{"id":5080,"date":"2010-09-26T20:20:53","date_gmt":"2010-09-26T20:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/09\/26\/short-story-club-second-journe\/"},"modified":"2010-09-26T20:20:53","modified_gmt":"2010-09-26T20:20:53","slug":"short-story-club-second-journe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/09\/26\/short-story-club-second-journe\/","title":{"rendered":"Short Story Club: “Second Journey of the Magus” by Ian R MacLeod"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m way, way behind the discussion<\/a> of this week’s story<\/a>, but having read it, I thought I’d post a couple of comments. This will be short, because there isn’t a lot to say.<\/p>\n

This is a sort of alternate Christianity story, a story in which Jesus gave in to the temptations offered by the devil in the desert (the relevant passages from the Gospel of Luke<\/a>, in three languages), and threw himself off the Temple to be caught by angels. Once the angels had appeared, he went the secular power route, and in the story an aging Balthasar, one of the magi who visited Jesus in the manger, makes a second journey back to the transformed Jerusalem, which is full of angels and miracles, and mroe than a little creepy.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Your reaction to the story will depend a lot on your tolerance level for Christian apologia. I found myself rolling my eyes a little, but I suspect a lot of people who read ScienceBlogs would click away from the page with great force. Matt Hilliard compares it to Ted Chiang’s religion stories<\/a> (“Hell is the Absence of God,” in particular), and I think that’s a pretty fair comparison, both because MacLeod is trying to do the same thing that Chiang does with his story, and because both of them leave me cold. It’s well done as a working out of the unpleasant consequences of an alternate gospel, but I just don’t find the subject that compelling.<\/p>\n

One odd thing about reading this: this featured some of the sloppiest copyediting I’ve seen in a professional publication, or even the web version of a professional publication. There are a ton of misplaced articles in the story, and initially I thought he was having Balthasar refer to “the Rome” or some other person speaking “the Greek” as a subtle way of indicating that he is a foreigner in the new Jerusalem. It’s not consistently done, though, and there are enough other weird typos (“the”s where they don’t belong, repeated words, a “to” instead of “who”) that I think it’s just shoddy production. <\/p>\n

Anyway, that’s my limited and belated take on the story. Any comments?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m way, way behind the discussion of this week’s story, but having read it, I thought I’d post a couple of comments. This will be short, because there isn’t a lot to say. This is a sort of alternate Christianity story, a story in which Jesus gave in to the temptations offered by the devil… Continue reading Short Story Club: “Second Journey of the Magus” by Ian R MacLeod<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-pop_culture","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}