The issue was bound to come up once people started writing science fiction stories. You’ve got humans, you’ve got aliens, you’ve got robots–put them together in a dark room without parental supervision and you get…

Eww.

It’s revolting, it’s fascinating, it’s gooey, it’s radioactive…It’s alien love!

Or something.

If you’re looking for a catalog of science-fiction’s multitudinous approaches to alien love, Star Trek is a great place to start, if only to learn the dimensions of the playing field. In this respect, the series in its various incarnations has fulfilled its promise to “Boldly Go Where No Man/One  Has Gone Before.” Star Trek has explored inter-racial love, inter-species love, human-robot love, robotic procreation, human-vaporous entity love, homosexuality, transgenderism, male pregnancy, virgin birth, pheremone-driven sexual attraction, drug-enhanced sexual attraction…the list goes on. Human-alien hybrids and cyborgs are routine fare. Sometimes the intent is titillation (sex sells, after all), sometimes it’s simple curiosity (How would they…er, could they?), and sometimes it’s used as a metaphor for a question that’s central to the genre:

“What happens when we embrace the Other?”

The Other is anything that isn’t us. Someone of the opposite sex, or a different race, or another culture. Maybe it’s a new idea or a different way of interpreting the world. We might confront the Other when we move to the opposite side of the globe, walk across to the opposite side of the street, or face someone on the opposite side of a sales counter. What will happen?

1. The Other might expand our perceptions in ways we never thought possible, and together, we’ll create something new and wonderful.

2. The Other might reveal our worst prejudices and motivations.

3. The Other might engage us in battle.

4. The Other might consume us…or worse.

Star Trek is hopeful, by and large, so it prefers Option 1. Embrace the Other, and you get hybrid vigor, synergy, a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts. You get Spock. You get Deanna Troi. You get B’Elanna Torres. You also get the Borg, which sort of kills my point, but…oh, wait. You still get Seven of Nine. Sigh. Happier now.

Thoughtful sci-fi might take us to Option 2, and we get to look at ourselves in the funhouse mirror of Alien Nation or District 9. The frontiers of our prejudices expand even as they remain fundamentally unchanged. We take alien refugees and do the sorts of things to them we’ve always done to immigrants until we get used to having them around. Who’s the monster now?

Action-oriented  sci-fi often selects Option 3, which is a lot of fun, in a fast-food sort of way. It doesn’t stick with you, but it sure tastes good going down. Something like Mars Attacks. “Can’t we all just get along?” Well…no. As much as we’d like to share peace, love, and rock & roll with everybody, sometimes the Other just wants us dead.

The last option is the most disquieting. We fear embracing the Other means losing part or all of our identity. The Other makes us part of itself, changing us into something different, unrecognizable, as alien as it is. Something not…us. We see this expressed in stories like The Blob, The Thing, The Puppet Masters, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And in the Bible.

The Bible?

Sure. In the story of Jesus, God turns the whole concept on its head. There’s more than a merger, there’s an Incarnation. God encapsulates Himself in humanity. The ultimate Other becomes one of us. He makes an unimaginable sacrifice, and it’s all because he loves us. Embracing that sacrifice involves the surrender of our will, but rather than losing our identity, we finally bring into reality who and what we’re meant to be. We become more ourselves–our true selves–than ever. The broken image of God we wear is repaired and renewed.

How’s that for alien love?

I recently read an interesting article, “PoMo: Everybody’s doing it,” critiquing the postmodern world in which we live. According to the author Jay Merrick, we have left the more ordered and restrained thought of modernism which found its basis in science. Instead we are now “profoundly immersed in the tortuous, commercially controlled currents of postmodern design and thought, and its weapons of mass psychic deconstruction.”

Merrick goes on to describe the early evidences of postmodernism in art as “deliberately indiscriminate weirdness: the ordinary was made to seem in some way excessively other, like stage props for a chaotic rather than reasoned reality. It was almost pose-modern.”

I have to admit, I couldn’t help but think of Lady Gaga when I read that, but of course “indiscriminate weirdness” isn’t all that defines postmodernism. Merrick adds this: “we seem to crave maximised senses of fractured movement, overlay, ennui and nowness.”

He continued by quoting Paul Greenhalgh, director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich: “We all confidently celebrated our lack of confidence about things: suddenly, it seemed, none of us knew exactly what was beautiful or everlasting; or if we thought we did, none of us were prepared to say so.”

Merrick further defines postmodernism by saying, “The and/but vibe now suffuses almost everything we think and do. Surface has become more important than depth. Style – or, more accurately, stylee – trumps coordinated articulation; disbelief is more acceptable than belief [emphasis added].”

What does all this mean for Christian speculative fiction? In some respects the genre is caught between two worlds, as many Christian speculative authors feel to be true about themselves.

On one hand, we believe, in contradiction to our culture, that there are absolutes, that belief is essential, that beauty is recognizable, and that now pales in comparison to one day.

And yet “indiscriminate weirdness” has an appeal, and the ordinary does in fact have the potential at least to be quite “other.”

If we’re honest, reality does seem rather chaotic, which is why some of us prefer to write fantasy or science fiction where we can order the world according to a set of rules and principles that have a consistency we desire.

Others of us, to be sure, write fantasy or science fiction or horror to express or examine the chaotic, to try to make sense of it, to try to tame it.

As I think about the culture, it seems to me that dystopian fiction or urban fantasy makes such sense for postmodern thought. Embrace the chaos, live for the now, disdain the ideas of beauty and truth.

But Christian speculative fiction, caught in the in-between as it is, seems like the perfect genre to bridge the gap — the generation gap, the cultural gap.

We embrace the idea of “other,” but we believe in beauty and truth. Rather than articulating these, however, we value showing them.

But here’s the thing. As I perceive the community of Christian speculative writers, many have felt marginalized — squeezed by both sides of who we are. I think that’s short-sighted. We above all others can draw from both camps. We can speak to both sides of the cultural divide. If not us, then who?

Consequently, rather than feeling squeezed out — displaced like lepers outside the city gates — by our place between two worlds, I think a more fitting response would be, YES! We are in the unique position where we can speak for Christ to our culture and at the same time show the culture to the Church.

What a challenge!

Horror is not an inherently evil genre of storytelling. It can be used for gratuitous evil purposes, or for godly moral purposes. The Bible tells many stories using the horror genre in order to inspire holy fear of evil and admonish or chastise those in sin. Horror movies can be biblically redeeming in three ways. First, horror can reinforce the doctrine of humanity’s sinful nature and its consequences. Monsters become metaphors for wickedness suppressed in unrighteousness and its outcome (Rom. 1:18). Second, horror can illustrate the consequences of modernism’s humanistic and scientific hubris. When humans play “god” in science or knowledge, they are blind to the true nature of evil and therefore reap their own destruction (Gal. 6:7–8). Third, horror can be a prophetic social commentary on the sins of society. We are revealed to be no different than zombies, bloodsuckers, and other monsters in our social injustice and cultural degeneracy.

When one thinks of horror movies, the usual images conjured up in the mind are of nubile coeds being lured to isolated locations for the purpose of having sex and then being murdered and carved up in ever innovative and disgusting new ways by a grotesque chimera or phantasm. Likewise, for thriller movies, images that stalk the mind are of innocent men or women being hunted by maniacal serial murderers as a relentless feast of fear and gore for the audience.

Though these repulsive clichés have become the norm for many Hollywood horror and thriller films, they are not the only approach to the genres. In fact, in today’s postmodern society so saturated with relative morality, horror and thriller stories have the ability to be an effective apologetic for the Christian worldview.

Some well-meaning cultural crusaders make claims that horror is an intrinsically evil genre that is not appropriate for Christians to create or enjoy. They believe horror is an unbiblical genre of storytelling. One writer argues, “Horror is an example of a genre which was conceived in rebellion. It is based on a fascination with ungodly fear. It should not be imitated, propagated, or encouraged. It cannot be redeemed because it is presuppositionally at war with God.”(1) Evidently, God disagrees with such religious critics because God himself told horror stories thousands of years before Stephen King or Wes Craven were even born.

The prophet Daniel wrote horror literature, based on images and drama pitched by God to him in Babylon. Not only did God turn the blaspheming king Nebuchadnezzar into an insane wolfman to humble his idolatrous pride (Dan. 4), but He storyboarded horror epics for kings Belshazzar and Darius as allegories of the historical battle between good and evil to come. Huge hybrid carnivorous monsters come out of the sea like Godzilla, one of them with large fangs and ravishing claws to devour, crush, and trample over the earth (Dan. 7:1–8) until it is slain and its flesh roasted in fire (Dan. 7:11); there are blasphemous sacrileges causing horror (Dan. 8:13), including an abomination of desolation (Dan. 9:26–27); angels and demons engaging in spiritual warfare (Dan. 10:13); rivers of fire (Dan. 7:10); deep impact comets and meteors colliding with the earth, Armageddon style (Dan. 8:10); wars, desolation, and complete destruction (Dan. 9:26-27). The book of Daniel reads like God’s own horror film festival.

It is not merely the human being Daniel who crafted this work of epic horror allegory, it is God Himself who rolled the camera and directed the action. God himself enjoys the horror genre. That’s God-breathed inerrancy. The author of this faith didn’t grow out of it after the Old Testament. In fact, he may have received an even harsher movie rating in his later production, the New Testament.

The book of Revelation is an epic horror fantasy sequel to Daniel, complete with science fiction special effects, and spectacles of horror darker than anything in a David Cronenberg Grand Guignol theater of blood. In this apocalyptic prophecy we read of a huge demonic spectacle of genetically mutated monsters chasing and tormenting screaming people (Rev. 9:1–11); armies of bizarre beasts wreaking death and destruction on the masses (Rev. 9:13–18); a demonic dragon chasing a woman with the intent to eat her child (Rev. 12:3–4); a seven-headed amphibious Hydra with horns that blasphemes God and draws pagan idol worship from everyone on earth (Rev. 13:1–10), massive famines (Rev. 6:8); gross outbreaks of rotting sores covering people’s bodies (Rev. 16:2); plagues of demonic insects torturing populations (Rev. 9:1–11); fire-breathing Griffon-like creatures (Rev. 9:17); supernatural warfare of angels and demons (Rev. 12:7); the dragging of rotting corpses through the streets while people party over them (Rev. 11:7–13); rivers and seas of blood (Rev. 14:20; Rev. 16:3); a blaspheming harlot doing the deed with kings and merchants (Rev. 17:1-5) who then turn on her, strip her naked, burn her with fire, and cannibalize her (Rev. 17:16); more famines, pestilence and plagues (Rev. 18:8); and when the good guys win, there is a mighty feast of vultures scavenging the flesh of kings and commanders in victory (Rev. 19:17–18). And I might add, this all gives glory to God in the highest.

The apocalyptic genre that was used by the prophets and apostles of God relied heavily on images of horror to solicit holy fear of sin and its consequences in their audience and point them to God. Horror and thriller movies (and by extension, other forms of horror storytelling or image-making) can accomplish this same “prophetic” redemptive task several ways.

ORIGINAL SIN CROUCHING AT THE DOOR

First, horror can be redemptive by reinforcing the doctrine of man’s sinful nature. Gothic storytelling prides itself on exploiting man’s fear of his dark side through vampires, werewolves, and other half-man/half-monsters. These freaks of nature or supernature personify the cultured, educated man by day and the unbridled beast by night. They represent the gospel truth that our evil nature avoids the light, lest its deeds be exposed (John 3:20), and that true evil is done by otherwise “normal” people who suppress the truth about themselves in unrighteousness (Rom. 3:18–21). We are Jekylls and Hydes, all.

The Victorian era provided western culture with a rich and lasting heritage of Christian metaphors for the depraved side of human nature that requires restraint. Those metaphors have been resurrected in some modern films with equal moral vision. Dracula symbolized the struggle of the repressed dark side and its eternal hunger and need for redemption, which is explored with modern fervor in Interview with the Vampire and Dracula 2000(2). Dr. Jekyll fought to suppress the increasing inhumanity of his depraved alter ego, Mr. Hyde, just like Jack has to defeat his destructive inner self, Tyler, in Fight Club. Victor Frankenstein’s scientific hubris leads to a vengeful monster in the same way that the conceit of scientists without moral restraint leads to the takeover of Jurassic Park by unpredictable dinosaurs. The corrupted conscience of H.G. Wells’s invisible man getting away with crime is revisited in the more recent Hollow Man.

One movie, The Addiction, uses the vampire genre as a metaphor for the addictive sinful nature of humanity. The vampires spout human philosophy as they kill their victims, attempting to prove there is no moral authority to condemn what they do. One of them even concedes R.C. Sproul’s theological point, that, “we’re not sinners because we sin, we sin because we are sinners.” One victim is shocked at being bitten by her friend. She anxiously blurts out, “How could you do this? Doesn’t it affect you? How can you do this to me?” To which her vampiress friend sardonically replies, “It was your decision. Your friend Feuerbach said that all men counting stars are equivalent in every way to God. My indifference is not the concern here. It’s your astonishment that needs study.” This reversal is an apologetic argument against unbelief, par excellence. If God is dead, as the modern secular mindset proposes, and man is his own deity, creating his own morality, then no one should be surprised when people create their own morality by feasting on the blood of others. Without God, there is no such thing as “evil.” In the end, the vampiress, believe it or not, has a Catholic conversion! This film embodies the argument for God’s existence through the existence of evil.(3)

(1) Doug Phillips, Doug’s Blog, November 1, 2006, “The Horror Genre,” http://www.visionforum.com/hottopics/blogs/dwp/2006/11/1878.aspx.

(2) The unique twist in Dracula 2000 is in its depiction of Dracula’s origins. Dracula is revealed to be the undead soul of Judas Iscariot prowling the earth in vengeance against his own perdition. This story contains strong Christian metaphors: Dracula/Judas’s insatiable lust for blood is a symbol of the eternal need for Christ’s blood of forgiveness; the silver abhorrence, a reflection of the thirty pieces Judas betrayed Christ for, and of course, crosses and wooden stakes through the heart, elements of the power of the cross of Christ to destroy evil. Dracula 2000 resurrects Christian elements that have been buried by many contemporary vampire movies.

(3) Another vampire film that warns of the subtle and seductive nature of sin is Let the Right One In, a story of a young boy befriending a young girl who happens to be a vampire.

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Brian Godawa is the screenwriter for the award-winning feature film, To End All Wars, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Alleged, starring Brian Dennehy as Clarence Darrow and Fred Thompson as William Jennings Bryan. He previously adapted to film the best-selling supernatural horror novel The Visitation by author Frank Peretti for Ralph Winter (X-Men, Wolverine).

His book, Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment has been released in a revised edition from InterVarsity Press. His new book Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story and Imagination (IVP) addresses the power of image and story in the pages of the Bible to transform the Christian life.

His new Biblical Fantasy novel, Noah Primeval will be released in early 2012. Visit his web sites to read sample chapters and learn more about Brian.

We love to hate bad guys. Some more than others. Especially Nazis. Very likely Nazis are the most-used standby bad guys. They feature prominently in nonfiction and fiction fields: from political rhetoric comparisons and Christian social-action documentaries, to action-hero movie plots and spy-thriller novels. Meanwhile, it seems stories about other villains like to attempt being more clever than that, by making the enemy Someone You Didn’t Expect:

• In X-Men: First Class, apparently, it’s not the Russians or the Americans in the Bay of Pigs (Cuba) standoff who are the bad guys. Russians really, really wish they were not involved. So Communists aren’t bad guys. Bad mutants are the real bad guys.
• For many movie versions of legends or books, authors or scriptwriters like to season the original meals with popular flavors of political correctness. Ergo, Arab terrorists originally featured in the Tom Clancy thriller The Sum of All Fears got changed into (guess who!) neo-Nazis, for the 2002 film version. Similarly, in the BBC series Robin Hood, Muslims want peace in the Holy Land just as much as Robin Hood does; it’s the Crusaders, the Sheriff of Nottingham, and Prince John, who are the real enemies.
• In How to Train Your Dragon, as mentioned last week, the dragons aren’t the bad guys. (Spoiler.) A huge kingpin dragon is. So love the little dragons. Kill the big one.

I’m not calling for everything to be predictable. Some readers do seem to prefer stories that way: give me good guys and bad guys, with easy differences, and don’t let’s have any of this messy “gray area” stuff. Scripture won’t permit that, not because we are all “neutral,” but because we all have mixed motives in varying degrees, good and evil.

Instead, a lot of these bait-and-switch strategies themselves miss the chief of all villains, and one of the most rarely used surprise,-here’s-the-real-enemy plot twists. In effect they claim the worst enemy may be an external person, place, or Thing, but never the human heart.

• “You’re a good person, Harry,” assures Sirius Black in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the film), before adding that bad things have happened to Harry (which the series later actually proves untrue, because Harry does have evil within him).
• “Look inside yourself, Simba,” intones Mufasa in the clouds, from The Lion King. “You are more than what you have become.” Ultimately that is all Mufasa can offer, despite Simba’s yearnings to receive help from his departed father: my son, you don’t need me; you already have what you need inside yourself.
• 

  Somehow I got the idea from the “Dawn Treader” movie that the Evil Green Mist™ tempts people.

  In The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader film (2010), the story swerves wildly off-course from the original book’s emphasis on a quest that is partly to find seven lost men, but mainly “not to seek things useful, but to seek honor and adventure,” according to the knight-mouse Reepicheep. And seeking Aslan’s Country, the mythical paradise beyond the world’s end, is worth all battles, quests, and dying, the noble mouse adds. In response, the movie director said he thought the book gave “no real reason for the journey,” and the film swapped longing for Aslan’s Country for self-esteem nonsense and only fighting External places and enemies — namely, an Evil Green Mist™. That’s not only rejecting the book; it’s just a lame story.

All these are from movies. Perhaps movies do this more than books, which have more time to develop characters and themes, complex ones, that more closely match reality. But the “you basically good, all enemies External” theme is easier to package and present in a movie.

But I cite these examples not to pick on these stories or to say they are all corrupted. I only need to prove this theme recurs too often. It’s constant. No matter who the enemy is, he’s always an evil far greater than the wickedness you have inside you. No surprises, no clever twists of the trope — the external enemy cliché rarely varies.

This is a reflection of people’s nonfiction worldview. Do they believe man is basically good or “neutral,” or basically evil? If good/neutral, then a story’s enemy is only External. If bad, then (so the logic goes) we can’t identify with a hero. Why? Because we’re basically good.

For internal use only

These assumptions make for uniform stories and themes, without challenge, creativity or honest reflection on human nature. This could be done even by those who aren’t Christians, and even in stories that aren’t that good. After all, even the much-maligned movie Spider-Man 3 (2007) did this by showing the effects of an evil alien black ooze on the otherwise wholesome Peter Parker. The parasitic ooze did not impute evil onto Peter. It only amplified or magnified whatever the host already had. (A similar concept was in Green Lantern.)

If you prefer examples from more-loved stories, this may be why The Dark Knight and other “gritty” stories have gained popularity (and unfortunately also imitators that copy the whats without the whys). But whether “gritty” or not, the best stories match or complement the external conflict or enemy with the hero’s inner battle. Consciously or not, they dare to refute the usual “you’re a good person” lines and explore who we really are: humans, with good and bad desires, who — in the best stories — ultimately do make right choices.

So I don’t believe assumptions that only complex stories can handle this, or that if we show human nature as a mixture of good and evil impulses, we can’t identify with a hero. In fact, if we are honest with ourselves, we know that we feel contrasting desires; even non-Christians can admit this. Thus we find the best stories also illustrate this struggle. Some even do this while chirping out the usual “follow your dreams” and “look within yourself” mantras — in those stories, what we’re told is not what we see! So the dialogue might as well go ahead and match what’s clear to everyone else: Hero X is not basically good deep inside. He’s a human.

The rebel flesh

What about for Christians? Scripture gives us even more reasons to suspect human nature.

Yes, we do read about two other sets of villains in Scripture — the Devil (Genesis 2, Job, and the New Testament) and his spiritual forces whom we fight (Ephesians 6), and the world (that is, our present evil age; such as in James 4:4). But the Bible’s overall emphasis is on fallen human nature. In Genesis 2, the serpent is not even named as the Devil — we guess that from later references. Scripture’s epic story begins with the enemy being, not Something Else, but ourselves. Later we are also told that Christ came to destroy the works of the Devil (1 John 3:8), just as His death accomplished many other goals. Yet the overwhelming thrust of Scripture’s story and theology is that He died to resurrect people from spiritual death — the otherwise inevitable state of our rebel human flesh (Ephesians 1-2). He saved us, not just from the Devil and his demons, or our world’s evil present age, but from ourselves.

How might our stories reflect this concept? Do they now? Next week: A savior isn’t enough.

By way of wrapping up last week’s discussion of romantic love in science fiction, or the lack thereof, I want to highlight a sub-genre that seems to grasp the power of the emotional bond between a man and woman devoted to each other: The time-travel story.

In a world where romantic love is defined by hormone-charged dalliances, throwaway relationships of convenience, and spur-of-the-moment “hookups,” the idea of a love that endures across the years in defiance of the ravages of time can seem alien indeed. Yet, I think human beings, deep down, long for love that lasts. Wedding vows that can seem trite and unrealistic in our cynical modern culture still resonate with our souls: “…to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness or in health, to love and to cherish ’till death do us part.”

Last week, I objected to the “science fiction romance” as lacking a substantial speculative element–it may be set in an exotic locale somewhere beyond known space, but it doesn’t use that extraordinary opportunity in a way that makes a difference. There’s form, but no substance.

Enter the time-travel story. It’s often a romance, or has a romance embedded in it. It’s a metaphor writ large, the story of two people struggling to hold onto each other across the years…or centuries. Love that is figuratively and literally timeless. Love that endures despite the passage of time and its inexorable corrosive force. There are difficulties. Some might protest that time travel is silly, inherently paradoxical, and lacking in common-sense.

To that I would answer, “Big deal. So is love.” And that only makes the metaphor stronger. Love flies in the face of common sense and our own mortality. It is powerful despite our weaknesses, and it doesn’t give up no matter how vanishing the odds of success. As Paul reminds us in I Corinthians 13, “Love is patient…It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

Finding examples of romance in a time-travel story isn’t difficult, whether we’re talking about books, movies, or television. Here are a few:

“Somewhere in Time”: In this film adaptation of the novel Bid Time Return, by Edward Matheson, a self-absorbed playwright is smitten by the image of a woman in an old photograph and employs a kind of self-hypnosis to unstick himself from time and travel into the past to meet her. Although the premise is a little lightweight, the romance works, supported by some lavish cinematography of northern Michigan’s Mackinac Island and a musical score that plucks at the heartstrings.

The Forever War: Joe Haldeman’s novel is set centuries into the future and told through the eyes of a soldier endlessly fighting a mysterious alien race. It’s primarily an allegory of the author’s experience in and after the Vietnam War. There’s a strong love story at its heart, though, a romance both hampered and facilitated by lifespans extended hundreds of years via time dilation from near-lightspeed travel.

“Back to the Future”: The cinematic adventures of Doc Brown and Marty McFly focus on Marty’s growth and enlightenment from hot-headed idiot to someone who understands the value of friendship, family, and, yes, love, as he snarls and unsnarls the threads of past and future. In Part III, absent-minded Professor Brown meets his match in a forward-thinking Old West schoolmarm–it’s a sweet and adventuresome love-story-within-a-story.

Star Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever”: A personal Trek favorite, one of a couple of stories where the womanizing Kirk stumbles into genuine love, though it’s sadly torn from him in the end to save human history from an unspeakable alteration. Of course, the good ship Enterprise is Kirk’s only enduring love, which might come up again in next week’s column.

I’ll leave mention of everyone’s favorite time-tripping Doctor to our resident fans.

Plenty of examples, but what about an exemplar, a story that captures the enduring quality of love I’ve been talking about? Here’s a possibility:

The Time Traveler’s Wife: I wanted to read Audrey Niffenegger’s novel first, but my lovely wife beat me to the punch and rented the movie. The synopsis is linked here, for sake of brevity, but this is a story about a man whose peculiar affliction sends him bouncing backward and forward in time, and his one true anchor is the woman who loves him, never knowing when he’ll vanish and when he’ll return–or what age he might be when they’re reunited. She waits, and endures, and they both struggle with the challenges of their disjointed life while cherishing every moment they share together.

The critics didn’t show much love to the film version, but I liked it. I even got a little misty-eyed a couple of times, and that doesn’t happen to me very often. Having spent much of my married life in the military, with all the short-notice travel and frequent separations that entails, the story felt poignantly familiar–I may not jump around in time, but I know the difficulties of life on an uncertain calendar, and the profound joy of finding a person willing to share that life with me, even though it often means waiting and enduring, holding it all together in my absence.

She is a gift from God, and no matter how far or long we are apart, I will always and forever return to her.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Next week: alien gbznetnxyn.

Not long ago, I discussed the “It Factor,” that intangible something that sets a work of fiction apart and gets people to notice and talk and read.

One thing most writing instructors agree on is that a novel opening needs to hook readers into the story. That particular something that claims a reader’s attention can be in the first sentence, paragraph, page.

Below are five unpublished novel openings — approximately the first one hundred words — for your consideration. Which ones hook you? Why or why not?

Please note, you can vote for as many or as few as you wish. Comments aren’t mandatory, but are really helpful and give us a basis of understanding what you as a reader see in these openings and what grabs your attention.

In no special order, the first five openings of all those submitted:

Choice A

The autumn foliage burns like a fire in my eyes. “Shut up, Joshua!”

“Please, just listen to me. “ He grabs my wrist.

“Which lecture will it be this time? This-is-wrong? The-bad-outcomes? You-know-better?” I try to pull away; his hands, though gnarled and spotted with age, are still strong enough to crush my thin wrists.

“Séipéal, I remember when you would raise your hand during the service to smilingly correct the pastor’s reference. I remember when you would babble on in class and somehow make sense of it like a firework exploding to dazzle our eyes”

Choice B

In an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood, late at night, a small boy slept in his bed, one arm thrown across a large stuffed rabbit.

The window slid open, and a black-clad figure slipped into the room. The figure paused for a moment, listening. The house was quiet.

The assassin crossed the room in three strides and stood over the bed, drawing a long knife from a sheath at its thigh. Then the assassin pulled back the quilt and gazed down at the boy and his stuffed rabbit. The child slept on, unaware of his danger.

Choice C

Trouble was glaring at him from across the open sparring grounds. Varian stopped writing his entry in the match-book and watched the young nobleman approach.

Kiffor Angleson nodded to him, his lips set in a thin line. “Signing up for the tourney?”

“Sword-sparrin’,” Varian answered. He finished his scrawl and tossed down a quarter bit of gold.

“Thank you.” The man running the table scooped the coin into the till. “Next? You signing up, young man?”

Kiffor shouldered into Varian as he stepped up to the table.
Varian bit his tongue and held it as he stepped into a clear space.

Choice D

He didn’t kill her.

I bend down and run my stave over the ground. Pause for a moment. Almost midnight, and I haven’t come nearly far enough yet. I hear only the familiar night sounds around me. No pursuit. Yet.

I run again. The grass brushes against my bare legs and I want to kick the cumbersome boots off my blinded feet. They slide with every step, ill fitted as the worries running through my head. Nathan is not a murderer… not really… not intentionally.

I flinch back from unwanted questions. I would stake my life on his innocence.

Maybe I am.

Choice E

Today the world lay quiet. The sun broke over the hills breaking the deep darkness with harsh yellows and reds against the bare grey earth. As the darkness lifted, a shadow could be seen silhouetted against the mist that covered the ground. The silhouette was that of a man standing alone in a meadow long dead. Boaz stood searching for something. The uneven ground had been trampled by the feet of the good and the bad, feed by the blood of the righteous and the unclean. Today there was no battle, the ground did not shake with the turmoil of war.

I learned from the poll on my site that some readers want a “None of these” choice, so I’ll include that as Choice F.

Have fun with this. And please don’t forget, these openings represent someone’s heart and soul. Well, that might be a little melodramatic. 😉 But they do represent someone’s hard work.

The poll will close midnight (PDT) next Sunday.

(The following is adapted from the complete ‘Harry Potter’ and the Issues Beyond Fiction series. For those who’d like that in condensed form, this is the Quick-Quotes version.

To see expansions on each point, read the complete series.)

Whether you enjoy Harry Potter, or you believe it’s full of witchcraft and dangerous, or if you are trying too hard to cram Christian parallels into the stories … some questions to ask:

1. Do we define “witchcraft” according to the Bible or according to pagans, seeing made-up “magic” as the same insidious practices the Bible condemns?

• If a pagan says “that’s real magic, my stuff,” let’s not automatically buy his belief. We know the Devil likes to exaggerate his powers and make us think God isn’t sovereign.
• Apart from the issue of impressionable children, or whether Potter contains actual paganism, some Christians are able to handle exposure even to real pagan beliefs.

2. Might we buy into the worldly notion that sin comes from Things, not hearts?

• Jesus is clear in Mark 7 and elsewhere that hearts, not Things, give rise to sin. If we forget that, we buy the Pelagian notion that we’re “neutral” and others are to blame.
• As with Things like meat sacrificed to idols, alcohol, or TV, or oldie songs, we should recall that all of us have varying levels of temptations toward making a Thing an idol.

3. In our zeal to warn about possible harms, do we commit equal sins of truth-carelessness or overt deception, even against perceived (or real) bad guys?

• Many critics of Harry Potter and similar stories feel it’s okay to fudge the truth about the stories’ content, such as claiming the books actually glorify the bad guys’ evils.
• As Christians, we must tell the truth and not exaggerate. Otherwise we only commit other sins in reaction even to real wrong things that we need to warn others about.

4. Could Christians overdo their “discernment” views based only on reactions?

• We may hear a lot about “Christians don’t discern enough.” That’s true, but the real solution is the Gospel. It will lead us naturally to want to discern what honors Him.
• If we only tell people what media, songs, or stories to avoid, we leave open the door for Gnosticism and other beliefs that reject joy in favor of duty-driven “spirituality.”

5. Do we assume “that looks bad or wicked to me” is the same as discernment?

• Some may look not to Scripture but to appearances to figure out what to avoid. But “abstain from all appearance of evil” (1 Thess. 5:22) means avoid actual evil practice.
• If we applied this “discernment” consistently, we’d not only judge with un-Biblical judgment, but would have to declare some parts of the Bible itself to “appear” evil.

6. Do we enjoy Christian tales whose “worlds” don’t include clear Christ-figures or best-behaving characters, then have higher expectations for secular stories?

• Defending The Chronicles of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings because they’re set in “other worlds” with different rules, or Christ-figures, should apply to all other stories.
• Many of Jesus’ own parables include tales about morally imperfect people, and don’t have obvious Christ-figures. We do not need to insist on higher standards than that.

7. Are we wary of the Word’s commands not to base our lives on made-up rules?

• Paul in Colossians 2 (and elsewhere) insists that Christians have been set free from bondage to sin, and need not be tied up by un-Biblical rules that don’t work anyway.
• While the flesh and the Devil are still dangerous, Christians may forget they aren’t meant to live for rules, but for Christ, Whose Holy Spirit changes us from the inside.

8. Might we “outsource” our discernment to others, believing only they are wise enough to do it for us, while not growing in our personal discernment wisdom?

• Media discernment ministries can be helpful! But some Christians act as if the Bible is not enough; they claim we also need them to stand between us and evil Things.
• This is a kind of “media shamanism.” But if those Christians can be exposed to the evil Thing, they would better encourage others’ individual growth and discernment.

9. Do we try to avoid bad Things like imaginary “magic,” while practicing our own favorite subtle mysticism methods, supposedly to get control or avoid sin?

• Treating objects as the real source of evil can also lead to mystical thinking: shun the Thing that contains remnant evil and you’ll be fine. This is actual practice of “magic”!
• Being wary only of obvious “magic,” we may neglect to avoid other mystical practices: seeking signs or personal prophecies, relying on “nudges” for discernment, and more.

10. Do we recall that Scripture itself shows saints like Daniel and Paul serving God in their holy living, even while knowing and studying real pagan religions?

• “Engaging culture” is often abused to excuse worldliness. Yet the Bible does not say “find what the world does, then do opposite.” The world may or may not reflect truth.
• In Daniel 1 we read that Daniel also studied actual pagan materials, with God’s help! Paul also took a truth, wrongly applied in a Greek poem about Zeus, to be about God.

11. Is “someone used it to sin, so that makes it wrong for all” a Biblical reason?

• This bypasses Scripture about the “meat sacrificed to idols” debate: love your brother and don’t abuse your freedom, but also don’t be constrained by un-Biblical rules.
• To practice this consistently, we would need to avoid anything that someone abuses to sin: any movies, or technology, or church buildings, or songs, or the Bible itself.

12. Even with good intentions, might we base our reactions to worldly things only on the reactions of “weaker brothers,” who do need love but also growth?

• Example: some reject drum rhythms because they reminded newly converted pagans of their pasts. But drum rhythms are not evil, and such new converts are not legalists.
• Based on Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8-11:1, we do need to be sensitive to others’ legitimate “stumbling blocks.” Yet we can also encourage them to grow in strength.

13. Are we sure we’re not basing views on our own dislikes (or simple lack of enjoyment) for some stories, and expecting other Christians to think the same?

• Not every Christian loves fiction; even fewer enjoy or see the point of fantasy. That could make it too easy to say: “what’s the big deal; why not just avoid it to be safe?”.
• Many people testify how God has helped them see His truths from His all-sufficient Word echoed in secondary ways: art, music, nature, and even secular fantasy stories.

14. Do we recall that true Christians may hold different views of discerning things, and yet avoid worldliness and instead grow in truth and love for Christ?

• To contrast one’s personal discernment rules only with examples of those who have become worldly, could imply that discernment is easy or will always looks the same.
• Some things are always evil. Others are trickier! But based on our own callings, gifts, strengths and weaknesses, some discernment is custom-made for each Christian.

A couple weeks ago, I posted the openings of six different novels on my personal blog and had visitors vote for the ones that captured their interest. It was a useful exercise and proved to be lots of fun.

I began to think we at Spec Faith might like to do something like that too, but instead of me giving novel openings to you, you could give me excerpts to post.

This would be something like the one-page critiques sometimes offered at conferences. Anonymous participants who aren’t afraid of the comments they’ll receive submit their work, and a panel of professionals says if they would like to read more and why or why not.

In this case, the “panel of experts” would be the Spec Faith visitors.

First we need anonymous participants who are brave enough to put their work forward for the public to shred discuss. 😉 If you would like to volunteer, you may email the first hundred words of your unpublished novel to rluellam at yahoo dot com. Sometime soon I’ll post the first five I receive, and then the fun can begin.

Some years ago I walked into my local Family Christian Store looking for a copy of Karen Hancock’s Light of Eidon as a gift for a friend. When I didn’t find it, I asked the clerk why they didn’t shelve the books of a three-time Christy award-winning author. She registered shock. “Oh, I didn’t know!” I ordered the book and since then have had no trouble locating Hancock’s books at that store.

The point is simple: people don’t buy good Christian fantasy because they don’t know about the books or where they can buy them—not because of an aversion to the genre or because of poor writing.

Are the readers who find the good fantasies hoarding them—not telling their friends or buying the books for their relatives, because they feel like they belong to a secret club and want to keep it that way? Possibly.

Or do the readers take the books for granted, assuming that if they found them, others will too in good time? Hmmm. This might be true.

Can we who love SFF make a difference? I have to believe so. Blogging, in my view, is the written form of word-of-mouth, so our views ought to start people looking at the books we believe in.

But this past week heard another fact—a recent survey revealed that only 18% of readers visit a publisher’s web site while 23% visit an author’s site. That makes me realize, blogging alone is not enough, especially by unpublished writers like me (23% of 0 being what it is! )

What am I driving at? We readers/fans/writers of Christian science fiction or fantasy need to do more to spread the word about our genre. Here are some ideas:

• buy at least one CSFF book for a Christmas present

• ask at least one local bookstore to stock books by a CSFF author you see missing from their shelves

• write a publisher of one of your favorite CSFF books and thank them for giving you the kind of book you love and ask them for more

• write a list of your favorite books and authors and give that to a local library asking them to add those to their buying list

• mention said list in your Christmas letter

• too late for the Christmas letter? send another one in January all about fantasy and why you love it and what authors you would recommend

• send same information to your e-mail contacts

• post a list of favorite authors on your blog

• invite friends, family, church acquaintances, school contacts, business collegues, neighbors to read your blog, especially during CSFF blog tours

• not participating in the tour? Sign up at CSFF Blog Tour

I’m sure there are other things we can do. Of course, not everyone is able to do all of these, but if you managed only three, starting with the first one on the list, that can begin a wave that will grow geometrically. One doubled becomes two. Two doubled becomes four. Four doubled becomes eight. How many steps to a million? Not as many as you might think, but it will NEVER happen if one doesn’t first double and become two.

The bottom line for me, however, is not simply sales. Rather, it is this: our culture loves story and right now is drinking in fantasy. Fantasy, a genre built on the struggle of good versus evil, can and should reflect God and His work in the world. What a great opportunity to be Paul on Mars Hill saying, I notice you’re worshiping an unknown god. Let me tell you a fantasy that will show you who He is. Might not Christian fantasy be the new evangelistic crusade?

I know I’ve triggered a few knee-jerk reactions with that last line (stories should NOT preach), and I don’t want to digress into a discussion of well-crafted theme versus preaching. No matter what you believe about that issue, I think we can agree that Christians should glorify God. It’s why we are. So a Christian who writes science fiction or fantasy should glorify God. In turn, do not those of us who read these writers want to point others to this work in order that God’s glory can be spread farther, wider?

Marketing shouldn’t be about garnering fame or dollars but about giving others the chance to see God through the writing we love. We can play a small part in this process—one becoming two.

[The above is a modified version of a post that first appeared at A Christian Worldview of Fiction a number of years ago.]