Gabriel Mckee's Blog: SF Gospel, page 4

Five reasons to hate Kick-Ass

Sorry to be a contrarian, folks, but I am anything but excited about Kick-Ass. In fact, I hated just about everything about the comic series it's based on, which I felt totally missed the point of superheroes in its ham-fisted attempt at satirizing the genre and its fans. I feel so strongly about it that I wrote a lengthy essay on the story's many, many failings, which you can read as a guest post at SF Signal. An excerpt:

The problem is that Kick-Ass wants to be a superhero, but his...

Persecuted Jedi in the news again

A while back I wrote a short piece for Religion Dispatches on an odd news item involving the U.K.-based Church of Jediism, involving a would-be Sith Lord's drunken attack on one of the Church's founders and, more importantly, the powerful impact that media attention can have on new religious movements. The Church of the Jedi is in the news again-- a member is claiming that Jobcentre, a job-training organization, discriminated against him by demanding that he remove his hood indoors. Chris...

The Muppet Wicker Man

 
Why didn't somebody think of it sooner? An online comic book adaptation of the '70s bizarro-pagan horror classic The Wicker Man, starring... the Muppets. Read it fast, before the lawsuits hit.

And, while you're at it, check out my review of The Wicker Man from a few years ago, in which I explored the movie's depiction of clashing religious ideologies.

SF Signal's Mind Meld: SF TV shows that deserve a remake

The lovely folks at SF Signal have invited me to participate in another Mind Meld column, this one on long-lost SF shows that deserve a remake. Check out my answer here, alongside a bunch more. There's an impressive array of responses ranging from Space: 1999 to Darkwing Duck, including a couple very obscure ones that sound fascinating (I've got to track down The Starlost and Otherworld).

MIND MELD: SciFi TV Shows That Deserve A Remake (with Videos)

Some links from the last month

Continuing the great catch-up project, here are some links from the last month or so:

At Tor.com, Teresa Jusino ponders religion, science, and science fiction. I'm interested in her approach to the "provable" deities of (for instance) Avatar and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:

Most people who debate science vs. religion tend to ask the same boring question. Does God exist? 
Yawn. However, the question in all of these stories is never "Do these
beings really exist?" The question is "What do we...

Simple Meme: What book are you reading now?

An easy-enough meme from SF Signal-- answer the following four questions:

What Book Are You Reading Now?
Why did you choose it?
What's the best thing about it?
What's the worst thing about it?

1. Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg. I'm about halfway through.*

2. I realized, after picking two of his stories for my list of The 10 Best Science Fiction Stories About Religion and reviewing Downward to the Earth, that Silverberg really is one of my favorite authors (with a bullet). I'm not...

Just a little apocalypse: Stephen King's Under the Dome

I was a big fan of Stephen King growing up, but it's been quite a few years since I've read anything of his. When I heard that his latest novel was a thousand-plus-page science fictional epic, I knew I was going to have to give it a try. Under the Dome describes, in minute detail, what happens when the small Maine town (what else?) of Chester's Mill is cut off from the world by an invisible, impenetrable barrier. The result is, without spoiling too much, a rapid descent into fascism, an...

You should watch Caprica, because it is a good show.

In case you haven't seen a billboard lately, Caprica premieres tonight on Syfy. The pilot is quite good, and, as I explained in my review a couple months ago, some of the same religious questions that drove Battlestar Galactica are central to the story:

Hidden deep in the heart of the Caprica pilot is a "how the
leopard got its spots" tale—but for "leopard" read "Cylons," and for
"spots" read "monotheistic religion." If anything, the conflict between
monotheism and polytheism will be even...

"Beware of Science Fiction"?

Self-identified Fundamentalist David Cloud has written a short piece on why you should "Beware of Science Fiction." (The reasons mostly boil down to "because it will make you a polyamorous nudist atheist who believes in evolution.") He singles out Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gene Roddenberry as the worst offenders-- and the expiration date on those examples goes a long way toward showing how much Cloud actually knows about SF.

The piece...

Avatar: Pantheism, proof, and pretty stuff

The subject of SF theology has been widely-discussed for the last
week, thanks to James Cameron's Avatar. (It would have to happen when
I'm on vacation, huh?) In a column for the New York Times, Ross Douthat
demonizes the film for its pantheism; Beliefnet's Pagan blogger Gus di
Zerega praises it for the same; for Religion Dispatches, C. Joshua
Villines frames the film as a ritual of atonement for "the sins of
commercialism and Western triumphalism"; even the Daily Show had its say. The...