Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection. But his fiction usually contains a lot of thought-provoking religion.
Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”
The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly (reviewed here); The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth; The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).
The first story, When Pigs Fly, is about an American woman (Wendy) who wandered away from her Muslim heritage (she was Wafa before). Then one day, God appeared in the sky. Only, unlike Rice’s novel Glass Cathedral, it was Al-lah, not the Christian God. God said he was going to kill reprobate former Muslims, but He was going to give Wafa an extra chance, since, He said, He just likes her. His only rule is to stay away from pork and pork products.
Wafa rejoins the mosque in which she grew up, in Oklahoma, and thinks she is obeying Al-lah. She has even dedicated her life to making the world better, by getting a college degree in biology. But in her biotechnology class she discovers that pig genes have been sliced into the DNA of almost all crop plants, and that she and all her fellow Muslims have been eating pork without realizing it. So, God killed all of them.
My science blog readers will be interested in the biotechnology by which pig genes are inserted into vegetables. But the question for my religious readers (this blog) is, would God ever do anything like this? Of course not, although a lot of religious people do not realize it. A relationship with God is different for each person, and is a whole life history, rather than a mindless following of one or a few rules. Christians, and Muslims, need to understand this.
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