Warning: Very Nerdy Post Ahead

This past week The Guardian published a list of the best scifi/fantasy novels of all time. I love these sorts of lists and my inner nerd compels me to comment. There's a bunch of stuff on the list I've never heard of so I'm only going to comment on the ones I've actually read and then rant about some of the HUGE omissions from the list.

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy - This is an amusing enough book but way, way overrated. Still, it has a big enough following that it's place here is probably deserved.

Isaac Asimov: Foundation - The first volume of the series is pretty good but the rest get a little tedious. Definitely a classic very much worth reading.

Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio - An OK book but one of the best ever? No way.

Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass - if you've only ever seen the Disney cartoon you have no idea how weird these books are. Great reads.

Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Cut 500 or so pages off this book and it would be great. But at it's actual length of nearly 1,000 pages it's long, boring and way overrated. It also has no business being on this list.

Philip K. Dick: Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep and The Man in the High Castle - High Castle's place here is well deserved but Electric Sheep is only here because it was the source material for Blade Runner, one of the few movies to be way, way better than the book.

Neil Gaiman: American Gods - I would have chosen Neverwhere instead but I'm glad Gaiman has a book on the list. American Gods is a great read but it gets a little slow in the middle and has too much sex.

Joe Haldeman: The Forever War - I have a strange relationship with this book. I hate and completely disagree with it's ultra left wing politics and stance on war but I still love the novel. It's extremely well written and deeply moving (even though I disagree with where it wants me to move towards!)

Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land - The first half is great. The second is weird and disgusting. Starship Troopers is not only better science fiction but a better novel.

Frank Herbert: Dune - A great, great book. If you haven't read it you should.

Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House - The best and scariest haunted house novel ever. Every page of this novel is unbelievably good.

Stepehn King: The Shining - Probably King's best work. I love how the tension slowly builds and then completely explodes in the final act. If you've only seen the movie you need to read the book.

Stanislaw Lem: Solaris - This is a great book and one of the first to show that science fiction can be deeply emotional, passionate and human.

Richard Matheson: I Am Legend - I don't care what Skip says, this book rocks!

China Mieville: The Scar - This one's pretty good. I don't know if it deserves a place on this sort of list but it's entertaining enough. Unfortunately, Mieville followed it up with the putrid Iron Council, which reads like The Communist Manifesto with monsters (even though that sounds kind of cool, it's really not)

Walter M. Miller: A Canticle for Leibowitz - Yawn. I have no idea what people see in this one.

Larry Niven: Ringworld - Overrated. Niven has written much better.

Chuch Palahniuk: Fight Club - I don't and never would support banning books but if I did this would be at the top of my list. A disgusting, despicable, filthy and worthless novel. If you watched The Dark Knight and found yourself agreeing with everything the Joker said and did, then this is the book for you. For the rest of us who aren't nihilistic anarchists: keep as far away from this one as possible.

Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space - I'm so happy this book made the list. I'm a huge Alastair Reynolds fan and Revelation Space is my favorite.

J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - I love Harry Potter as much as the next guy but this is not one of the best fantasy novels of all time. The series as a whole, maybe. But not any of the individual volumes and especially not the first couple.

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein - A great monster story even 200 years later.

Dan Simmons: Hyperion - Dan Simmons is my favorite living fiction writer and Hyperion is one of his best. A great, great book.

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Not nearly as good as you'd think.

Bram Stoker: Dracula - You've probably seen some sort of adaptation of this at some point. Do yourself a favor and read the original. It's well worth it.

H.G. Wells: The Time Machine and War of the Worlds - These are not really that wonderful. Influential: yes. Well written: nope.

T.H. White: The Sword in the Stone - This is the best volume of The Once and Future King. The rest are a little tedious but this one is definitely worth a read.

Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun - I never have finished this one. I found it good but something didn't quite click when I tried to read it. I'll have to give it another try sometime.




Omissions

Lord of the Rings? Narnia? What possible excuse is there for leaving those off this list? None whatsoever. It's too bad, because this is actually a really great list overall. Unfortunately, leaving off Tolkien and Lewis effectively turns it into a big joke. Completely inexcusable.

Roger Zelazny should have had an entry on here. Lord of Light is one of my favorite novels ever. It's not just good scifi, it's a great and very deep literary work.

I also think it's pretty outrageous that Lord of Light, Ender's Game, Fahrenheit 451, A Wrinkle in Time, 1984 and Earthsea were left off. Those aren't as big of omissions as LOTR, Lord of Light and Narnia but each has been extremely influential not to mention they're all great novels.

I also think it would have been nice to see something from Vernor Vinge, Tad Williams, George R.R. Martin, Robert Jordan, Terry Pratchett and Peter Straub. It's memory has been tainted by the horrible movie made out of it but Battlefield Earth is a actually a pretty good book that I would have included.


Overall, I like the list a lot. I can't imagine what possessed them to leave off Tolkien and Lewis. But putting that aside, there a lot of great reads here.

1984 and The Mercy of Jesus

I'm listening to George Orwell's 1984 right now. As the story was playing yesterday, there were a few lines of dialogue that struck me as really an amazing picture of the mercy and acceptance of Jesus when we finally turn to him.

At this point in the story the protagonist, Winston Smith, is just starting to take his first chances at going against the totalitarian designs of The Party and Big Brother. He lives alone, abandoned by his wife who chose The Party over him. He hasn't had a conversation in years that wasn't laced with Newspeak or supervised by The Thought Police. And then a woman he works with, Julia, passes him a note saying "I love you". They arrange to meet in private, out of the long arm of The Thought Police and it's then Winston's starts this amazing conversation:

"Now that you've seen what I'm really like, can you still bear to look at me?"
"Yes, easily."
"I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife I can't get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth."
"I couldn't care less," said the girl.

Isn't that exactly how Jesus treats us when we come to him, embarrassed and ashamed of just how desperate our situation is? It's not that He denies the flaws; it's that He chooses to see through them and into the person He always intended us to be. That is what amazing grace is all about.


Note: I would not carry this analogy throughout the rest of the book. But that's the beauty of walking with God and listening to Him. He can take a single line of dialogue, or a lyric from a song, and speak through it, regardless of context. It's only we who insist on everything making perfect sense. He just wants to love us and speak to us

Book Review: Why We're Not Emergent

In the mid-1990s I was part of what is now known as the Emerging Church and spent some time traveling the country to speak on the emerging church in the emerging culture on a team put together by Leadership Network called the Young Leader Network. But, I eventually had to distance myself from the Emergent stream of the network because friends like Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt began pushing a theological agenda that greatly troubled me. Examples include referring to God as a chick, questioning God's sovereignty over and knowledge of the future, denial of the substitutionary atonement at the cross, a low view of Scripture, and denial of hell which is one hell of a mistake.

-Mark Driscoll, Senior Pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle

Like a lot of people, I've been interested recently in the Emergent Church. I'll confess up front that I have not read the books or been to the seminars. I've heard a few sermons (online) that could probably be described as Emergent but have not been to an actual service. My experience has been more through reading blogs, articles and a fair amount of basic online research. It's an interesting movement, one that at first glance has a lot about it that's attractive. But the more I've read, the more concerned I've become about certain aspects of the movement.

Over the past few months I've seen Why We're Not Emergent referenced several times in various blogs and articles. I've been excited to read it for a while now and I'm glad I finally got around to it. This is an important book and essential reading for anyone who is part of, looking to join, or just interested in learning about the Emergent Church.

One of the big frustrations with the Emergent movement is that it can be just about impossible to define. In some ways this is a virtue (and Emergent leaders would see at such). It allows for more diversity of opinion and thought, and that's largely good. The problem comes when that group virtue gets applied at an individual level. Just as the movement as a whole is tough to pin down, so are the individual views of its leaders. About a week ago I read a response from Emergent leader Brian McLaren to a question about whether homosexuality is sinful or not. After going through his very lengthy reply twice I still had no idea what his view was.

The book does a great job documenting cases like this. The authors dig deep into the Emergent views on the virtues of uncertainty. Now, I'm personally a great believer that doubt and uncertainty are tools God uses to help us grow. I've seen it in my life countless times. But I also believe we aren't meant to wallow in uncertainty forever. God doesn't mean for us to spend a lifetime in doubt about everything. The latter part of my view is not shared by many Emergent leaders who seem more interested in what we can't know than what God has told us.

The implications of this are very problematic. Take the low view of Scripture held by many Emergent leaders. The book quotes Stan Grenz saying, "It is not the Bible as a book that is authoritative, but the Bible as the instrumentality of the Spirit." That sounds nice at first but what happens when two different people claim the Spirit has told them two different things about the Bible? Is it all just a matter of personal interpretation? At some point we need to trust God that He communicated an authoritative message to us in His word or else what good is it? The authors also discuss how well Emergent leaders will claim respect and love for the Bible, they aren't comfortable with adjectives like infailable, absolute, inerrent, etc. That's a problem.

Even more troublesome than the Emergent love of unending uncertainity is what you can pin them down on. Talking about the doctrine of substitutionary atonement (the beautiful doctrine that Jesus took the place we should have had on the cross) Brian McLaren writes, "It sounds like divine child abuse." On the same topic, Steve Chalke says that if doctrine is true, God was repaying evil with evil.

It doesn't get much better. At one point they quote Rob Bell, pastor of the other Mars Hill Church, talking about how we put too big of an emphasis on the resurrection. His argument is that if we look to Christ for salvation our attitude is selfish since we're just trying to get something out of it. Instead we should just try and live like Jesus. The first part of this breaks my heart. Is there any event more glorious in human history than the resurrection? Can he be so blind he's missed completely the victory, the life, that was won in that moment? The second part sounds nice but how are we to do that without the new life Christ brings us through His resurrection? I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not all that good at living like Jesus. I need a constant outpouring of the grace He died for at the cross. I need, every moment of every day, the transforming power of His resurrection and acension.

When I first started this book I was angry about a lot of what I was reading. Having finished it, I feel more sad than anything else. There's a lot the Emergent Church gets right. Their emphasis on relationship, both with God and others, is wonderful. But on what foundation is it built? If you strip away all the doctrine and orthodoxy all the good stuff falls apart. What's happening in a lot of Emergent circles is heart breaking. Hearing Christians compare God to an abusive father tears me up. Hearing the miracle of the cross pushed aside by Christians leaves me speachless.

I don't want to end this post on a downer. God has promised that He will build His church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. The Emergent Church is hardly the gates of hell. Even in its imperfections I believe God is using it for good, just like He promised. If nothing else, this book has inspired me to pray and pray hard for the leaders and followers in the Emergent Church. May their hearts be healed where they've been wounded by bad experiences in more "traditional" churches. May they be willing to see Jesus not just through the lens of personal interpretation but the Christ of the Gospels, risen and alive. And when they look at God may they see not an abusive parent but a loving Father who gave everything so that He could save us.

The Joy of the Internet

Like a lot of people, there are plenty of things about the Internet, and modern technology in general, that drive me nuts. But there's plenty of good too. For me, one of the best things about the Internet is the ability to get expensive books for cheap.

As part of my goal to read a biography on every US President, I'd decided to read Thomas Jefferson & The New Nation by Merrill D. Peterson. Unfortunately the book costs $50 to buy new. For the life of me, I can't figure out why. We're not talking some fancy, gold leafed volume with glossy, color pictures. It's a standard trade-paperback book with only a handful of black and white pictures. Yes it's long, but so are a lot of books I read that cost $10.

When something like this happens, my favorite site to go to is fetchbook.info. This site goes out and searches several used book sites (Half, Abebooks, Ebay) and comes back with the lowest prices. Using this, I was able to get my Jefferson biography, virtually new, for a fifth of the cost.

All 1,000+ pages of historical joy were waiting for me when I got home tonight. So now I'm happy, the used online bookseller is happy, and my wallet is happy. About the only person who's not happy is Merrill D Peterson who's not getting any additional royalty money because of how outrageously expensive his book is. I highly recommend fetchbook.info both for cases like this and for out of print books.

G.K. Chesterton's Heretics: Stand For Something

Last week I finished reading Heretics by G.K. Chesterton. I've held off writing about it until now since it's a dense book, full of ideas, and therefore takes time to digest. the book is a series of brief essays, most of which decry what is in Chesterton's opinion a heresy contemporary to the early twentieth century.

At times, that makes the book seem dated and confusing. Names that would have been familiar when the book was written are completely foreign to most of us modern readers. But what struck me more than the passages that have aged poorly is just how much of what Chesterton says is relevant to today.

He was combating modernism and many of the issues he has with it are only amplified in our post modern world. He is particularly alarmed by the shift from the pursuit of truth to the idea that there is no truth, no absolutes.

Commenting on so called progressives he writes, "Nobody has any business to use the word progress unless he has a definite moral creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal" In other words, for all the post modern talk of progress the question remains: what exactly are we progressing towards?

That's a very relevant point for today. Not just for society in general but also for the church in particular. One of my great concerns with the Emerging Church is that while it (rightfully) recognizes the failings in an academic, study-first, program oriented approach to Christianity, it's already swinging too far in the other direction and favoring emotion and experience at the expense of doctrine.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis describes doctrine as a map of the ocean. If the modern church has spent too much time studying the map and far too little voyaging on the sea then I'm afraid that the post modern, emerging church is in danger of throwing away the map altogether, content tot be tossed about on the waves. Sure they're sailing on the ocean, sure they're progressing, but towards what?

God gave us doctrine in the Bible for a reason. Not so that we could use it to hide behind (as we've done), not so we can use it to replace experience with Him (as we've done), not because we should rely on it instead of Him for guidance (as we've done), but so He could use it to protect us, so He could use it to draw us into deeper experience with Him, and so He could use it to guide us in our journey.

I think for a lot of us, a book with a title like Heretics makes us cringe. It seems very judgmental and maybe in part it is. But for me, reading it was refreshing. Chesterton is saying what he believes and defending it as best he can. That's a quality in far too short supply today.

I'm no fan of using doctrine to wag my finger at someone or inform them they're going to hell. How we go about defending our beliefs matters and matters a great deal. God is no fan of self righteousness judgments. But truth matters. It matters a great deal. Christians have a duty to pursue, defend it and, in love, share it

Books Recap

I'm back! Not in town yet (we've got one more week, this one in Myrtle Beach) but I should be online and able to post a little more regularly this week. Finding a wi-fi signal on Ocracoke Island is no small challenge and proved not worth the effort as the week went on, hence the lack of blogging. Besides, isn't part of vacation being able to disconnect for a while?

Anyway, Annie and I had a great time on Ocracoke. We spent most mornings at the beach (see previous post) and spent the very hot (at least by Minnesota standards) afternoons doing puzzles or laying around reading books. We'll probably post some vacation highlights and pictures on the family blog at some point but in the meantime here are a few highlights from my reading this week.

By far the best book I read last week was The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning. This is the best presentation of grace I've ever read. Manning again and again hammers home that it's not what we do but what He did. It's powerful, deeply moving, and definitely one I'm going to need to revisit often.

As expected Philip K Dick's, The Man in the High Castle was a mind trip but a great read. The book takes place in an alternate post World War 2 America where the Axis powers won. The Nazis control the eastern part of the country and the Japanese the Pacific Coast. Slavery is legal and the holocaust is in full swing in America. All that sounds straightforward enough but the story is told through several loosely connected tales that range from somewhat straightforward to very bizarre. There's also an alternate history novel within this novel where the US won the war but not as it happened in actual history. This only gets more weird as two of the characters begin to suspect that their world is really fiction and the novel is real. Confused yet? Me too! I love books like that!

I'll avoid anymore history talk for now but tonight I finally finished John Adams by David McCullough. It's simply brilliant. One of the best books I've ever read and worth reading no matter how boring you find history.

I finished G.K. Chesterton's Heretics at the beginning of the week but I'll hold my fire on that one for the moment. It's a great book and sometime in the next day or two I'm hoping to discuss some of what it talks about more in depth.

On the docket for this week: Eye in the Sky, A Canticle for Leobowitz, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and rereading some C.S. Lewis.

Sci Fi Geek Confessional: Alastair Reynolds

For anyone still in doubt that I'm a full fledged, certifiable, sci-fi nerd wonder no longer. I'm here to confess one of my geek secrets involving the fantastic British author Alastair Reynolds.

I got hooked on Reynolds about four or five years ago when he was in the middle of writing his Revelation Space trilogy. Since then I've bought every one of his books as soon as they've come out in hardcover. Two years ago when Pushing Ice came out I ordered it from Amazon only to find myself extremely disappointed. Not because Reynolds had written a bad book (Pushing Ice is one of his best) but because they'd changed the the cover for the US edition of his book and it was far inferior to its UK counterpart.

Now I was hoping this would be a one time deal, that the US publisher would come to its senses and start using the good cover designs again. No dice. When Galactic North was published that fall the UK cover was beautiful matching all the others he's written. And though the US one did match Pushing Ice in design, it also looked like a bad photoshop job completely butchering the UK cover design.

So what did I do? Simple. I did what any true geek would do. I paid extra to get the UK edition of Galactic North. I've done the same with the two books since and I'll keep doing so until the US covers stop looking like they were made in a high school graphic design class.

Ok, it's not quite as bad as it sounds. It's really only a few bucks more and since I started this practice they've only given me more cause by delaying the US releases of each book by over a year. The Prefect, which I read in April of 07 is just being released in the US (complete with ugly cover) this week. House of Suns doesn't even have a stateside release date yet.

I just finished Reynolds latest, House of Suns, last night and it only reinforced my decision. Not only was the book great but it also looks totally cool with all my other Alastair Reynolds books on my shelf.

As for the book itself, let me give a very brief review. This is the sort of book that reminds me why I read sci-fi. It's chock full of cool ideas like spaceships miles long, sentient robots, clones who've been travelling the galaxy for 6 million years. It's also his most philosophical novel dealing with issues like the nature of reality, bad actions done for good reasons, what defines existence, cloning and identity. It does slow down a little in the middle but the very cool ending more than makes up for that. Highly recommended.

And in case you don't believe me, check out my comparrison of the covers below. The UK ones match House of Suns above

Subtle and Stylish. The UK Prefect Cover:

Ugly and blunt. Especially the yellow/orange lettering. The US Prefect Cover:

Great colors and fits with the ship over planet design of Reynolds early books.
The UK Pushing Ice cover:

Not nearly as bad as the Prefect US cover but this one still comes off as uninspired and boring
The US Pushing Ice Cover

Summer Reading

Woo hoo! My summer vacation books showed up today! Annie and I are leaving next Friday for a couple of weeks of relaxation in the Carolinas. I'm the type of guy who likes to bring a bunch of books on a trip, not because I'm necessarily going to get to them all but because I never know what I'm going to be in the mood for at any given time. I also like to mix in several rereads. I love revisiting old stories and vacation is a great time to do so. Here's a few snippets of what I'll probably be reading over this year's vacation, starting with the new stuff first.

I'm really excited about this one. I have yet to see the HBO miniseries based on this book but I love David McCullough's writing. Adams is one of the more interesting founding fathers, but smothered between the giants of Washington and Jefferson, his presidency tends to be overlooked. I'm hoping this can help round out some of my knowledge of the early presidents


Epic is one of the few things by Eldredge I haven't read (though i have heard him do a live version of it). The basic idea is to present the Gospel as a story going back before the beginning of time, through the rebellion of Satan, to redemption on the cross and the promise of future victory.



Reading Philip K. Dick is an experience. I've never read another author quite as mind boggling as him. But it works and if you can accept the weirdness it's a blast. If you can't, best to stick to the toned down movies based on his stuff like Minority Report and Blade Runner.



I've never read anything by Brennan Manning before but I've heard enough about him to be excited about giving him a shot. His books all have very high marks on Amazon and I'm hoping he becomes another of the wonderful Christian writers I've discovered in the last year.



I've just finished reading Frank Herbert's original Dune series. This is his son's continuation/conclusion based on notes and outlines found after Herbert's death in 1986. I know there are lots of Dune fans who loathe what Brian Herbert has done by trying to finish his father's series but I'm optimistic.






I've been meaning to read the medieval mystics for a while now. I've heard great things about St. John of the Cross and this is probably his most famous book.





To be honest, I know almost nothing about this book. But it's a sci-fi classic and as a certified sci-fi nerd it qualifies as a major hole in my reading. Hopefully it's as good as the hype.






Rereads:

Shadowland by Peter Straub - Straub is probably my favorite living horror writer. I don't remember this very while but I enjoyed it the first time through. It's not as scary as his brilliant Ghost Story but it's a good book nonetheless.

L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy - The movie is better known but the book is a lot of fun too. They're pretty different from but this is one of those cases where both movie and book are equally good.

Miracles and The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis - These are two of Lewis's best books. It's been a while and God has taught me tons since I first read them. Hopefully I'll get even more out of them this time around

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury - This is my favorite Bradbury novel (unless you count The Illustrated Man as a novel). It's been a while so hopefully it holds up to my memory.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson - This is one of the great haunted house novels of all time. Over half a century later it's still very scary and a blast to read.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem - This is a brilliant and beautiful science fiction novel. I'm one of about five people who actually liked the George Clooney movie based on it. But the book is different enough where even if you hated the movie you'll want to give this one a shot.