Christian entertainment has gotten a bad rap for being unrealistic, unrelatable with a side of cheesy dialogue and happy endings.

Because of this formula ridden stereotype of yesteryear, many people do not want to attend a “Christian movie” or read a “Christian book.”

For years I didn’t want to be considered an author who wrote Christian literature. I didn’t want to be included into this cubbyhole. I wanted to be an author who happened to be a Christian.

This week we feature Anna M. Aquino and her novel A Marriage in Time in Lorehaven Book Clubs. Stop by the flagship book club on Facebook to learn more about this story.

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But then I realized that who I am comes out in what I write. I wanted to write real characters who went through real issues. I wanted people to be changed through laughter and tears as they read my work.

People are hungry for real stories.

I did not set out to be a pioneer in speculative fiction. I set out to tell the stories that I felt God was giving me. I set out to blaze a trail and in doing so teaching biblical truths along the way.

It all started when I simply wanted to write my dad’s story. He was a grunt soldier in Vietnam and I wanted the world to hear the stories that he repeated to me again and again. I wanted his voice and his survival in the jungle to resonate with the people he fought so hard to protect.

Then I kept writing. I kept telling more and more stories. While the fullness of his book has yet to be in print, in telling his story my life changed.

“Anna M. Aquino paints a rich historical setting for a timeless tale of the bondage of sin . . . and the power of forgiveness.”
— Lorehaven Magazine

Jesus was a storyteller. He understood the need to create stories that people would understand. He spoke in parables. He turned to storytelling to illuminate the word. These stories continue to touch the lives of believers and nonbelievers.

People who won’t go to church or hear a sermon preached will pick up books. Deep in the hearts of some countries where the Bible is banned; I know for a fact that The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings are read. To my knowledge my books, blogs, and articles have gone places I may never set my feet. From the jungles of India to people’s homes I have never meet. The written word and storytelling has a far lasting ripple effect.

However, I know I am not alone in my journey. I have noticed in the last decade I have seen many Christian writers begin to branch out and embrace the uncharted territory of real Christian fiction. We’ve left the models and formulas and sought to write books that change the lives of people.

But my concern is that some have gone too far.

I love a good fictional story. I love to step into the realm of the imagination. Pioneers must remember who and whose they are. We must venture out in this uncharted territory of speculative fiction, and go “where no man has gone before,” but remember our values and integrity.

In my In Time fictional series, I explore a fictional character that has grown weary of his time as a small town pastor.

In An Ember in Time, God sends him a “time traveling angel” that allows him to visit any time in biblical history. The problem is when he accidentally messes up Biblical history. He has to go back and fix his mess up or the Bible would unravel.

In A Marriage In Time, the pastor’s wife is on a verge of an affair and she is sent back in time during David and Bathsheba’s lives.

In the third book, A Legacy in Time (yet to be released), these two are sent back in Biblical history to be confidants to King David during his children’s rebellion years as their own son has found himself incarcerated.

The whole series is best described as the series Quantum Leap meets Back to the Future. These books are honest, raw, and funny. While they are a work of fiction, they do hold tightly to the framework of the Bible.

I love this series. I’m a child of the ’80s and ’90s, and I found myself wanting desperately to tap into the light hearted sci-fi that existed in my generation but make it for today. As I have read and reread these books I find myself laughing hysterically and crying in the next chapter. I think we as Christians can be too serious. Through humor, God can speak to people. It’s such a blessing to me when people come to me and tell me “it’s that one scene” that will always stay with them throughout their lives. That when my character went through some of his life altering moments they found that they were captivated by what this meant in their own lives.

We journey into the unknown, explore and create our own stories. We are a unique expression of a loving Creator. May we hold tightly to imagination. May we embrace the freedom of vision. May we learn not to fear the unknown. May we learn to enjoy stories outside of the formula of yesteryear, but that still have prophetic resonance. May we all be pioneers in our own spheres of influence. May we remember that we do not need to be a copy of what the world is doing, but blaze a trail for the Kingdom of God. May we all be inspired to live our lives beyond what we can see.

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“Anna M. Aquino paints a rich historical setting for a timeless tale of the bondage of sin . . . and the power of forgiveness.”
— Lorehaven Magazine

Explore Anna M. Aquino’s novel A Marriage in Time in the Lorehaven Library.

Read our full review exclusively from the summer 2018 issue of Lorehaven Magazine!

Authors, in your story worlds of fantasy and science fiction, do you think much about who has to do maintenance work on your weapons? Who cleans them and keeps them working, who does the behind-the-scenes stuff?

Putting holes in paper targets…into shapes equal to the size of a person at 500 meters (we also shot pop-ups up to 800 meters away).

My thoughts run this way at the moment because my Army Reserve unit sent me to a short course on shooting machine guns last week. I spent 4 training days with a weapon called the M240B–a piece of technology that if we could travel back in a time machine and hand it over to the brightest and best in WWI, say in Germany or the UK, the war would have turned out far differently than it actually did.

I considered posting on machine guns themselves, though I decided that’s too specialized a topic for Speculative Faith. But I think most people don’t really understand the difference between an assault rifle and a machine gun–for example, do you know a M240B can accurately hit targets around one kilometer away if on a tripod? And assault rifles are not designed to go tripods? That machine guns are fired in crews of at least two people? And that an M2 machine gun, which uses 50 caliber (12.7 mm) bullets, which was also used at our course (though not by me), can reliably hit targets around one MILE away?

I just don’t see that portrayed very much in fiction outside of military fiction…(for example, does anyone in The Walking Dead ever shoot anything from more than around 100 meters away?)

Cleaning M240B’s

But I’m getting away from my purpose here. Because my fourth day of training was in fact all about weapons maintenance. This is ordinary stuff for soldiers–I don’t mean to bore those of you who already know this–please keep reading because I’m going to apply this in just a bit. But our long day of range time translated into a next day of hours of scraping and daubing with cleansers the machined metal parts inside our weapons to remove the carbon accumulated from exploding gunpowder.

I think stories are generally aware of the issues of cleaning and maintaining weapons and other devices, though rather vaguely. We know Medieval times had blacksmiths and sometimes fantasy stories that include weapons talk about those who make weapons. But do we generally think of the fact that ordinary warriors had to keep weapons oiled to keep from rusting, had to know how to effectively sharpen them–and had specialists they turned to when something went seriously wrong with the weapons? Craftsmen (and women) who didn’t just hammer out steel, but who specialized in precious metal work, or jewels, or bone carving, or the leather of scabbards and holders?

Do you think much about the fact that bows were left unstrung in times of peace, because both the wood of the bow and the bowstring suffered damage from being under tension for too long? Or that any suit of armor required an entire team of people not only to build it, but to keep it in working order? (Etc.)

Lots of stories with magic in them mention those who create magic items–but it’s much rarer to talk about how magic items are maintained. If magic wands exist in a story, then it stands to reason from real world weapons that someone not only makes the wands but someone would specialize in repairing damaged wands. And users would probably have certain spells they use to maintain their wands in top working order on a routine basis. And not just wands, any magical device would require maintenance. And it might actually take an entire team of people to maintain or repair a single complex magical item.

Just like carbon accumulates on any weapon that uses gunpowder, why wouldn’t magic use leave some kind of residue that would have to be cleaned? Power, after all, is never really free–it always comes from somewhere and always has consequences, from large things to small.

I can understand, of course, if you don’t want to spend much time talking about magical residue. There are more important aspects of storytelling to be sure. But I recommend you keep these details in the back of your mind. Even brief references, here and there, to magical repair and maintenance could add a great deal of depth to a fantasy story.

And for my science fiction-writing friends, yes, it’s true that sci fi has given a fair amount of attention to maintenance. Star Trek alone has provided us Scotty, Geordi LaForge, Miles O’Brien and more major characters whose primary job was to keep the tech running. However, you don’t see much in the way of user-level maintenance and I’m pretty sure there would be some.

The reason to mention this aspect of speculative fiction stories is not to be picky or to zing stories for their shortcomings but because working on equipment, keeping it running, checking it before use, is such a big part of the life of a soldier in modern times. And it was also important to warriors in the past and no doubt will be important to the high-tech fighters of the future.

So don’t forget about it, writers. Every time any piece of equipment is used, especially weapons but everything else, too, it has to be maintained in one way or another. You may not want to focus on that–but it’s a major part of your characters’ lives, so you might want to mention it from time to time.

So having made that point, who are some of your favorite characters who had the job of keeping stuff running? I named three of my own favorites from Star Trek, but many, many more could be mentioned. I’d be especially interested in any fantasy characters who have maintained equipment. 🙂

I recently posted a discussion on Facebook that received a bit of attention so I thought I would expand it into an article. The topic was about androids/synthetic humans. Several weeks ago, I watched two films dealing with the subject: Zoe on Amazon Prime and Extinction on Netflix. I can’t talk about how artificial people factor into these films without spoiling the stories so you’ll just have to go check them out for yourself. But in both films, the line between man and machines is blurred almost to nonexistence and it is crossed in numerous ways.

For many people, the notion of self-aware artificial intelligence and synthetic human bodies is tantalizing and exciting. Of course, talking like a human and looking like a human are two separate technological pursuits. You can have a humorous, empathetic chatbot that is confined to CPUs and hard drives and has no physical presence, a brain without a body. Then there are engineers and scientists trying to create a realistic human body that can jump and spin and run and pick up things like humans do, but it would just be executing pre-programmed commands with no intelligence other than what is needed to maintain balance and identify obstacles. The Holy Grail would be to combine the two, a human-replicated personality inside a human-replicated body. Despite what Hollywood would have us believe, this electric dream is still a long way off, but as technological advances accelerate, so does the pace at which this goal can be achieved.

Tech CEO/celebrities like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos make frequent public proclamations about the future and also devote a lot of resources to making their visions come to life. It almost feels inevitable that, barring a cataclysmic global disaster or societal collapse, that we will one day have robots walking among us, fulfilling a number of duties.

So what should we as Christians make of this? The Bible doesn’t speak directly about AI or androids, but it speaks volumes on the hearts and hands of the people who would make it a reality. It is clear from Scripture that God created us to do work. He didn’t put Adam and Eve in the garden and tell them to just enjoy the view; He told them  to work the land (Gen. 2:15). Several Bible passages warn against laziness and extol the virtues of work (Prov. 21:25, 1 Thess. 4:11, 2 Tim. 2:6, and many more). This doesn’t mean that we must all be manual laborers and any automation is bad, but I don’t think that living like the porcine blubbards in the movie Wall-E is what God had in mind for the human race. There is satisfaction in a job well done and that is how God intended for it to be.

What about morally dubious interactions with robots? Is it really cheating to have intercourse with an android? What about a lonely soul who falls in love with an artificial person? What about platonic friendship? Who wouldn’t like to have a bond like Captain Picard and Data?

God created us as sentient beings with physical and emotional capabilities and needs. We have no assurance that these needs will be fulfilled, but Psalms 37:4 tells us to delight in the Lord, and He will give us the desires of our heart. The key is “delighting in the Lord,” finding serenity and satisfaction in Him. Perhaps He will then reward you by fulfilling your desires, or perhaps you will find that the things you desire are not worth pursuing after all. Craving sexual satisfaction to the point of sleeping with an android is not a godly desire. Finding emotional and relational connection with artificial intelligence is a bit stickier, especially since some people have impairments or are too isolated to allow for normal human contact. But heaven forbid this should ever become commonplace. How sick would our society be when people actually prefer the company of soulless, factory-made machines to living, breathing people knit in the womb by God’s hands?

I know I probably sound like a stodgy old man grumbling about the technology steamroller, but as we have already seen in countless instances, technology can easily lead to greater isolation and emotional distance, despite physical proximity. Most of all, it can be an idol, and there is nothing we humans love more than worshiping ourselves.

Every once in a while, I’ll encounter people questioning the validity of fiction as a mode of communicating genuine truths.

Generally it’s the kind of doubt-casting that falls along the lines of whether writing is better as art or entertainment.

If it’s the latter, communicating something of substance is secondary.

If it’s the former, then it is absolutely essential. Good art always leaves those who engage it with something more than when he or she came upon it.

For most people reading this article, its fundamental question is probably a non-issue. Of course we can enjoy fictional stories and convey truth.

This week we feature Brett Armstrong and his novel Day Moon in Lorehaven Book Clubs. Stop by the flagship book club on Facebook to learn more about this story.

Subscribe to Lorehaven Magazine for free to download our new summer 2018 issue.

There is, however, a counter-argument worth addressing. All stories are abstractions of reality. The problem with abstractions is that they can actually come to supersede that which they represent. A strong example is The Hunger Games. If you read those books it is absolutely apparent Suzanne Collins does not think the world as it is functions in an acceptable manner.

Most of western civilization is more or less guilty of the villainy charged to The Capitol. Yet one would not know that from all of the fanfare, marketing, and bedazzling array of superficiality surrounding the movie adaptations of those books. There were cosmetics lines released as movie tie-ins. Red carpet premieres featured the standard, “Ooh, what is she wearing?” and “Who did he bring to the premiere?” type media noise. Spectacle, ignorance of want, and surfeiter are all put on trial through the course of the series. For all their clear themes and underlying messages, life imitated the art critiquing it.

A novel about genuine problems in the world shouted them in print, but it got lost in the adoration for the abstraction itself. Western culture seems to be battling the tendency to engage in endless distraction and self-interest at a moment’s notice.

In this light, abstractions seem like a bad thing and it presents a particular problem for Christian fiction, in that we tend to expect to emerge on the other side of it with something gained. As well we should. If reading fiction can shape our perception of reality and values—see the explosion of people interested in survival skills and archery after The Hunger Games—then it needs to be more than mental candy. If every Christian novelist just moved on to writing non-fiction, the problem would be solved, right?

A strategic withdrawal is unwise, because abstraction is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, if you agree with Plato, C. S. Lewis, or the Book of Hebrews, abstractions—shadows—are an integral part of understanding reality. Not just fiction pointing to the present world, but the present world to Heaven. That is a strong argument in favor of Christian fiction. Consider a well-known verse:

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.”

(Hebrews 11:1, KJV)

An elegant summary of every Christian’s lifeline: faith.

If you’re like me, there have been more than a few times when it was a challenge relying on the spiritual substance born of hope and evidence for unseen realities. Our senses are our pitons in the real world. Anytime we have to trust something that isn’t anchored through those senses we’re uncomfortable. After all, letting go of what’s holding you to a cliff face is a good way to fall.

Except, that’s exactly what God asks of us: trust a different set of anchor points, ones not forged from our senses.

Which also makes sense (pun intended). For the greater realities unseen we need links formed from the same. The Lord asks that we trust Him to keep us on the rock face.

“An intriguing masterpiece of character relationships, marked by deception and betrayal, displays authentic human interactions and motivations on the story’s canvas.” — Lorehaven Magazine

My novel Day Moon is woven through with this notion of trusting the unseen. And not only doing so, but doing it when it seems foolish and others are happy to point it out.

The protagonist, Elliott, is living in the near future. As a prodigy working on a global software initiative, Project Alexandria, he’s more than familiar with the arguments against faith in God. He might have no faith himself, but for the influence of his grandfather. Which is fitting. Before being in an accident, Elliott’s grandfather left a series of clues and through them Elliott realizes there’s something sinister about Project Alexandria. Those clues are the only thing keeping him one step ahead of the authorities, even as they lead him further and further into the wilderness and deeper and deeper into questions of whether the reality he’s known his whole life is truthfully real or not.

Elliott can’t communicate face-to-face with his grandfather. He does know his grandfather’s character and he has the clues left for him. In effect Elliott is walking by faith.

It’s not a perfect analogue, but in writing the story, I found it so similar. There is so much to distract in Elliott’s world, so many voices he could listen to, telling him to give up. I like to think of it in terms of a signal, an electromagnetic wave bearing vital information being sent out. The messages of truth, and the Truth in particular, issue forth with a coherent signal. It’s not for lack of clarity that the latter is misunderstood or misinterpreted. Many elements of this world act like background interference. Introduce enough of it into a system and the signal you want can get lost. Faith helps us filter through the noise to find that signal again.

Stories are by their nature shadows, abstractions of the real world. Traditional dystopia tells us that if these shadows remain unaltered, then comes tragedy. Day Moon is a tragedy where reality and truth and faith are almost lost, but Elliott and his group are hanging on to the signal, to the substance of that which they hope for and the evidence of the unseen. As Christian fiction, it can use an abstraction to point to the greatest reality.

My prayer is traversing the abstracted world of Day Moon will help someone to hang on to the Faith and not lose sight of that which we see in shadow now.

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“An intriguing masterpiece of character relationships, marked by deception and betrayal, displays authentic human interactions and motivations on the story’s canvas.”
— Lorehaven Magazine

Explore Brett Armstrong’s novel Day Moon in the Lorehaven Library.

Read our full review exclusively from the summer 2018 issue of Lorehaven Magazine!

Special thanks to all who entered the 2018 Spec Faith Summer Writing Challenge and to all who gave their feedback in the preliminary rounds.

As in other writing challenges, we had a lot of 2018 entries that received a high number of pluses. Clearly these were strong submissions, many from writers who haven’t entered this contest before. I hope the writing challenge has encouraged and inspired each to continue developing their storytelling skills.

I was especially intrigued by the wide variety of 2018 entries—some science fiction, one involving a dragon, one with merfolk, even a contemporary. In many stories Bran was the king’s son, but in another he appeared as his brother. Some developed him as the king’s ally, but a number had the two as enemies. One even developed Bran as a female character. (I actually thought we might have more entries that went that direction, so that was interesting, too). All in all, I find the creativity of the authors who entered our 2018 Summer Challenge to be wonderful. That they could all take the same opening line and do such different things is impressive.

As always, we’ve selected the three 2018 finalists whose submissions received the most positive responses over these past two weeks. So here, in alphabetical order by last name, are your 2018 Summer Writing Challenge finalists: L. C. Crouch, Cathy H., and Zachary Totah.

All that’s left is to select the winner. Choose from these three entries and vote in the poll at the end of this post for one entry you think is best.

The entry receiving the most votes will be the winner, and the author will receive a $25 e-gift card from either Amazon or B&N. (In case of a tie, I’ll draw for the winner).

Voting will last until midnight (Pacific time), Sunday, August 12.

And now the finalist entries:

By L. C. Crouch

If only Bran could stop the king, but he was too powerful, too sure he was right, Pallas thought as he reassured his stallion. The horse was uncharacteristically frightened by the cacophony of the battle in the valley below them.

“Father, this battle was not appointed to us,” Prince Bran pleaded, his voice heavy with concern.

The sun glinted beneath them, dimmed only by blood staining sword and armor alike.

“As Commander of the Guard I must agree with Prince Bran. This battle has not been granted to us to fight. We will be risking many lives and forego the protection of The Sovereign,” Pallas said.

King Caelan’s enormous, black steed pawed the ground, nostrils flaring, his coat glistening with the king’s heraldry.

King Caelan raised a battle-scarred hand. “I grow weary of arguments. Our neighbors fight for their freedom, and we will bear the burden of battle with them. Surely the nobility of our cause will please the Sovereign!”

Who was more eager for battle, the King or his steed?

“I beseech you, King Caelan, heed the Word of The Sovereign. He has not ordained this battle and that which He has not ordained, He will not bless!” Pallas tensed, awaiting the king’s wrath.

“Sound the charge!” The king drew his sword and pointed it towards the heavens, shouting, “For The Sovereign!”

The trumpets sounded, and his horse reared, intoxicated by the thrill of impending battle. The twang of bowstrings sounded a sharp staccato to the arpeggios of the king’s trumpets as arrows left their nocks. The king and his steed fell, still and silent.

King Bran commanded his troops to retreat. Raven eyes dampened with mourning, he dismounted to close his father’s eyes, and repeated, “That which The Sovereign has not ordained…”

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