Forbidden Sanctuary: The pope gives a sermon about aliens, among other things

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Readers of this annoying blog may have noticed that I have lots of problems with religion. Readers of my fiction (especially Pontiff) may have noticed that I treat religion (and, in particular, people with strong religious faith) pretty sympathetically. What’s up with that?

Beats me. It really is a mystery why some characters and plots and issues seem worth writing about, and others don’t (why, for example, I have no interest in writing the organically plotted novel I talked about here).

Anyway, here is a little snippet from Forbidden Sanctuary that addresses issues I still find interesting: the relationship between science and religion, the nature of morality, blah blah blah. Pope Clement is giving a brief sermon to a small congregation in a drafty rural church before he goes off to meet with the alien leader–a meeting on which the future of the world depends (naturally). He has been doing a lot of thinking….

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“We have heard it stated,” Clement said softly to the congregation, “that mankind’s knowledge has outstripped its religions. The Church fights losing battles against Galileo and Darwin, and people’s faith is shaken. Is the Church nothing more than a relic of ancient ignorance, vainly reinterpreting its doctrines in an attempt to reconcile them with modern facts?

“We would suggest that the opposite is true, that science is struggling fitfully toward truths our spiritual nature has always apprehended. And chief among these is the interdependence of all life, all matter. As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me. Ask the ecologist, the physicist if that is not a scientific truth as well.

“Always our perspectives are widening, but the moral basis for our response to these perspectives has always been there. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Science makes the starving African our neighbor, and the homeless Indian, and the oppressed Cambodian, and we realize our actions affect them, they cannot be ignored. Now we have a new neighbor, and science struggles to understand why, and how. But the moral, the spiritual response to this knowledge already exists, and it is right. If we falter in our application of these spiritual truths, then truly religion’s claim to superiority is lost. This is a crucial time for mankind, not the least because these truths are being put to the test.

“That is why we ask for God’s blessing on our work, and your prayers. The truths will always be there, but men and women must always seek the strength to put them into practice. That strength can only exist with God’s help. Let us stand and profess our faith. I believe in one God…“

What do you do if your future is already in the past?

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I’ve been rereading my first novel, Forbidden Sanctuary, as it makes its way through the ebookification process. You’ll like it! Check out the first chapter!

Forbidden Sanctuary is straight-ahead first-encounter science fiction with a religious twist. I wrote the novel in the 1980s, but for reasons that are somewhat opaque to me now, I set the action 30 years in the future–around 2003, if I follow the novel’s implicit chronology correctly. This offers the same challenges I faced with Replica, which is implicitly set in 2024, except that I don’t have the extra 12 years of futureness to play with. All the action in the novel takes place in the near past, as far as a present-day reader is concerned. And, of course, I got some things wrong.

Do my failed attempts at futurology matter? The novel is an artifact, created at a certain time and in a certain place. You don’t expect science-fiction predictions to be entirely accurate. Readers understand this. Why bother tweaking the thing?

Well, for one thing, I’m not completely sure that readers do understand this. The original publication date is right there on the ebook’s copyright page, but that’s all there is to let people know that this ebook isn’t new–it’s not like you’re buying a paperback with yellowed pages in a musty used bookstore. I was talking to a really smart guy who had just read the ebook of Senator, and it soon became clear that he thought I had written the book recently, presumably to coincide with the 2012 election. Er, no.

Anyway, as with Replica, the two major features of modern life that I missed were cell phones and the Internet. I did have some people with “personal phones” that they flipped open, but I was somewhat inconsistent with them. For example, I also had FBI agents communicating with each other via something called “telecoms,” which I guess were like super-modern walkie-talkies. There were also some minor references that no longer work in the world as it actually was in 2003: references to the Soviet Union, for example, and to the never-ending conflict in Northern Ireland. So I did some tweaking.

The thing that I got right, I think, is the role of the Catholic Church in the 21st century. I didn’t imagine the sex abuse scandal, of course, but I did imagine a church fighting a rearguard action against modernity–churches closing, vocations plummeting, but still with many people who believed deeply, fervently, in its truths.

Also, the aliens are great!

An Organic Plot (Note: This is about writing, not gardening)

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I mentioned “organic plots” in this post about the novel Maine. The idea is that, in novels like Maine, the plot grows organically out of the characters and the way they interact; it isn’t a structure (or, at least, it doesn’t feel like a structure) imposed by the author on the characters. I have never taken a writing course, so I don’t know how academics talk about plots, so this is just the way I view the matter.

My novels — thrillers, mysteries, private-eye novels — are about as far from organic plotting as you can get. In them, plot and character have about equal weight. Often I need to invent characters specifically to fill a role in the plot I’ve constructed. I do occasionally rejigger the plot to fit a character, but after a certain point in the writing the plot doesn’t give me a whole lot of room for rejiggering. So the plot and characters basically have to be developed together.

I don’t want to say that one model is better than the other. I suppose an organically plotted novel has a better chance of being good than a highly plotted one; a plot without interesting, believable characters is worthless, but characters without a good plot will still hold my interest. On the other hand, the most satisfying novels to me are the ones that manage to seamlessly combine both plot and characterization. That’s hard to do!

So here’s a wisp of a novel idea that came to me during my morning run a few weeks ago. If I were to actually write it (I’m not going to), it would have an organic plot, although it would (I think) have more structure than a novel like Maine

It’s the late 70s. A wife gives a thirtieth birthday dinner for her new husband. She invites three or four other couples that they know, and they talk about current events, popular music, their hopes and dreams. In the course of the dinner we learn about the characters as seen through the eyes of the wife. At the end, exhilarated by the success of the dinner, she says: “Let’s make this a tradition! See you all in ten years!”

We then move to the 80s, and his fortieth birthday dinner. Same people, different point-of-view character. We learn what has happened to them in the meantime, and we know them more deeply than we did from the first snapshot of them ten years ago.

So, we do this two more times, up to more or less the present day. Characters die; characters are divorced and replaced. Some are successful; others are not. Some of the things we thought we had learned about them turn out to not be true. Some people surprise us; some never change/ Everyone gets older. And so on.

This is not a bad structure for a novel, I think. It’s probably influenced by the play/movie Same Time Next Year, which I’ve never seen. Its organic-ness is obvious, right? The only actual events are those that take place during the dinner parties. People talk and eat and drink and listen to music. And the point-of-view characters remember and judge. But by the end we know a ton of stuff about them and (if the thing is done right) we hope that everything turns out well for them. That’s the idea, anyway. As I said, I’m not going to write this novel — feel free to write it yourself! But if I did, I’d have to approach it differently from the way I usually approach things. It would have to start with the characters, and only when they were deeply realized would I start to figure out how they interact.

“Maine” and plotting

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Richard Bowker

In my previous post about the novel Maine (by J. Courtney Sullivan) I was complaining about its lack of verisimilitude. I’ve now finished the book, and things got better on that front, although she talks at one point about “Irish Need Not Apply” signs; those signs are much more typically worded “No Irish Need Apply.”

OK, not a big deal.

Sullivan does a pretty good job of recreating the famous Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942, which becomes a central incident in the narrative. (My grandfather was a police captain in Boston back then and was on duty that night; he was worried that my mother and father (not then married) were celebrating at the nightclub, because my father had attended Holy Cross, which upset the heavily favored Boston College football team at Fenway Park that afternoon. The football game also figures in Sullivan’s retelling of the fire.)

On a scale of “threw the book across the room in disgust without finishing it” to “eagerly devoured the book and only wished it could be longer,” I rate Maine “had no problem finishing it, but wished it was 100 pages shorter.” I don’t think the characters or, the plot justify the 500-page length. Here’s the plot:

Three women (daughter, grand-daughter, and daughter-in-law) separately make their way up to Maine to visit the family matriarch at their summer home. They argue about a couple of big issues in their lives. Then they leave.

That’s about it. It’s what I think of as an organic plot–it flows out of the characters rather than being imposed upon them. I’m not complaining about that kind of plot, but I want more resolution than Maine offers. The plot extends backward in the narrative as well as forward, which is also fairly standard. A point-of-view character pours a cup of coffee and thinks about the past. Another point-of-view character checks her email and thinks about the past. Eventually we know a whole lot about these four people, how they think about each other and all the other people in their family, all of which informs the final confrontations.

This is all fine, except the final confrontations just don’t give us the payoff we’re looking for. The problem is that nothing fundamental changes as a result of the confrontations. The ending isn’t sappy, with all the conflicts of a lifetime somehow neatly resolved, but that doesn’t mean the ending is satisfying. Take the Cocoanut Grove incident. This turns out to be the motivating event in the matriarch’s life; everything that happens afterward–her marriage, her drinking, the way she treats her kids–flows from the secret she has held inside her about the fire. She finally tells a priest the secret. And then–nothing. After 450 pages, I was looking for a bit of a payoff. But she doesn’t change; nothing changes.

My guess is that the author fell in love with the outsized multi-generational Irish-American family whose story she was telling, and ultimately she couldn’t impose enough order on that story to make us care as much as she did.

But then, I’m a guy, and this is a book about women. Maybe a couple of strong male characters would have changed my mind, but they pretty much don’t exist in Maine. Sullivan should stretch herself and try a male point-of-view character in her next novel. I’d give it a read!