July 22

GUD Issue #3 Preview

GUD issue 3

Once again GUD is hading out free samples from their upcoming Issue #3. My sample story is “Lacerta – Named by Johannes Hevelius” by J.M. McDermott.

I was a little disappointed, because it’s a poem, and I am horribly picky about the poetry I enjoy. However, the poem reminded me strongly of “Saturn in G Minor” by Stephen Kotowych (Writers of the Future volume 23), altogether not a bad thing as the story didn’t strike me as hard as some of the fiction near it, but has stuck with me more than tales from that volume that I liked more.

This short, short poem captures the stars and the song of poetry, and damned if it isn’t a little bit sexy.

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July 18

Guest Blog: Clamour Underbridge by Rev. Jim Hensley

Jim is a friend of mine who writes a column for The Letter, Louisville’s GLBT newspaper. I really enjoy his essay and asked if I could share. Below is the Clamour Underbridge for July. Past articles can be read at http://clamourunderbridge.typepad.com/clamour_underbridge/

~M

Without Further Ado…

CLAMOUR UNDERBRIDGE

What’s in a Name?

Wedding bells are ringing in California for same-sex and opposite-sex couples.  The clamour is deafening.  You would think it would all be anti-climactic since California already had statewide domestic partnerships.  You would be wrong.  It seems that the little song I learned from Sesame Street is correct.  “One of these things is not like the others.” The Supreme Court of the state of California did not find any logical reason to call “an officially recognized and protected family” one thing for same-sex couples and a different thing for opposite-sex couples.  It’s the name that matters.

The Supreme Court of California failed to address the entrenched and entangled relationship legal marriage has with religion and the churches.  We’ll come back to that.  It’s important.

Let’s hop in the way back machine for a moment and revisit the clamour from another Supreme Court decision.  That one was Loving v. Virginia.  Ring a bell?  It’s from the Supreme Court of the United States and was handed down in 1967.  That decision struck down the Commonwealth of Virginia’s marriage laws that were based on race.  Anti-miscegenation laws were all the rage back in the day.  It was ever so necessary to protect the sanctity of marriage from interracial couples.  Kentucky’s last bite of the miscegenation apple was in 1932 when our legislature, in its wisdom, forbade marriages between whites and “negroes or mulattoes.”  Co-habitation was also illegal.  The punishment was $1000 fine (big money for 1932) and 12 months imprisonment if done “knowingly.”

Here’s what the “activist” court of 1967 said when they overturned the bigoted marriage laws of Virginia, Kentucky and a number of other states:

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival… To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statues, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.  The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination.  Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

The outrage was tremendous.  Inter-racial marriage interfered with “God’s arrangement” of the races on separate continents.  God “separated the races” and “did not intend for them to mix.” It was all very predictable and very sad.  The great state of Alabama fought back by waiting until the year 2000 before taking their inter-racial marriage law off the books.

How very much like the denunciations and outrage over the California Supreme Court Decision?  “God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve.”  “Gay Marriage… The Final Abomination.” How predictable and very much beside the point.  Marriage is a civil contract enforced by the state and entered into between two parties.  “God” is rarely invoked to co-sign loans, liens and other contracts.  How odd that this one requires the Almighty’s seal of approval.

It’s all in the name.  Marriage is something that happens in church.  California and a few other states (Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Oregon, Hawaii, the District of Columbia, Maine, and Washington) tried to keep the church crowd happy by separating church marriage from state civil unions or domestic partnerships.  It’s not working.  Civil unions and domestic partnerships don’t convey the rights and responsibilities of marriage and are mostly ignored by Federal agencies, disapproving businesses and other groups that have a heterosexist agenda.  And in the state of California it was very clear to the Supreme Court that a domestic partnership was separate and unequal to marriage.

Let those wedding bells ring.  The clamour is music to my ears.

~~

While he is co-pastor of Progressive Pathways Fellowship in Louisville at www.progressivepathways.org, opinions expressed by Father Jim do not usually represent the official policy of the church.  Email for Father Jim or Clamour Underbridge may be directed to fatherjimppf@gmail.com. Visit http://clamourunderbridge.typepad.com to post your story about the Queandom or leave a comment.

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July 18

Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams

Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams

Implied Spaces is an incredibly detailed voyage through a multi genre world, shot through with barbs at our own pop culture. It starts with Aristide, a man who comes off like the all knowing NPC at times, traveling through a desert world inhabited by trolls, ogres and other fantasy creatures. With his magic sword and his talking cat Aristide joins a motley crew turning against a large band of thieves and their blue skinned priest overlords who have been attacking caravans and plundering supplies for months.

Did I mention that this is a science fiction novel?

Aristide, it soon turns out, is overly knowledgeable because this fantasy world is actually a constructed world, part of a larger multi-cosim where humans have advanced to the point of being able to “save” their personalities and memories, much like we save games on memory cards. The ability to reincarnate themselves into new, healthy and highly adapted bodies at will has lead to quite lengthy life spans.

Complications arise when the strange blue priests in the world co-created by gamers and anachronists wield the same power as Aristide possesses in his sword, a curious ability to say the least. In fact, the ability leads directly to the more modern world, where Aristide and his allies discover that someone, or something has been funneling humans from the unwired worlds elsewhere and reprogramming them as mental slaves. Call them zombies or pod people, someone, or something is building an army.

This barely scratches the surface though. Implies Spaces is packed with incredible amounts of detail. In the first few chapters the long description in nearly painful detail seems a little odd, but by the time the story stretches into an expansive multiverse the sheer amount of detail makes the story absolutely solid.

Aristides himself is an interesting tool used to establish the limits of the world. Given his position as an aged, respected and highly intelligent member of society unlike many other books on the market Aristide doesn’t have to figure out motives or plots, the reader eventually learns to trust his leaps of logic and suspicions as true. Of course, considering that A.I.s with brains the size of planets exist in these worlds Aristide’s intelligence is quite challenged.

The depth and detail of this book simply cannot be explained in a simple review. Expanding through both social and hard science fiction, as well as touching on mystery and fantasy, Implied Spaces is an impressive tale that’s surprisingly human at its core.

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