The Dream Thief

Steven Lawhead doubtless hoped that his work of Christian science fantasy, The Dream Thief, would lead his readers to prayer and repentance, and in my case at least he was completely successful. Indeed, I found myself praying fervently that the writing would improve, and there were numerous moments when I bitterly repented the fact that I had ever started the book.

Well, I should be charitable and say what's good about this story. It improves. The latter half is better than the first. So if you can drag yourself uphill for two hundred pages, there's hope. Secondly, Lawhead is a fairly good descriptive writer. I found the parts I enjoyed the best were the ones without much human interaction, introspection, or dialogue - descriptions of dreams, a character wandering around by himself on Mars, depictions of a space station, and of India. The parts about India are so vivid that they make me wonder if Lawhead has spent time there.

The story itself isn't without interest - outer space intrigue, lost cities, alien beings, a plot to take over the world. And it wasn't without flashes of humor. For example:

"And who can stand against God?"
Spence could think of no one offhand.

The characters can be charming - I found myself drawn to the Indian genius Adjani and the alien Kyr. Unfortunately, this was at the expense of the main characters, Spence and Ari.

Some of the discussions about God were appealing. I particularly liked the Eucharistic scene which happens later in the book. I also appreciated the way the conversion sequence (as you know, there must be a conversion in every work of "faith fiction") was fairly gradual and halting. The protagonist half-believes, then doubts, then disbelieves, then half-believes again. He receives what seem to be certain indications of Providence and then disbelieves them again the next day. This seems to me a fairly realistic depiction of human nature.

So what's wrong with this book?

Well, for one thing it's two or three hundred pages too long. Lawhead draaaaaaags things out in the beginning, then advances the plot by uneven fits and starts, and then draaaags things along again. At some point he realizes that he's nearing his five-hundred page limit, and speeds everything much too fast, skipping over great chunks of important material near the end.
Motivation is a problem. The readers know why the characters should pursue a certain line of action, since we know more of the behind-the-scenes happenings, and because the formula demands it. The poor characters do not know these things, but Lawhead jerks them through their required paces regardless. Often someone will have an intuition or a mysterious feeling in their heart which tells them where to go or what to investigate next, or there will be a bizarre coincidence that reveals an important clue. These intuitions and coincidences usually provoke a pompous sermon on The Mysterious Promptings Of The Lord. Deus ex machina! This is poor theology (what happened to free will and secondary causes?) and worse writing.

As I've said, a few characters are interesting, but most of them are cardboard cutouts, a stereotype with a name attached. The main character is a remarkably bland and colourless man for the first two hundred pages. This is partly because Lawhead wishes to show what a life of selfish ambition does to a person, but it is pretty difficult to care about him. Even at the end, when he had grown, I found myself sympathizing more with the supervillain during one of his rare displays of personality. The villains are either snivelling cowardly bullies, or super-brains who have a plan for everything, but who have random fits of stupidity and hapless blundering to prevent them from actually winning.

The love interest is a two-dimensional blue-eyed blonde beauty, who's none too bright and who becomes your typical damsel in distress. Barring her deranged mother, who gets a bit part, she is the only female character. All of the scientists and cadets on board the ultramodern space station are male. Women are restricted to very traditional roles: "Spence half-expected the docking bay to be filled with wives and sweethearts and screaming children, all waiting eagerly for their husbands and lovers to return from their voyage. It suprised him to discover that, aside from a few girlfriends of cadets and the docking crew, the area was empty." Small wonder. What self-respecting woman would hang around guys like this?

How about the religious themes? As I've said, some of it is well done. Other parts, not so much. The theological musings can seem clumsy and preachy, and the God of this book appears to be pretty arbitrary. By the end we have a vague idea of why God would have been helping these particular people out, but in certain places Lawhead's hamhanded theologizing prompted more doubt than faith.

Though we have two important Indian characters, they both happen to be Christians, as are most of the good Indians in the story. The ignorant and wicked Indians are all Hindus. At points, Lawhead hints that some Hindu ideas may resonate with the truth about God, but then he backs away and makes a swipe at the religion: "As Spence had suspected... Hinduism was founded upon a primitive misunderstanding, a mistake of cosmic proportions." Oh, so the fact that some minor Hindu gods may have been based on space aliens sends the whole ancient religion tumbling to the ground? We Christians don't like it when crackpot theories are used to cavalierly dismiss our origins, even in fiction. I imagine Hindus feel the same way. Lawhead needn't accept Hinduism as true in whole or in part, but a more respectful handling of that faith would have been welcome.

Speaking of disrespectful handling, I've left one of the more bizarre things about this book till the end. The villain who gets the most screen time is a super-genius scientist. He's got a neuromuscular disorder of some kind, which leaves him skeletal and crippled. He floats around in a futuristic wheelchair which amplifies his voice and makes him sound strange. His name?

Hocking.

Sound familiar?

Shivering World

I recently read Kathy Tyers’ Shivering World. I enjoyed it. Partway through I said it was “workmanlike” and I still feel that way. If you read mystery fiction, you’ve probably heard of “police procedurals.” It’s a subgenre grounded in quotidian reality, which describes ordinary police officers investigating a case, following regular procedures. Well, Shivering World is the science fiction version of that, except the main characters are scientists, politicians, and colonists, and the setting is a world which is being terraformed about two centuries from now.

Tyers gives the reader a lots of goodies – frequent but digestible doses of science (biochemistry and earth sciences, mostly), political intrigue, frontier life, adventure, personal relationships, ethical dilemmas, and some religious exploration. She’s very effective at illustrating character motivations and interpersonal/familial conflicts. The viewpoint switches back and forth between a number of different characters, and we see how their individual understanding of events, their ambitions, and their fears bring them into conflict or concord. She’s also good at working the science into conversations and everyday life of the characters. Tyers was trained as a microbiologist, so she includes a lot of that science and seems to know what she’s talking about. She has an interesting way of addressing with our current ethical dilemmas while subverting the standard contemporary positions – the people in this story are in desperate need of global warming, for example. Likewise, human genetic engineering is explored, but many of the characters have already been modified, and are now pondering whether it was worth it.

I didn’t feel that there was anything overbearingly ‘evangelical’ about this story (Tyers is a member of an Evangelical Free Church.) If you are a contemporary Westerner who is reflexively hostile to all things evangelical, then there are probably enough hints in this book to make you stomp away in disgust. But for the most part I thought she had a light touch. There are some conversations about God and the Gospel of John, but like the science it’s woven seamlessly into the story. There is a Christian conversion, and even a sinner’s prayer of sorts, but in a believable context for a complex character.

Casual sex is implied but not described. Tyers does not go out of her way to punish the characters which engage in it, though she does indicate some of the less desirable consequences. She’s quite frank about sexual desire, particularly in her heroes.

There is an amoral atheist who is something of a villain, but she is not obviously punished – in fact, she ends up as ally (albeit temporarily) to the protagonists. There is also a villain who’s an amoral religious fanatic. And there are atheists, agnostics, Jews and even a Goddess-worshipper who come off as highly sympathetic characters.

Thanks to die stille im lande, who recommended Tyers to me! I’ll have to read her Firebert... uh, I mean, Firebird trilogy when I get the chance. (Firebert... it's just not a good commando name...)

I’m currently working on Lawhead’s The Dream Thief, and it’s not nearly as enjoyable. Here’s hoping it gets better. I also spent some time rereading bits of The Well of the Unicorn, which continues to impress me.