The abstract for his last book starts like this: “A blab droid is a robot with a body shaped like a pizza box, a pair of treads, and a smiley face. Guided by an onboard video camera, it roams hotel lobbies and conference centers, asking questions in the voice of a seven-year-old. “Can you help me?” “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?” “Who in the world do you love most?” People pour their hearts out in response. This droid prompts the question of what we can hope from social robots. Might they provide humanlike friendship?”
Campbell thinks not. He has a philosophical reason, and it’s very plausible.
Bless me, blab droid, for I have sinned…
But I got stuck at this intro. WHY do people pour their hearts out to the blab droid? Do we, as the Catholic church discerned, have an inate desire to confess? Or are we all such egotists that we can’t help talking about ourselves? And like social media, the blab droid raises an ethical question. What happens to the answers it receives? What happens to the DATA? If you tell the blab droid/confessor your secrets, where do your secrets go? Who gets to access them, and what will they do with them?
Forget the droid, and its fascinating ability to expose the universality of both human egotism and loneliness. Social media is the real blab droid, and it doesn’t even need to ask us questions in little girl voices to make us confess. But the same issues apply. Where does the data go? What happens between me posting this on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg banking his next billion? Shouldn’t we know?
This is, I suppose, the first evidence of the work on Buddhist Futurisms that I’ve been doing for the past half decade or so. It had an eventful pre-publication history, actually. At one point, it was destined for a book, but that failed to transpire. On another occasion, it was repeatedly sent back for corrections by Reviewer Number Two (accursed be thy name!) for failing to cite his (it was a he) own research. Which wasn’t remotely relevant.
Anyhow, this is the overly-detailed explanation for why this is only appearing something like four years after being written. I’ve not been lazy. There is much more to this project, including multiple other publications already scheduled.
But it is gratifying to see the first bit in print. Last year I missed out on a big scholarship, primarily because there was no evidence I knew anything about Buddhism or had ever researched it. So at least now that evidence exists, albeit a little later than useful, to me anyhow, but hopefully not for others.
It actually tells an interesting story, which is not something one expects of academic writing generally. It’s a positive story too, of negative stereotypical preconceptions being overturned by a cultural encounter which shapeshifted into an ongoing interaction of mutual benefit between Buddhism and the West, and America in particular.
SF often envisages a post-religious future. In other words, it often fails to foresee a role for religion in the futures it imagines. Far from always, which is what you might think from most SF criticism, but certainly a lot of the time.
Usually, this is just by simple omission. There is a kind of unexplored assumption of societal evolution that runs from multi-religious (including non-religious as a range of strands among the range of religious strands) present to monothematic post-religious future (often fully automated luxury communism enabled by post-scarcity) without ever explaining the intervening steps.
I wondered if it helps to understand how a post-religious future might come about by considering how a religious past came about out of a pre-religious past. In other words, was there a time before religion, and how was it?
This question arose in my mind when I was reading about Çatalhöyük, widely considered to be possibly the world’s oldest town.
The site in rural Turkey at its peak during the Neolithic era contained a population in the thousands, and there is clear evidence that even at that early moment in human civilisation, ritualistic behaviour was a significant part of people’s lives.
Exactly what that was, is hard to tell. Some people think the town’s residents were goddess worshippers, others feel it was a cult of masculinity, focused on fighting bulls and bears. Mostly, the evidence is open to wide interpretation, but the nature of burials, the room adornments, the special ‘history houses’ and especially the wall art all seem to suggest ritualistic practices, if not actually spiritual ones.
But at what point does ritual activity become religious devotion? There are various schools of thought on that, which I won’t delve into here, but one rule of thumb is the development of dogma and doctrine, ie precepts which are passed down from generation to generation in terms of behavioural proscription, narratives, or a cosmological understanding.
In Çatalhöyük, this may have occurred about half way through the site’s settlement, at around 6500BC, when building use changed, modes of burial and adornment changed, and the site slowly began to depopulate.
Debate has gone back and forth as to what the cosmology or beliefs of the people of Çatalhöyük might have been. Were they goddess worshippers as James Mellaart and Maria Gimbutas believed? Animists? Ancestor worshippers? Shamanistic? A cult of masculine leopard, bear and bull fetishists? One particular opinion stood out to me. M. Bloch wrote a book chapter entitled “Is there religion at Catalhoyuk . . .or are there just houses?” Intriguingly, he concludes there were just houses.
So can we speak of human civilisation BEFORE religion? If so, what do we mean by that? And if we can speak of human civilisation before religion, does that give us any clues, however dim and distant the archeology may be, as to what civilisation AFTER religion might look like?
Furthermore, Bloch’s position is heavily contested, and many scholars insist in various ways, basing their arguments on evidence such as the burial practices, figurines, wall paintings and animal skulls, that religious practice WAS central to the residents of Çatalhöyük some 8,000 years ago.
Fundamentally, in terms of religious futurism, the question I’m asking is whether religious faith is somehow inherent to the human psyche, or at least to sufficient human psyches in any particular polity to make it a significant presence?
We can see from the histories of the great atheistic communist regimes of the twentieth century, all of which sought to suppress religion and clergy of various ilks, that religion in recent times has proved strangely resilient under state disapproval, despite Weber’s disenchantment of society and the slow ebbing away of faith practitioners in Western countries with freedom of worship.
Most SF, as I noted above, tends to envisage a future without room for faith, often predicated on the Enlightenment idea that eventually science will provide answers to our deepest questions. These ubiquitous attempts to depict a future without religion in some senses may well be the most speculative and imaginative SF concepts of all.
More intriguing to me are the narratives in which SF alterities, whether artificial life or alien, emerge with either an attachment to terrestrial religion or else a faith format of their own. These seem to me to be more plausible than the idea that society will at some point casually jettison as retrograde the accumulated cultural capital and transcendence attached to the faith experience.
They are also more plausible than Bloch’s suggestion that houses which contained the bodies of ancestors, imagistic figurines, animal heads and other non-practical items were as he says “just houses”.
Maybe human civilisation and the religious impetus (setting aside its truth content as being a matter for the individual to invest in or not, as the case may be) are intrinsically entwined. We can presume that religiosity predated Çatalhöyük.
Even if we accept that Çatalhöyük was, as Bloch argues, “just houses”, it eventually fell into disuse as a residential site and that region of Turkey is today rather devoutly Islamic (having experienced no doubt many differing religious beliefs in the interim). Let’s agree with him and accept that they were, as far as we can tell, non-religious. Who knows what faiths or beliefs lurked in the hearts of those who, like devout Orthodoxy during the Soviet era, kept their dangerous thoughts to themselves?
If religion is somehow inherently human, would becoming truly post-religious require us as a species to become truly posthuman? Could we, in fact, define posthumanism in terms of non-religiosity? Must we become posthuman in order to become post-religious? And how might we do that?
We are pleased to announce a call for papers for a forthcoming collection of essays on the broad topic of Religious Futurisms, to be edited by Sumeyra Buran Utku and Jim Clarke.
Religious Futurisms derives its intellectual inspiration from the emergence of Afrofuturism and other Alternative Futurisms as ideological and analytical frameworks in recent years. Religious Futurisms can manifest as ideology, criticality, prophecy, futurology, philosophy or artistic practice. They may be discerned in a wide range of forms, ranging from speculative theology to performative videogame interaction to abstract or polysemous imagery in visual art.
Fundamentally global and interdisciplinary in nature, Religious Futurisms encompass not only attempts within theology to reframe and examine faith-based futures, but also the lengthy tradition of revelatory knowledge forms as theme and mode within speculative fiction and other texts and formats of speculative artistic expression, such as film, television, music, gaming, comics, graphic novels, visual and conceptual art, theatre and poetry.
Faith-related themes and narratives have proliferated in speculative fiction since its earliest manifestations, and feature heavily in some of SF’s most popular and influential texts, such as Dune, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. However, Marxist and materialist modes of academic critical analysis have tended to shy away from addressing Religious Futurisms. This volume of essays seeks to address that gap in scholarship.
In this first attempt to codify and taxonomise the various strands and manifestations of Religious Futurism, the editors invite abstracts for essays which address any of the following topics:
Futurological approaches to existing terrestrial religions in artistic expression.
Futuristic approaches to theology.
The depiction of religion or faith in speculative artforms.
The intersection of Religious Futurism with other Futurisms, such as Afrofuturism, Sinofuturism, Chicanofuturism and so on.
The intersection of Religious Futurism with other emancipatory ideological modes of analysis, such as gender studies, queer studies, critical race theory, disability studies, etc.
Religious futurism and utopia or dystopia.
Posthumanism or Transhumanism and Religious Futurism.
Cyberpunk and Religious Futurism.
Islamofuturisms, Sufi Futurism, and their relationships with Gulf Futurisms.
Judeofuturisms.
Futurisms of Christianity.
Futurisms of religions of sub-continental origin – Hindufuturism, Buddhist futurism, Sikh futurism, etc.
Religious Sinofuturism and other East Asian religious futurisms, such as Taoist Futurism and Confucian Futurism.
Religious Futurism in Techno-Orientalism.
Indigenous belief futurisms and Shamanic futurisms.
Mystical, Esoteric and Mythic Futurisms which relate to religious belief.
The depiction, reception, repurposing or Alienating (attributing to aliens) of antiquated or ancient faith systems (Egyptian, Sumerian, Mesopotamian, Nordic, Greco-Roman, Animist, etc) in futuristic cultural works.
Invented religions and theology in speculative fiction and speculative artforms.
The development of real-world faith practices out of speculative fiction and other speculative artistic genres, for example Jediism.
Conceptualisations of Alien or Artificial Intelligence revelatory practices, faiths and religions.
Messianics, Apocalypse, Rapture, Chiliasm, Millenarism, or other faith future endpoints in speculative artforms and fiction.
Speculative religious cosmology and cosmogony.
Speculative exegetical forms, such as Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, or Erich Von Däniken’s paleo-contact Biblical hypotheses.
Conversion, proselytising and dogma in religious futurisms.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a 100 word bio and affiliation by December 1st 2021. We aim to inform successful contributors by January 31st 2022, and completed drafts of 5,000 – 7,500 words will be required by May 31st 2022.
In that they offer uncomfortable seating and there’s usually some guy ranting incoherently while everyone else avoids eye contact.
Also, you wait ages for one and then a whole bunch arrive at once.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, relating primarily to parenthood, emigration and writing commitments, I’d not actually been to a conference in over a year, until I was invited to take part in this excellent one-day event on Literature, Cultural Studies, and Translation. It was my first conference held in Cyberspace, so I finally got to experience the Zoom fatigue everyone else has been complaining about for 18 months.
Speaking on Nadsat in translation alongside Benet Vincent.
Anyhow, it was an excellent, eclectic and engaging experience, for which I must thank the organisers at Cappadocia University. And it has spurred me into action to do a few more. Often, one thing which precluded attending conferences was the same reason which rendered them appealing – that you had to visit a different location. The upside to Zoom-fatigue conferencing is the same as the downside – it can and will be done from one’s back bedroom. So, newly emboldened, I’ve re-engaged on the conference circuit and have a few abstracts accepted already for the forthcoming year, primarily on religious futurism topics.
Next up is an especially busy conference, as I’ll be presenting not one but two papers in two days. I’d link to SFRA 2021, except you have to be a member and pay to attend. If that is you, then please pop in to listen to my papers. I hope you find them interesting.
I’ve already mentioned the first paper here, which will examine Israel in Alt-History. The other relates to my long-running SF and Buddhism project and takes us up to the Sixties:
There is, of course, four days worth of exceptional SF research, not to mention roundtables, keynotes and discussion. If you’re not an SFRA member, you should definitely consider joining and (virtually) coming along to the conference. There are too many papers I’m looking forward to hearing (childminding permitting) but most of all I’m excited about my fellow panel members. I’m on two amazing panels, one on Israel and Palestine in SF and one on religious futurisms.
We might even have a little announcement to make too. More of that after the event.
It’s especially gratifying to see oneself mentioned, not only in Chiara Crosignani’s conference report about “Fantastic Religions and Where to Find Them”, from Genzano a couple of years ago, but also in Derek Thiess’s imaginative and very current article about preppers and the apocalypse.
As always, there’s a bumper smorgasbord of non-realist writing to be enjoyed, from the Gothic to SF, from Britain’s haunted forests to Stanislaw Lem. Over 280 pages in fact!
I’m personally saving up, like a child hoarding his easter egg, their review of the Korean SF anthology Readymade Bodhisattva for after I finish reading the collection.
Fantastika is always an excellent read, and in these days of outrageous access charges for academic research, it’s delightfully free to read.
Karma, they say, is a bitch. But karma is also a balancing act, a mode of returning one’s energy back to you.
I’ve been fascinated about religious futurisms for some time now, and already wrote a book about SF’s engagement with Catholicism. Since then, I’ve been working on SF and Buddhism, and anyone who’s heard me talk about it knows that I’m putting a lot of energy out there about it, because it’s something I think is fascinating, culturally complex, and also important for how we develop collectively as a society.
That energy karmically returned to me the day I got an email from Eric Molinsky, who runs one of THE best podcasts anywhere, the Imaginary Worlds podcast. It really is essential listening. Eric’s an old pro from the New York radio scene, and his ability to produce magical radio has reincarnated in his new role as host and producer of Imaginary Worlds.
So now you can join the people who’ve heard my energy about SF and Buddhism, because Eric only went and did an entire episode of Imaginary Worlds about exactly that. Better again, he got some absolutely phenomenal SF writers to talk about it too, including one of my favourite authors, Ramez Naam.
The episode is here, and if you rummage around in Eric’s archive, you’re bound to find a load more interesting episodes to occupy your lockdown time.
I’m billed in the podcast as a professor at Coventry University, which isn’t accurate, as I haven’t risen to such nosebleed heights (yet!) and I’m also no longer in Coventry. That’s my karma, I guess.
It takes a brave writer to rewrite the Bible, and perhaps a foolhardy one to invent his own macaronic dialect in so doing.
The latest article on Anthony Burgess’s invented languages at Ponying the Slovos examines how he attempted to evoke the linguistic milieu of the time of Christ in both TV and novel forms.
The MOSF Journal of Science Fiction has produced a fascinating special edition volume focused on what they term Middle Eastern SF (though the inclusion of an article on Iranian ‘theory fiction’ writer Reza Negarestani suggests a somewhat expansive understanding of Middle East).
It’s not especially focused on religious futurism, despite the inclusion of a review of Jorg Determann’s book (my own review of which is pending publication in the next edition of Foundation.)
Nevertheless, there is much of interest here for those curious to know more about Arab futurism, Gulf futurism and the interactions between Israeli and Palestinian SF especially. Highly recommended.
