Gabriel Mckee's Blog: SF Gospel, page 8

Listen Up TV - "Exploring New Frontiers" of religion and SF

I was recently interviewed for Listen Up, a Canadian religion news show, for a special episode on religion and science fiction. The episode, entitled "Exploring New Frontiers," also includes interviews with Robert J. Sawyer, John C. Wright, and Robert Charles Wilson, among whose company I'm quite thrilled to find myself. It airs Sunday, June 14th on Canada's Global Television Network, but it will also be going up on Youtube in the very near future, so I'll save you the trouble of tracking down

Stephen Baldwin, King of the Jungle: The bizarre spiritual landscape of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!

New by me at Religion Dispatches: an essay on the surreal role of religion on NBC's reality show I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, the roster of which includes public evangelist (and bad theologian) Stephen Baldwin, and Spencer Pratt of The Hills, whose recent conversion to Christianity is... well... Just read this:

Spencer, who has made clear his intentions to be the show’s villain, is
a recent convert to a very Hollywood sort of Christianity. Spencer sums
it up best by recounting his firs

Not science fiction (and mostly not religion, either): Some recent music.

It ain't all science fiction here. I've been enjoying some music lately, too.
First, one of my favorite bands, maudlin of the Well, released Part the Second, a free reunion album. motW was an odd sort of post-metal group, with complex composition and instrumentation, masterminded by Toby Driver (with whom I went to college, but I assure you I'd love this music even if I hadn't). Their twin albums Bath and Leaving Your Body Map, which are basically a big concept album about astral projection an

"Dead to that which held us captive": Eric Brown's Kéthani

The dead walk in Eric Brown's Kéthani, which takes place in a world where aliens (the Kéthani of the title) have given human beings physical immortality. The story begins with the mysterious materialization of a few hundred thousand enormous crystalline spires across the planet. These are the "Onward Stations" of the Kéthani, an alien race similar in many ways to the Overlords of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End: their purpose is to give us the means to return from the dead, in exchange for s

Better living through vampirism

New on Religion Dispatches: an interview with Joseph Laycock, a scholar who's interested in real-life vampires as a new religious movement. His book, Vampires Today: The Truth About Modern Vampires, comes out tomorrow from Praeger, and it sounds far, far more scholarly and respectable than one might expect a book on real-life vampires could ever be. But it's not quite so serious that the interview can't still include great lines like this:

While it may be comforting to think that we are totally

The complex religious landscape of Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock

Destined to be remembered as one of this year's best SF novels, Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock is the compelling tale of rebellion against tyranny, both political and religious. The eponymous hero is a nephew of Deklan Comstock, a tyrannical dynastic president living under self-imposed exile for fear of his uncle's paranoid tendency to execute those who might threaten his power. Julian has little interest in political power—he's far more interested in science and the arts, his life goa

800 Words: A new play about Philip K. Dick's religious visions

If you're planning to be in Minneapolis anytime between May 28th and June 7th (or if you're looking for a reason to be), this sounds pretty intriguing: 800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick, a play based the final days of Dick's life. From the official description:

800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick is based on the life of ground-breaking science fiction author, Philip K. Dick, complete with secret agents, Dick’s dead sister and a talking cat. The play begins just as Phili

Did network squeamishness about religion kill Kings?

In a story on Newsarama, Kings creator Michael Green alleges that NBC effectively kept his parallel-universe adaptation of the King David story from reaching its audience by leaving its biblical basis out of the promos:

"When the time came for the marketing, there was a very deliberate, outspoken, loud desire articulated by them that, 'We are not going to say King David.' They were scared to say King David. They just felt that that would be detrimental to the show," Green explained. "I thought

Why I'm not that upset about the cancellation of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

It's official: The Sarah Connor Chronicles will not get a third season.

I liked the show from the beginning. Though it wasn't the most intelligent show in the world, it was always philosophically interesting. (I wrote about it here, and here, and here, and here.)

But you know what? I don't mind that it's done.

[Spoilers ahead.:]

The reason? The ending of the second season was a totally satisfying conclusion to the story the show told. The show took place in the middle of its main characters' esta

Robert J. Sawyer to high-school student: "Skepticism can be dogma"

Robert J. Sawyer reports on his blog about a letter he received from a 12th-grade student writing an English paper on The Terminal Experiment and Calculating God. The student asks, "Are you a religious man yourself?" Sawyer's responded that he's not—but, unlike many non-religious, his skepticism is open to new evidence: 

I liked playing with the notion of whether skepticism/atheism was really a reasoned position, or simply another belief system that would endure regardless of the evidence, or la