Merry Christmas, everyone.

To our thinking, Reader, it was a sorrowful star, that star of Bethlehem. What good purpose for Jesus or for anyone it served we cannot discover. It stood over Bethlehem, however, with a dire meaning to the homes there. All the little children there, except the one that “fled” into Africa were soon to be little corpses. The star of Bethlehem has had some little tolerable poetry and a great deal of doggerel addressed to it; also a considerable quantity of religious and sentimental prose. It has, too, had a good deal of banter bestowed upon it, which yields less amusement however, than the laborious effort of some theologians to throw light upon it by semi-natural conjectures as to how it may have been produced. They seem to have been led into these ill-advised attempts to naturalize the Magi’s light from its being termed a star; forgetful of the fact that the Jews who did not know what or where the real stars are, but thought them to be little ornaments to our earth, would very naturally give that name to such an appearance.

[…]

There were, so it seems to us mortals, two ways open to Providence of shielding Jesus from harm. First, by staying the arm of Herod, and thus saving not only the life of Jesus, but also the lives of all his fellow little towns-children; or, as here given, flight on the part of the holy family, and abandonment, sauve que peut, for all the other little Bethlehemites. We are grieved to find that Providence chose the latter. And as we read this, we are compelled to say that our heart is not with the fugitives into Egypt, but entirely with the little victims and their parents thus left behind.

[…]

The visit of the Magi to Jerusalem proved to be a most calamitous occurrence. Their declaration in Jerusalem that a King of the Jews was just born excited Herod’s attention; led to the flight of Jesus and his parents from the country; and, worst of all, led to the dreadful massacre our author now proceeds to narrate. What useful, what conceivable purpose was served by this untoward announcement on the part of the Magi, is not discoverable. Jesus, for at least thirty years afterwards lived in seclusion up in Galilee, his very existence unknown in Jerusalem. And when he went there towards the end of his life, we shall look in vain for the slightest reference either by himself or by anyone else to what we here read. Anything more utterly purposeless than this visit to Jerusalem of the Magi and its pitiable consequences it would be difficult to imagine.

[…]

Were we told that Herod overtook these mischievous Magi and slaughtered them also, we think few readers would feel very much more grieved.

The first Christmas was not a festive one in Bethlehem. There was “lamentation and weeping and great mourning” there. Poor Bethlehem! The journey of Joseph and Mary from Nazareth for the special purpose that Jesus might be born in Bethlehem may have been an honour, but it was dearly bought.

[…]

With the amiable view, we suppose, of softening our pain at the narrative of this massacre, and its permission in such a connection, some commentators have ventured to offer us some considerations, intended, we gather, to be soothing to our hearts if not to our minds. These little victims were in reality favoured beings, we are told; they are now termed “the holy innocents,” though why more holy or more innocent than any other children dying young is not stated; they were by this means saved from the ills and trials of life; and they are now safely lodged in Heaven. Some doubt, however, seems to exist as to whether they continue babes in that happy land or no. We do not know what warrant there is for such assertions, nor do we know whether these commentators would like their own children to be favoured in a like way. From such a point of view it almost seems a matter of regret that the radius of the slaughter was not greatly extended. We know nothing in the world more truly sad than the wild arguments used by pious men in struggling with the ugly parts of their holy writ. For ourselves, we find a much more solid comfort as we think of this melancholy story. It is that it rests on the sole unsupported statement of our author. Of corroboration there is not a vestige. Learned Christian scholars have toiled zealously, not, as one might have hoped, to dispel this story, but we regret to say, to substantiate it. We are thankful to add without any success whatever.

From pages 12 ff. of A Plain Commentary on the First Gospel by an Agnostic, Williams and Norgate, 1891. http://books.google.com/books?id=cXpCAAAAIAAJ.

Goodnight, children, everywhere.

So: Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo and David Malki ! organized a synchronized book-buying event which propelled their short-story anthology Machine Of Death to the #1 spot on Amazon.com’s bestseller list. Since any bestseller only actually moves a few hundred copies on a single day, they figured, why not get everybody to buy on the same day and push the book to the top of the list for just that long?

It worked. And then it got better:

American conservative talky guy Glenn Beck called us out on his show yesterday because it turned out that his book also had its official release date on October 26th, and he was upset that it was in third place to Keith Richard’s new autobio “Life” and our little book. He told his listeners that he’d worked on his book for over a year, and that his books always debut at #1, and that we (along with Keith) were part of a left-wing “culture of death” that “celebrates the things that have destroyed us” and that everyone should support life by buying his book instead of ours?

It’s basically amazing.

Every time you piss off Glenn Beck, a LOLcat gets its invisible bike.

In completely unrelated news, Brian Switek‘s Written In Stone is coming out next Monday, the first of November. (Free preview!) Written In Stone is about evolution. Glenn Beck is a creationist.

(Whatever you fellows do, I’m buying two copies. I promised my mother I’d get one autographed for her at ScienceOnline 2011.)

UPDATE (29 October): Ach! All my evil plans, they are ruined!

I always prowled around the edges of science fiction. When I was fourteen years old, or thereabouts, I used up my fannishness on Isaac Asimov, which has left me with an all-too-encyclopædic knowledge of the whole Robot/Empire/Foundation business — the sort of story which they’ll never make into a movie, and which offers no opportunities to dress up as anybody. Now, I don’t have any passionate adoration left to spare for the stories which drive people mad, the ones which breed sub-sub-cultures and squirm like botflies in the brain. Taking film-studies classes to round out my humanities curriculum requirement left me watching Ghost in the Shell like a scholar.

(Or, worse yet, a poet.)

When I had time for fiction, I usually ended up among the authors who, you suspected, escaped the SF ghetto because they were more marketable outside than in. Late at night, in good company, the arguments would unfold over what exactly Kurt Vonnegut and Lois Lowry and Thomas Pynchon meant for the definition of SF, since the interesting problems with a definition always manifest at the edges. For a couple years, I had a subscription to Asimov’s, which I let lapse for the utterly humdrum reason that the stories in it never seemed to demand I make the time to read them. I felt episodically guilty about it — being such a nerd that I actually was seeking a career in science, shouldn’t I be keeping up with SF much better?

A beautiful and musical and cold-hearted young woman introduced me to Transmetropolitan, to illustrate what the graphic-novel format was capable of doing (Cosma Shalizi suggests, “[I]magine Hunter Thompson and John Brunner collaborating on the script for a movie to be filmed by Fritz Lang, Capra and John Carpenter, rendered by a Hogarth who has seen the future and loathes it”). This was my introduction to all things Warren Ellis, who — to make a long story much shorter — now argues that the numbers foretell doom for SF print magazines:

Cases are always made that in fact these magazines are on strong — or at least survivable — financial ground. Even ignoring the fact that the money they offer for fiction is pitiful, I think that matters less than that they are reaching massively fewer people every year. […] I live in hope that WEIRD TALES is preparing to post truly wonderful year-on-year figures. But, for the four magazines with available numbers (unless some communications failure has hidden a resurgence in INTERZONE numbers from the redoubtable Dozois)… it’s pretty much over.

As was stated over and over last year, any number of things could be done to help these magazines. But, naturally enough, the magazines’ various teams appear not to consider anything to be wrong. They’ll provide what their remaining audience would seem to want, until they all finally die of old age, and then they’ll turn out the lights. And that’ll be it for the short-fiction sf print magazine as we know it.

Time to focus on the online magazines, he suggests, instead of the “walking dead.” How do you make an online rag profitable? (I let my subscription to Baen’s Universe lapse, too, so I’m the wrong guy to ask.) More fundamentally, how do you make such a site anything more than a “fanzine by any other name”?

Originally posted at Pharyngula. Salvaged from the comment threads, edited and re-posted due to popular acclaim.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose that in the near future, our global civilization collapses: maybe we try to cancel out global warming with nuclear winter. Centuries later, cities are being built again, and archaeologists come across books. One series in particular must have been exceedingly important, as copies are found in different languages — French, German, English, Latin — all around the world. Each copy is only a fragment, but by comparing the overlapping portions a complete canon is tentatively identified. Some portions, attested only in surviving electronic records and printed material of lesser quality, seem to be later additions by a community of hands, but then again, portions of the canon itself are judged on literary grounds to be as low-quality as the least inspired of the apocrypha. The first copy found is in Latin, which scholars know to be the oldest of the languages in which translations exist, but further investigation turns up copies in Germanic languages which appear to be older.

Much of the material in these chronicles is of a fantastic nature, with epic battles between good and evil waged in a realm beyond the sight of most citizens, which the chronicles describe as blissfully ignorant. Believers in magic point out that prophecies made in one book are fulfilled in another, a claim which scholars dismiss as valueless. Upon a closer look, however, some places in these fantastic tales can be matched with known cities of the era, attested by archaeology — places like London. What’s more, incidental mentions of technology coincide with what is known about the era just before the Great Collapse.

Should we then have faith in Harrius Potter?

No doubt they rose up early to observe
The rite of May, and hearing our intent,
Came here in grace our solemnity. […]
Good morrow, friends. Saint Valentine is past:
Begin these wood-birds but to couple now?

— A Midsummer Night’s Dream (IV, 1)

Today is the first day of May. On this day, Americans join together like good Communists from other countries to affirm their commitment to an ideology of Authority. Gaelic pagans of old (and wiki-pagans of the modern age) celebrate the day as Beltane, and indeed, the attitude of begging personal intercession from nature spirits intimately concerned with human reproductive business has not entirely left the occasion.

It is a day for scratching a spiritual itch.

And what could be more spiritual or more sublime than geeking out with a crowd of like- but not identical-minded folk about the difference between book and film, the interplay of text and subtext, about science fiction as art? It’s a fitting time to explore, with Jeremy Bruno, why Jurassic Park is not a pro-science movie. How better to sharpen the joy of æsthetic contemplation than to indulge our primate appetites and join together against a common enemy? We are gyptians, meeting in the hall of the Gyptian King — otherwise known as a blog comment thread — to test the weaknesses of the Magisterium, who stand against freedom and reason, and who are played in this episode by Michael Crichton.

Come, join us!