That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made by Eric James Stone

[james_davis_nicoll]

A horny but pious Mormon and a hot but godless scientist witness the wrath of an angry god.


That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made by Eric James Stone

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

It's a long time since I read the story, of which my recollection is basically so mediocre that I remember nothing more than the Mormon Space Whale Rape concept and had even forgotten Dr Merced, but your review was highly entertaining.

[james_davis_nicoll]

My take on Stone is that he's basically the 21st century analog of Theodore R. Cogswell: mostly forgettable filler.

[patrick_morris_miller]

I think I would rather reread Sundiver than read this.

I can not believe I just typed that.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Sundiver is infinitely superior to Leviathan. Brin has my permission to put that on the cover.

[anne]

still can't believe this boiled potato beat Shweta Narayan

[dsrtao]

Sundiver has a beginning, a middle, an end, and is a reasonably fair SFnal locked-room mystery. The fact that a major technology cannot possibly work (in a field not far off from one in which the author has an academic degree, and thus should have known better) is as irrelevant to the plot as it is in any FTL-centric mystery or time-travel-centric mystery (though I repeat myself).

So, sure, why not. No space whale rape, just tinkling sapient broccoli trees.

[elysdir]

I laughed out loud at “Perhaps it simply reflects American culture having run its course, with only decline ahead of it.” (And was relieved because I had been waiting for the “USA delenda est” footnote and had started to worry that there might not be one.)

[elysdir]

As for the story:

At the time, a couple of friends of mine read and liked it. (Which made it seem plausible to me that a fair number of Nebula voters also honestly liked it.) I didn’t like it at all, but I didn’t loathe it the way lots of other people seemed to.

One of my friends who liked it wrote (quoted publicly with permission):

“I liked this story a LOT more than I expected to, it was really pretty, an excellent sensawonda piece.”

(I personally didn’t find it sensawunda-inducing at all; I’m not agreeing with my friend, just noting that this was one experienced and non-Mormon reader’s honest reaction.)

So I kind of suspect that what most people who did like the story were reacting to was the setting and the aliens, taking them at face value rather than as clunky cardboard cutouts for the author to manipulate into agreeing with his arguments.

And that relates to another aspect: when we first read it, neither those two friends nor I felt that the story was especially heavy-handed in Mormon proselytizing. But I subsequently read several dissections of the story, and I saw that there was a lot of superficially nonobjectionable-seeming-to-me stuff that I failed to see through; in other words, those friends and I fell for the façade of reasonableness. (Perhaps partly because my initial assumption was that it was going to be over-the-top heavy-handed, so I was relieved that it wasn't.)

And I think that part of our lack of reaction to that aspect of the story may have been that we knew nothing about the author.

[nineveh_uk]

That feels like it sums him up.

[jsburbidge]

I can provide a plausible answer to the baptism question. Mormons are notorious for baptizing people by proxy, including those who would rather not be do baptized, and even those who are dead. It's why they have that huge genealogical database, so that a Mormon convert can have all known relatives baptized. (This is a good reason for discouraging any relatives from becoming Mormons by any means that are not actually illegal.)

This seems to fit the situation as described very well.

[(Anonymous)]

I suspect Brin knew very well that the space refrigerator laser couldn't work, but gave himself permission to have it work in the story, but an afterword clarifying that would have been nice (I like to know when an author is playing and when they have bought their own conceits (Kingsbury apparently really believed his "ancients used pendula periods to determine standard lengths"))