”Angel of Light,” by Joe Haldeman

The date 9/11/01 is a sort of dividing line in our history. Much SF written after that date takes it into account. We saw that already reading “A Flock of Birds.” We see it again with “Angel of Light.”

The story contains elements of extrapolation from our present. We become gradually aware of the juxtaposition of Christian and Islamic customs, but we aren’t sure that we are in a future world until Amed, the narrator, finds his grandfather’s gun: “ I recognised it from news and history pictures, an Uzi, invented and used by the old infidel state Israel.” From this we know also that Israel in its present form no longer exists.

We are probably about 60 to 100 years in the future as we know from Ahmed’s thoughts on the date of the box he finds in his basement. Christianity and Islam merged some time after 2044 after a possible struggle. But other than a few references to Christ, Christmas, and a “new Bible,” most of the life ways are Islamic.

The narrator tells of bad times endured by his father: books were burned. Chrislamic people were allowed to have only two books, the New Q’ran and the New Bible. His father was punished for keeping a forbidden book, for clinging to old Islamic ways:

“When a surprise search party later found an old Q'ran in his study, he had to spend a week, naked, in a cage [. . . .] He told them he kept the old book because of the beauty of the writing, but I knew his feelings went deeper than that: he thought the Q'ran in any language other than Arabic was just a book, not holy."

But those times have passed. Still, Ahmed lives a simple life without many conveniences. He must put sticks on the fire that warms his dwelling. He lives in a culture where most technology is banned and older financial practices are no longer followed. Documents “about land and banking” are “useless.” Strict rules govern financial transactions. Fiction too is off limits.

He is a simple, godfearing man intent on doing right. Members of Chrislam confine themselves behind walls, a decision made earlier than the time of the story. The present times are “less rigid” than his father’s but still when he finds the issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories in his grandfather’s box, remembering his father’s fate, he is tempted to call the authorities. He takes a chance in selling the magazine but, perhaps a bit of a rebel like his father, is willing to risk so that he can buy a Christmas gift for his children.

The magazine he finds seems bizarre to him if not to us, coming from an older, more worldly time. He’s worried by the scantily clad woman on the cover and asks Mohammad and Jesus for strength against temptation. He is fascinated by the stories. He notes that much of the content of the magazine comprises “tales - not religious parables or folk tales, but lies that were made up at the time, for entertainment.” He self-righteously condemns the stories as he must since his culture considers fiction written for entertainment to be simply lies.

But ironically he finds the stories familiar – they are suitably moralistic and not too far removed from his religious understanding—-and if they aren’t he makes them so. It is fun to look at this issue of an old pulp fiction magazine through the eyes of a pious Chrislamic man of the future: “Much of the content was religious. [....] ‘Terror in the Dust’ and ‘The Devouring Tide’ described scientists who were destroyed because they tried to play God - the first by giving intelligence to ants and then treating them as if he were an almighty deity, and the second, grandly, by attempting to create a new universe, with himself as Allah. ” We would have to read the stories to see how accurate Ahmed’s description is, but it doesn’t sound far off –- SF sometimes has a moralistic vein and the ethos of religion is submerged but present in many SF tales. Strictures against playing God recur – wait until we read “The Sand Kings” later in the semester!

Ahmed unwittingly reveals more about his world and about pulp SF: “The language was crude and at times bizarre, though of course part of that was just a reflection of the technological culture those writers and readers endured together. Life is simpler and more pure now, at least on this side of the city walls. The Kafir may still have books like this.” In Ahmed’s walled and rather puritanical city, SF does not exist.

From this we realize that it is the world enclosed by walls that has changed and the secular life we are used to still goes on among the “Kafir,” the unbelievers. These Kafir are white: they venture into the Chrislamic city and walk “ through the crafts and antiques section, I suppose looking for curiosities and bargains. Things that are everyday to us are exotic to them, and vice versa.” Ahmed insists he is not prejudiced against them.

How did this situation come to be? There are several possibilities: This may be a post War on Terror world, either in the United States or some other part of the globe, where Islam fundamentalism has in fact conquered – and been changed by the conquered people who were forced to embrace it. But there is another possibility: The emphasis on the Kafir as white and the fact that Ahmed refers to his father’s slave name, Washington, in fact a common name among African Americans, reminds us that many African Americans today are Muslim while others are devoutly Christian. Perhaps it is these who merge in the future and choose to live apart from white society.

While either scenario can be extrapolated from our present situations, the alien from Arcturus cannot. Like faster-than-light spaceflight, he is purely speculative. Aliens always are. There is nothing in our present world which will lead inevitably to alien encounters. A kind of in-joke among SF enthusiasts, this one is not all that different from the alien on the cover of the magazine who looks like “a giant squid, green as a plant.” The alien in our story “was much taller than the tallest human; it had a short torso but a giraffe-like neck. Its head was something like a bird's, one large eye on either side. It cocked its head this way and that, looking around.” This is comic. Both aliens are described as aliens often are by comparison to terrestrial creatures -- squid, giraffes, birds. In fact this alien more neatly fits the descriptive acronym coined by early SF buffs: BEM, bug-eyed monster.

The alien is accompanied by a white man wearing a suit and policemen with guns, Kafir (unbelievers) from outside the walls. When the alien wants to buy the magazine, Ahmed declares, "I - I can't take white people's money.” In other words, you are either Chrislamic or a Kafir. In other words, all aliens look alike.

But in spite of the Alien’s being an unbeliever, the ball of light, Ahmed remarks, is “one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I touched it with my finger - it felt cool, and tingled - and pushed it a few inches. It stayed where I moved it.” Seemingly magic but really the product of a technology far advanced -– even the white men want to study it -- it defies gravity and will outlast them all, like some kind of eternal truth. It makes him think of angels, beings whom he says are not as they are pictured, with robes and wings, but beings of pure light, and he gives it to his family for the top of their Chrislamic Christmas tree.

Everything changes. Islam and Christianity combine into Chrislam, which attempts to isolate its adherents from the world. But Chrislam itself has changed and will continue. You may try to wall out the rest of the world, you may even ban science fiction stories, but then the world –and science fiction-- will come to you like curious kafir lured by the exotic or aliens wanting to buy your old SF magazines. Ahmed knows he has been given something wonderful – he incorporates the alien gift, as he did the stories,into his system of religious belief and uses it as the traditional angel on top of the Christmas tree. But he will eventually lend it to the imams and kafir so that they too can benefit from it. Both groups will perhaps be united by the alien visit.

This is, I think, a rather humorous story about the triumph of the human imagination. Countless cultures have tried to quash it – books have been burned, pictorial images have been censored, but eventually imagination makes its way back into human cultures. The truth of either aliens or angels may be far different from our attempts to imagine them, but that shouldn’t keep us from trying.

In this story those who think “outside the box” are rewarded. Nothing much has changed in the narrator’s world – but he is the richer for the experience. He has come close to violating several taboos of his religion and no harm has befallen him. The funny looking alien has brought eternal light to the earth. Interestingly, the star Arcturas has another name, Haris-el-sema, from the Arabic Al Haris al Sama, "The Keeper of Heaven.”

Week 3: Sept. 18 –24
This week we read three more stories about aliens closer to home.

Kelley Eskridge, “Alien Jane.”
Severna Park, “The Cure for Everything.”
William Gibson, "The Belonging Kind."
 
Friday, Sept. 22: QUIZ ONE AVAILABLE IN “ Assignments.”