Gabriel Mckee's Blog: SF Gospel, page 6

The First Annual Doomsday Film Fest and Symposium

Repent! Next Sunday, I will be speaking on a panel at the First Annual Doomsday Film Fest & Symposium. The festival runs from Friday Oct. 23rd to Sunday Oct. 25th at the DCTV Theater in New York, and will feature great tales of the end times and after like Mad Max 2 (probably better-known to most of you as The Road Warrior), War Games, and Return of the Living Dead.

My panel, "The End is Nigh: Prophecies of the End Times from the Rapture to 2012," is coupled with a screening of Michael...

Mysticism in SF

Another story I meant to write about recently: Sci-Fi Wire asks: "Is mysticism overtaking science in sci-fi?"

I could write a response, but instead I think I'll just present this quote:

"The vision (sense of wonder, if you will) that sf tries for seems to me very close to the vision of poetry, particularly poetry as it concerned the nineteenth century Symbolists. No matter how disciplined its creation, to move into 'unreal' worlds demands a brush with mysticism. Virtually all the classics of...

Dick vs. Hubbard

Here's a story that I neglected to mention back when it broke, but I'll add some thoughts to it now, since it's more than a little relevant to my interests.

io9 recently posted a link to a discussion on an Anonymous message board posing the question: what if Philip K. Dick, instead of L. Ron Hubbard, were the basis for a religion?

Why then, is the only going science-fiction author cult of personality
devoted to -- of all people -- L Ron Hubbard?! If Scientology were
pretty much exactly the...

Stargate: Universe's answers from a (divine) whirlwind

I wasn't all that excited about when I first heard about Stargate: Universe-- I'd never really watched much Stargate, and the impression I had gotten from what I had seen was that it was... hm... not the best show. (I'm in the process of watching the show from the beginning on Hulu-- they currently have 7 of SG-1's 10 seasons-- and there is certainly a marked improvement in quality toward the end of the first season). When early reports suggested that SG:U might transcend the franchise's...

Robert J. Sawyer in the Cloud of Unknowing?

Holy Post, the religion blog of Canada's National Post, features an essay by Patricia Paddey on Robert J. Sawyer's theological outlook. There's some great (and a bit surprising!) clarification of what Sawyer means when he says "agnostic":

The technical meaning of agnostic is that if there is a Divine entity,
by its nature being superior to us, it would be incomprehensible to
us... An agnostic is someone
who believes the nature of the Divine is unknowable... and in that
sense, I'm willing to...

Countdown to FlashForward

The ABC series FlashForward , adapted from the novel of the same name by
Robert J. Sawyer, premieres tomorrow night. The novel and show share
the same basic premise: for a little over two minutes, the entire human
race simultaneously blacks out  and experience a glimpse of their
futures. Sawyer's novel is a masterpiece of philosophical SF,
approaching the ensuing questions of free will and destiny from a
variety of compelling angles. Was the future seen in the visions set in
stone, or just a s...

My Work is Not Yet Done: Thomas Ligotti's Dark Buddhism?

I don't read very much horror fiction. I enjoy Poe and Lovecraft and
even occasionally King, but the genre doesn't grab me in quite the same
way that SF does. But the biggest exception for me is Thomas Ligotti, a
little-known writer whose short fiction has mostly been confined to
small presses and tiny print runs despite the fact that he's one of the
best writers in any genre, living, dead, or otherwise. His sort of most
recent work, a novella (or just a short novel, depending on your page
c...

SF Signal's Mind Meld: Bad guys we love to hate

I was a glad participant in SF Signal's latest Mind Meld post, which asks:

    Who are the best bad guys in science fiction,     fantasy, and/or horror literature?

Read my full response-- which is more about bad things than bad guys, since that's what I think works best in letter-based SF-- here, alongside answers from the likes of Sandra McDonald, Adam-Troy Castro, and Suzy McKee Charnas [no relation (that I'm aware of):].

The Many Pleasant Surprises of Strikeforce: Morituri

When I was younger, I had the first two issues of a Marvel Comics
series called Strikeforce: Morituri. I enjoyed them, but I knew the
series had been canceled pretty quickly, and so I assumed that it
wasn't very good, and never sought out any other issues of it. But I
was always curious about where the story went.


And so, when I found a complete run of the entire series for 20
cents a pop, I couldn't resist it. Six bucks was a small price to pay
to settle one of the enduring mysteries of my ...

Where's the love for Defying Gravity?

I wrote a brief review of Defying Gravity , ABC's new prime(ish)-time SF drama, for Religion Dispatches, in which I discuss the role that religion plays in the show's first episode. But that's not what I'm going to talk about here. Instead, I want to ask a simple question: why aren't SF fans talking about this show?

Now, I'll freely admit that I haven't done anything like a complex, comprehensive search of SF blogs or anything, but really, I've hardly seen any discussion about it. You'd think it