One way to write a Science Fiction novel, part three

The birth of a notion. Or two.

I said in a previous installment that a good science fiction novel needs to be about something, and that something can begin with a notion.

I want to talk about the notion(s) that led me to write Shree Krishna And The Singularity.

I saw the first Star Wars movie (Chapter 4, but nobody knew that back then) shortly after I stated reading Srila Prabhupada's books.

I must sound like a snob thirty years later, but I thought it was derivative. I had read Science Fiction for years and could identify things in the story that had been borrowed from S.F. classics I had read. All S.F. authors stand on the shoulders of giants to some extent, but if you're going to borrow someone else's idea you want to do something to make it your own, not just take it as is and mash it up with other borrowed ideas.

I agree that Lucas put stuff on the screen that had never been seen before and brought S.F. to a whole new audience. That isn't nothing, but the story could have been better.

A couple of years later I was a fairly serious devotee in ISKCON. The one thing I hadn't done was accept a spiritual master. In the early days of ISKCON Srila Prabhupada was the only spiritual master. If he accepted you as his disciple he would pretty much run your life in return for taking you back to the spiritual world with him. He had been a devotee all his life, and I was impressed with him. I read all his books, and while I found his commentaries repetitive he clearly was teaching me something new and profound.

Srila Prabhupada died in 1978. He left behind an organization called the GBC which was in charge of the movement, but no actual spiritual masters. There were men who were allowed to accept disciples, but Prabhupada had never claimed that these men had reached the end of the path and were capable of bringing others to the end of the path.

This was an awkward time to be a devotee, because a devotee is required to have a spiritual master, and is required to worship him as if he was God. (You don't believe that your guru is God, but you treat him like God). These menu had divided the world up into zones, and if you lived in a guru's zone you were required to be a disciple of that guru. If you wanted a different one, you'd have to move into his zone.

I had a job I wasn't willing to give up, and I wasn't all that taken with the idea of having a guru. I could have avoided accepting one longer, except for one thing: I wanted to marry one of the women in the temple.

The whole sad story may be found here:

The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim

The short version is, I was in love with her. She liked me, but had taken a vow never to marry. I might get her to change her mind about that if I was an initiated disciple of a guru, but not otherwise.

The thing that bugged me about our gurus is that they didn't seem to be necessary from any practical point of view. They would never tell anyone anything that Srila Prabhupada hadn't already said in his books. In return for parroting that stuff they expected to be worshiped.

So one day Tamal Krishna Goswami, the guru for our zone, said he'd accept me as his disciple if I followed the rules and donated half my salary to the temple. I wouldn't have to move in or shave my head. There would be a probationary period before he would accept me, but if I was an exemplary devotee it would happen.

I agreed to this and started a routine that took every waking hour and greatly limited my sleeping hours.

Subconsciously, I kept looking for some indication that Tamal Krishna Goswami had something to teach anyone that would not be found in Srila Prabhupada's books.

Then one day he said something that would qualify. He told us that two year's after Srila Prabhupada's guru died, world war two began. Two years after his guru died, world war one began. It would soon be two years after Srila Prabhupada's "disappearance" and that could only mean that world war three would soon begin. This war would be atomic, and would kill off most of humanity. It would be up to the devotees to rebuild civilization and become the dominant religion of the survivors.

I don't know if Tamal Krishna came up with this alone or if several gurus collaborated on it. I suspect some collaboration was involved.

I thought it was really lame. Also derivative:

A Canticle for Liebowitz

If I hadn't been in love with a devotee I might have given up on ISKCON at that point. Maybe I wasn't much of a devotee, but I knew lousy Science Fiction when I heard it.

Over the next few days we heard more plans for how we would survive this coming apocalypse. The woman I loved took these seriously and called them "nectar", the generic term in ISKCON for anything really spiritual. I couldn't, but didn't say anything.

But the seed was planted that would one day develop into a notion. I had heard a bad Hare Krishna Science Fiction story. So what would a good one be like?

Thirty some odd years later I thought of this. I decided that the story would need to be about how the Hare Krishna movement became really important, but in a way that did not require wiping out the whole human race. My story would be about how the movement would become important, but for reasons that nobody in the present movement could possibly predict.

So what could they not possibly predict? The answer would have to do with consciousness. The very first thing they teach you in the Hare Krishna movement is that you are not your body. You are a spirit soul that suffers because you identify with a body.

Currently there is no way to prove that this isn't true. (Other things in the Hindu scriptures can easily be proven false, which is why many in ISKCON think the Moon landings were a hoax).

Suppose that somebody made a machine that had consciousness. That would be even more impossible for a Hare Krishna devotee to accept than Moon landings. Suppose that one devotee had enough knowledge of science that she had to accept it. Suppose this acceptance led to the Hare Krishna movement becoming more important somehow, rather than totally irrelevant?

Those were the notions that led me to write this:

Shree Krishna And The Singularity