This is the third in my irregular series of posts on science fiction and/or speculative fiction.

It will probably come as no great surprise to anyone that I didn’t watch Richard Dawkins’ new show Enemies of Reason: Slaves to Superstition on the ABC on Sunday night. It’s fairly well known I’m not a fan. But whatever your view of Dawkins’ work, it seems to me that tarot card readers are the least of the worries of anyone committed to the Enlightenment project. Perhaps someone who did see it could enlighten me, but if this is one of the practices Dawkins regards as pernicious, then I suspect his understanding of what constitutes reason is very ethnocentric and rather limited:

What about sticking pins into your body to free the flow of Chi energy and cure your illness?

It’s called Chinese medicine, I believe. Acupuncture by any other name.

I’d also want to put a big question mark about the too easy equation of “reason” with “progress” - for a whole range of reasons, including but not limited to whether history can actually be understood in this way and the Frankfurt School style critique of instrumental reason and the Holocaust. But all that’s by the by. I’d been hoping that I’d be able to recommend sitting down with a good book instead of watching Dawkins get his future told. One book in particular - James Morrow’s The Philosopher’s Apprentice. On the strength of a number of reviews, I’d been eagerly awaiting its appearance on the shelves of my favourite independent sf bookstore, Pulp Fiction, and I was pleased to see it arrive just when I was off work with the flu and needing some novelistic goodness. Alas, I was to be disappointed.

Faren Miller’s review in Locus Online gives a good sense of what it’s all about, and why I thought Richard Dawkins should probably read it. (more…)