missing. That something was the “tangible” presence of God, which can be found in a Catholic Church in the Eucharist. A former Evangelical myself, I can identify with this sentiment.

Susan is leaving the Old Testament Temple from before the Messiah and going to a Protestant church after the Messiah and, ironically, feels she is losing something. And it’s no surprise, for something is indeed missing in a Protestant church. Israel was not meant to survive without the presence of God in the tabernacle or temple, and the Church is not meant to survive with the presence of God in the “tabernacle,” which is what we call the box where the Eucharist is reserved.

To my mind, this is one of the greatest problem affecting Christian sf and fantasy. The Christianity of many of these novels is a Christianity missing something, a Christianity that has been artificially truncated by repetitious schism and self-emptying. A Church moving forward with God as a body, aided by Scripture, Tradition, liturgy, the Magisterium, the Holy Spirit, and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist has been replaced with a loose collection of individuals figuring it out for themselves with their Bibles. The weakness of this kind of religion becomes obvious when it is translated into story form. And that is why the religion of The Restorer and The Restorer itself are missing something. Until they recover the rich history of their religion, Evangelicals will have a difficult time writing good religious fiction.

Real men love blog tours:

Trish Anderson
Brandon Barr
Jim Black
Justin Boyer
Grace Bridges
Amy Browning
Jackie Castle
Valerie Comer
Karri Compton
Frank Creed
Lisa Cromwell
CSFF Blog Tour
Gene Curtis
D. G. D. Davidson
Chris Deanne
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Linda Gilmore
Beth Goddard
Marcus Goodyear
Andrea Graham
Russell Griffith
Jill Hart
Katie Hart
Sherrie Hibbs
Heather R. Hunt
Becca Johnson
Jason Joyner
Kait
Karen
Dawn King
Tina Kulesa
Lost Genre Guild
Rachel Marks
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
John W. Otte
John Ottinger
Robin Parrish
Rachelle
Cheryl Russel
Hanna Sandvig
Chawna Schroeder
Mirtika Schultz
Steve Trower
Speculative Faith
Jason Waguespac
Daniel I. Weaver

June Christian Science Fiction/Fantasy Blog Tour Day 2

The blog tour of (female) champions.

This month’s Christian Science Fiction/Fantasy Blog Tour features Sharon Hinck’s novel, The Restorer. See Sharon Hinck’s blog here.

Yesterday, I reviewed Hinck’s novel. Today we’ll discuss its central conceit, the Woman Warrior.

The Restorer, as previously discussed, is loosely based on the story of the judge, prophetess, and warrior Deborah from Judges 4 and 5. In Hinck’s alternate universe, the soldiers, forming something like a looseknit formal militia, are known as “guardians.” Female guardians are common in Hinck’s world, which tends to mask the uniqueness of Deborah’s role and that of Hinck’s protagonist.

Though women riding into battle were not a mainstay of ancient oriental warfare, the story of Deborah and her counterpart Jael have a thematic relationship with the stories of other women in the Old Testament:

After Barak and Deborah ride to war and rout the forces of Hazor, the Hazorite captain Sisera flees to the tent of Jael, who he expects to be an ally. After he’s asleep, she drives a tent peg through his skull (Judges 4.17-21).

A woman throws a millstone off a wall and cracks the skull of Abimelech in Judges 9.53.

Isaiah 51.9-10 is a hymn to the arm of the Lord. Dr. Seth L. Sanders, who used this passage in a lecture he delivered at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations about three years ago, discussed this passage and its connection with the Combat Myth. With Dr. Sanders’s emendations, the NRSV version of the verses would read as follows:

Awake, awake, put on strength,
O arm of the Lord!
Awake, as in days of old,
the generations of long ago!
Are you not she who cut Rahab in pieces,
who pierced the dragon?
Are you not she who dried up the sea,
the waters of the great deep;
who made the depths of the sea a way
for the redeemed to cross over?

The address is to a feminine figure because arms in Hebrew are feminine, but Dr. Sanders suggests the poem is an invocation to Deborah.

Then of course there’s Judith, the Old Testament’s greatest wise woman except for Woman Wisdom Herself. With her wiles and the help of God, Judith slices off the head of Holofernes, chief of Nebuchadnezzar’s Assyrian army in Judith 14.6-9. The story of Judith is pure fiction; even if it contains an historical kernel as some have suggested, that historical kernel is irrelevant to the final product. Judith brings together recognizable names from Israel’s historic enemies and has them band together as one to make war against the people of God in a romanticized geographical setting where they are defeated by a wise woman whose name simply means “Jewess.” The Book of Judith is therefore the premier example of fantasy writing in the Bible.

In Christian thought and iconography, these Old Testament women who bash heads and take names are types of the Virgin Mary. In particular, Judith’s fictional story and general name lend to typological reading. Some versions of the Latin Vulgate and subsequently the Douay-Rheims Bible (mis)translate Genesis 3.15 as, “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.” The footnote of the Douay-Rheims admits this may not be the best rendering, but also advises that it doesn’t matter much, “for it is by her seed, Jesus Christ, that the woman crushes the serpent’s head.” For this reason, many of our icons feature images of Mary treading on a serpent.

This “happy misreading" or superreading or whatever you wish to call it is similar to several other Old Testament passages that have gone through a creative interpretive process. This particular one places the Virgin Mary at the end of the line of women who fight evil by attacking its head and ties the stories both to the Fall and to the Redemption, so that Jael, the unnamed woman on the wall, and Judith form a thread connecting the first and second Eves.

Considering that she is drinking at the font of biblical woman warriors, it is curious that Hinck uses no head-knocking imagery in The Restorer. The protagonist Susan never encounters her opposite number during the last battle with the Hazorites and so has no opportunity to cut his head off (or pull some wire-fu moves, which I was waiting for through the whole book). Indeed, the Hazorites have no personalities at all; they are a faceless swarm.

I would like to give a list of great woman warriors from fantasy, but they are so numerous that any list would necessarily be incomplete. Besides, John C. Wright, the admirable sf writer who recently became a Christian, has already posted a litany of swordmistresses at his blog. I find a few of Wright’s posts to be in poor taste, including this one, but, well, it’s a homage to swordmistresses. I would only add to the list my own all-time favorite female swordfighter, Thorn Harvestar from Jeff Smith’s Bone. No, on second thought, Thorn’s got close competition in Nalyn from Neotopia. Oh, I do have to warn that the links here include images of women in what might be considered immoderate clothing. Call me a prude, but, much as I appreciate attractive women, I find posting images of them on the Internet a little voyeuristic.

The point I’m getting around to is this: some Christians may think the sword-wielding warrior woman is a character born either of an overactive teenage male imagination or of a feminist fantasy. Au contraire. The sword-wielding woman is an important Christian image, especially if she knocks in some heads. (Thorn Harvestar mostly managed to get her own head knocked in, so I think she’s slipped a notch below Nalyn.)

But now I’ll end this brief homage to head-bashers with a paraphrase of that greatest of head-bashers, the warrior poet ‘Antara ibn Shaddād, subject of the Romance of ‘Antar and author of one of the legendary Bedouin Hanging Odes that, embroidered in gold on Egyptian silk, waved over the shrine of Mecca:

My sword is the greatest cure of headaches, head colds, and all diseases of the head!
It cures the sickness by removing the problem in its entirety!

The blog tour that just won’t stop:

Trish Anderson
Brandon Barr
Jim Black
Justin Boyer
Grace Bridges
Amy Browning
Jackie Castle
Valerie Comer
Karri Compton
Frank Creed
Lisa Cromwell
CSFF Blog Tour
Gene Curtis
D. G. D. Davidson
Chris Deanne
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Linda Gilmore
Beth Goddard
Marcus Goodyear
Andrea Graham
Russell Griffith
Jill Hart
Katie Hart
Sherrie Hibbs
Heather R. Hunt
Becca Johnson
Jason Joyner
Kait
Karen
Dawn King
Tina Kulesa
Lost Genre Guild
Rachel Marks
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
John W. Otte
John Ottinger
Robin Parrish
Rachelle
Cheryl Russel
Hanna Sandvig
Chawna Schroeder
Mirtika Schultz
Steve Trower
Speculative Faith
Jason Waguespac
Daniel I. Weaver

June Christian Science Fiction/Fantasy Blog Tour Day 1: Review

White American suburbia + swordfighting = really bad science fantasy.

This month’s Christian Science Fiction/Fantasy Blog Tour features Sharon Hinck’s novel, The Restorer. See Sharon Hinck’s blog here. My review of her novel follows:

The Restorer by Sharon Hinck. The Sword of Lyric, book 1. Navpress (Colorado Springs): 2007. 477 pages. $14.99. ISBN-13: 978-1-60006-131-8, ISBN-10: 1-60006-131-1.

According to Alberto Manguel in A History of Reading, Henry Miller claimed that James Joyce’s Ulysses is best read in the toilet. If so, then Sharon Hinck’s The Restorer is best read in the bubble bath. And with a total of 477 sluggish pages to get through, I burned the midnight aromatherapy candles to ensure you had this review on time.

The story begins with the innocuously named narrator, Susan Mitchell, who has developed a serious case of homemaker ennui, not because her family is dysfunctional or her life is in tatters, but because her family is perfect and her life is mind-numbingly dull. Different writers have suggested different cures for the housewife blues: some suggest getting a job; in his 1979 short story “Options,” John Varley suggests getting a sex change; Hinck, on the other hand, suggests vacationing in an alternate universe where everyone wears sweatpants and drinks chai tea: it’s a housemom heaven.

The alternate world Susan enters is loosely (very loosely) based on Iron Age I Palestine, and Susan’s story is loosely (very loosely) based on the story of the prophetess Deborah from Judges 4 and 5. Interestingly, whether she knows it or not, Hinck has selected for the subject of her novel one of the two passages of scripture generally considered the oldest: the two are the Song of Miriam in Exodus 15.1-19 and the Song of Deborah in Judges 5.2-31. The age and historicity of the content of these passages are disputed.

Hinck has not tried to make her fictional universe match the world of Iron Age I. The Israelites of that time, if they could be said to exist at all, were a conglomeration of Canaanite tribes with no national identity, no concept of a Bible or canon of scripture, and no concept of a coming messiah. Hinck’s alternate universe, by contrast, is a comfortably American world with a republican government, a carefully recorded Bible, and a national religion that looks suspiciously like nondenominational Evangelicalism.

To make an excessively long story as short as possible, Susan spends the first two thirds of the novel whining. She starts the book off by whining about how bored she is with her home and family, and very soon, the reader is bored with her home and family, too, for after landing in the alternate universe of Lyric, Susan spends 300 pages whining on almost every single page about how much she wants to go home. I don’t remember the Narnia kids or the Fionavar Five or even the Bone cousins being such crybabies.

As it turns out, Susan is a “Restorer.” A Restorer is meant to be roughly similar to a Judge, but a Restorer is less a tribal warlord than a knight who leads in battle and sometimes gives annoying pep talks. To help her fight the nation’s wars and to save her after innumerable stupid moves, Susan’s Restorer abilities include the capacity to heal quickly and to see and hear better than ordinary mortals. I have never seen superpowers so under-utilized: Susan uses her abilities for little more than eavesdropping and recovering from bruises. Inexplicably, her ability to fight suddenly improves in the last eighth of the novel, even though Hinck has told us repeatedly up to that point that Susan is a poor fighter. The rapid improvement gets the plot moving (finally!), but doesn’t make very good sense.

The political situation of The Restorer is reasonably developed, but nothing we haven’t seen before. The “People of the Verses” are beset on every side by a variety of mostly faceless enemies. The biggest threat comes from the nation of Hazor to the north. Here, Hinck has named her enemy nation after a city from the Bible, which in Judges 4.2 is the center of King Jabin, the antagonist of Deborah and Barak, just in case the Deborah parallels aren’t explicit enough.

As expected, the novel ends with a final battle. It’s customary for unexpected help to show up at the last moment in climactic fantasy battles, but Hinck throws no less than three deus ex machinas at us, one of which has not the faintest hint of foreshadowing (it involves the arrival of some “lost tribes”). The effect is difficult to swallow.

Hinck has attempted to construct a believable science fantasy world, but she has failed:

Hinck asks us to believe in a high-tech society without a written language. Yet in spite of the oral culture, Hinck is apparently unable to imagine good religion without a Bible, so the people of Lyric have theirs in the form of books on tape known as “Records.”

Hinck asks us to believe in green, renewable energy in the form of “magchips.” What are magchips, you ask? Solar power? Geothermal? Powerplants in the mantles of red giants linked to Earth through superstrings? No, magchips produce electricity by “magnetic attraction” (p. 287). All this time, we’ve been burning fossil fuels while the secret to limitless energy is stuck to our refrigerators.

Hinck asks us to believe that the people of this high-tech society fight with swords (and without armor). For whatever reason, swords have been a mainstay of B-class sf, but if the reader is to accept them, they had better be Vorpal Blades or lightsabers or something that can at least pretend to compete with advanced weaponry. If magnets are so important in Hinck’s world, why don’t they use Gauss rifles instead?

Hinck isn’t the first to try blending sf with swashbuckling. Frank Herbert’s Dune is an example of such a combination, but Herbert has a good excuse for it in his shields, the energy fields that deflect fast-moving objects, rendering projectile weapons useless. Hinck gives no such explanations. The nation of Hazor has remote-controlled tanks and long-range heat rays, but when they fight the final battle, they send in sword-wielding cavalry! Did they run out of tanks? Have they no gunpowder? Do they not even have bows and arrows? The worldbuilding in this book is unbelievably sloppy.

And these are just the science fiction elements. On the fantasy side of things, Hinck asks us to believe in a plastic sword that turns into the real thing for no reason whatsoever. Susan’s journey to Lyric begins when she’s rearranging her children’s toys in the attic; she picks up a plastic sword and--zap--she’s in an alternate world with a real sword in hand. Adding to this folly, Hinck tries to explain later that Susan’s transdimensional trip took place because of some advanced machinery called “portal stones” (p. 463). The science and magic are here so garbled we can’t differentiate them and consequently can’t believe in them, either. If science brought her to this alternate world, and if this alternate world runs on scientific devices, what’s with the magic sword?

The trip through an attic to another universe does parallel some great works of fantasy. George MacDonald’s Lilith comes to mind, as does Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which pays homage to MacDonald’s work. Perhaps a closer parallel is Elizabeth Winthrop’s The Castle in the Attic, which features a portal to a fantasy world in the form of a toy castle and toy knight that become real, similar to Susan’s sword. But Winthrop is careful in her worldbuilding where Hinck is slapdash, and so Winthrop’s castle and knight, which eventually grow into a whole universe, are believable where Hinck’s Lyric is only hokey.

Hinck also expects us to believe in the Rhusicans, a race of unambiguously evil people who can drive others insane simply by talking to them. Everybody seems to know the Rhusicans are evil and dangerous, yet they walk around unharassed; you could meet one at the bus stop. How can this be? Because the government is corrupt, Hinck tells us. All things considered, that’s not much of an explanation. On the whole, the Rhusicans are a cool idea, but I simply can’t believe they’re walking around everywhere, easily identifiable. I also can’t believe they have no motives. Hinck never tells us what they’re after; they’re evil for evil’s sake when they could have been much more. They could have been mental vampires who feed on human brainwaves, for example, or beings who feed on human misery like Mr. Dark in Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, but Hinck uses them only for a religious allegory: she seems to be saying that talking to non-Christians is dangerous. Is that a good message?

Almost sillier than the Rhusicans are the Kahlareans. Supposedly, the Kahlareans are master assassins, but their assassination method consists of rushing a person in the street and wrestling with him for a while before trying to stick a knife in him.

Probably the worst element of this world is also its centerpiece: the religion. The religion of Lyric has no rituals, no sacrifices, no priest class, no ritual calendar, no artwork, no shrines. All it has are the “Verses,” a set of carefully memorized scriptures, and the “Records,” a shorter set of scriptures on tape, which the characters get together to recite from time to time. Now Hinck is asking us to believe in an entire religion organized around the Wednesday night Bible study.

The people of this religion do have a single feast day, and it’s actually called “Feast.” Could a generic, made-up religion possibly sound any more generic and made up? And what do they do during Feast, you ask? Why, they gather in a big megachurch to sing praise choruses and strum guitars! If I didn’t know better, I’d think this book were a parody.

This religion is another product of shoddy worldbuilding and also appears to be the product of an Evangelical pipe dream: this is a dogmatic, creedal religion with nothing to hold it together but a memorized set of bad poems. Hinck depicts it as unified, but a religion like this in the real world would have split into dozens of different sects with dozens of different doctrines.

In an earlier, fumbling essay about what’s wrong with Christian sf and fantasy, I suggested that Christian authors should avoid depicting the Bible as a magic cure-all for life’s problems, and The Restorer exemplifies what I meant. There is no problem in the world Susan or the other characters can’t solve by either quoting scripture at it or giving a religious pep talk. Someone’s driven nuts by a Rhusican? Quote scripture. Someone’s having a bad day? Quote scripture. Government corruption is rampant? Quote scripture. Someone’s threatening to kill you? Well, for that, you’ll need to pull out the big guns and use Christian pop-psych:

“It cuts both ways, Kieran.” I still didn’t fully understand what I was saying, but the words flowed from a compassion that grew so strong, it made me ache. “You’ve made yourself believe that you don’t feel anything. Or that you only feel hate. That’s a lie. And it’s hurting you. You care about Tristan. You care about Kendra, your father, your whole village.” [p. 161]

The book has several similar trite passages, and Hinck even aggravates the problem by explaining and reiterating and explaining again as if she’s afraid the reader might somehow miss the novel’s moral and religious message. For example there’s this:

My shoulders slumped. He was right. Back home, I kept begging God to use me, to show me His purpose. But there were no answers that satisfied me. I suddenly saw how much of my service came with an “if.” I’ll support my husband if I feel loved and cherished. I’ll raise my children if I can feel fulfillment and respect. I’ll reach out to a friend if I can see results. And yes, I’ll even go through trials bravely--if I understand the purpose and value of them. Could I ever learn to walk a road that was not of my choosing, without even an explanation from God? [p. 137]

And after the final battle comes this, which I can’t help but imagine being prefaced with “And the moral of the story is”:

Warmth surged through me. He was right. The role of the Restorer wasn’t all that different from the roles I had in my own world. In both worlds I felt discouraged by my weakness and very small against the needs and battles I faced. Yet, even weak or small, I wasn’t alone. [p. 444]

Even the allegory of this universe is shaky. Hinck’s world poses theological problems she never addresses. The book makes clear that this alternate world is in need of a messiah who has not yet come, indicating that there are to be multiple incarnations. Is Jesus, then, going to shrug off one human nature and assume another? Besides this, the Verses apparently give behavioral regulations, and though we never learn much about what they are, we do learn that they’re different from those of ancient Israel. Is God, then, an arbitrary lawgiver? These difficulties never bothers Susan: serious theological thinking is not part of her inner monologue.

The Restorer is a good example of everything that’s wrong with Christian sf. As science fiction, it’s badly constructed; as religious fiction, it’s saccharine and empty. Like many similar novels, it is a religious book about a religion short on substance and lacking in the elements that make religion interesting. A non-Christian reading this would probably conclude that Christianity is a religious version of an especially vapid self-help seminar. Given the complex and intriguing history and content of Christian theology, mythology, and history, which many Christian sf authors have apparently forgotten, this is most unfortunate.

Are there honestly going to be sequels?

The Sci Fi Catholic’s Rating for The Restorer:

Myth Level: Low (some mythic elements incompetently handled)

Quality: Low (pedestrian prose made worse by conscientious attempts at meaningfulness)

Ethics/Religion: Medium (not enough content to be offensive)

And the blog tour continues:

Trish Anderson
Brandon Barr
Jim Black
Justin Boyer
Grace Bridges
Amy Browning
Jackie Castle
Valerie Comer
Karri Compton
Frank Creed
Lisa Cromwell
CSFF Blog Tour
Gene Curtis
D. G. D. Davidson
Chris Deanne
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Linda Gilmore
Beth Goddard
Marcus Goodyear
Andrea Graham
Russell Griffith
Jill Hart
Katie Hart
Sherrie Hibbs
Heather R. Hunt
Becca Johnson
Jason Joyner
Kait
Karen
Dawn King
Tina Kulesa
Lost Genre Guild
Rachel Marks
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
John W. Otte
John Ottinger
Robin Parrish
Rachelle
Cheryl Russel
Hanna Sandvig
Chawna Schroeder
Mirtika Schultz
Steve Trower
Speculative Faith
Jason Waguespac
Daniel I. Weaver

Upcoming Christian Science Fiction/Fantasy Blog Tour

This month's blog tour is set for this Monday to Wednesday, and this month's feature novel is Sharon Hinck's The Restorer. I have a review of the novel all ready to go, and I'm hard at work at some other supplementary materials including an essay exploring the book's themes and a more self-indulgent essay hanging a discussion on a couple of sentences from the novel. I hope you will all come for the blog tour, and I hope you will find the discussion interesting.

"...the Pope...of the allegedly irrational Church, is the only public figure speaking out clearly about the role of reason in life."

So here I am again in Nevada in that pub in that casino. Today, I even hiked a number of blocks through cold rain to get here just so I could write a blog post. I have no idea what I'm going to write, but this is just another way your Sci Fi Catholic is out to serve you.

I have little to say partly because everything is in transition. I am planning an essay on Harry Potter, but am unsure if I'll have it ready before or after the new volume comes out. I'm going to review The Restorer, but I've not yet finished it. And sooner or later, someday, I'll write about The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Glasshouse.

For today, I intend to alter the sidebar yet again so there will be a list of most important posts, but I haven't gotten to it yet and am unsure if I'll get to it tonight before I run out of battery power.

For today, I suggest hopping over to John C. Wright's Journal where the esteemed and very funny sf author has an interesting post on Hirsi Ali, an atheist woman, formerly Muslim, who has spoken out against many msogynist tendencies in Islam. Wright uses this to segue into a criticism of modern liberalism, which has, as many have observed, strayed from its ideals. The rousing debate in the comments section after the post is intriguing, and I take the the title of this post from one of Wright's comments in it. I don't agree with Wright's view of Harlequins, but it's still a good post.

Sharon Hinck's The Restorer Received

It's been a while, but I'm back, sort of. I now live in Utah, but I'm not in Utah right now; I'm currently sitting in a casino in Nevada because it's about the only place in this town where I can get Internet access. I can't really tell you where I am or what I'm doing because Nevada apparently has some law on the books that what happens here has to stay here.

Anyway, because this is a public spot, until I know better, I can't put certain features into the blog posts because I don't care to expose certain personal info on this public network. We'll get this all worked out at some point.

Anyway, for an upcoming Christian Science Fiction/Fantasy Blog Tour, I'll be reviewing Sharon Hinck's The Restorer, book 1 of her The Sword of Lyric series. I recently received my copy and a press release came with it. I assume it's appropriate to reproduce for you the entirety of the release, so here it is. It's from NavPress and it's by Danielle Douglas:

THIS DESPERATE HOUSEWIFE IS INTERESTED IN MORE THAN CATFIGHTS AND TRYSTS!

New Hinck Novel Takes a Desperate Housewife To An Alternate Universe

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., January 2007--NavPress and Sharon Hinck are pleased to present the first novel in the Sword of Lyric series, THE RESTORER.

In book one, readers are introduced to Susan Mitchell, a modern-day soccer mom who longs to be a heroic woman of God. Susan, in dire need of a change, is pulled through a portal into another world, where her adventures carry her through swashbuckling battles, relationship challenges, and a profound spiritual journey.

THE RESTORER absorbs readers in a unique and entertaining experience while carrying a word of encouragement to anyone who has felt abandoned by God or bewildered by a path that doesn't make sense. It is a page turning story to stretch the imagination and provide encouragement to fight the battles of life.

More that a typical sci-fi fantasy, The Sword of Lyric series blends genres in a unique way combining mom-lit and high fantasy. Readers will relate with the heroine, an ordinary soccer mom, and immediately be swept into another world with dire villains, conflicting loyalties, sword fights, epic battles and grand journeys. In a daring move with a style reminiscent of Frank Peretti, J. R. Tolkien and Robin Jones Gunn, Hinck unleashes THE RESTORER.

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Available June 2007, Paperback, 1-6006-131-1
$14.99k, 480 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/4"

About Sharon Hinck

Sharon Hinck is a wife, mother, and author who has experienced many adventures on her road with God, though none has involved an alternate universe (so far). She earned an MA in communication from Regent University in 1986 and spent ten years as the artistic director of a Christian performing arts group, CrossCurrent. When she isn't writing, Sharon enjoys speaking at conferences, retreats, and church groups. She and her family reside in Bloomington, Minnesota.

About NavPress

NavPress is a publishing outreach ministry of the Navigator's. For over 25 years NavPress has specialized in producing trustworthy Bible studies, books, magazines, and the best-selling contemporary language bible, The Message. NavPress imprints include TH1NK, Pinon Press books and Discipleship and Pray! periodicals.

To order a copy of The Restorer, please visit http://www.navpress.com/.

Okay, it's D. G. D. again. Would it be in bad taste to comment on this press release? I mean, besides the missing hyphen, missing commas, and missing letter in J. R. R. Tolkien's name, I have to at least say something about TH1NK, an imprint I can't help pronouncing "Thwunk." This is the one, or the thonenk, that infamously includes a volume allowing masturbation. That tells you how "trustworthy" NavPress's publications are. Speaking of which, The Message is an awful, overwrought, slangy paraphrase I recommend you avoid unless you share my masochistic obsession with collecting study Bibles.

And who is Robin Jones Gunn?