Mentioning Mormons in science fiction

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Eric James Stone

Before I turn to my subject, I just want to call attention to the Nebula Awards ceremony taking place this Saturday.  Two LDS authors, Brad R. Torgersen and Nancy Fulda, are nominees.  From what I understand, the ceremony will have a live video stream.  I’ll update this post with a link once I have one.

Possibly my favorite Robert A. Heinlein novel is Double Star.  The main character is an actor hired to stand in for an important political leader who has been kidnapped. (I sometimes wonder if the idea for the movie Dave was stolen from this book.) The plot involves important negotiations with the Martians–the book was written two decades before the Viking probes landed on Mars–and at one point the main character participates in an alien adoption ceremony:

I reached the ramp leading down into the inner nest and started on down.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

That line of asterisks represents the adoption ceremony. Why? Because it is limited to members of the Kkkah Nest. It is a family matter. Put it this way: A Mormon may have very close gentile friends—but does that friendship get a gentile inside the Temple at Salt Lake City? It never has and it never will. Martians visit very freely back and forth between their nests—but a Martian enters the inner nest only of his own family. Even his conjugate-spouses are not thus privileged. I have no more right to tell the details of the adoption ceremony than a lodge brother has to be specific about ritual outside the lodge.

I can remember reading that as a teenager and being impressed that Heinlein knew what he was talking about when it came to Mormons.  The use of the word gentile from a Mormon perspective is particularly telling, but I also liked the respect shown to the sacredness of the temple.  More than that, though, I was thrilled that a major non-Mormon author thought Mormons could still be around in the future.  Much of the science fiction I read at the time tended to at best ignore religion in the future.  Some of it was actively hostile, assuming humans would outgrow the need for religion, or using crazy religious people as antagonists for the rational heroes.

Continue reading →

Posted in SF&F corner | 9 Comments

The Mormon Ibsen: A Tribute to Eric Samuelsen

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Mahonri Stewart

When I discovered that Eric Samuelsen was retiring from BYU as the playwriting professor, I have to admit a little bit of my heart broke. In many ways it may the best decision. From what I understand, Eric’s battle with polymyositis, a degenerative auto-immune disease, has been tough and painful and has limited his freedom to do what he would like to do. So retiring from BYU may have been inevitable. Yet the good he has done there, the good he has done Mormon Letters, the lives he has impacted along the way–I had hoped that he would still be forging the way for Mormon Drama at BYU for many years to come. He is not only one of Mormon Drama’s best representatives and talented pens, but also a man fierce intelligence, warm hearted kindness, and integrity. It is a great loss for BYU not to have him on their active staff anymore. Continue reading →

Posted in Community Voices, On-stage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Wanted: One Internet-free Dark Night of the Soul

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Stephen Carter

At a Sunstone Symposium a few years ago, I was talking with a person who ran a popular podcast. She mentioned that one of her hopes was that the podcast would help people to feel not so alone when they went through faith crises.

Hearing this made me think back on a “dark night of the soul” I went through—a time when I most definitely felt alone. Would it have been a more bearable and more constructive experience had I not felt so isolated, I wondered? Or had that aloneness been an essential part of the experience? Continue reading →

Posted in Personal Narratives | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

2003 Mormon Literature Year in Review

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Andrew Hall

This is part of a continuing series of republications of my annual Year in Review. This post was first published on the AML-List email discussion group in January 2004.

Novels

National market novels by Mormon authors in 2003 were dominated by young adult novels, while the growth of the Mormon-specific market continued unabated. The five largest Mormon publishers released 77 novels in 2003, up from 61 in 2002 and 50 in 2001. The community of literary critics have not, unfortunately, kept pace with this growth in publishing, and therefore serious reviews of a majority of these works have yet to appear. While for many of these un-reviewed books the silence is undoubtedly charitable, I am afraid that some notable novels have escaped my attention, for which I apologize. Continue reading →

Posted in This Week in Mormon Literature | 5 Comments

Mormon Lit and Other Nineteenth-Century Religions’ Lit

Posted on May 10, 2012 by James Goldberg

Many of our recurring discussions about Mormon Lit try to measure how the field is doing and how it is likely to do within our lifetimes. We return again and again to the economics of literature written for Mormons, to the challenges of and prospects for depicting Mormonism for a national audience, to questions of what a “Great Mormon” novel/play/writer/criticism/bookstore/etc.–whether one exists, whether one will exist, whether one ought to exist, etc.

Sometimes, to encourage ourselves, we talk about the success of Jewish Lit or invoke the Harlem Renaissance or get excited when people read books in which Muslim religious identity is an OK thing. Sometimes, to depress ourselves with envy and push ourselves to work harder, we think about Jewish Lit or the Harlem Renaissance or how much better Australian Muslim writers are doing than their Australian LDS counterparts.

But what we don’t seem to do when trying to gauge our progress and prospects is to compare Mormon Literature to the literatures of other nineteenth-century religions. No comparison is entirely fair, of course, but I think it is important to note that Mormonism is one of four worldwide, fast-growing religions to come out of the nineteenth century. How does Mormon Literature compare to Seventh-day Adventist Literature, Jehovah’s Witness Literature, or Baha’i Literature?

Continue reading →

Posted in Mormon LitCrit, Storytelling and Community | 18 Comments

Publishers Corner: Engaging the National Market from an LDS Perspective

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Chris Bigelow

Guest post by E.M. Tippetts

Late last year I decided to take the plunge and become an indie author as E.M. Tippetts – the name I use to write LDS chick lit. There were a lot of reasons behind my decision to go this route rather than find an LDS press – for example, I make more money this way and have more creative control – but for the purposes of this article, I’d like to focus on the strongest. I feel that there shouldn’t be demarcation between LDS fiction and the rest of the market. Readers can empathize with women who lived in Regency England and teenage girls who dream about becoming vampires, so they can empathize with Latter-day Saints too. However, I do not feel they can empathize with much of the fiction produced exclusively for the LDS market. If we want our readers to empathize with our characters, we need to empathize with our readers.

Let me give a little of my own life history. I’m an adult convert to the Church, though I grew up in a town that had a very large and active LDS population, so I’ve never been a stranger to the Gospel. My two best friends in high school were LDS, though they have both since gone inactive. I am the only Saint in my family (but not the only saint, if you get my meaning. My family are some of the most virtuous people I know and admire.) All my life I’ve wanted to be a science fiction writer and have been working on this actively for the past eleven years, ever since I graduated from the Clarion West Writers Workshop. In my late twenties, I decided to see if I could learn a little more about publishing by going for a smaller market, and the LDS market seemed like a good one to try. I took on the name E.M. Tippetts, which is my married name, and my first novel sold to the second place I submitted it.

Continue reading →

Posted in Publishers Corner, The Writer's Desk | 13 Comments

AML Presidential Address 2012

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Margaret Blair Young

From my early childhood, I remember people with dark skin and black hair in my home.  I understood that they were working with my father on projects in different languages.  Most were Mayan Indians, from various places in Guatemala.  The summer I was eight, our family went to Yucatan, where Dad was working on his dissertation.  I would see him with his Mayan assistants, and would interrupt frequently with a question.  “How do you say…?”  “What does it mean if they say?”  Finally, Dad had to tell me to just try to figure it out on my own. He couldn’t be my full-time interpreter. Continue reading →

Posted in International Scene, Literary Views of Scripture, Thoughts on Language | 4 Comments

This Week in Mormon Literature, May 4, 2012

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Andrew Hall

It is award season, with the AML Awards two weeks ago, and the Whitney Awards on Saturday. Matthew Kirby also gets an award of his own from mystery writers. Scott Hales talks about teaching Mormon literature to non-Mormon students. Non-Mormon bestselling author Sandra Dallas produces a novel about the tragedy of the Martin Handcart company, and receives strong praise, except for the small problem of only making characters from one of the genders three-dimensional (one out of two isn’t so bad, is it?). Carol Lynch Williams stays in her wheelhouse with a blank verse novel about a girl suffering a tragic loss, and gets starred reviews from both Kirkus and PW. Please send any suggestions or announcements to mormonlit AT gmail DOT com. Continue reading →

Posted in This Week in Mormon Literature | 6 Comments

Open Season for Writing Conferences

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Rachelle Christensen

This week is an incredibly busy and exciting time for me and several other writers. I will be attending the annual LDStorymakers conference at the Provo Marriott on May 3-5, Thursday-Saturday. This will be the 7th year I have attended this conference and I credit this specific writing conference for putting me on the path of publication.

I wanted to highlight the importance of attending writing conferences because if you are serious about the craft of writing and motivated to get published–you should be going. There are a hundred reasons to attend writing conferences, but I’ll run down a short list for you.

Posted in Announcements, Mysterious Doings, The Writer's Desk | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Mormon Authors writing Non-Mormon Inspirational Fiction

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Jessie Christensen

Over at Motley Vision, Jonathan Langford reviewed his reading of Whitney finalists. In his review of the General Fiction category , he noted that few of the finalists engaged with religious issues, and only one book was explicitly Mormon at all. I wanted to expand on some of Jonathan’s questions about a few of the finalists and explore the idea of taking Mormon fiction to national publishers and national audiences. The finalists this year that most explicitly dealt with Mormon doctrine and culture were actually found in the genre categories (Mystery and Romance), and were published by LDS publishers and primarily marketed to LDS audiences. I think that some of those books are taking steps to explore LDS issues in new ways, but that is not the subject of this post (I had also wanted to look at some of the general youth finalists and religion, but I ran out of room in this post). Continue reading →

Posted in Mormon LitCrit | Tagged , | 8 Comments