After reading James Morrow’s The Madonna and the Starship, legendary wordsmith Harlan Ellison declared:
I am so besotted with James Morrow’s talent that I cannot find a word big enough to deify it.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
Ron Charles of The Washington Post discussed the Charlie Hebdo killings with acclaimed religious satirist James Morrow, author of The Madonna and The Starship and Shambling Towards Hiroshima.
Morrow has never shied away from making fun of religions. The Denver Post once called him “Christianity’s Salman Rushdie.” His “The Godhead Trilogy,” published in the 1990s, involves the discovery of the giant body of God floating in the ocean. Religious figures, relics and beliefs are all fair game in his cerebral comedies. His new novel, “Galápagos Regained,” which pits Christianity against Darwinism, is being released this week.
“I would be deluding myself if I imagined that I was doing anything as brave as what [the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists] were doing,” he says from his home in State College, Pa. “They knew that the sights of those rifles were trained on them, and they had the raw courage to keep on fulfilling that sacred obligation to be satiric. I’ve worked exactly the same side of that street: I see blasphemy not only as a right, but as a sacred duty.”
<snip>
The problem, as he sees it, is that Islam never went through its own Enlightenment. “In the West, we’ve benefited from the great Enlightenment conversation. We enjoy the benefit of free speech — it’s the default,” he said. “But that’s a very recent and begrudging breakthrough on the part of religion. I don’t take it for granted.”
He’s quick to note that the gunmen in Paris on Wednesday did not represent the Islamic intellectual classes in any way. But he would like to see “the Islamic world educate its children in a plenary fashion.”
“Manichean dualism is the worst,” he said, “the single worst idea people ever came up with — this notion that you can divide humankind into the children of light and the children of darkness.”
He’d also like to see schools in the West do more to teach children about Islam and its extraordinary intellectual cultural heritage. “This was a world that kept civilization alive,” he notes, citing the lasting contributions of Islamic scholars to science and mathematics.
Read the rest of Charles’ conversation with Morrow at The Washington Post.
For more info on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
For more info on Shambling Towards Hiroshima, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Ann Monn.
Mabel Stark of See The Elephant enjoyed James Morrow’s The Madonna and the Starship.
The Madonna and the Starship gives a brisk spanking to fundamentalism on both sides of the religion vs. rationalism debate. I found the characters interesting, but not terribly nuanced. The backdrop of the innocent early days of science fiction lends a certain charm, as does the cast of quirky characters. The centerpiece of the novel is the satirical, surreal episode of the formerly pious By Bread Alone, created by Kurt and Connie and the actors. The ending has the lilt of a Shakespeare comedy, with lessons learned and good cheer all around. A quick read with plenty of inside jokes and clever bits for fans of classic science fiction and philosophy alike.
Read the rest of Stark’s review at See The Elephant.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
The Rhapsody in Books Weblog reviews James Morrow’s The Madonna and the Starship.
If you love satire and aren’t offended by writing that makes gentle fun of religion, this short book has many laugh-out-loud moments. Morrow has won a number of awards for his work, and is worth getting to know.
Read the rest of the review at the Rhapsody in Books Weblog.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
Living in the same Pennsylvania town has afforded the close friends, Daryl Gregory and James Morrow, the opportunity to jointly promote their new Tachyon titles: We Are All Completely Fine and The Madonna and the Starship. One such event was recently captured by Michael Swanwick on his Flogging Babel blog.
Saturday, I went to Big Blue Marble in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, to hear James Morrow and Daryl Gregory read. It was a hoot.
Jim read from his latest book, The Madonna and the Starship, a novella in which a writer of pulp television has to face down diabolical space lobsters. Daryl read from We Are All Completely Fine, in which survivors of various horror-movie scenarios undergo group therapy.
In the audience were many writers including Fran Wilde, Eugene Myers, and Darrell Schweitzer.
Also, for some reason, a lot of psychiatrists.
Read the rest of Swanwick’s thoughts on the event at the Flogging Babel.
For information on We Are All Completely Fine, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
In the May, 2014 issue of Sci-Fi Magazine, Adam-Troy Castro praised James Morrow’s The Madonna and the Starship.
One of the field’s more mordant satirists here puts his more pessimistic side on the shelf and dispenses his usual irreverence toward religion in a wild, over-the-top farce. The setting is 1953 Manhattan. Young science fiction writer Kurt Jastrow has left the pulps for the more lucrative field of television, scripting BROCK BARTON AND HIS ROCKET RANGERS and hosting a science spinoff, UNCLE WONDER’S ATTIC. It turns out that both have earned him fans among the extraterrestrial Qualimosians, who give him a prize for his efforts: a fine honor that turns threatening when he realizes that the squid-like beings are at war with religion back on the home world, and will upon the inevitable discovery that humans possess the same thing will use a death ray on the viewers of the inspirational program that follows his. The problem: how to keep the aliens occupied while he and a growing army of allies write a script for a show that will not only comfort the alien visitors with blasphemy, but also forever stop them from bringing their conflict to Earth?
This is a slim novel, that once it starts, never stops racing, Complications abound, lunacy predominates, the aliens are kept distracted and the world is saved with a broadcast that surely would have made viewer heads explode in 1953.
Read the rest of Castro’s review in the May issue of Sci-Fi Magazine.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
For Strange Horizons, Molly Katz provides a lengthy review of James Morrow’s enjoyable The Madonna and the Starship.
Before I summarize The Madonna and the Starship, I have this to say: it’s better than it sounds. The back of the book didn’t sell me on the premise: “Will Kurt and his colleagues manage to convince the Qualimosans that Earth is essentially a secular and rationalist world? Or will the two million devotees of NBC’s most popular religious program suffer unthinkable consequences for their TV-viewing tastes? Stay tuned for The Madonna and the Starship!” This pastiche of the cheesy-pulp cliffhanger doesn’t work for me. It’s too glib—all satire, no heart. Fortunately, James Morrow (as you may already know, if you’ve read his other works) has a talent for breathing poignancy and life into what might, in less deft hands, read like a ham handed satirical lecture. The pastiche Morrow produces in the novella itself is much richer and more emotionally resonant than its description promises.
<snip>
Morrow’s most effective gambit is to let Kurt tell the story. Through Kurt, Morrow shows us what he imagines pulp SF would look like to its ideal audience. He shows us a man who appreciates the possibility of the medium to marry established science, heady fantasy, and the wild ambition of portraying the human condition. And Kurt makes for good company. From the first pages of the novella to the last, he tells his tale with a distinctive voice and a distinctive sense of humor—one that does not always match with my own idea of a good joke, but which endears him to me nevertheless. I particularly enjoyed hearing from him that he tells people he came to New York for the trees, only to amend that to, “that is, the greatest of all good things trees give us . . the pulp” (p. 4). There’s something wonderfully not of the present day about this punch line and this phrasing, and Kurt’s distinctive voice persuades me that Morrow has his finger on the pulse of the historical moment he’s chosen.
<snip>
Ultimately, Morrow’s book is not a love letter to the Golden Age of Science Fiction. (If that is your interest, you might check out Felix Gilman’s The Revolutions.) He often sends the stuff up. It’s worth remembering that he took an interest in pulp SF because of its “cultural function,” not its merit on its own terms. I would have liked to love the pulpy elements in this story more, but Morrow does succeed in making me love the people who love pulp, which I believe was more important to him. Well, as Kurt and the Qualimosans might say, “fair enough.” It’s an enjoyable read—funny, thought provoking, and memorable.
Read the rest of Katz’s review at Strange Horizons.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
Richard at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud reviews the laugh-it-up lark The Madonna and the Starship.
What a lark! (And I don’t mean either the cigarette or the Studebaker.) If you’re old enough to have watched Lost in Space or Star Trek at night, you’ll resonate with this tale’s daffy Firesign-Theater-esque Smothers-Brothers-y energy; if Captain Video crossed your eyestalks as a sprog, a sharp pang of nostalgia will pierce your vitals to add tears to the grins.
<snip>
Religion takes its licks…there is nothing on this Earth so satisfying as the mental picture of Jesus arguing that playing god is a bad idea on a show called Not By Bread Alone…but so does rationalism by way of a surrealist romp of acid-trip proportions. Eight-foot-tall blue lobster-women wearing the statue of Prometheus from Rockefeller Center as a necklace tend to fall on the surreal end of my personal story-telling spectrum, don’t know about you.
<snip>
The fun that I had reading this delectable morsel of mash-up gumbo made this trim volume a sterling value.
Read the rest of Richard’s review at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
Anton at Genre-Bending decided he needed to read some funny science fiction and focused in on James Morrow’s The Madonna and the Starship.
It’s a delight to read: ‘heartless aliens, promiscuous death rays, casual slaughter — this was science fiction at its worst.’ It mentions all these things, plus it has giant genocidal blue lobsters from outer space. There is, perhaps, too much of what Dirda calls ‘retro-fun’. There are some in-jokes in the book, but I wonder how many people will get them (I certainly didn’t). It’s still a fun read, as a satire novel should be.
Read the rest on Anton’s review at Genre-Bending.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
The Island of James Morrow, the freshly renovated Internet home for the award winning author of The Madonna and The Starship, recently premiered under a new URL and with new content. Largely the work of webmaster Patryk Soika, the site celebrates all things Morrow including information on his works, passions, and more.
To learn more about James Morrow, check out The Island of James Morrow.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
The Madonna and the Starship cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
