How do you do a Hare Krishna Science Fiction story?
After I left the Hare Krishna movement I wrote the first draft of what would become The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim on a Royal Sabre manual typewriter. After that I considered the amount of work it would take to get it into final draft form, plus the likelihood that anyone would publish it, and gave up. It would remain in a box, ignored, for thirty years.
I did not give up writing, though, and it seemed to me that what I had learned in the Hare Krishnas could be used as the basis for a novel. I had never managed to write a novel before, but I had this notion that I could write a story about Krishna, the ordinary human who would one day be considered a god.
The problem with that idea is that Krishna only makes sense as a god. Just as an ordinary guy named Brian could not do what Jesus is supposed to have done, an ordinary man could not possibly be used as the basis for the god called Krishna.
It was a really lousy idea for a novel, but I spent a long time trying to do research for it, and I did manage to get through a draft of that too. The less said about that draft the better. Unlike my memoir, I did throw this one out.
Now that I have finished and published my memoir and some people have actually liked it I have given some more thought to the idea of using my experiences in HK in a novel. Specifically, I wanted it to be a science fiction novel.
The Hare Krishna movement had its own idea about what its future would be. Back in 1979 some of its leaders thought there would be a devastating atomic war and afterwards the Hare Krishna movement would become the dominant religion on the planet.
After thirty years of not writing novels I have more sense than to try to use that as the basis for a novel. Anyone who tried would wind up with something worse than the Left Behind series, if such a thing is possible.
The key to using the HK's in a novel, I believe, is to describe the movement as it is, not as it sees itself, and to invent a future for it that it could never imagine for itself. I think I have done that much in the novel I am currently writing.
About that novel, more later.
I did not give up writing, though, and it seemed to me that what I had learned in the Hare Krishnas could be used as the basis for a novel. I had never managed to write a novel before, but I had this notion that I could write a story about Krishna, the ordinary human who would one day be considered a god.
The problem with that idea is that Krishna only makes sense as a god. Just as an ordinary guy named Brian could not do what Jesus is supposed to have done, an ordinary man could not possibly be used as the basis for the god called Krishna.
It was a really lousy idea for a novel, but I spent a long time trying to do research for it, and I did manage to get through a draft of that too. The less said about that draft the better. Unlike my memoir, I did throw this one out.
Now that I have finished and published my memoir and some people have actually liked it I have given some more thought to the idea of using my experiences in HK in a novel. Specifically, I wanted it to be a science fiction novel.
The Hare Krishna movement had its own idea about what its future would be. Back in 1979 some of its leaders thought there would be a devastating atomic war and afterwards the Hare Krishna movement would become the dominant religion on the planet.
After thirty years of not writing novels I have more sense than to try to use that as the basis for a novel. Anyone who tried would wind up with something worse than the Left Behind series, if such a thing is possible.
The key to using the HK's in a novel, I believe, is to describe the movement as it is, not as it sees itself, and to invent a future for it that it could never imagine for itself. I think I have done that much in the novel I am currently writing.
About that novel, more later.
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Bhakta Jim's Bhagavatam Class
If I have any regrets about leaving the Hare Krishna movement it might be that I never got to give a morning Bhagavatam class. You need to be an initiated devotee to do that and I got out before that
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