I recently moaned pointlessly about The Sparrow, a sci-fi novel that focused far too much on religion to its determent. It wasn’t keeping up with any modern thought on religion, and focusing on the problem of evil.
To which I had only one comment: Good luck with that shit, it will never be solved from a religious point of view.
I was ready to read something completely free of religion, and picked up Afterparty, by Daryl Gregory.
Shit, religion from page one.
Afterparty is set in a world where designer drugs can be printed at will. I love this conceit, as I first encountered it in Jaron Lainer’s wonderful Who Owns the Future (a book which I tell people to go off and read at nearly every conversation) and have been dreaming of the kind of worlds such a setting would create ever sense. It’s a rather real topic to speculate on, which is one reason I read sci-fi in general. In Afterparty, the protagonist is on a mission to find who is manufacturing a drug that she helped to create, in order to put an end to it. The drug ruined the MC’s life in a pretty horrific life, and what it specifically does is seemingly activate a part of the brain responsible for religious experiences.
It’s actually a pretty cool conceit for a story. A drug that tickles the part of your brain that gives you religious experiences. And, in a blink and you will miss it throw away line, a character points out how horrific the implications of that are. Those implications feel like spoilers, so I will leave it at that.
The book shows religion in the modern world done correctly. While the Sparrow looked to an unsolvable Gordian knot of religion, this actually seems to delve into religion in a modern context. This was wonderfully refreshing to read, even though I did cringe a little at the mention of new atheism, and some of its members that were named outright. When there was a religious discussion in the story, it actually seemed like it was relevant to the context of the lives of the characters in the story. This is what The Sparrow lacked. It was just Jesuits in space, who never asked why their guiding book says that world is shaped like a tabernacle.
Afterparty was by no means perfect. The individual events that propel the story forward seem too rushed, there is something of a villain roulette wheel where one never sees who the real culprit is until a lazy last minute reveal, and a blink and you miss it antagonizing force that felt rushed, only to have a sort of ‘no country for old men’ presence in the book. Ultimately I found the ending to be lack luster, and I was wondering what happened to the promises of the book. But it did speak on religion in a way that I thought was modern and interesting, instead of rehashing a problem we have failed to solve since Plato put down Socrates words. I think that might actually be something worth mentioning.
Failures in Polymathy 