This is why authoritarians hate art and hate books:
Approximately six hundred and fifty years ago, Elizabeth's ancestors had arrived on Croatan. About a thousand people: some English, some Indians, a shipload of Africans, and not all from the same place or even (from what later historians had deduced from fragmentary records and traditions) the same time. Others---fishermen, sailors, and slaves rescued from the wild Atlantic by beings that some saw as angels, others as demons---arrived in small, bewilderd consignments as time went on. The dates of their origin were not necessarily in the same order as the dates of their arrival. Out of two centuries and a half of living on this world---newer than the New World from which most of their ancestors had come---and of trying to make some sense of it and of the other worlds with which they gradually came into contact, a sect had emerged that the majority of Croatan's human community called the Scoffers---a name which they eventually claimed proudly for themselves. Their prophetess, Joanna Tain, had preached that the greater universe revealed to them by their displacement, and the strange nature of its other inhabitants, left the Scriptures at best irrelevant ("a Revelation solely to the People of the Earth, as the Law of Moses was unto the people of Israel, and not Universall, as even the Scripture itselfe saith")---at worst, false.
That's from Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod. In the chapter where it appears, this bit seems a throwaway, a tangential thought leading to another tangent that veers backwards and intersects with the main narrative without any purpose but the fun found in taking a quick side trip. MacLeod's imagination is as overstuffed as Dickens', and in the same way a reflexive twitch of the pen by Dickens would cover the page with a thousand words, MacLeod can apparently turn out a whole page just by resting his fingers on his keyboard.
But I'm learning as I go that, as with Dickens, none of what MacLeod writes is throwaway. I suspect that Joanna Tain and her sect of Scoffers will return in an important and interesting way later in this book or in one of the other books in the series.
Even if they don't, in the passage, a seeming aside, MacLeod has passed along detail that gives us important background into the world he's creating and one of his main characters' place in it and her relationship to it.
A passage like that in a realistic novel will usually get the writer accused of over-writing. "He needs an editor," critics will complain, if his editor or agent hasn't blue-penciled the offending sentences before publication.
Which is why so much realistic fiction stinks. Passages like that, apparent tangents full of detail of no immediate relevence, are necessary to building the little worlds that it is a writer's job to create.
This is an old debate, though. Is it better to write too much or write too little? You can guess what side I come down on, but I didn't start this post to make a case for over-writing.
What I really like about that passage is that it's a perfect example of what authoritarian types, of the right and left, religious authoritarians and secular authoritarians, hate about art.
Art offers a glimpse into another world. Read a book, watch a play or a movie, look at a painting, and you are witnessing a challenge to the solidity of this world.
Art makes people ask, "You mean it doesn't have to be this way? This isn't it? There are other possibilities?"
The first rule of running a successful authoritarian regime is "NO QUESTIONS!"
Art is a question.
The question is, "Sez who?"
You can see in MacLeod's apparent tangent there an idea guaranteed to make a Religious authoritarian's head explode.
Joanna Tain and the Scoffers aren't questioning the Bible's being the Word of God. They've just figured out that it can't be the only words He had to say to the universe. The universe is a big, diverse place. How could what he have had to say to a small group of first century human beings living along the Mediteranean coastline be exactly what he'd have to say to a group of twenty-seventh century human beings living far out in space, nevemind to the non-human beings living out there with them?
Which, naturally, raises the question how could what God said back in the first century be exactly what he has to say in the 21st?
For that matter, if what God said in the Bible is the whole of his message to all the universe, why didn't He see that the whole universe got the message all at once? Why did the people of Northern Europe have to wait 500 years for it? Why did the people of Eastern Asia have to muddle along without it for 1200 years?
And if there are beings on other planets, has the message been delivered to them already or do they have to make do until we invent warp drive?
That may take a while. Why do they have to wait?
Here's an idea? Maybe He did see that everybody got the message. Maybe he used lots of different messengers. Maybe the Bible is only one of a hundred or a thousand or a million notes from God.
You can see that Cosmonaut Keep is not a book Christian Fundamentalists would want their kids reading.
Without calling into question the existence of God, although that's an idea all those questions are bound to lead to---if there are so many different messages, might there not be a lot of different beings sending the message? Or maybe there's no original messenger at all. What if the messages were all thought up by human beings who only thought they came from a god?---Joanna Tain and the Scoffers have undermined the authority of all the priests and preachers.
By the way, what do Christian Fundamentalists think is going on out there in space at the moment? Do they believe there are other planets out there? Other life forms? Are they for or against space travel?
Joanna Tain and her Scoffers were driven from Croatan, dealt with in the usual way those who question the Bible's authority have been dealt with.
Blood had been shed, and after urgent appeals from both sides the gray folk had moved in swiftly to evacuate Tain's few thousand followers and to set them down on another planet, which they named Mingulay. They had been there two centuries when [the spaceship] The Bright Star had risen in their night sky, and had brought heresies beyond the wildest rantings of Joanna, and evidence that the universe was even stranger than she had supposed. The ship's library had become the foundation of the university and most science and technology, and a good deal of culture and art, in the hands of humans on Mingulay---and on an expanding radius of other worlds.
(My little brush-with-greatness post script: Ken MacLeod showed up to leave a comment on my first post about Cosmonaut Keep, A tin nose, to gently and good-naturedly tell me that my nitpicking criticism of his description of a building lobby was hogwash. I should be embarrassed but I'm not. I'm thrilled. I just hope he noticed in the post where I said I am enjoying the book. I still am.)
Comments