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Catherine Nixey’s first book, The Darkening Age (review), told the sobering story of how Christianity’s rise required the persecution of all opposing beliefs: the destruction of pagan temples and statues, the burning of books, the prohibition of worship.
Her second work, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, focuses on Jesus himself. Nixey observes that, whatever the historicity of Jesus, what we are left with are stories that don’t describe one Jesus Christ, but many.
The bizarre Infancy Gospel of Thomas tells of a son of God who, as a child, kills other children out of spite—reminiscent of Anthony Fremont in “It’s a Good Life” wishing his victims into the cornfield. In the Gospel of Basilides, it’s not Jesus who was crucified, but Simon of Cyrene, while Jesus laughed at him.
Nixey vividly describes the ancient world as a place where the kinds of miracles the New Testament attributes to Jesus were commonplace claims by many self-anointed prophets and miracle workers. Raising the dead, healing the sick? Not a one-time deal.
It’s no surprise, then, that the Acts of Peter describe a magic duel between Simon Magus and Apostle Peter, or that Jesus was sometimes depicted as a wand-carrying wizard by his own followers.
Despite brutal attempts to suppress “heretical” Christian beliefs, Nixey traces the legacy of these sacred texts in literature, art, and surviving Christian traditions like Mandaeism and Ethiopian Christianity. All, of course, view theirs as the orthodox truth.
You’re a wizard, Jesus: In this 4th century depiction, Jesus multiplies loaves and and fishes with a wand.
Like the stories of Jesus, the concept of monotheism itself can be traced to precursor beliefs. Nixey points out that the Bible retains traces of polytheism or henotheism (the worship of one supreme God among many).
One common example is Psalm 82:
“God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.”
But even Genesis, the very foundation of monotheistic belief, refers to other entities alongside God:
“Let us make humankind in our image” (1:26)
“Behold, the man is become as one of us” (3:22)
“Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language” (11:7)
These are extant references to the Canaanite pantheon; before there was one God, there were many.
Catherine Nixey’s Heretic, despite its sometimes acerbic tone, is not an anti-religious book. It simply documents how religious ideas blend and evolve over time. Any one belief, no matter how fervently held, has its (often contradictory) antecedents and descendents.
Looking at this tapestry of belief, anyone can appreciate that there is beauty in it—but also that those who point at one specific sacred text and say “That’s the one, that’s the one worth killing for!” should make heretics out of us all.
Speculative fiction from the era before the moon landing and the exploration of the solar system occupies a special place in my heart.
Writers from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s still dared to dream of life on Mars. Their imaginations had not yet been influenced and constrained by the slow progress of real-world space exploration, or by particular visions of the future like those popularized by Star Trek or The Expanse.
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One was published in 1970 and contains a total of 26 stories first published between 1934 and 1963. The book includes 15 stories selected by a vote of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and 11 stories picked by editor Robert Silverberg.
One cannot pick up such an old collection in 2024 without noticing the all-white and almost all-male selection of writers. The stories themselves, too, reflect the prejudices of their era. In “Helen O’Loy”, the perfect robot wife cooks, cleans, and adulates her husband; in “Twilight”, a time traveler from the future remarks on the wonderful music produced by “semicivilized peoples”.
Nevertheless, this collection includes some stories that are well worth your time. There are the classics that have inspired countless adaptations and imitations: “Microscosmic God” about a scientist who creates a civilization; “It’s a Good Life” about an omnipotent child; “Flowers for Algernon” about an intellectually disabled man who is turned into a genius by way of surgery.
The alien Tweel, depicted here by artist Emmanuel Lafont, is one of the unforgettable characters from “A Martian Odyssey” by Stanley G. Weinbaum. (Credit: Emmanuel Lafont. Fair use.)
The (at least to me) lesser known gems include “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” about children’s toys from the future, “Scanners Live in Vain” about humans bio-engineered to survive space travel, and “Surface Tension” about a civilization of tiny aquatic humanoids and their microbial helpers.
“Scanners Live in Vain” takes an imaginative leap that was still barely plausible in 1953: the idea that space travel causes conscious human beings to suffer and die due to an unexplained condition called “The Great Pain of Space”. Therefore, space travelers have to hibernate under the supervision of caretakers without the ability to feel.
It’s the kind of story unlikely to be written today, but it makes for a fascinating “what if” now. What if space travel had been like that?
Keeping its biases in mind, “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” remains a useful starting point for exploring this era of speculative fiction. Except Silverberg, all the authors have passed away as of this writing. Their influence on how we think about the future — and the past — endures.
The full list of stories:
- “A Martian Odyssey” by Stanley G. Weinbaum
- “Twilight” by John W. Campbell
- “Helen O’Loy” by Lester del Rey
- “The Roads Must Roll” by Robert A. Heinlein
- “Microcosmic God” by Theodore Sturgeon
- “Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov
- “The Weapon Shop” by A. E. van Vogt
- “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” by Lewis Padgett
- “Huddling Place” by Clifford D. Simak
- “Arena” by Fredric Brown
- “First Contact” by Murray Leinster
- “That Only a Mother” by Judith Merril
- “Scanners Live in Vain” by Cordwainer Smith
- “Mars is Heaven!” by Ray Bradbury
- “The Little Black Bag” by C. M. Kornbluth
- “Born of Man and Woman” by Richard Matheson
- “Coming Attraction” by Fritz Leiber
- “The Quest for Saint Aquin” by Anthony Boucher
- “Surface Tension” by James Blish
- “The Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke
- “It’s a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby
- “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin
- “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester
- “The Country of the Kind” by Damon Knight
- “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes
- “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” by Roger Zelazny
The vast number of indie games published every month, on big stores like Steam and on smaller sites like itch.io, can be overwhelming. If a title doesn’t generate a lot of buzz (like Dredge in 2023 or Vampire Survivors in 2022), it’s easy for it to get lost in the shuffle.
Part of the joy of indie gaming is the sense of discovery, when you come across something truly special that very few people are talking about. Debug is a new video game magazine that may reignite that joy among its readers.
Published quarterly out of Norwich in the UK, each issue is packed with previews, reviews, interviews and feature articles, focused entirely on indies.
To give just an example, the third issue featured reviews of Sea of Stars, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Cocoon, Viewfinder, Somerville, DungeonGolf, The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo, Everspace 2, Station to Station, Kentucky Route Zero, Boti Byteland: Overclocked, Full Void, Ad Infinitum, Girl Genius, The Repair House, Solar Ash, and WrestleQuest.
In addition to new titles, older indie games are featured in lists such as “the 10 weirdest indie games”, or because they’ve been ported to new platforms (e.g., Kentucky Route Zero was ported to Xbox earlier this year).
A two-page spread from issue 3 about the game “Planet of Lana”. (Credit: Debug. Fair use.)
Just like many indie games, Debug lacks a bit of polish. One writer uses the redundant construction “also …, too” so frequently that I started to find it a bit grating. Issues 1 and 3 accidentally included the same top 10 list. Small things like that. On the other hand, the magazine is visually very appealing and gives a lot of space to the beautiful artwork from the games it features.
The reviews strike a good balance of offering criticism without tearing down the work of indie devs. They often include a second opinion, or pointers to other similar titles players might enjoy. Many titles showcased by Debug have received very little attention on platforms like Steam, so you’re definitely likely to discover something new.
Anyone who’s ever thought about developing an indie game will appreciate the interviews and feature articles that talk more about the process behind the games. But the magazine never feels like inside baseball—despite the name “Debug”, it’s accessible to folks who just want to play games.
As of this writing, the magazine is very affordable, with a US sales price of $10 for the print edition and $4 for the PDF version. I found the ordering process from the US painless, with a very reasonable $7 shipping fee for three print issues. For more than 80 pages of indie goodness, it’s a bargain, and I recommend Debug for all lovers of indie games.