The Way the Future Blogs

Here are the answers to last week’s Bible quiz:

Sodomite?

1. a and c. As for stoning on a father’s doorstep, that is the fate of non-virgin brides. (Deuteronomy 22:13.)

2. b. Read the Song of Songs and blush. It also serves as a metaphor for divine relations with Israel or with humans.

3. a, b and c. We forget that early commentators were very concerned about sex with angels (Genesis 6, interpreted in the Letter of Jude and other places) as an incorrect mixing of two kinds.

4. c. “Sodomy,” as a term for gay male sex, began to be used only in the 11th century and would have surprised many early religious commentators. They attributed Sodom’s problems with God to many different causes, including idolatry, threats toward strangers and general lack of compassion for the downtrodden. Ezekiel 16:49 suggests that Sodomites had “pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”

How’d you do? If you didn’t get at least one right, go to the nearest bookstore, pick up a copy of Rev. Knust’s book and study, study, study.

And have a thought for all those poor Tea Party legislators, currently holding back on approval of the raise in the federal debt limit unless great cuts are made in programs meant to aid “the poor and needy.” They probably don’t even know that they’re Sodomites.

 

Well, maybe it isn’t exactly your Bible, because we’ve got a multiple ethnic world these days, but probably you know which Bible we’re talking about. Or what Rev. Jennifer Wright Knust is talking about, anyway, because we’ve borrowed some extracts from her new book, Unprotected Texts.

So here are four questions for you, all multiple-guess to make it easy, because by the law of averages you should get at least one right:

1. The Bible says of homosexuality:

   1. Leviticus describes male sexual pairing as an abomination.
   2. A lesbian should be stoned at her father’s doorstep.
   3. There’s plenty of ambiguity and no indication of physical intimacy, but some readers point to Ruth and Naomi’s love as suspiciously close, or to King David’s declaring to Jonathan: “Your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” (11 Samuel 1:23-26)

2. In the Bible, erotic writing is:

   1. Forbidden by Deuteronomy as “adultery of the heart.”
   2. Exemplified by “Song of Songs,” which celebrates sex for its own sake.
   3. Unmentioned.

3. Among sexual behavior that is forbidden:

   1. Adultery,
   2. Incest.
   3. Sex with angels.

4. The people of Sodom were condemned principally for:

   1. Homosexuality.
   2. Blasphemy.
   3. Lack of compassion for the poor and needy.

All right, pencils down, but wait for the answers until next week when they will probably appear in this space,

L. Ron Hubbard, left, and John W. Campbell

Part 6 of “Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl — The Conversation,” recorded 26 June 1978 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
 

Pohl: I’ve just realized something very significant. Of all the science fiction writers in the English-speaking world who began in the late ’30s and ’40s who have survived since and done reasonably well, there are only two who were not largely and directly influenced by John Campbell. That’s you and me!

John Campbell is the fellow who took science fiction by the scruff of the neck in the late ’30s and changed it. Made it much better. And people like Isaac Asimov and van Vogt and Bob Heinlein, and almost everybody else who really became significant writers around that period owe a great debt to Campbell. They were published primarily in his magazine and got a great deal of advice and guidance from him. And I know I didn’t.

John Campbell was a good friend of mine but he had this one tacky personality trait — he never bought any stories from me! I kept trying but he never would buy them. How about you, Alfie?

Bester: Oh, I had an experience with Campbell! As Fred has said, he really took science fiction by the scruff of the neck and shaped it into something really worthwhile. Up until then it had just been hack writing by guys who were translating westerns into science fiction. Campbell changed all that. He was a great man. I worshipped Campbell, of course.

I wrote a story called “Oddy and Id.” The premise of the story simply was that we are not consciously in control of our actions but this deep Id, this well of primal urges within us, is really in control. I submitted the story to Campbell and got a phone call from him — I’d never met him.

“I want to talk to you about the story. I want to buy it but I want some changes. Will you come and see me?”

“Oh God, yes, Mr. Campbell.” It was when their office was out in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Now, you’ve got to picture me, a guy from Madison Avenue writing scripts; all I know is the networks, the advertising agencies and all that jazz, it’s what I’m used to. I’m also used to the rates that they pay. But I have to meet Campbell.

I go out to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and I come to this goddamn printing plant, this factory, expecting to be ushered into the great office of this great man. But I go into this tacky little office which is about two feet by four feet and here is this guy who is about the size of what we would call in American football, a defensive tackler. He’s about 19 feet high, 47 feet wide, a towering guy. He sits behind his desk and I squirm into the one visitors’ chair.

He says, “Now about your story. Freud is finished!”

Continue reading ‘Me and Alfie, Part 6: John W. Campbell and Dianetics’ »

The Last Days of the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute

Back in Highlands, New Jersey, William Lindsay Gresham was soon forgotten. At least he was not spoken of. Around then, the Mannings became less likely to drop by on a Saturday night. A coolness seemed to have developed between the neighbors. I don’t think that is necessarily a coincidence, but I don’ know any details. Fletcher didn’t want to talk about it, and I didn’t press him.

The weekends were still pleasurable and the company generally good. If there was any significant difference in tone it was only that Fletcher himself seemed to be a little less bouncy in spirit. The billiard-room sessions with the portable typewriter in his lap were going a bit more slowly.

I haven’t, in these pages, said anything about Fletcher’s religion. I haven’t said anything much about anyone else’s, either. Personal religion was not high on the interest list among the people of the Ipsy-Wipsy. But I did know that Fletcher had been brought up Christian Science, back in those Buffalo days of his youth, and that he still had some sort of ties to Mary Baker Eddy’s church. Yet when Fletcher began to concede, under Inga’s questioning, that, yes, it was possible that he’d picked up a mild case of the flu, I was confident that if any symptoms became really worrisome, religion would not prevent Fletcher from taking the matter to a real M.D.

Indeed, it didn’t. But unfortunately Fletcher let it go a bit too late. When the surgeons opened his abdomen up on the operating table there was no longer anything they could do. They simply sewed him back together and let him die, which he did on the 11th of June, in the year 1956. He had been 59 years old.

That was the end of the Ipsy, for Inga didn’t have heart to try to carry it on without him. She put the big old house up for sale, and the buyer who appeared was, I think, a dentist from, I believe, Jersey City. The dentist didn’t have it long, though. Before long in a midweek a fire started there, with hardly anybody around, and the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute suffered a Viking’s funeral,

The dentist tore down the wreckage and put up a more normal-sized house on that great piece of land. But the new house had none of the Ipsy-Wipsy’s magnificence, and especially none of its well-loved people.

 
Related posts:

• Fletcher Pratt, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
• The Ipsy-Wipsy Institute

    William L. Gresham

By the third or fourth year of the Ipsy, the great house in Highlands had pupped a fair-sized litter of clones. There was me and my family in Red Bank, the del Reys a quarter of a mile away, George and Dona Smith in Rumson and, at least briefly, the Kornbluths in Long Branch and the Budryses in Oceanport … and, perhaps most important, the Laurence Mannings in Highlands itself, next door to the Ipsy-Wipsy itself.

When Laurence Manning — Fletcher’s long ago collaborator from the days when science-fiction magazines had the square footage of telephone books (no, not in the number of pages, of course!) — and his family came out for a weekend, they loved the location as well as the company. And when Laurence mentioned that he was looking for a house to buy and move to, Fletcher was quick to say that when he and Inga had bought the Ipsy, they’d bought more acres of land than they had any use for, and the Pratts would be happy to hive off a few acres to sell to the Mannings if they’d care to build a house next door. Which they did, and so the Pratts and the Mannings were next-door neighbors.

Actually that seemed like quite a nice arrangement. Although Manning didn’t have much interest in science fiction anymore he still liked the company of writers, and the conviviality of an Ipsy-Wipsy weekend. And we liked the Mannings.

He knew everything about home plantings, which made him a useful resource for those of us who, like myself, had never had to plant a space much bigger than a windowbox before. He was good company and by no means limited to shop talk. So things went swimmingly, with the Mannings’ house guests walking the couple hundred feet of lawn to the great house next door on Saturday nights … until they didn’t.

Remember that I once said that, with all the social drinking that went on of an Ipsy weekend, I had only once seen anyone unpleasantly drunk?

This was the once. The man in question I did not know well, though I had read some of his work. His name was William Lindsay Gresham.

Continue reading ‘Fletcher Pratt, Part 5: Shadow Over the Ipsy’ »

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

Do you remember the name Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani? Probably not. I didn’t remember it myself until, just now, I had to look it up so I could write this. But she was pretty famous all around the world a few months ago, after a court in Iran convicted her of adultery, and sentenced her to death by stoning.

What happened then was that people all over our planet began making outraged noises about this sadistically savage punishment. Even the president of Brazil — about the only friend Iran has left in the western world — offered to give her sanctuary from the Iranian executioners.

So the Iranians retreated slightly. They changed the charges against her from adultery to murder.

That didn’t mean she wouldn’t be pinned down while bystanders threw cobblestones at her face until, in as much pain as possible, she died. Just that it would be listed on the record as for a different crime entirely.

See, the thing is, I try to give Moslems the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think that belief in the teachings of the Koran is in itself more conducive to encouraging the murder of unbelievers than is belief in the Bible. Indeed, it was the most devout Christians who burned alive the most Moslems, Jews — and Protestants — a few centuries ago. And if we ethnic Christians don’t do that any more, it is — or so I have always told myself — because we’re better educated now. We know the difference between right and wrong. And mad mullahs — or Ku Klux Klan Baptist ministers — can’t whip us up to lynch mobs any more.

Or at least that’s what I’ve always believed. Education is the cure for many evils, including that one.

I still believe that to be true, but I’m beginning to worry a little. According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, 16 percent of Americans believe that what brought the twin towers down on 9/11 wasn’t the jet planes that were on every TV set in America as they crashed, but “secretly planted” explosives, and that this was done in order to make Americans mad enough to go to war in the Middle East.

This, remember, means that out of every six Americans, one would rather believe a preposterous lie than the evidence of what he saw on his own TV.

That’s not all. 18 percent of Americans believe that the sun revolves around the Earth, 24 percent believe in witches and 34 percent believe that UFOs really are alien creatures, and that our government is hiding the evidence.

So maybe even education is not enough to prevent human beings from becoming gratuitous killers.

Oh, wait a minute. I already knew that. Look at Germany in the late 1930s.

 
Then what is?