Conjunctions

Just made quick stop at my local coffeeshop on Leidseplein, and as I got there a young kid was waiting in line at the counter. I was looking for his diaper – I know, as the years pass I am loosing all ability to distinguish between 14 and say, 18.  I guess youth nowadays dazzles me to the extent that I can no longer notice the details. I’m really fortunate that I’ve always preferred older men to twinks, or this newfound age-blindness could have lead me into serious trouble.

Anyway, at the counter the young twink flashed his ID, all smiles and exuberance.  He just turned 18 today, and it was his first time into a coffeeshop.  Everybody was exceedingly nice to him, congratulations all around, he even got an extra joint as a birthday present, and he left engulfed in the pleasure of having ticked off another symbol of his adulthood. 

Coming of age in Amsterdam, it really is something special.

When in the vicinity I always drop into my local bookstore to check the new SF&F arrivals, and frequently have to suppress an instinctive revulsion when skimming through the truckloads of vampire and undead pulp the publishers see fit to unleash on us.  In this article Hal Duncan dissects the vampire trope and graciously clarifies my own reaction to the subgenre for me.  His analysis ranges from the religious roots of the vampire trope, to its development from Stoker through Rice and the whole Goth/Emo Thing, before dealing with contemporary examples. 

Duncan here confirms what I have always suspected: though the undead drivel itself is indeed offensive, it presents a grateful subject for gender based analysis.  By likening the contemporary vampire to the ‘reformed’ homosexual, he also explains the position this fad occupies in the current political landscape.  The vampire trope often is repressive poison, but it can be interesting if not swallowed.

My interests in current events and science fiction seem to overlap significantly today:   Marc Kaufman reports that the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences held a five-day conference to discuss astrobiology.  The conference focused solely on scientific issues, but speculation abounds about the ethical implications for religion when alien life is finally discovered. Contact related science fiction is rife with examples of religious nuts cracking when the aliens arrive, so perhaps it is prudent of them to prepare for the eventuality.

That the Vatican specifically is taking up the issue is only just.  Two novels that I consider among the top 50 science fiction novels of all time feature Catholic clerics dealing with difficult ethical problems presented by the ultimate Other.  In both James Blish’s A Case Of Conscience (1958) and Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996), a Jesuit priest have to confront the realities of an alien existence that stresses his received beliefs.  Both novels succeed in being more than mere fiction, but are rather fictionalized illustrations of theological arguments.

Kaufman expects that Islam and Mormonism will have fewer problems accepting extraterrestrial life.  I cannot speak for Islam, but I remember a post by Jesus’ General that led to my education on the Mormon belief in God’s home solar system, Kolob.  A cursory glance at the wiki page on Kolob will convince anybody that this is pure lunacy, and as such I cannot imagine the Mormon church being more receptive to alien life.  After all, Kolob may be God’s solar system and all, but once those Kolobians cross the border and ‘take our jobs’ it will be entirely a different matter.