A conspiracist’s perspective on science fiction

Gary Farber listened to a very odd podcast — it’s all about how the atheists and Marxists conspired to take over science fiction. It’s hosted by a guy named Max Kolbe, who runs a blog titled Escaping Atheism: Because atheism is bullshit” (I guess his biases are obvious, at least), and he’s interviewing an author named Brian Niemeier, who is pleased to have been one of the Sad Puppies, so you know where he is coming from, too. Niemeier’s introduction to the interview is weirdly self-congratulatory and back-patting.

YouTuber Max Kolbe recently had me on his show to explain how the SJW convergence of tradpub science fiction happened. Max is particularly interested in the sudden shift from stories that took the Christian worldview for granted to overtly atheistic, anti-religious works. We discussed how John W. Campbell ended the reign of the pulps and how the Futurians fomented a Marxist revolution in SF publishing.

The episode garnered a lot of praise. Listen in and learn how sinister forces relegated the once-dominant SFF genre to a cultural ghetto.

Max himself is an unabashed sci-fi fan from way back, and I couldn’t help nodding along as he related how he drifted away from the genre about twenty years ago. He’d also been led to think of the post-1937 Campbell era as the “golden age” of SF and to regard everything that came before as trash.

The interview itself is a ghastly mangling of history with a great deal of lumping together of everything they dislike: notice how atheist, Marxist, and SJW are all used pretty much interchangeably?

Here’s the nonsensical premise of their discussion. There was a time in the past when science fiction was much more Christian, and readily embraced Christian themes. Then John Campbell abruptly forced all of science fiction to become atheist in 1937, and he was aided and abetted by a coalition of 50 godless liberal New York editors. The evidence for all of this is in an appendix in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide.

I don’t know what to say in the face of such an onslaught of bullshit.

There has always been a strain of irreverence in science fiction, and there have always been authors who explore novel ideas both in and out of the context of religion. Start with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; very irreligious, but exploring the roles of the creator and created. Is it an atheist book? Atheist-influenced, certainly, and written by a freethinker, but its relationship to religion is complicated. CS Lewis wrote science fiction. Tolkien was religious. Mary Doria Russell is an acclaimed, even by this atheist, author of books that have a strongly Catholic perspective. On the other hand, Isaac Asimov was an atheist…but religion is orthogonal to most of the stories he told (I must be a traitor to atheism to say that Russell is a far, far better writer than Asimov ever was). I’m sure a lot of contemporary SF authors are godless, but it would be tough to tell from reading their work. I simply do not see a pattern in the history of SF that would support a transition from religious to non-religious, or even that religious ideas are suppressed in contemporary work.

Ah, but you must look at their evidence. Here it is: Appendix N from the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, published in 1979. It’s Gary Gygax’s personal reading list of science fiction and fantasy books that influenced him. According to Kolbe and Niemeier, this is a very spiritual list that if not openly Christian, takes Christianity for granted. WTF? These books?

Anderson, Poul: THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS; THE HIGH CRUSADE; THE BROKEN SWORD
Bellairs, John: THE FACE IN THE FROST
Brackett, Leigh
Brown, Frederic
Burroughs, Edgar Rice: “Pellucidar” series; Mars series; Venus series
Carter, Lin: “World’s End” series
de Camp, L. Sprague: LEST DARKNESS FALL; THE FALLIBLE FIEND; et al
de Camp & Pratt: “Harold Shea” series; THE CARNELIAN CUBE
Derleth, August
Dunsany, Lord
Farmer, P. J.: “The World of the Tiers” series; et al
Fox, Gardner: “Kothar” series; “Kyrik” series; et al
Howard, R. E.: “Conan” series
Lanier, Sterling: HIERO’S JOURNEY
Leiber, Fritz: “Fafhrd & Gray Mouser” series; et al
Lovecraft, H. P.
Merritt, A.: CREEP, SHADOW, CREEP; MOON POOL; DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE; et al
Moorcock, Michael: STORMBRINGER; STEALER OF SOULS; “Hawkmoon” series (esp. the first three books)
Norton, Andre
Offutt, Andrew J.: editor of SWORDS AGAINST DARKNESS III
Pratt, Fletcher: BLUE STAR; et al
Saberhagen, Fred: CHANGELING EARTH; et al
St. Clair, Margaret: THE SHADOW PEOPLE; SIGN OF THE LABRYS
Tolkien, J. R. R.: THE HOBBIT; “Ring trilogy”
Vance, Jack: THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD; THE DYING EARTH; et al
Weinbaum, Stanley
Wellman, Manley Wade
Williamson, Jack
Zelazny, Roger: JACK OF SHADOWS; “Amber” series; et al

Here’s the deal: if your story is a medieval European fantasy, like Anderson’s or Bellairs’, then yes, Christianity is taken for granted, usually. It’s part of the environment, like castles and swords and dragons. But the others…have they even read Burroughs or Howard? There ain’t no Christianity in them, but there is a lot of disrespect for priests and gods. Fritz Leiber’s books had magic and pagan deities and demigods that could be poked with a sword. Moorcock’s Elric stories are about a battle between the gods of chaos and law; he’s also the guy who wrote the obscenely blasphemous book, Behold the Man (which I recommend!). Manley Wade Wellman…sure, he was religious. He wrote stories built around Appalachian folk Christianity, also good stuff. I really don’t see a consistent religious or non-religious theme in this list.

Oh, and H.P. Lovecraft? This is your representative of spiritual Christianity in old SF? The interview waffles around the criteria, but eventually reveals that if a story features clear-cut good and evil, that’s enough to define it as spiritual and Christian-based. Apparently moral ambiguity and complexity are the vices the SJWs and Marxists have inflicted on genre fiction. Which sounds like praise, to me.

As for the “50 SJW editors” who control the SF publishing world from their citadel in New York, I don’t know. I can’t say that I have much familiarity with big name SF editors. What little I do know suggests that there’s more diversity than this conspiracy theory can tolerate. Jim Baen published a lot of stolid old school and military SF, stuff that the Sad and Rabid Puppies probably consider just fine, and the one true acceptable kind of science fiction. I’ve met Teresa and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden — they’re not atheists, but definitely on the progressive/liberal side of social issues. Maybe it’s just my lack of knowledge, but I’m just not seeing an atheist/Marxist/SJW cabal out there.

Maybe the real world is more ambiguous and complex than the crystal-clear distinction of good and evil that these Catholic fanatics imagine it to be.

Sure. My lab looks just like it.

Behold! Gwyneth Paltrow’s new retail store, which she calls Goop Lab.

The store, called Goop Lab, opened this week in Brentwood Country Mart, a cluster of boutiques in a plush, celebrity-filled neighbourhood near the Pacific Ocean which likes to call malls “marts”.

The shop is airy, bright and small, just 1,300 sq feet, with soft music and smiling, white-clad staff – a physical embodiment of the online store that inspires devotion for Paltrow’s vision of wellness and scorn for products such as jade stones which women are invited to insert into their vaginas.

Crap. Her ‘lab’ is bigger than mine. Much tidier, too. I’m also missing out on a profit opportunity here.

The entrance, which mimics a garden, offers “buttery and soft” deerskin gloves for $48, gold-handled floral scissors for $72 and the “prettiest compost bin ever” for $175.

Further inside, you find a pair of Portuguese napkin rings with images of sky blue swallows for $56 and a champagne flute for $180. A silk blouse costs $685; a floral dress $795.

Probably the first thing you’d see in Myers Lab is a cable rack draped with years of accumulated wires and connectors, some of them antique and artisanal. I should slap some pricetags on them.

On the left, the interior is dominated by a large cattle trough which is used as a reservoir for the flow through water system for the fish tanks. Imagine you hear the lowing of well-groomed happy cows, and the burbling of a brook running through the field. That is the ambience we are going for.

I have nothing to compare with the “prettiest compost bin ever”, unfortunately. I do have some chemical waste disposal containers, though — maybe I should spruce them up with a cheery sprig of heather, and sprinkle some sapphires about the bench.

At least I have some tiny, delicate iris scissors that were a heck of a lot pricier than her floral scissors. How déclassé of her.

How to Persuade an Atheist to Become Christian

In case any of my readers are interested in doing that (and some of you are! I get your email all the time), here’s a WikiHow article on how to convert atheists. It’s very simple, and I can summarize it in one sentence: be very nice, and for the love of god, don’t talk about Christianity.

I’m not kidding! Every recommendation is about demonstrating how you’re a nice person, but if the atheist confronts you with any of their disagreements with Christian doctrine or mythology, you’re supposed to back away gracefully and avoid addressing any of their points. Let me just inform any of you proselytizers out there that this tactic would simply increase my contempt for your religion, so don’t bother. Thanks.

You know, I read the educational literature to figure out better ways to get ideas across to my students, and there are effective ways to communicate and inform. I’m trying to imagine doing a better job of teaching cell biology by forming a personal rapport with my students, being friendly and kind, but running away every time I’m asked a question about mitochondria. I don’t think it would accomplish any of the goals I have for the class.

Wait! I found another site that reveals what happens when Christians do talk about the specifics of their religion. It’s called PROVING THE INSANITY OF ATHEISM BY FACTS PHYSICS HAS NO FOREKNOWLEDGE, WHICH IS A FACT.

So physics could have never known in advance that man’s body could produce knowledge.

By knowledge we take the proper food to eat which then by our organs becomes blood, and obviously we need this to live because life is in the blood. Even if you eat or if the food becomes blood you are still dead. So what happened to evolution? Who knew in advance that after food becomes blood you need veins all over your body, so the blood can flow throughout your body and also that you need a pump to keep circulating the blood? Is this a proven technology or a myth of physics? And also who knew the heart has to keep pumping constantly otherwise you are dead? Do you put the food into your mouth or evolution does? You do. If you eat food you grow, but if you do not then you do not grow. What do you see here, that food makes you grow or that evolution makes you grow?

So physics puts the food into your mouth or your knowledge puts the food in your mouth? For food to become blood, you must have different organs working to form it. Every organ has a special workmanship in order to complete the foreknowledge of the personality, but again, not by physics because physics has no foreknowledge. The atheists claim it is by physics, however. So the atheists do not understand wisdom.

Welp, I sure am convinced.

Only a conservative twit would believe he’s entitled to a speaker’s slot at a con

Pity poor Jon Del Arroz! The sad far-right science fiction author first came to my attention a short while ago when he was complaining bitterly that the SJWs had taken over science fiction, using cherry-picked and misleading statistics. He’s got a persecution complex big enough to fill the San Francisco bay, where he lives.

Now he’s getting picked on again! He claims to have been blackballed from a local convention — he’s spoken there before, but he was not invited this year. After going on and on about reviews for a recent book, and praising himself mightily, he cuts to the chase.

The reason I was disinvited was because it is well known that I support the President of the United States, duly elected and all, and that I’m happy about the way the country is being run. You know, like most normal people are. That’s the only thing that’s changed between then and now. It’s the same dangerous rhetoric out there that many of these folk who run the convention post on such a consistent basis that has turned Facebook from a “fun catching up with friends” website to a hellhole of fear, anger and hate (which as Master Yoda taught us, leads to suffering!). It’s impossible to communicate anymore, and as such, there is a small but vocal power structure of people in the convention scene and publishing that can’t tolerate the concept of seeing my pretty face. I am a minority that’s been discriminated against, not because of my race, but because of my ideas. In Science Fiction, ideas are everything, and it’s frightening to think about those being shut down as a consequence. These people want my career to fail, and they believe they can accomplish that by silencing me and giving me the cold shoulder.

There’s one little problem with this woeful narrative. We have the letter the conference organizers personally wrote to him after he complained.

Dear Jon,

Thank you for your interest in BayCon 2017. We have made some changes to the programming which are discussed in detail here: http://baycon.org/bcwp/programming-2/

At this time we are not issuing you an invitation for this year’s convention. You are definitely on our guest list for 2018 and we hope very much to see you there.

Sincerely,

BayCon Programming

He wasn’t blackballed. He’s even on their list for next year. They just like to rotate their speakers a bit, and not bring in the very same people every year — which is a good policy. I like hearing from new people.

Jon Del Arroz thinks getting one invitation to speak means he is now invited to speak at every con every year in perpetuity. He’s an idiot. He’s such an entitled ass, I have to wonder about BayCon — why have they invited him back for next year? Have they no standards in invited speakers? That’s not a good sign.

By the way, I have a similar example: I was a speaker at Skepticon multiple times. One year they decided they needed new blood, so they invited some other people, instead of me. If I were like Jon Del Arroz, I would have made a big stink over the violation of tradition — they invited me once (actually, a couple of times), so now they must invite me every time. Every year. Over and over. Until attendees are sick of me, and even then they aren’t allowed to stop.

That isn’t the way this works. I approve of diversity in the line-up. I think it’s great that they have enough people with interesting things to say that they can have a different roster of speakers every year. I’m perfectly willing to step aside, especially since it means I can just attend and enjoy the event without having to give a talk.

But then, I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. Maybe it’s all those rabid Republican dude-bros who run Skepticon who have blackballed me.

Ripping on the History Channel is always fun

As a measure of the degeneration of our public discourse, all you have to do is turn on your TV, and you’ll find a whole sequence of corrupted discussion. It’s not just Fox News; the people who credulously watch Fox may also find themselves primed by the so-called “educational” stations, the ones people watch because they’re supposed to make learning interesting by explaining stuff that people are already curious about. Somewhere along the line, though, the television programmers realized that you can just drop the difficult “education” part and skip right from “curiosity” to “spectacularly batshit looney-tunes stories from grossly unqualified (that is, cheap) sources”. Take The History Channel, please.

I don’t know if you knew, but the Hebrews didn’t spend forty years in the Sinai after the Exodus because they’d incurred the wrath of God. And they didn’t leave that desert because the offending generation had died off. The chosen people were forced into the Promised Land because the algae-based-protein-bar machine that dispensed the “manna from heaven” they’d been eating finally broke down.

“Of course, [the machine] needed energy, for cultivating the algae, and this was produced, we postulate, by a small nuclear reactor,” says Rodney Dale, a wild-eyed madman.

This is the History Channel, circa 2009. “But,” asks the narrator, “If the Israelites’ survival depended upon the manna machine, where did they get it? Some believe they had stolen it from the Egyptians prior to their exodus. Other suspect extraterrestrials gave it to them as a humanitarian gesture to prevent their starvation in the desert.” The show is “Ancient Aliens,” and it’s everything that’s wrong in America.

I haven’t watched it in years, since it gave up on History and decided that people driving trucks or others buying crap at auctions was more interesting, i.e. profitable. It seems to be oscillating between the mundane, like pawn shops, and absurd bullshit, like aliens building portals in the Southwest desert. The only thing worse than an occasional television show with unbelievable claims is to actually attend a conference by these true believers — I’ve gone to the Paradigm Symposium twice now (and never again), and you discover very quickly that sensational, exaggerated claims without plausible evidence are deeply boring. That’s happened to the History Channel, too — it’s boring, and they try to reinvigorate it by making more and more ridiculous claims. It doesn’t work.

Let There Be Ignorance!

After playing an unbelievably bad atheist philosophy professor in God’s Not Dead, Kevin Sorbo is going to stretch his range by playing an unbelievably bad atheist doctor of medicine in Let There Be Light. Watch the trailer and be in awe of Jerkules’ acting chops!

Can you spot the Christian tropes in the plot summary?

After suffering the traumatic loss of his youngest son to cancer, Dr. Sol Harkens (Kevin Sorbo) loses faith and heads down a path of darkness. Distancing himself from his ex-wife Katy (Sam Sorbo) and their two remaining sons, Sol turns to alcohol to numb his pain. Soon his bad habits catch up to him, and Sol is involved in a serious car accident that leaves him dead for four minutes before he is resuscitated. What Sol experiences during this time changes his outlook on life and brings him closer to his family and faith.

I see…

  • Atheists are angry at the gods because of some trauma.

  • Leaving the gods sends you down a path of darkness.

  • You’ll lose all your friends and family if you don’t follow the gods.

  • When you’re near death, boy will you regret not believing in the gods.

  • Dreams and the confabulations of the unconscious mind are objective evidence of the existence of the gods.

Poor Kevin seems to be making a career of playing a caricature of an atheist, poorly, who then undergoes a miraculous conversion, unconvincingly. The most persuasive part of the trailer for me is when Sorbo accepts Christ into his life after suffering a traumatic brain injury, and as a reward, Satan (played by Sean Hannity) shows up to offer him a chance to appear on Fox News. Nope, I’m convinced. No way will I ever drink the Christian Kool-Aid.

Can someone explain this to me?

Peter Boghossian blurted this out tonight.


There are no right angles in nature, yet no one says right angles are *social* constructs because they’re not morally motivated to do so.

There are right angles in nature. We also have social constructs built around ideas about right angles — look, Boghossian just made one, stating an idea about right angles and the nature of our interactions with them. I am baffled and have many questions.

  • Is he drunk-tweeting?

  • Does he have some point that he is trying to make, poorly and insipidly?

  • Is he so annoyed that humans are social animals who build mental models of how the world works,
    and that the map is not the terrain, that he is lashing out in defense of some kind of Platonic absolute?

  • Is he a very bad philosopher?

  • Is he not very bright?

A lot of the people I follow are currently rather flabbergasted at this flaming nonsense.

So, you’ve heard that the world is supposed to end on 23 September

It isn’t, of course, but if you’re curious about how someone could come to such a bizarre conclusion, let me lead you through it.

It starts with a Bible verse, Revelation 12.

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.”[a] And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.

7 Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

See? War in heaven, Satan cast down to earth. But why 23 September 2017? The Bible doesn’t say that! We have to go to another source: astrology.

The Bible has a few things to say about astrology, but don’t let that interfere with your bibliolatry!

All the counsel you have received has only worn you out. Let your astrologers come forward, those stargazers who make predictions month by month, let them save you from what is coming upon you. Surely they are like stubble; the fire will burn them up. They cannot even save themselves from the flame… Each of them goes on in his error; there is not one that can save you.

But you need astrology to explain all those strange references to a pregnant woman with stars on her head, a dragon, and signs in heaven. According to some, these are references to constellations (‘ware that link — it’s a manic YouTube video by a loon babbling a mile a minute). The woman is Virgo; the moon is at her feet on that date; the constellation Leo with 9 stars is above her head; Jupiter is passing through her belly, so she’s giving birth to Jupiter. The International Space Station is also passing by, which is supposedly significant, but I couldn’t bear to listen to the video any more to figure out why.

Then there’s numerology.

The September rapture date came from a Christian researcher named David Meade who calculated it would occur 33 days after last month’s eclipse, The Washington Post reported.

Jesus lived for 33 years. The name Elohim, which is the name of God to the Jews, was mentioned 33 times [in the Bible], Meade told the newspaper. It’s a very biblically significant, numerologically significant number. I’m talking astronomy. I’m talking the Bible … and merging the two.

Another factor is Nibiru. Nibiru is a wandering planet in our solar system that the aliens of Zeta Reticuli explained to a human alien contactee through the implant they put in her head. It’s also based on the ravings of ancient astronaut fanatic, Zacharia Sitchin. Anyway, they’re saying Nibiru is going to smack into the earth in a couple of days.

So now you know why people think the world will end on Saturday. The evidence is a series of stretched metaphors from the trippiest chapter of the Bible; astrological alignments; the ravings of a saucer kook; a story from an ancient aliens conspiracy theorist; and numerology. I think you are capable of evaluating the claim from the quality of the evidence, so I’ll leave you to decide whether you need to start preparing for doomsday.

The courage of Gwyneth Paltrow

I can hardly believe how brave she is. Would you believe she actually sells psychic vampire repellent?

If it were me, I’d be afraid to stock something that would repel or destroy me, and I sure wouldn’t be selling it to people, not even for an outrageous $30 for 100ml, who might spritz me with it. Especially not when it’s been infused with such dangerous things as moonlight and reiki.

The psychic vampire repellent may not be FDA evaluated, but who cares when it has sonically tuned water, moonlight, love, reiki, and gem elixirs which is totally not left over water from a rock polisher. It must be very potent as there is a double dose of reiki. I’m not sure how they get all that reiki in the bottle because reiki isn’t an object but no conversation needed here because ancient gem elixir physics, duh! One should spray it around one’s face to “safeguard” one’s aura and “banish bad vibes (and shield you from the people who may be causing them).” I mean that’s some potent, women empowering health shit right there, you know? Just don’t empower it into your lungs.

I’m assuming that Psychic Vampires are real, because no way would Gwyneth sell a fake remedy to a fake problem. That would be, like, a double-fake. Which confuses me, because wouldn’t a double-fake mean it’s real?

Also, it’s obvious that Gwyneth herself is a psychic vampire. She’s leeching the minds out of people.

Jesus H. Christ!

This is painful to watch, so I’ll summarize it and spare you.

Ron Wyatt, biblical fantasist extraordinaire, claims to have found dried blood in the rocks below the place where Jesus was crucified. He took it to an Israeli lab where they reconstituted it, and then cultured it in a growth medium, and discovered that the blood was still alive. A miracle! Especially since if you took some old rock scrapings and threw them in growth medium you probably would get something to grow…it just wouldn’t be human cells.

Then, further, they looked at it under a microscope and counted the chromosomes. How, I don’t know; you can’t see chromosomes with a light microscope unless you squash the cells undergoing mitosis and stain them, which would require killing Jesus’ cells.

But they counted them anyway, miraculously, I guess. They discovered that Jesus’ cells — we have now leapt straight into the assumption that this is actually blood from a named person 2000 years ago — contained 24 chromosomes. Twenty three from Mary, which gave him his human form, and a Y chromosome from Jehovah to make him male. So the old joke is right: the “H” in his name is for “Haploid”. Also, he’s aneuploid.

Of course, it’s a bit odd. Old guy comes into the lab with some flaky red stuff scraped off a rock; lab technicians accept that it’s two millennia old human blood. They cultivate it on growth medium and get some cells, and they still accept his claim that these are human. They magically count chromosomes in these cells, and they have a non-human number; they still assume it’s human, and even that it is from a specific human. None of this makes any sense.

After that revelation, the video goes on and on about another old evangelical Christian chestnut: there is a molecule called laminin that is vaguely cross-shaped, which is somehow supposed to imply that we’re held together by Jesus. Only (?) problem is this guy spells and pronounces it “liminin”.

We are compelled to accept the inevitable truth. Jesus was haploid, and he was from New Zealand.

The only other possible explanation is that Ron Wyatt is a liar, and these gullible Christians are mind-bogglingly stupid. But that can’t possibly be.