Thanks to Ed Brayton for revealing the existence of Anomalos Publishing. This new Christian publisher is excited to announce:
We are working on a project right now with an author who has written a phenomenal piece of fiction that will blow the lid off the creationism/intelligent design vs evolution debate.
I've gotten my hopes up so often that I'm going to wait to see. While authors like Denton, Johnson, Dembski, Behe, Brown and Wells all do well at creating their fictional premise, the actual storytelling gets a bit convoluted and too conceptual. I like the idea of a novel written as if it were a scientific discourse, or as if it were a jeremiad about evolution in a world where logic and data are different from what we know in this world. Unfortunately, these authors didn't quite strike the right balance between the fictive pseudoscience and the necessary self-awareness that the genre relies on. That most of these authors have written sequels of even less literary merit is very disappointing.
Hopefully this new book will be better. Maybe it should involve a curator at the Museum of Natural History getting murdered in front of a Tyrannosaurus fossil, and only through the anagram-solving skills of the protagonist can the murderer be identified and the greater mystery revealed – that a secret group of Catholic Anglican scholars have been tasked with hiding the truth about who (or what!) created life on Earth.
I know that the nugget of the story is embedded in the writings of Billy Dembski, but I think a young, ambitious author could turn that into a decent literary franchise. There might even be a movie in it.
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Christian publihing houses have already written novels that they think of as truth-based fiction : fiction that describes things that have or really will happen. Left Behind is supposed to be that. It's kinda scary.
-Rob (who is a Christan but not of that sort)
I was encouraged to hear an interview the other day on "Fresh Air" (NPR) with the new head of the National Association of Evangelicals. He is one of the "new breed" of evangelicals who rejects Biblical literalism and, most importantly, pre-millennial dispensation. That is the toxic, false theology that says everything that happens on earth is God's will, so there's no reason for human beings to even try to deal with global warming. It's a sign of the Apocalypse a-coming.
B.S.!
Other problems are the scarcity of concepts and the obfuscatory plagiarism that is so common that it has got its own name, "quote-mining". The astonishing insistence out of the blue that other genres 'has problems' doesn't help under the critical eyes of the publishers. But it is the unintelligent design of the plot that ultimately dooms this genre.