Ah yes, the glorious 90s, when nothing conveyed a dramatic scene quite like a cascade of oboes.

There are, like, SIX separate mysteries, but they don't overlap at all. Just one after another, and you solve them all so quickly that it feels like kind of a letdown, deduction-wise.

I hope you like missing out on the most sympathetic Christian writing on earth, I guess!

WHO ON EARTH DOESN'T HAVE TIME FOR THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY???

Do not mention A***** to A***** to Mallory. She doesn't take it well.

I can confirm the part about the spiders.

Christian here. I agree with all of this! I suppose I should add that my thrust is more towards film and television than writing. While there's definitely a critical ghetto that SF writing gets put in, it seems like there's more room for nuance and religious/thematic suppleness than in our conversations abt genre film and tv. I think this is probably for a few reasons - first, there's not much of an equivalent to blockbuster genre novels (unless you count like The Hunger Games) and also novels never make money anyway, so who cares how they're sold to audiences? (Imagine a trailer for Gravity that is entirely dialogue about the importance of not giving up. Nobody would go see it!)

My point with the refs to The Sparrow, Wrinkle In Etc., were more to draw a historical thread between religious ideas and sci fi. I absolutely agree that my blithe, two sentence summaries here are not what they deserve - but I also think it's important to note how tightly bonded religion and genre have been historically so we can talk about how they are still present in contemporary examples.

Absolutely. Lem gets a lot of the credit here. I think, tho, that Tarkovsky's "thing" was taking a straight genre piece and through his lens and editing and casting and etc. putting in the undertones of religiosity and spiritualism. He took the strong lines of sci fi and then added a ton of subtext between them.