Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 4. The Book of Ruth

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.

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; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth (all reviewed earlier); The Book of Ruth (reviewed here); The Old Burrill House (reviewed in my science blog; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

This is a story right out of the Bible, about which Rice, who has written extensively about religion, knows a great deal. Ruth is a Moabitess woman. Moab is one of the tribes neighboring Israel, which considers itself God’s chosen people. She is the friend of Naomi the Jewish woman. They live as gleaners, by gathering the grains dropped on the ground after the harvesters have passed through the grain fields. Ruth is extremely worldly, while Naomi is very religious. Actually, this story is not straight out of the Bible, but is what happens when Ruth intersects with Bizet’s operatic character Carmen. Ruth knows what she wants and how to get it.

A religious wanderer, Mahlon, sees Ruth and falls in love with her. Ruth wants Mahlon to fight for her; when he hesitates, she sings Carmen’s song from the opera. When a violent farm worker threatens Ruth, Mahlon quickly defends her. The rich land owner, Boaz, drives Mahlon away and decides to protect both women by giving them work within his house. He then marries both of them. Of course, as you could guess, this was not the end of Mahlon.

The Bible makes it very clear that Israel, not Moab, was God’s chosen people. As a reader of this blog, you probably have your doubts about this. This story will make you doubt it even more.

In case you think the Bible is full of boring theology and regulations, you are wrong—the Bible has some dramatic stories, including the book of Ruth the spicy details of which you never hear in church. Put it together with the equally spicy story of Carmen, and you are in for a wild ride.

The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part three: Quality

You cannot just put your books on Amazon and expect people to find them, even if they would have enjoyed reading them. An author is not only competing with thousands of human authors but with computers that can generate AI garbage a hundred times a second.

An intelligent customer might want to verify that the author of a book is not an AI bot by searching the web for an author website. AI bots generally do not have author websites, though I could be wrong about this. But the author has to make it easy for the customer, who is usually busy and tired when looking for a book.

You have to promote your book. This means several things.

First, you need a platform. My platform consists of a brand new website designed by my son in law which, thus far, has only my non-fiction books on it; two blogs, which have collectively had over a million views; a YouTube channel, in which I pretend to be Charles Darwin; and Facebook. This does not mean I can just scatter announcements all over my platform. People read my blogs and watch my videos because they can learn something, usually about science, from them. If they suspect I am dumping cheap advertising on them, they will stop visiting. I have to make the announcements of my fiction books relevant to the platform. In my case this might be easy, since much of my fiction focuses on science (particularly, Darwin and evolution) which is exactly what my science blog is about, and faces a lot of religious questions, which is exactly what my religion blog) is about. This is exactly the same situation as a tree faces out in nature: it has to have fruits and seeds that match the animals it is expecting to patronize them, rather than just random seeds.

Second, you need to catch their eyes in a pleasurable way. I will do this by having really attractive covers and short summaries.

The covers will be colorful and eye-catching and often create just enough cognitive dissonance that they will wonder what the book is about. I am fortunate that I have literally five decades of photographs from which to choose. I could never have guessed I would use them as book covers. It is also important to adjust the photos, not just with cropping, contrast, and coloration, but with special effects, which are now easily available on PowerPoint.

The short summaries must excite the reader and make them want to read the book. Here is an example of the first sentence of a summary, from a novel I wrote about Charles Darwin being a vampire: “You just thought you had seen the last of Charles Darwin.” The summary does not have to have everything in it. The summary of my novel The Confessions of Conseil take a swipe at the exalted image of Pierre Arronax, narrator of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. In Conseil’s voice, I call him Arronax the Arrogant who thinks his servant Conseil cannot possibly have a brain or a life of his own. Now this might create cognitive dissonance, therefore interest, among the thousands of readers who grew up (as I did) loving Jules Verne. I also portray Captain Nemo as a Marxist revolutionary.

Third, you have to deliver the goods. It has to be a good book—a good plot, good characters, good everything. I have to make readers feel good, even when unpleasant things are happening in the book. I have to remember I am writing for my readers, not for myself. I have to remove anything that is interesting only to myself, e.g., lists of plants. Only then will a reader—maybe, just maybe—remember my name and look for another book by me. I include a lot of humor, not gratuitous but as part of the plot and dialogue. I also frequently have sex, not pornographic but as part of genuine human encounters, and very rarely the full sex act. The sex is never degrading. And never gratuitous—it has to have a reason to be there. The Bible is my guide in this respect. There is a lot of sex in the Bible, but there is always a reason for it. Fiction should never have any gratuitous anything.

Will this fiction publishing venture work? I have made a conservative estimate that I will earn at least $75,000 for thirty books, which is $75,000 more than I would earn with my track record with commercial publishers. If it works, it will not be because of my business acumen but because I took my inspiration from the evolutionary success stories of the trees.

The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part one. Publishers vs. Kindle

I have frequently written on this blog about my non-fiction publications. But I have also written a huge amount of fiction. My fiction would be very hard to sell to commercial publishers, because I have so much religion in them. Commercial publishers think no one would want to read a novel about God and the meaning of life. Nobody, that is, except people like you who are reading this blog. You can learn a lot about the Bible by reading my novels. Commercial fiction publishers don’t like books that teach people things, especially about the Bible.

I am no amateur in fiction writing. I have been writing fiction for decades, often rewriting the same story or novel over and over until I get it as good as it can be. In the process, I have removed whole chunks of text that I originally thought were really good but which I admitted would not advance the plot and might, however well written, cause the reader to give up.

But I have almost no fiction publications—just in a couple of minor literary journals that no longer exist. I have earned a grand total of $25, which I sent to a writer and environmentalist who, unlike me, had no steady employment. So the question arose, decades ago, how should I publish my fiction?

The days of submitting manuscripts “over the transom” ended decades ago. Now, to approach an editor of even a small press, you have to be represented by an agent. When I started writing fiction, agents were actual people, and they sent me personal responses. But now, the prospective fiction writer seldom gets any response whatsoever, and if so, it is a form letter. I now have the suspicion, in the modern age of artificial intelligence, that agents almost never read submissions, because they already know what they are going to send to publishers: the works written by their friends, themselves under a different name, or by an AI program they have installed. They claim to be looking for new talent, but I simply do not believe it. In fact, agents may actually themselves be artificial intelligences. They may have their photos on the agency website, but they may not be actual people. An agency can leave the entire process—choosing which manuscripts, if any, to represent, and then sending them to editors—to artificial intelligence. I have encountered a grand total of about five agents out of hundreds who have given personal responses that indicate that they are human. An AI bot can write fiction that is as marketable as that written by most human authors. I guess what I am saying is that getting a fiction agent for a commercial publisher is practically impossible. I have been told this by many authors—you know, the ones that spend their time and money going to writers’ conferences.

For many years, an attractive alternative has been to self-publish on Amazon. Gone are the days of vanity presses, where the author pays for a few hundred copies of the book to be printed, and then the author has to figure out what to do with them. These are the days of Amazon, in two ways:

First, no commercial publisher can afford to do “print-on-demand,” because there has to be a minimum print run of at least a thousand books each day to justify the costs of printing. But Amazon can do it, because they sell so many books. It does not have to be a thousand copies of the same book. Print-on-demand is one of the Amazon options. If just one person wants your book, they can get it.

Second, e-books cost very little to produce. A Kindle book can be produced and sent to customers with very little cost, except for maintaining the servers. Once again, if just one person wants your e-book, they can get it.

Kindle publishing is rather clumsy. If it is just text, as in most novels, it works fine. But I have never seen a really satisfactory illustration in a Kindle book. It usually ends up really small and illegible.

The advantages of Kindle books are astonishing. The software, at least now, is relatively simple. You provide a cover illustration (just the front cover), a document with the whole book in it, financial information, the jacket blurb (which will show up on the Amazon site), etc. You can do it all yourself. If you mess something up, you will get an email telling you what to fix. The best part might be that the author gets to keep 70 percent of the money. In contrast, a commercial publisher offers 10 percent, which must be split with an agent. This would mean an author gets 8 percent. A hundred books (@$5.00) generates $500, of which the author gets to keep $350. From a commercial publisher, you would get $40.

Now, for the ecology of book publishing. It is like a tree or bush disseminating its seeds. There are lots of ways of doing this. A tree could produce a few, large seeds, inside of fruits that animals want to eat; or a lot of small seeds, that blow away in the wind. Wild plant species use both options, just like a writer could use the agent/publisher option or the Amazon option. There is, in the world of publishing just as in seed dispersal, no single correct way of doing it. I spent decades on the agent/publisher route, and am now ready to try the Kindle route. My first Kindle novel just came out today.

What you don’t want to do is to publish online and then ignore all publicity. Fruits and seeds dispersed by animals put a lot of expenditure into publicity—that is, into attracting animals to disperse them. Publicity—that’s what the next essays are about.

Biblical Deserts

There are many references in the Bible to deserts, none of them good. One of them is an Old Testament prophecy that Handel used in The Messiah: Make straight in the desert a highway for our God (Isaiah 40:3).

Clearly, Old Testament deserts are things that we should get rid of. And the Old Testament describes the reclamation of desert areas as the work of God. One of these passages follows immediately after the above quote.

When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights and fountains in the midst of valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane, and the pine together, that men may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it (Isaiah 41: 17-20).

The deserts, or wilderness areas, are not to be confused with thriving, highly-evolved desert ecosystems. In natural deserts, the plants have many exquisite adaptations to deal with heat and drought. Succulent plants store water, desert bushes have very deep roots, and desert plants even have special forms of photosynthesis that allow them to make food under all but the driest conditions. Some desert plants are small and tender, and have astonishing flowers, and they appear totally out of place in a dry desert. The way they survive is by living their whole lives, from seed to seed, in the brief rainy season. These are the deserts we need to protect, such as in Saguaro National Park (Arizona) or Anza-Borrego State Park in California. These are not the deserts to which the Bible refers.

 

The deserts of the Bible are the lands that have been corrupted by human civilization. Poor farming practices swept away the natural plant cover and caused soil erosion, leaving a barren landscape. That is why cities that were once thriving consisted only of collapsed walls surrounded by bare soil. This is what the earliest Sumerian cities looked like even at the time Isaiah wrote his prophecy. There was plenty of degraded land even around Jerusalem that everyone who heard Isaiah’s prophecy could readily see. To this day, most of the land around the Mediterranean remains partially degraded from millennia of human abuse. Today we think of Italy and Greece as dry shrublands; but they used to be, according to ancient writings, covered with thick forests.

If you are someone who is involved in any stage of land reclamation, to take a landscape that has been devastated by decades or centuries or millennia of human mismanagement, and turn it into a thriving ecosystem, you are doing some of God’s work. Although I do not believe that the modern nation of Israel is in fact God’s own special country, it is obvious that modern Israel has done a lot of reclamation, making what had been a devastated landscape bloom. They have been pioneers of soil conservation and dry land agriculture. Drip irrigation was invented in Israel. The joke goes: on the cover of the birthday card it says, In honor of your birthday, a tree has been planted in Israel. Inside the card it says, Wednesday is your day to water it.

The lands that have been reclaimed from human-produced deserts do not look like natural deserts. Just read the list of plant species in the passage above. Cedar, acacia, myrtle, olive, cypress, plane, pine. There is no natural ecosystem where you will find all of these trees together. They have to be planted in a garden that has displaced the degraded land.

None of this is miraculous. It is just good, hard work based on scientific studies (many of them Israeli). Isaiah says that God has done this. But it was not miraculous. God works through us, in this case through scientists and farmers. In order to see it as God’s work, you have to do what Isaiah said: to see and know, to consider and understand together. A quick glance at the trees is not good enough to see the work of God through mankind.

Bible Literacy

I recently finished reading a book in French called Zapping de la Bible. Published by Larousse, better known for dictionaries, this book was neither promoting nor degrading the Bible. It had about three thousand little boxes of facts about the Bible. “Zapping” means that no single piece of information was explained at length. It is a sort of summary of the things that people should know about the Bible. Everything from Cain and Abel to Noah to Abraham to David to the prophets to Jesus to Paul. I knew most of them, from decades of Bible study. But there were some overall surprises.

The first was that most people know few, if any, of these things. There seems to be two groups of people. First, the ones who claim to believe the Bible, but know almost nothing about it. I did surveys of my students back when I was teaching in Oklahoma, and found that most students claimed to believe the Bible but knew almost nothing about it (e.g. who King David was). These people just believe what their leaders tell them to believe about the Bible. Most recently this means to believe that Donald Trump is bringing about the Will of God on this planet (a belief strengthened by the release of the Trump Bible). Any difficult questions simply do not occur to them.

The second group is people who reject the Bible as nothing more than white males trying to control, even enslave, the rest of the world. These people, also, seldom know anything about what the Bible actually says.

The fundamentalist mindset that controlled me for many decades of my life blinded me to the true purposes of much of the Bible. Take, for example, the apocalypse (Revelation). My fellow fundamentalists all believed that the details of the Apocalypse would all occur in the future—not the author’s future, but ours. Point by point. One radio preacher even organized a tour group to go see the valley of Megiddo in Israel, which, she said, would be filled with blood as deep as horses’ legs (which would require billions of people to be killed). But in reality Revelation was a message to the churches which were just beginning to experience Roman persecution: keep the faith. It was coded in a mysterious way so that, if the manuscript got uncovered by Roman authorities, they could not understand it. It was all a retelling of concepts from the Old Testament. The four beasts came from Daniel; the four horses from Zechariah; the lion from Amos; the sky rolled up like a scroll from Isaiah; the locusts from Joel. The whole symbolism was lifted from the marginally-crazy visions of Ezekiel. No one in Jewish-Christian society of about 100 C.E. could have missed this. But us fundamentalists did.

The Bible, in reality, raises many interesting questions about the purpose (if any) of humankind and the world, and about how we should live. Often, the Bible itself offers no clear answers or, if it does, these answers are contradictory. But I believe that, in our culture, to deal with these questions, it is important to know how the authors of the Bible dealt with them, in order to selectively agree or disagree with them, neither swallowing nor rejecting the whole.

The first and most obvious fact about the Bible is that it is not a book. It is 66 books, written by at least 40 different people (we assume, men, but we cannot be sure about some of them) over the course of at least 1500 years. Not surprisingly, the authors all believed different things. The final list of which books to include in the Bible was not made until the Council of Carthage in the year 397 of the current era. The Bible presents these different viewpoints then leaves it up to us to figure out what it all means.

Whatever you believe, you can probably find it in the Bible. If you believe that God has chosen a people (originally, the Israelites, and today America) to rule the world, you can find a lot of this in the Bible. If you are agnostic, or even think that God is inexplicably unjust, you can find that too, especially in Ecclesiastes and Job.

I strongly believe that my grandchildren should have access to this information so that they, as I eventually did, can make up their own minds about what to believe. This is how we raised our daughter who, like me, had a journey from faith into skepticism. And our daughter and son-in-law believe the same thing: they do not hate the Bible. They are willing to let our grandchildren explore it.

Meanwhile, we are all fiercely dedicated to the general religious principles of how to live: to love your family and your neighbors, for example. No destructive behavior, toward self or others, is tolerated. This is no different from those humanists who accept altruism as one of the main components of evolution. Love is a product of evolution, not a miracle from God.

The only problem is, explore it when and how? I struggled with the idea of how to bring the subject up with my grandchildren, who are still too young to understand much about life. Not to indoctrinate them, but just to get them interested. If there is a Spirit, the Spirit can take it from there.

It turns out that nature can take its course. When I finished the Zapping book, I left it on the return-to-library shelf. My granddaughter saw it and asked about it. Before long my wife and I were explaining the Exodus and how the modern Christian Passover is Easter, a holiday we had just celebrated by seeing the resurrection of the green foliage of the trees.

And there is no turning back now. The subject of the Bible is open for the next generation. I did not need to artificially open it. France is a secular society, but it has many holidays based on the Christian calendar. Everything closes down not only for Easter Sunday but for Good Friday and Easter Monday as well. You won’t find that in Christian America.

Inconvenient Bible Passages, part two.

Here are some more passages from the Bible that conservative Christians love to hate. I taught Christian students about them back in 1990.

“The Earth mourns, the world languishes, the high heavens languish with the Earth. The Earth is polluted through the touch of its inhabitants, because they have transgressed the laws and broken the covenant. Therefore a curse has devoured the Earth, and its inhabitants have paid the penalty.”

“On that day I will make a covenant with them, with the beasts of the field and with the birds of the air, and the reptiles of the ground; and I will sweep away the bow, the sword, and war from off the face of the land; and I will make them to lie down in security.”

The inhabitants of Judah were carried into captivity “until the land had enjoyed its sabbaths. All the days of the desolation the land kept sabbath, to complete seventy years.”

Inconvenient Bible Passages, Part One

While cleaning out my accumulated papers, I ran across a list of Bible verses that I taught in a Natural Resources Conservation class at a Christian college in 1990. Since that time, conservative Christians have largely turned against environmental issues, and recently have abandoned them because of their adoration for Donald Trump. But these verses remain as a challenge to them. I merely list them here. They almost sound like the kinds of environmentalist screeds the conservative Christians so openly hate, but they come directly from the Bible.

“For six years you may sow your land and gather its crops, but during the seventh year you must leave it alone and let it lie fallow.”

“…because there is no fidelity, no kindness, and no knowledge of God in the land…therefore the land mourns, and everything that dwells therein languishes, even the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea are also swept away.”

“When the poor and the needy seek water in vain, and their tongues are parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them…I will open rivers on the bare heights and wells in the midst of valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool…I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane, and the larch as well, that men may see and know, may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this, that the Holy One of Israel has created it.”

“The land must not be sold in perpetuity; for the land is Mine, since you are only resident aliens and serfs under me.”

I will let you think about these for a while, then post some more.