Disposable Lit Reviews

Questar, 1991
227 pp.
ISBN 0-446-36193-3

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One of the overwhelming flaws of science fiction literature for its first few decades was its absolute refusal to seriously treat religion. This, after all, was the literature of science!, that freeing instrument of rationalism, and all that religious claptrap had no place in it; if religious matters ever came up, they were in the form of closed-minded, anti-intellectual fanatics (a la Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall), who only stood in the way of the clearminded, selfless men of science.

Fortunately, with the genre-wide shakeup of the ’60’s (there were things other than science fiction that were shook up during that time period, I hear), science fiction moved beyond purely technological speculation and into what-ifs involving the “soft” sociological sciences. And little by little, writers came to acknowledge that religion was an ever-present part of human society; a novel set in an alien or future society which didn’t treat religion at all was an incomplete, almost dishonest one.

Greg Bear’s Strength of Stones is one of the books in the first wave of those which treated religion not obliquely, but head-on. The premise in captivating: by the beginning of the 21st century, the world was largely turning against the “Abrahamic” religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — and those three found themselves more closely allied for survival. Eventually, a century later, the adherents of those three faiths purchased a planet of their own, renamed it God-Does-Battle, and set about to make, if not a new Eden, then a New Jerusalem, based on the ties between those three divergent faiths, rather than their divergences.

However, the social planners of this Judaeo-Christian Promised Land were too optimistic in their projections of their posterity. The cities of God-Does-Battle are huge cyborg complexes, charged with the material comforts of their inhabitants as well as their adherence to agreed-upon standards of piety and faithfulness. However, after a few centuries, the cities in concert came to a momentous decisions: Their flawed inhabitants were falling short of the charters of all three religions, and unworthy of residence in them. Therefore, all of the citizens of God-Does-Battle were expelled from the cities, which maintained themselves as empty, self-perpetuating shells while the communities outside eked out an uncomfortable existence, ingraining in their social structure the idea that they were one again thrust from Paradise for unworthiness.

(A note in passing: While I find the premise intriguingly plausible for Judaism and Islam, it’s a little more problematic that Christianity would be on equal footing with the other two, mainly because Christianity, at least as far as its most dedicated adherents and promoters are concerned, is much less an cultural or ethnic body than the previous two. I would venture to say that any version of Christianity which would agree to sequester itself completely from the rest of humanity, excising from its dogma the missionary directives which form some of its earliest and deepest-rooted theology, would be a Christianity modified in notable ways from its current form. Wisely, rather than dealing with this, Bear concentrates most of his attention on characters of Jewish and Muslim descent.)

All of the above is really background. Strength of Stones is a series of sequentially linked stories, less cohesive than a novel but more than a simple short story collection (the best analogies being Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy, or Orson Scott Card’s Hot Sleep), set several hundred years after the “exodus,” with the human societies showing the modifications of centuries in sackcloth and ashes. The cities, too, are changing; being semi-biological constructs, the are succumbing to entropy and death. Also being semi-sentient, the cities are also experiencing their own crises of conscience, since they cannot in good conscience allow flawed sinners back within their walls — but for artificial intelligences designed to serve a populace, do they have any purpose without inhabitants? Thus, the cities are effectively mutating, becoming less predictable and more bizarre as they try to redesign themselves around failures biological, mechanical and psychological.

Given that God-Does-Battle is literally a world founded on religion, every moment of every day of every inhabitant is infused with religious concerns. There is much in this book about duty and belief (as opposed to faith, which surprisingly makes very little showing), about dogma and human inspiration, and about the flaws inherent in humanity — those of the original designers as well as their beleaguered descendents. The central question is largely (and wisely) left unanswered, because its asking is more profound than any pat answer: Can flawed humans, seeking perfection, survive in a world based on their own flawed perceptions of what perfection is?

Nathan Shumate