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Fundamental Problems

February 4, 2006
by Howard V. Hendrix

Back in the 1980s, I wrote "The Art of Memory," a story set in a theocratically-controlled Christian States of America, in a near-future world impacted by global warming.

"Memory" first appeared as "experimental fiction" (though I considered it pretty straightforwardly science fiction) in a little magazine called EOTU, edited by Larry Dennis. Like most of the writers he published, I’ve long since lost touch with Larry, but I still appreciate his taking on that story. Some of its ideas probably seemed a little crazy at the time, but they’ve turned out to be perversely predictive.

Don’t get me wrong. Yes, science fiction writers occassionally "nail" some aspect of the future: Clarke and geostationary satellites, Asimov and pocket calculators, and the strangest of all — Heinlein actually naming his first man on the moon "Armstrong," in a story published many years before that actually came to pass. Specific prediction is not really our job, however. Emily Dickinson once admonished her readers to "tell the truth, but tell it slant." Science fiction writers, in sharing their piece of the truth, must usually tell it not only slant, but forward slant.

As a science fiction writer, setting a story in the future allows me the distance to talk about what I perceive to be going on in the present. What I saw in the 1980s was the increasing erosion of the wall separating church and state, a trend toward theocratic rule in America, and the accumulation of evidence for what we used to call the greenhouse effect.

"Art of Memory" is one of the few stories I set in the dark time of theocratic American rule, but that dark time is part of the recent past in all my novels, particularly Better Angels (1999), Empty Cities of the Full Moon (2001), The Labyrinth Key (2004) and Spears of God (forthcoming, 2006). In every novelistic reference to that dark time, I have always made it a mercifully short period (less than a decade) of religiopolitical tyranny between periods of democracy.

I took as my model the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century, when Cromwell and the parliamentary Puritans overthrew the monarchy to establish their theocratic Commonwealth and Protectorate. Despite the naming of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, Cromwellian theocracy collapsed in relatively short order — as I hope a theocracy in the United States also would.

There would obviously be differences between the two periods. Such an American theocratic interval would not be an interregnum, a time between monarchies, but rather a time between periods of republican democracy (whereas it could be argued that the English interregnum was in many ways more democratic than either the reign of Charles I before it or Charles II after it). The point was not to suggest that history repeats itself, but rather that its events exhibit self-similarity across scale.

Such self-similarity across scale haunts me when I look at this morning’s news. As a result of cartoons derogatorily depicting the Prophet Muhammed, mobs have set fire to Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria, and protesters in London carry signs saying "Butcher Those Who Mock Islam." We are in a time of new crusades and jihads. Conflict between Islam and the West has ushered in the third millenium after Christ, much as it also ushered in the second.

The reasons are said to be different this time. The West is supposedly secular and democratic now, not a Christendom of kingdoms. I wonder, though.

In the forthcoming Spears of God, a character refers to the America of the dark time as COKT up — run by a Covert, Oligarchic, Kleptocratic Theocracy, secret rule by a cabal of powerful thieves masquerading as righteous men.

We may well be in that dark time. During the Cold War, C3I stood for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence. Now it seems to stand for Corruption, Cronyism, Corporatism, and Incompetence.

The president tells us we’re in Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence. There was no secret alliance between the fundamentalist Islam of al-Qaeda and the secular Baathism of Saddam Hussein. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The terror attacks of 9/11/01 really happened, but Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with them. Yet we're still in Iraq.

So why are we there? Oil? Hegemonic control of the region? A covert attempt to push Christianization, and thereby defeat Islamist ideology, as some in the Muslim world have argued? If terrorism is the sword of the new jihad, then is cultural imperialism the sword of the new crusade? If so, the confict is more "asymmetric" than most have supposed. Or maybe not, if it's all really just a conflict between Islamofascism and Christofascism.

All of this concerns me because Spears of God involves sites holy to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I try to make clear in the book that the problem is not Islam, not Christianity, and not Judaism. The problem is fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Christianity, and fundamentalist Judaism. The problem is not religious faith, but fundamentalism. Intolerance — of other religions and of secularism — is characteristic of fundamentalisms in all religions. In fact, fundamentalism is in the religious realm what fascism is in politics.

Combine a fundamentalist view of the sacred with worldly political power and you have a potent and explosive mix. My wife worries that my forthcoming book will result in a fatwa being issued against me — and we can’t afford bodyguards. I think that’s about as likely as that I’ll be targeted by Mossad or NSA. . . .

I hope none of that will come to pass. I hope that those in power still understand the difference between fact and fiction — at least better than James Frey and other scribes of "creative nonfiction" do. I hope that the social controllers will ignore my little book, just as the anticommunist witchhunters of the 1950s ignored The Day The Earth Stood Still — despite its pacifist and internationalist message — because it was "only science fiction."

I’m generally in favor of maintaining the walls between church and state, between freedom of religion and freedom of speech, between speculation and prediction, between fiction and nonfiction, between imagination and confession. That doesn’t seem to be the way the world is going, however. The activity along both the theocratic and global-climactic trendlines seems to be increasing. Maybe the two are related, just as they were in that old story I wrote nearly twenty years ago.

If they are related, I’m sure it's in subtler ways than the USA changing its name to the Christian States of America. But hey, I was only writing fiction about the future in broad strokes, right? And such a name change wouldn’t be that much less subtle than a name like Department of Homeland Security — or "Vaterland Sicherheits," in good German.

Leaders on every side want to infect us with their fears, to peddle paranoid fantasies to us so that we’ll let them take all sorts of liberties with our civil liberties, in the name of "protecting" us. As a science fiction writer I’m always dancing the tightrope between "prophetic revelation as conspiracy theory about the future" and "conspiracy theory as prophetic revelation about the past" — as one of the very fictional characters in Spears of God would have said, if that little speech hadn’t ended up on the cutting room floor when I was revising the book.

Maybe it’s not only science fiction writers who are dancing that tightrope, come to think of it. Maybe we all are — if we haven’t already fallen off, if we aren’t already in free fall.

P.S. "The Art of Memory" can be found in my ebook collection Möbius Highway (from scorpiusdigital.com).

Spears of God

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