Interpretations of "Aye and Gomorrah" and the implications on the Gay Rights Issue

In the sci-fi short story "Aye and Gomorrah," there are two races that have no gender identity, and are exiled from mainstream society because of it...but that is only the tip of the iceberg with this story. The story, written in 1967, was written during the fallout from the Stonewall Riots in New York City, starting the modern gay rights issue in full force, which continues to this day. In the 1960s counter-culture movement, the gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals really started campaigning for their rights, following on the trail of the black civil rights movement and the women's rights movement. The fact that a biblical title was used by the author, in reference to a specific event in the Bible that wiped a city out for its sexual sins, seems to imply that the events of the 1960s and Stonewall were of significant importance to the author in writing the story, mainly in the fact that the author himself, Delaney, was gay, and the issue of gay rights was therefore very poignant to him, especially during the 1960s, when the idea of gay rights had first become mainstream, although gays, prior to the 1930s and the religious revival, had never been stigmatized too much, as shown in the book "Gay New York," about the history of homosexual inhabitants of Manhattan and New York City in general.

Happy Friday! New post about speculative history

Rome, one of the world's greatest civilizations, lasted as a Republic or Empire in some form for more than 1800 years, from 500 B.C. to 1453 A.D, but after 476 A.D., only the Eastern half of the Empire persisted, with the deposition of Romulus Augustus by the German warlord Odoacer in 476 A.D. The question I ask is this: What if Rome survived the crisis of the 5th century A.D., and continued to exist as a unified but jointly-ruled state, centered in Rome and Constantinople? There are numerous ways that this could have happened, but the most likely one is if the Romans had conquered Germany and not made the grievous error of underestimating Hermann, or "Arminius," the long-haired German king and fierce enemy of Rome, who slaughtered General Varus' legions at Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9, drawing the Roman border west of the Rhine. Let's say, for instance, that Germany was conquered and Rome managed to win in A.D. 9. What consequences would a Roman Germany have for  Europe? The short answer is...huge. Germanic culture was very, very different than Roman culture, German language and runes looked and sounded totally different than the Roman alphabet and Latin, not to mention English is derived from Anglo-Saxon, which wrote in Germanic runes, so if Germany was conquered, there would be no modern English language, we would all speak Latin or some variant of it, and sound very much like modern Italians. The Germanic culture of heroism, brotherhood and the Comitatus, or "band of brothers" as seen in later Anglo-Saxon literature such as "Beowulf," would have been crushed, so there would be no Anglo-Saxon culture, German culture, Scandinavian culture or Slavic culture, Europe would have been completely Latin, under Roman control. Even with the introduction of Christianity, and the abandonment of pagan gods, the religion would have been instituted homogenously across Europe by Constantine the Great in the fourth century A.D., and all of Europe, Asia Minor, the Levant and North Africa would be made Christian in one fell swoop, therefore, missionaries and Christian crusades would never have been necessary, and neither would the Inquisition. There would be no Dark Age, no witch trials, no Renaissance and no Enlightenment, as there would be no need for Roman and Greek knowledge to be revived or re-propagated. Technology, science, philosophy, and progress would have continued unabated, and the crisis of the 5th century would have never happened at all, as there would be no barbarians to threaten the might of Rome. The empire would still have likely been divided along east and west to make governance easier, but the authority would still lie firmly in the hands of the Emperor in Rome. With the conquest of Germany and the vast forests of the Haidnur, the Old German word for a "black forest," Rome could build a massive Navy as well as its marching Legions, and huge ports would have been built all along the Roman coastline, to conquer new lands on overseas routes. Countries like China, India, Japan and the coasts of Africa, and yes, even the Americas, would have trembled in fear of the Roman Legions. They would have brought Christianity to those lands hundreds of years earlier than in the actual timeline of history, and established the Roman Colonial Empire, circa 900 A.D., consisting of coastal China, Japan, Korea, India, the coastline of Africa and North and South America. East Asia would have evolved as a mix of mostly Roman and some remnant Asian culture, creating an environment completely foreign to us today. The Romans would have forced all conquered people to learn Latin and enslaved millions of Japanese, Chinese, African, Indian and Native American peoples to maintain the Empire. The Japanese bathhouses would have been sacked by the Legions, the beautiful cherry groves of Kyoto burned to the ground, and any resistance to the might of Rome would have been completely and utterly destroyed. There would have been no British Raj, no French Revolution, no Napoleon, no Kaiser Wilhelm, no Columbus, no Cortes, no Pizarro, no Otto von Bismarck, and no Hitler. So, to summarize, if Germany had lost that battle in A.D. 9, the world today would likely be dominated by a uniform, Roman dictatorship that had kept the peace for more than 2,500 years, everyone would speak a language similar to Italian, and we would all be Christian, or whatever the Caesar in Rome said we were. An interesting thought, indeed.

Interpretations of Evolution From Science Fiction

In the 19th Century, Darwin published his landmark books, "The Origin of Species," and "The Descent of Man," and changed the way we saw life and its origins. In 2013, the theories are now more accurately described as "theorems," as is, theories that are so well-demonstrated to be true that any questions of their validity must be very, very convincing to disprove the theorem, and so far, no anti-evolution claim has ever held up under close scientific scrutiny. In science fiction, SF writers, myself included, tend to extrapolate on trends and evolutionary history, showing how life might look thousands or even millions of years from now. This type of extrapolation is not just the domain of science-fiction, a few years ago, there was even a documentary called "The Future Is Wild," based off of an earlier book by the same author, Dougal Dixon, called "Life After Man." I own DVDs and an electronic copy of the "Future" set and the book, "Life After Man," as well as the book companion to the DVD set, and one can easily see how Dixon, a renowned evolutionist from Scotland, I believe, extrapolated these evolutionary concepts of life into the world as geologists predict it will look, 50 million years, 100 million years, and 200 million years from now, respectively, by using modern science and geology, as well as extrapolating fossils into the future, based on how life has evolved to cope with challenges in the past, to create some truly fantastic environments based on the theorem of evolution. (Incidentally, Dixon has two more E-books out in this same set, called "Man After Man," the future of human evolution, and a book about what dinosaurs might have evolved into in the modern-day, had they not gone extinct, so this extrapolation is not limited to future environments, alternate histories are also very common in SF and other forms of speculative fiction.) Popular examples of evolutionary SF are Planet of the Apes, where apes, enhanced by humans, evolve to take over the world and commit a Holocaust against humans, Miyazaki's Japanese anime classics Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, where animals have evolved human sentience, in the case of the wolves and boars in Mononoke and the "Toxic Jungle" and the sentient Ohm insect monsters in Nausicaa, and various T.V. shows, such as the X-Files "Host" episode and Star Trek: The Next Generation- Genesis Episode. Also, evolution and ecology also play a role in Dune and Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and Andromeda Strain novels, as well as Arthur C. Clarke's trilogy on the colonization of Mars, with the "terraforming" of Mars, or building Earth-like conditions on it. Evolution is a vast concept, and one of the six critical points of Darwinism, outlined by Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, is that it is an ongoing process. Who knows what the future holds, but we know one thing. No species lasts forever.

Egoist Crown: The Sad, Sad Paradox of Society and How it is Damning Itself to Extinction: An Excerpt from My Most Recent Novel/Political Manifesto

Egoist Crown: It is a subset of one of the main principles of Pantheon Cult Doctrine, the Seven Doctrines of Societal Absurdity. The Egoist Crown is represented as an iron crown of thorns over the head of every society that has ever existed. The Egoist Crown is not an actual crown, but a sad paradox of society that dooms every single one that has ever existed to extinction. Since humans are egocentric and care only for themselves in the end, society is corrupt and uncaring, with no helpful individuals at all, and therefore does not deserve to exist. Therein lies the paradox, society is destroying humanity, but it also allows for humans to have an acceptable quality of life, the paradox states that sin is a natural side-effect of society, and that sin in the steel Crown-of-Thorns that society wears for eternity...and the toxicity of its own blood, the blood of the Ideology Fields, that carry the ideals of Mankind around the societal Gestalt, in the same way that blood carries oxygen around the human body, eventually drowns society, causing it to die...except for those that reject tradition and normalcy, those that do not care for society's expectations. Breaking free of the Egoist Crown is not easy, as society is masochistic in this regard, enjoying the pain that the Crown causes because it provides a sense of security. There is no such thing as 'security.' You can die in your own home. Even a police officer or soldier, who are tasked with keeping the Egoist Crown firmly in place, are not safe at all, even though they are safer than most because they are trained to protect themselves and others, but under false pretenses that do nothing except eventually destroy society, rather than save it. Police and soldiers destroy society, rather than save it, the Seven Doctrines make this perfectly clear, and I hope that this message reaches every single human being, if any are left besides us, encouraging mass-disobedience of police and soldiers galaxy wide, if everyone stood against them, the Egoist Crown would fall off like a dead leaf from a tree in autumn, and society would finally be free of its own vices. Our Empire collapsed because of the Egoist Crown, we became a police state, and Emperor Arditi knew it...that's why he abdicated. Not to destroy his own society, but to save it by rebuilding it from the ground up. He should return very soon. What is needed instead of police and soldiers, is a well-educated, well-organized populace, so smart and so powerful that armies and police forces are no longer needed...and now that we have augmentation technology, giving us these wondrous features and abilities, we can achieve that goal, as part of the Paradox of Self-sufficiency and Destruction, of which the Seven Doctrines and the Ideology Fields fall under. This destruction of the Egoist Crown would also mean the end of the Ignorance Paradox, where because of chaos, nothing can ever accurately be known. Aside from natural chaos in the universe, society would no longer have chaotic fluctuations...it would progress ever upward, without a Dark Age ever again. That is the dream I have, and that is the dream King Irkaya has, for all of us, once the Emperor returns... Down with police, down with soldiers, up with Enlightenment, off with the Egoist Crown.”

Religious beliefs in science-fiction: Arthur C. Clarke and the critique of the Church through "Childhood's End"

In Clarke's landmark work, "Childhood's End," where a society of aliens known only as "Overlords" comes down and attempts to guide humanity on the path to enlightenment, Clarke makes some very critical statements of faith and religion in general. In Part I, "Earth and the Overlords," the colonial supervisor Karellen makes a statement on page 23 of the Del Rey Edition, to quote Clarke directly: "You will find men like him in all the world's religions. They know we represent reason and science, and they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily in any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion." Karellen makes this quote in reference to Wainwright, a man who is highly skeptical of the Overlords and uses his faith as justification for portraying Karellen and the Overlords as dictators. This one quote on page 23 sets up a variety of arguments and debates, but the one that Clarke appears to be leaning towards in this passage is that faith, most notably the Catholic Church and any organized institution of religion in general is a dividing force far more often than it is a unifying one. History, something Clarke was very familiar with, given that "Childhood's End" is essentially a parody on Britain's colonization of India, stands by this statement. In the past 500 years, the Catholic Church has killed more than 250 million people, more than the Nazis and Communist despots combined, and upheld beliefs of ostracism, racism, hatred, bigotry, homophobia, anti-Semitism and forced conversion through the Inquisition. The 500 years of warfare between Protestants and Catholics, that reached its zenith in the Thirty Years' War and did not end in Ireland until the 1970s, destroyed so many historical artifacts on both sides, as well as hundreds of pre-Christian, pagan European texts, that knowledge of entire societies may have vanished from human memory. The Catholics say that they are inclusive and tolerant, but Clarke appears to be using Karellen as a vessel for his own opinions on the Church, in that the Catholic Church saying that they are tolerant because they are inclusive is the same thing as Adolf Hitler saying that he was tolerant because he thought all white people were equal. Catholics claim that they strive for a utopia, and Clarke may be arguing that the only true utopian society would be one without the decidedly dystopian reality that institutionalized religion creates, and that the best way to eventually do away with the Church would be to ignore it, as Karellen states on pages 23 and 24.

Romance in Science Fiction: Real or Imagined?

Romantic love is many things, but rarely does it get mentioned in the field of science fiction as a major plot device. More often, a focus on love is found in fantasy or adventure books, but romanticism, the practice of depicting things as they should be, not as they are, happens all the time in science fiction and is quite often extrapolated into a ideological plot device, such as "utopian world" stories, where a main character tries to create a new world where he or she is in control of human ideology and controls the human race's thought processes. This often turns into a dystopian reality, but the ideology is romanticized because the main character is trying to make a world in the way that they think it SHOULD be, not as it actually IS. As far as romantic love is concerned, aside from many popular science fiction examples, for example, the love story between Padme Amidala and Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars, or the Machiavellian pseudo-romance between the two dystopian-society architects Light Yagami and Misa Amane in the Japanese anime series Death Note, there isn't much ground covered in classic science fiction literature aside from a few examples, namely H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. In the most recent movie adaptation of the story, the "Time Traveler," a typical Victorian-era aristocrat from London who has little better to do than discuss philosophy, drink brandy, smoke cigars and build fantastic machines all day, is in love with a beautiful young woman who dies in a mugging on the streets of London, and the Time Traveler attempts to go into the past to rescue her, but she dies over and over again, because due to Einstein's theory of relativity, it is impossible to change the past because it has, obviously, already happened, and that particular time stream has already passed, one cannot change the past, as the Time Traveler said, "I could go back 1,000 times and see her die 1,000 ways." Wells also romanticizes the Eloi and the Morlocks, the Eloi, though very primitive and having "devolved" back to a Stone-Age existence in the year 802,000 A.D. because they saw no need to compete with each other anymore, they are a romantic depiction of a human race where the Eloi live in peace, they do not fight, they have the mentality of innocent children and they do nothing but eat fruit all day, a very idyllic, some would argue even utopian existence, which, aside from the subterranean Morlocks preying upon the Eloi, is relatively unfettered, an embodiment of innocence and Voltaire's ideals of the "Noble Savage." The truth is that romanticism is far more common in SF than romantic love, for reasons that are not quite clear to me, anyway.