Mike Duran's Blog, page 79

Review: "The Skin Map"

My last foray into Stephen Lawhead territory was with The Pendragon Cycle. That was back in the early 90′s, and it was quite an enjoyable experience. So it was with some anticipation  that I opened The Skin Map, Lawhead's latest and the first of a series. Conceptually, the novel appeared to be a perfect vehicle for Lawhead, who excels at historical detail. But while the concept and the detail don't disappoint, I found myself struggling through both.

The Skin Map blends several genres, but is probably best described as time travel or urban fantasy. The story revolves around Kit, a 21st century Londoner who stumbles upon a portal between different universes within our multiverse (alternate universes with infinite possible histories). Along the way, he loses his girlfriend Wilhemina in 17th century Prague, and in an attempt to rescue her, finds himself in a quest for a map that details these universal portals (or ley lines). As such, the story shifts between numerous possible worlds, an 18th-century Chinese port, old England, ancient Egypt, just to name a few.

But what could be a wild ride was, for me, only marginally interesting. For the main characters who lead me on this fantastical journey are not very interesting. Kit and Wilhelmina's relationship, which becomes the dramatic hinge of The Skin Map, endeared me to neither. For instance, upon introduction, we learn that Kit believes "he simply had to get a new girlfriend at first opportunity" (pg. 29). After a rather unflattering description of Wilhelmina's features — mousy hair, receding chin, spinster's hump, and dark-circled eyes — it's no wonder he feels this way. She yawns a lot, is emotionally cold, even calls him a "dope." Thus, our protagonist concludes, "Wilhelmina was no catch" (pg. 30). To which the reader must surely agree. So when Kit leads Wilhelmina to the portal and they spiral into different histories, I almost wanted to say "Good riddance.'

Which creates a problem, because finding Wilhelmina becomes the springboard of the novel.

As compelling as the possibilities of inter-dimensional, alternate history jumping could be, Lawhead's characters seemed strangely un-incredulous, as if finding oneself in 17th century Prague was just a scheduling error. So when one of Kit's guides warns that Wilhemina "might cause unimaginable damage, unleashing catastrophe after catastrophe of unreckoned proportions" (pg. 125), I had to ponder what "unimaginable damage" that might involve. Time travel stories carry their own logical questions. Tweaking A affects B, which changes C and inevitably removes Z. Perhaps Lawhead will explore such possibilities in later installments. However, in The Skin Map, I was left with a lot of those questions.

Stephen Lawhead is adept at setting and historical details, and this is where The Skin Map excels. Descriptions of the Chinese port city and the bakery in old Prague are wonderful. And some of the physics and philosophical speculation are intriguing. (I especially liked Lawhead's short essay Afterword entitled The Ley of the Land, which outlines the realtime theories behind the story.) So as much as I felt a disconnect with the characters, Lawhead is a great writer and has proven his handle on tales of epic scope. For that reason, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and the rest of the series a shot.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I'd like to thank Thomas Nelson Publishers for providing me this Book free as part of their BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."

How to Hug a Porcupine

So when we saw a guy at the local mall holding a Free Hugs sign, part of me cringed. The other part of me wanted to run bawling into this stranger's arms.

Have you seen these people? They're part of the Free Hugs Campaign, a group that travels round the world dispensing affection… to complete strangers. I'm not sure what compels these folks to do this, but I know this — they didn't grow up in my house.

Being raised in an alcoholic home, one learns to survive… without hugs.  Resilience becomes far more useful than empathy, a thick skin is preferable to a tender heart. Sure, the absence of attaboys and weepy parental pep talks did not enhance my people skills. But durability is now a specialty of mine.

Hugs? Who needs 'em?

'Course this made my entry into the Christian community rather rocky. You see, I quickly learned that Christians liked to hug. In fact, there was all kinds of hugs to choose from.

There was the awkward side hug.
There was the disarming, motherly, pat-on-the-back hug.
There was the reckless, slobbery, open-armed, full-on bear hug.
There was the stiff, tense,  let's-make-this-quick hug
There was the slow, deliberate, uncomfortably long, I-really-mean-this hug

But there was no porcupine hug. Porcupines don't do hugs.

Needless to say, Christian fellowship can be quite taxing on us non-huggers. Handshakes are fine. But hugs? I need my space, brother. Besides, I grew up believing there were only two types of people in the world: The weak and the strong. And people who require hugs are not strong. So how had the Church survived all these years filled with cream puffs?

Okay. Maybe it's time to reevaluate. Perhaps the fact that Free Hugs exists and people want them is indicative that the weak DO survive. Barely.

Either way, I steered clear of the guy. I've survived this long with minimal hugging and doubt that some stranger on a sidewalk in a busy marketplace will sufficiently alter my psychological malfunction. I smiled and nodded as I passed. But I just couldn't seem to shake this nagging thought:

God hugs porcupines, and has the wounds to prove it.

Alright, enough with this foolishness! This kind of talk will do us no good. The world is cold and cruel, and one can't survive pining for shows of affection. Then again, does surviving really require quills?

10 Books I Should Read, but Haven't

You have one of these lists, right? They're different for all of us, but if you're a reader, that list just seems to grow and grow. It's those books you should read, but haven't, the books you're always meaning to read, but don't. For some of us, the list consists of classics, for others, it's genre standards. It doesn't matter what's on your list. For one reason or another, these books have found their way onto your radar and never left. You may have gone so far as to purchase some of them and they're sitting on your bookcase right now making you feel guilty. Anyway, I decided to blow the dust off my own Top 10 list of Books I Should Read, but Haven't:

1984, George Orwell
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
The Stand, Stephen King
Don Quixote, Cervantes
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clark
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
At the Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft

Any similarity to your list? Of course not! Okay, so what are some of the books you should read, but haven't?

Did Flannery O'Connor Write Christian Fiction?

She is routinely considered one of the greatest Christian writers ever. An avowed believer, passionate and unashamed to speak or write of her faith, O'Connor's work is often upheld as a standard for what religious fiction should (or could) be.  Nevertheless, many readers of contemporary Christian fiction still have a difficult time answering the aforementioned question: Did Flannery O'Connor Write Christian Fiction?

In her favor, O'Connor clearly had a "redemptive agenda." In her collected letters, The Habit of Being, she writes:

One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, the whole reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.

So O'Connor wanted to bring "the ultimate reality. . . the Incarnation" to "people who think God is dead." I'm not sure I know a single Christian author who doesn't aim for that end. However, it's this "audience" issue that muddies the question. For in attempting to reach "people who think God is dead," O'Connor eschewed didacticism in favor of shock. She explains:

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural …. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock  — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. *emphasis mine)

Notice that the Christian novelist, when writing to an audience that "holds the same beliefs you do," can… "relax a little." Exactly how do Christians authors writing to Christian audiences relax? And does this "relaxation" hurt or help our stories? Whatever the answer, it was O'Connor's perceived audience that prompted her to employ shock and grotesquery. And it is precisely these "large and startling figures" that often befuddle and offend the contemporary Christian reader. Take for instance, this paragraph from her story, Parker's Back:

Suddenly Parker began to jump up and down and fling his hand about as if he mashed it in the machinery. He doubled over and held his hand close to his chest. "God dammit!" he hollered, "Jesus Christ in hell! Jesus God Almighty damm! God dammit to hell!" he went on, flinging out the same few oaths over and over as loud as he could.

O'Connor is undoubtedly a believer with a clear evangelical aim. But by current standards, language like this immediately disqualifies a story from the ranks of Christian fiction. So perhaps that's the problem: We use today's Christian fiction as the yardstick for what the genre should be.

It's not a stretch to suggest that O'Connor would take issue with today's religious fiction. In Mystery and Manners (p. 163) she writes:

Ever since there have been such things as novels, the world has been flooded with bad fiction for which the religious impulse has been responsible. The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible. (emphasis mine)

The "sorry religious novel" is one where the writer gets herself "as little dirty in the process as possible." Which makes me wonder whether or not our "family friendly" approach to Christian art isn't somehow detrimental.

So on both of these counts — audience and language — Flannery O'Connor's stories would NOT be considered Christian fiction. However, I think that says more about how we have come to view Christian fiction than anything. Which is a shame.

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What say you? Did Flannery O'Connor write Christian fiction?

Why We Need Heresy Hunters

I am not a heresy hunter. In fact, I believe many heresy hunters are way off base. However, the Bible says there is a such a thing as heresy. If this is true, then we need heresy hunters. Even if they are off-base.

They've been called many things, like Discernment Bloggers or the Truth Police. They are reviled by some and hailed by others. My first encounter with heresy hunting took place in the early '80′s. Dave Hunt's controversial book The Seduction of Christianity was the catalyst. The church we were then attending removed numerous books from their library as a result of Hunt's charges. All Catholic books were expunged as well as any author employing psycho-therapeutic techniques, which included the iconic James Dobson. Hunt took aim at faith healers, mystical prayer techniques, yoga, and self-help.

Despite the ensuing name-calling, character assassination, suspicion, pseudo-scholarship, and witch hunt, the subject was worthy of discussion.

Heresy hunters are still very much at work today, and their list of heretics is quite long. Recent notable figures / groups who have been found on that list include,  Brian McLaren, Benny Hinn, Rob Bell, Rick Warren, Harold Camping, John Piper (for believing in an Old Earth), Thomas Merton, Mother Theresa, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Crouch, TBN, every pope, and all Catholics.

Oftentimes, their charges are nit-picky, Pharisaical, and wildly melodramatic. For instance, in an article entitled Seven Tactics of the Heresy Hunters, Troy J. Edwards writes

In the beginning of the Pentecostal movement at Azusa street in 1906, the leaders of this movement, William J. Seymour and Charles Parham were labeled "rulers of spiritual Sodom." Another person labeled them, "Satan's preachers, jugglers, necromancers, enchanters, magicians, and all sorts of mendicants." This same person also labeled the Pentecostal movement as "spiritualism." Another well known preacher of that time labeled it, "the last vomit of Satan"…

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Pentecostals were also falsely labeled as "hypnotists," "mentally unstable" and attributed the miraculous manifestations in the churches as "demonic power."

I have my own issues with Pentecostals. But I have never considered them "the last vomit of Satan." Either way, after watching all the charges fly, it's led me to ask whether heresy hunting can become a sort of heresy all to itself.

But this post is entitled Why We Need Heresy Hunters, so let me explain my simple rationale. It goes like this:

The Bible explicitly says that the Church must be on guard against heresy, against false teachers and false doctrine (I Tim. 4:1), and those who "secretly introduce destructive heresies" (II Pet. 2:1). Christians are called to "not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings" (Heb. 13:9) but to be vigilant and discerning. These biblical charges are very pointed and largely undeniable. There is such a thing as false doctrine and we must know where to draw the line.
Those who vigorously oppose heresy hunting often have a hard time affirming and identifying what actually IS heresy. This is one of the most disturbing conclusions I've reached in the last couple of years. Those who are most adamant and resistant against the heresy hunters are often those with squishy theology. In fact, they usually spend a lot of time talking about love and unity. I dunno, but this makes me very suspicious.
Thus, regarding possible heresy it's better to err on the side of caution, than grace. Better to remove the entire leg than save the leg and risk letting the gangrene permeate the body. Better to have a theology that is too strict than too lax.

Which is why I believe it's better to tolerate heresy hunters, even encourage their role, than to blow them off. Even though they may be fanatical, extreme, narrow-minded, and defamatory, they play an important role in the Church. Now, I just hope they don't label me "the last vomit of Satan."

I'm Interviewed at Author Culture

I'm being interviewed at Author Culture today by Johne Cook. Author Culture is a terrific group blog for writers. Johne asks me a lot of provocative questions about things like "literary missionaries," the writer's wilderness, industry thawing, and my path to publication. It was a lot of fun. You can check out the entire interview HERE. Thanks Johne!

The Church or the University: Who's More To Blame?

I recently Unfriended someone on Facebook, a former student in my church Youth Group. Their posts had turned increasingly political and hostile toward religion. They were now officially on the Bash the Church bandwagon, critical of all they (and their parents) once held sacred. So what happened to the innocent teenager I once knew? Answer: They went to college.

Radio talk show host Dennis Prager, in a column entitled Why God Isn't Doing Well These Days, offered four reasons why the belief in God is declining in America. His number one reason is

…increasingly large numbers of men and women attend university, and Western universities have become essentially secular (and leftist) seminaries. Just as the agenda of traditional Christian and Jewish seminaries is to produce religious Christians and religious Jews, the agenda of Western universities is to produce (left-wing) secularists.

…the more university education a person receives, the more he is likely to hold secular and left-wing views.

Prager's argument is a fairly common one, an argument employed by many Evangelicals: Growing secularism is due to an atheistic academia.

While I don't disagree with the assertion that "Western universities have become essentially secular (and leftist) seminaries," I question whether or not universities are the primary cause of secularism in America. You see, I think the Church is more at fault for the rise of secularism than the University. Or to put it another way:

The growth of secularism is not due to the rise of the University but the decline of religion.

 

In Why College Students Are Losing Their Faith,  Conor Friedersdorf takes on Prager's assertion this way:

…if four years of college undo 18 years of parenting and religious affiliation, perhaps the faith community's tenuous hold is the problem, not the particular place outside its bubble where that hold evaporates. Consider the believers we've seen in history. With all the persecution that Judaism and Christianity have survived over the centuries, an argument that sites America's Top 310 Colleges as a first order adversary is hard to credit. (emphasis mine)

Is it just me, or do we Christians constantly look for scapegoats for our lack of cultural influence? Instead of looking in the mirror and letting judgment begin in the house of God (I Pet. 4:17), we point fingers at Hollywood, the media, the press, and the universities. Everyone's to blame but us. No wonder America is being swiftly secularized — Christians have been in cultural retreat for the last half century, building our own echo chambers to keep us unspoiled from the world.

Listen, the Church has survived centuries of persecution, corruption, martyrdom, even genocide, and now we want to blame… colleges? Jesus said that the gates of hell would not withstand His church (Matt. 16:18). I think the secular university fits in that category.

Your thoughts?

Interview w/ Johne Cook of Raygun Revival — Pt. 2

You can find Part One of my interview with writer and editor Johne Cook HERE.

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MIKE: From my perspective, there seems to be a lot of illusions about independent presses, the types of quality they will "tolerate," and the insular, perhaps "cliquish," nature of their business. Johne, what are some of the most common myths or misunderstandings about independent presses?

JOHNE: Whenever you peer into a scene from the outside, it's not unusual to draw inaccurate impressions or conclusions about the nature of the scene or the people who populate it. Honestly, from my perspective, there's a bit of truth to the myths and misunderstandings.

For example, let's talk about payment rates versus the quality of submissions. Perhaps I won't astonish you with this observation — the more you can pay, the better the submissions. We put the best face on it, but there it is.

When RGR started, we were aware of the bias in the minds of some (many?) authors against submitting to a strictly 4theluv outfit, so we started by paying a nominal $10 rate for stories, and ramped all the way up to $15 (whee!) for awhile after that. Despite being nearly nothing, there was an observable uptick in attention by paying something rather than nothing, even though the end result was nearly equal.

Now that we're paying semi-pro rates (thanks to our gracious hosts at Every Day Publishing), we're seeing much bigger names in the slushpile. SF legend Mike Resnick even wrote a new Catastrophe Baker story just for RGR, based in his career-spanning Birthright Universe of stories! We're working on landing a story from Kevin J. Anderson.

As an idealist, we really loved working with first-time authors, mentoring them as writers and showing them the ropes of our favorite genre. As a pragmatist, I can tell you that the signal-to-noise ratio is much better among established writers.

MIKE: There was a time when digital publications were viewed as second tier. Having a story published in an ezine did not carry the clout that a hard mag did. Is that still true? Or have digital imprints gained more respect in the industry?

JOHNE: Yes, but times are changing as we speak. The once-venerable dead tree publishers are the ones who are now backpedaling and trying to adapt. The big three didn't used to accept online submissions, but that's started to change. They still carry the panache, but the buzz is clearly with writers selling their works in the digital or audio arena. Writers who started in 'zines are starting to win some of the really big awards. The 'zines strike me as venerable farm clubs for big league ball teams. People in the know perk up if you say you've been published in some of my favorite 'zines. For instance, John Scalzi cut his sci-fi teeth at Strange Horizons. Clarkesworld Magazine has risen from obscurity to Hugo award winning zine in a few short years. There's a definite trend toward respectability for some of the digital publications, however, it's like anything else. Some outfits will keep doing what they do with no apparent change, some will follow the trends, and a smaller percentage will elevate themselves from the herd. As you might expect, who earns respect and who doesn't is a healthy mix of hard work, good timing, and simple hard work. Not everybody will make it to the next level.

MIKE: As you know, a lot of writers who frequent my site are Christians, but are unhappy with the current content being labeled "Christian fiction." They love speculative fiction, but want "faith" elements in their stories without the ultra conservative strictures or preachiness. Does Raygun Revival publish books and stories with "spiritual / religious" themes and, if so, what advice would you give to writers of such a genre?

JOHNE: RGR does not publish Christian fiction. With that said, space opera is very much about embracing stories with a strong moral discussion, with discernable good guys (or aliens) and bad guys (or aliens). That's one of the things I most liked about Star Wars – there was no doubt who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. In Firefly, Joss Whedon, a self-professed Atheist, was able to talk about religion without being brandished as Christian fiction. He simply wrote a story that allowed for a myriad of characters with a multitude of perspectives, and one of them, Shepherd Derrial Book, was a devout Christian with a dangerous past who served as the spiritual guide and conscience for Captain Mal Reynolds.

That's what we look for at RGR, adventure stories that sometimes feature a character of belief, who can talk about the success and failure (or benefits or dangers) of religion from the outside, where most sci-fans live. Timothy Zahn gave us my favorite example of doing this right back in the day with his novel Deadman Switch (1988, Baen), which featured a first person story narrated by Gilead Raca Benedar, a Watcher with a hyper-keen eye for detail (not unlike Sherlock Holmes) who is practically telepathic. He's highly respected, and also a devout Christian. (There are relatively few Christians at that time because of a purge at some point in our history.) The story focuses on the science fiction side of things while using religious differences to help drive the conflict. It was, first and foremost, a rigorous science fiction story that happened to feature a character of Christian persuasion as part of the largely story, not in place of the larger story.

At RGR, that's as far as we go. We love stories that have moral elements, moral conflict, but stay away from stories that explicitly exist for the purpose of proselytizing. We prefer discussions of the numinous to be organic rather than strident or didactic.

MIKE: What are some of the indie presses that you most admire and believe are putting out some of the best stuff?

JOHNE: From a sci-fi perspective, in no particular order, I like Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Electric Velocipede, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, the now defunct Jim Baen's Universe, Nate Lilly's Spacewesterns, and the stories published online from Tor.com.

From the side that talks about sci-fi from a Christian perspective, Jeff Gerke's Marcher Lord Press is doing some really exciting stuff. Chila Woychik's Port Yonder Press is looking intriguing and promising. I love Relief Journal and The Midnight Diner. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Grace Bridge's Splashdown Books, Lyn Perry's Residential Aliens and Digital Dragon magazine from Tim Ambrose and Randy Streu.

MIKE: Finally, what advice would you give to someone who wants to start a indie operation? Aside from the money — no small thing indeed — what factors should the entrepreneurial small presser consider before diving in?

JOHNE: In no particular order, here's what I'm thinking of right off the top of my head:

Vision – Honestly, from our perspective, the money isn't nearly as important as a fierce clarity of vision. Clarify your vision as soon as possible. We started without any funds at all but we had a unified vision right out of the gate, and that bore us through a host of weird times and hard knocks.
Network – Rub shoulders with other operators doing roughly what you want to do. Get help as soon as you can. Tim Ambrose asked me for five minutes and I chatted with him about the failures and successes we saw trying to launch RGR on and off for three weeks. Lyn Perry bent my ear when he was thinking about his publication. We learned from those who went before us, and love to share what we've learned with others who are up-and-coming.
Community – Engage your community, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. We put up forums for RGR six months before the magazine went live, and by the time the first issue hit, we had a core of rabid, engaged fans.
Unique – Find one or two things that make your outfit unique and play it up. At RGR, we are known for phenomenal cover art, a fun pulp adventure fiction genre, and the faux arrogance of the Overlords and our Big Red Button.™ Finding some things that make you different will give you a sense of identity and help set you apart from other similar groups.
Fun – By all that's holy, enjoy what you're doing. If the project's not fun, I'd seriously question if you should be undertaking such a mammoth undertaking.

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If you haven't yet, please check out RayGun Revival. And if you'd like to find out more about Johne Cook, you can hook up with him through both Facebook and Twitter. Terrific stuff, Johne! Thanks so much for visiting.

Interview w/ Johne Cook of Raygun Revival — Pt. 1

In our continuing series on indie presses and the ever-changing face of the publishing industry, I'm excited to welcome Johne Cook to deCOMPOSE.  John is one of the founders and editors of Raygun Revival (RGR), a digital mag that describes itself as "a throwback publication that revisits space opera and golden age sci-fi." RGR features some fantastic stories and incredible artists, some of whose work I will sprinkle along the way. Johne is a technical writer by day and creative writer / editor at night. I'm impressed with Johne's knowledge of the industry and the passion (and humor) he brings to the discussion.  Johne graciously agreed to answer a few of my questions. I hope you enjoy the first of this two-part interview.

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MIKE: Johne, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us. There's a lot of debate about the state of the industry and the future of books and publishers. Is it safe to say that indie publishers are booming? And if so, are the factors that have contributed to this a good or bad thing?

JOHNE: Videogames are booming. Indie publishers are flourishing.  But I worry that books themselves (in physical or digital form) are quaint and have to argue with ever-increasing competition. Learning to read is one of the cardinal signs of advancing civilization. Choosing not to read must surely be one of the signs of a falling civilization. But I digress.

There is, of course, a lot of activity in the publishing / reading community, a radical shake-up of the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime. Speaking for myself, the very factors that are enabling / forcing these changes have created a season of opportunity for anybody with vision, gumption, and initiative.

There are many factors that combined to make this surge possible. The ones I'm most interested in are pragmatic. I remember being a co-founder of an Unreal Tournament clan (read: online videogame club) in late 1999. We experienced some early notoriety because our clan hosted our own broadband server instances where other players could come and play our particular flavor of the game with decent performance. In the era of dial-up and high latency, our six servers were centrally-located in North Carolina and quickly vaulted to the top of the server lists. The difference (and secret) was our early servers were hosted out of a closet of a bank and boasted a Ten MB/s half-duplex connection. We had a connection that players trying to host their own servers off dial-up connections couldn't begin to match.

We've come a long way since then. Personal Computers have gotten faster, cheaper, and more powerful, broadband connections are faster and more widely affordable, monitors are flatter, thinner, and larger, hard drives are now recorded in Terabytes instead of Gigabytes or Megabytes. Rapidly improving technology has made it possible for more people to make their dreams into reality on a limited budget.

I will say that there's more opportunity for self-made creative types than at any time in human history. For my part, I walked away from hosting videogame servers in 2003, and, with some like-minded friends, started Ray Gun Revival (RGR) in July of 2006, something we could not have as readily done in 1999. At RGR, we focused on publishing space opera and golden age sci-fi stories that might not have otherwise have seen the light of day. We've published 57 .PDF issues and four full months of weekly HTML content — that's positive for space opera. In our case, I'd argue technology itself is neither good nor bad, it's what you do with it that counts.  When we looked around at the landscape, instead of saying, "Somebody outta do a space opera magazine," we just did it, and we've kept doing it as the entire publishing landscape has changed around us. Technology has helped us to easily adapt while keeping our day jobs and our family lives intact. That's good for us, and it's good for our readers.

MIKE: Tell us about Raygun Revival. What prompted you to start it? Are you a natural entrepreneur, did you see a void that needed filled, or do you just love space opera and golden age sci-fi so much that you couldn't be apart from it?

JOHNE: In one word: Firefly. Add in a dash of kismet, a bash of bitter circumstance, and three genre rebels, and you get a perfect storm of opportunity too good to pass up.

I met Paul online in the mid-to-late 90s on an e-mail list for the Christian rock band Daniel Amos. DA's always been sort of a black sheep group that Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) never quite knew what to do with. As a bit of a black sheep myself, I like the vibe. It fits the way mere convention never has. I joined another list Paul was on a couple of years later that exemplified that same sort of vibe in the arts; people who enjoyed film, poetry, stories, and novels. While on that list, I learned something interesting about Paul that changed my life. (By now, he probably hates when I tell this story, heh.) While working in the mailroom of a company in Omaha, Paul funded and directed his own character-based film with his cousin, Chad Leahy (keep that name in mind — Chad's the one who would later design the RGR logo and initial art). When I heard about that, I thought that if he could pursue his creative dreams from such humble beginnings, the only thing stopping me from doing something similarly audacious was my own lack of vision and initiative.

I met Lee King in 2003 over at Deep Magic magazine where I submitted short pieces for monthly writing challenges. Deep Magic was an amazing Fantasy magazine with high production values. At the time, they had the most phenomenal covers in the business. I decided then and there that if I ever became involved with a Sci-Fi magazine, I wanted to follow their example. In 2004, I worked with Lee as Associate Editors at Bill Snodgrass' The Sword Review. A year after that, we learned that Rebecca Shelley was stepping down from Dragons, Knights, and Angels magazine and was looking for someone to take the helm. Bill asked me if I'd go over there for a spell as Managing Editor, and I agreed, taking Lee King and Selena Thomason with me. As much as I enjoyed my time at DKA, I was never completely comfortable with the explicit Christian focus of the publication. I've never understood the utility of preaching to the choir. Lee and I had many conversations about how many Christians still didn't get F/SF. We felt like we were lost between genres, too religious for mainstream F/SF and too speculative for mainstream Christians. I've never quite understanding the insular vibe of a group whose primary marching orders, as I understood it, is to take their Good News to the world outside. I happened to be available when DKA needed an editor, but I came to view my primary focus there as an interim figure. I felt others would likely thrive in the environment where I found myself squirming.

I'd recently discovered Firefly on DVD and in 2004 wrote a 55k word novel for NaNoWriMo that featured a very Firefly-esque vibe, a steampunk swashbuckling pirate story that I always thought would eventually morph into space opera once the story got off-planet.  I'd bought the Firefly DVDs at a Wal-Mart, watched five minutes of the pilot, and was instantly smitten. I consumed the series in great gulps of three or four episodes per night after work. I thought it was cool what Joss Whedon was able to talk about with his disparate characters, including riffing on religion via Shepherd Book. What I observed to be truths about life and belief shared in that environment seemed to be going out to people who could get the most mileage out of it, and that's where my heart wanted to be.

As it happened, Paul was going through a really rough patch in his life at that point, and we turned to chatting about Firefly on IM I think as a defense mechanism, a way to get his mind off a relationship that was falling apart despite his best efforts. (You can read more about that in the editorial called The Final Proclamation in Issue 57, our last .pdf issue. Brings a tear to my eye every time I read that editorial.) Around the same time, I tested the waters. I'd been talking with Bill about the possibility of doing a space opera / sci-fi thing if we could find someone to take over at DKA, thinking that we might be able to put something together over the course of a year. Instead, things came together in just 24 hours. We asked Selena  Thomason what she thought about taking over at DKA, and she leapt at the opportunity. That freed me up to focus my efforts where I thought they'd be more effective.

While talking with Bill about starting a new 'zine, and he said another person had been talking with him about a similar idea and said we should get together. Unbeknownst to me, it was my friend and co-editor Lee King. Paul, Lee, and I got together in IM and quickly came up with an idea, a name, and a schtick, and RGR was born. Instead of founding co-editors, we called Ourselves the Overlords, and it just sort of stuck. We loved the quality of Firefly and wanted to take that enthusiasm and share it with a whole new generation of readers who'd never heard of Doc Smith or Miles Vorkosigan.

We also had an idea to resurrect the idea of the serial novel, the ongoing episodic story where you could follow new adventures by the same heroic / tragic characters week after week. That was a challenge because at the time, nobody was doing serial fiction. To prime the pump, each of the Overlords agreed to write a proof-of-concept serial novel, and because we were initially thinking of putting out weekly content, we recruited up-and-coming author Sean T.M. Stiennon to fill out the fourth slot. Sean wrote a classic old school sci-fi adventure called Memory Wipe. Lee wrote Deuces Wild, a space western with a cynical gambler and a space cowboy and their adventures in hostile space. Paul contributed Jasper Squad, a riff on Firefly with his own unique twist, and I resurrected my NaNo novel idea, The Adventures of the Sky Pirate. We published 48 or so biweekly issues, and then reverted to monthly updates. This July starts our sixth year of publication, and we're back to publishing weekly content.

MIKE: As you mentioned, after 57 issues, Raygun Revival underwent some changes. What were those changes and how did you reach the place to require them? Where are you at in your operations now, both staff and volume.

JOHNE: If it isn't yet incredibly obvious, I'd like to direct your attention to the name "Bill Snodgrass." Lee and I knew Bill from Deep Magic magazine, where we were all contributors. When Bill got together with his lifelong buddy Cameron Walker and started The Sword Review, I spent many happy afternoons on my commute home talking to Bill on the phone about TSR and our views about Christians, fiction, and our roles in that world. After starting The Sword Review, Bill needed a bookkeeping entity to keep track of all the non-profit numbers associated with the enterprise, and Double-edged Publishing was born. After Dragons, Knights, & Angels was added to the fold (and later became MindFlights), new zines started popping up at an accelerated rate. Fear & Trembling (Christian horror) was added to the fold, followed by Haruah (a Guideposts-like inspiration / devotional magazine). There was a youth magazine, and talks of others, one dedicated to Romance stories, a Western magazine, another one dedicated to Mysteries. Bill's wife jokingly referred to DEP as an 'empire,' but instead of being the emperor, Bill was behind the scenes for all of it. Instead of Ming the Merciless, think Wizard of Oz. Bill had a true servant's heart and wanted you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

But this is how you know how important one man can be — what happens to the empire when that one man is no longer able to do everything he used to do? If he's just a figurehead, the engine keeps on going. If he's irreplaceable, the entire thing comes down. Bill was the latter.

After years of indefatigable service behind the scenes, hosting everything, paying for all the stories for all the magazines through a series of donations (and, I suspect, out of his own pocket), the economy went south, Bill's web hosting company had to close, and suddenly the various DEP magazines had a choice to make. Bill moved from webmaster to seminary student and teacher, and new owners were lined up to keep the POD arm of DEP running. However, they had no interest in running the magazines, and the various magazine editors got together to decide what to do next. Some of the zines struck out on their own (MindFlights), some found new homes (Fear & Trembling landed with Lyn Perry's Residential Aliens group), and some folded outright.

And then there was RGR. The Overlords had this idea that we'd transition from a primarily .pdf 'issue' delivery system to a more modern blog-based HTML delivery system, but we really didn't have the technical knowledge to make it happen. After Issue 57, Ray Gun Revival went on hiatus as we grappled with what to do next, but it looked like one thing was apparent — despite our best efforts, we were going nowhere fast. That's not to say we weren't putting our best face on it, but our intentions were grander than our abilities.

And then, as they say, the miracle occurred.

While we were thrashing around, I got an e-mail out of the blue from Jordan Lapp, founder / editor of Every Day Fiction. We knew Jordan, and had published him twice in the pages of RGR. He'd heard about the dissolution of DEP and wanted to know what our plans were. We hemmed and hawed but it must have been clear that we had nothing going that we couldn't be talked out of. Jordan approached me in September of 2010. He said he really respected RGR and liked what we were doing and asked if EDF could help out. As we talked, it quickly became clear that they had everything we needed without asking for any editorial restrictions. It was a dream deal. Basically, their pitch was to host RGR, provide admin and technical support, pay semi-pro rates for stories of up to 4k words, all with the goal of eventually becoming a publication worthy of a best Semi-Pro Hugo nomination. And Jordan repeated that they basically intended to take an editorial hands-off approach and let the Overlords do our schtick and continue to find and publish space opera and golden age sci-fi stories with a fun and adventurous pulp feel.

To make a long story short, that's exactly what they did. We Overlords are arrogant and imperious, but we're not complete fools. We leapt at the opportunity, and went live again in February, 2011 after a hiatus from August, 2010.

* * *

Please check back in later this week for Part Two of my interview with Johne Cook.

When Is Fiction False Doctrine?

One of the many charges against William Young's best-seller The Shack was its portrayal of God as a black woman. I have gone on record with my concerns about The Shack. Frankly, God being portrayed as a black woman is not one of them.

So does God being portrayed as a black woman cross some doctrinal line? I personally don't think so. Especially as it's housed in a work of fiction. But however you answer that question, make no mistake about it: Doctrinal lines are a HUGE part of Christian fiction.

Exactly what those lines are and when they are crossed, is another story.

Over at Speculative Faith, novelist and editor Rachel Starr Thompson revisited this subject in an entry entitled When Speculation is… Confusing. She compares two recent books she's read, one of them being my first novel The Resurrection. Rachel writes

I'm somewhat ambivalent about speculative fiction that takes place in this world… I mean, when we're making up an entire world from scratch, then I think we've got fair license to make it work however we want. But if we set a story in this world, don't we have some responsibility to play by the rules of this world? If we don't– if we blur the lines between reality and fantasy– do we risk causing confusion to our readers, especially as pertains to spiritual realities? (emphasis mine)

So in writing fantasy worlds, the author has a "fair license" to create her own laws. On the other hand, stories rooted in the here-and-now are somewhat bound by "the rules of this world." In other words, I am free to interject space aliens into downtown Los Angeles. I am not free to strip God of His power to eradicate those aliens. For Christians, an impotent God is less tolerable (and more fictional) than an alien invasion. Which brings Rachel to her concerns about my novel.

… Mike speculates freely about spiritual warfare and the various spiritual denizens that inhabit our world, and while that speculation is at times chilling and at other times just plain fun, I came away a little confused on a few points, and feeling that it wouldn't be too hard to interpret God as just another deity vying for control of the planet, rather than as the King of Kings thundering His authority over every inch of it. This is reality, but it's not; the lines are blurry.

In the ensuing comments, Rachel summarized "…we can play with the rules of our world as long as we don't play with the nature and character of God." This is THE doctrinal line we Christians mustn't transgress.

Let me make clear: Rachel's review is fair and generous. She is not accusing me of false doctrine, but accurately describing the "theological plumb line" that many Christian readers impose upon their books. Nevertheless, she worries that I speculate too freely about God and His world. Behind her concerns is the fear that, at some point, fiction can become false doctrine.

This is a good concern for Christians to have. Nevertheless, its application is sticky. I mean, at what point is fiction false doctrine?

The Lord of the Rings trilogy has not a few Christian detractors. While some consider LotR to be one of the greatest works of fiction ever penned by a believer, others view its theology as askew. The Bible condemns witchcraft and sorcery, they say. So how can Gandalf NOT be antagonistic to a Christian worldview? On these same grounds, any book with wizards, sorcerers, spells or incantations, is categorically branded as biblically unsound. So Harry Potter doesn't stand a chance.

Truth is, many Christian books take liberties with "doctrine." C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce envisions a bus ride from hell (or, at least, purgatory) to heaven, even though the Bible dismisses such travel (Luke 16:26). His Space Trilogy goes even further, taking us into florid un-fallen worlds. But can there be such a thing as an un-fallen world? This educator watched A Wrinkle in Time removed from her Christian school's curricula because of what some perceived as a "New Age content." Tosca Lee speculates about demons,  Eric Wilson about vampires, and Robin Parrish about ghosts. How can Christians write speculative fiction without, um, speculating?

So maybe this is a no-win situation. I mean, the author writing for the Christian market is invariably forced to dot her doctrinal I's and cross her theological T's. Which is why I have suggested elsewhere that the import of theology into our fiction potentially stifles speculation. Yes, God revealed Himself as a Jewish carpenter. But does that mean He couldn't have used a black woman?

Is there such a thing as "false doctrine"? Absolutely. But when does fiction cross that line? I'm not sure. But whatever that line is, I think Christians often draw it too conservatively.