ArmadilloCon 2010: religion in worldbuilding

Official synopsis: "Religion plays a part in worldbuilding, but if you just lift aspects of current religions, they may not fit well into the world you are creating. How can religion be added without making it a caricature?"

I thought this synopsis contained a nugget of unintended irony. Why would it be difficult to include it in your SF or fantasy world without making it a caricature? Could it have to do with absurdity of most religious beliefs? Unless your religion is so vague that it limits itself to a largely indifferent, hands-off Creator, it can be characterized by Heinlein's famous quote: "one man's theology is another man's belly laugh". Ironically, your readers might think that a supernatural being you created is ridiculous, but the one they believe in is not, though they differ only in details.

Mikal Trimm, Matt Cardin, and Matthew Bey on Religion in Worldbuilding panel.

Somebody in the audience held Frank Herbert's "Dune" as an example of a SF novel in which religion is done very well. Fair enough -- I don't remember it being ridiculous. Somebody else mentioned an Arthur C. Clarke's story that incorporates religion very well. In that story, missionaries go to a distant corner of the galaxy to preach their religion, and reach a star system where all life went extinct thousands of years ago when the star went supernova. Turns out, that was the Star of Bethlehem. I think the story makes a good point, but it avoids making a religion look like a caricature at the cost of making it look ironic, arbitrary and cruel -- just like in real life. So that was probably not the point the panelists were trying to make.

I was disappointed how one or two people in the audience perpetuated the myth that the "New Atheists" are just as fundamentalist as religious fundamentalists. But it wasn't the right place to get into that debate. However, I had a chance to pitch my Science and Religion in Fiction book club to the audience (well, it's not mine, it's part of Center For Inquiry, but I'm the organizer), and I got a few people interested. Whether any of them will ever make an appearance at our meetings, is anybody's guess. (Mine is "no". :-))

More on the similar topic: my blog post on Creating a Believable Religious Society: an ArmadilloCon 2004 panel .

Pictures from Armadillocon 2010 are in my photo gallery.

ArmadilloCon 2008: Getting the Biology Right in SF

On "Getting the Biology Right in SF" the panelists skewered writers for common biology-related blunders we see in books and movies. The aspects of biology covered in this panel ranged from human anatomy and physiology to ecology.

As an emergency room physician, Kimberly Frost was uniquely qualified to educate writers on what kind of injuries a protagonist could sustain and still survive. One of the highlights of the panel was her showing the audience how far her blood would spurt if the arteries in various places of her body were cut. The panelists noted that there are lots of individual differences in how much bodily damage a person can incur and survive, but feats like jogging 500 miles with a gushing wound (one of the panelists has actually read a story where this happened) is flat out impossible. Yet human body is capable of less ridiculous, but still impressive performance under duress. Paige Roberts told a story about her ex-husband, who had half of his right hand blown off by enemy fire; the bullet severed the nerves that controlled the two outermost fingers, but he still had control of his index finger. So he clamped the wound down with his other hand and kept shooting, and saved a dozen soldiers' lives. In a few hours, though, he was flat on his back in a helicopter, being medevac'ed. Adrenaline can only take you so far.

Kimberly Frost has first-hand familiarity with what happens when movies and books use medical facts irresponsibly. For example, too many times in the movies you see people breaking the glass with their limbs when they want to break into a house or out of it, and the glass just breaks away. But in reality it doesn't work that way. Kimberly has seen people who tried to do it: some of them cut themselves only superficially, and doctors were able to fix them up, but others cut their tendons that way. Paige writes erotica, and she is careful not to give readers ideas to try things that would be very dangerous in reality -- like bondage with a rope tied around one's neck.

Later Paige Roberts and John Moore got into an animated argument on whether the difference between your and opponent's body mass is a deciding factor in winning a fight. John Moore argued that it was; Paige, who's done martial arts, thought other factors matter more. She said she would have little difficulty throwing a tall, muscular guy across the room, but would find it impossible to do the same to a short person with a low center of gravity.

On the ecology front, one the most interesting observations was the one Kelly Persons made about Frank Herbert's "Dune". "Dune" is often praised for its ecological theme, but the problem with Dune is that it doesn't have any ecology. "It's a planet with one species on it. There's no energy input into the Dune world," Kelly said. It takes a lot of energy to power a worm that's as big as a locomotive to move underground. What did worms eat? And where does the oxygen come from, given that it's a desert planet? John Moore asked.

Why is carbon, not silicon the basis of life? was a question from the audience. Because, says Kelly Persons, carbon is able to form long chains, while silicon can't. A combination of silicon and oxygen can form long chains, but only under certain conditions. If you are writing about an alien silicon-based life form, the temperatures on the planet where it evolved would have to be very different.