Biographical Notes to â€å“a Discourse on the Nature of Causality Benjamin Rosenbaum Review
Interview thread
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Benjamin Rosenbaum: God's Really Weird
| Benjamin Rosenbaum grew upwards in Arlington, Virginia, and attended Brownish Academy, earning degrees in computer science and religious studies. He makes a living as a computer programmer, and has lived in Israel, Italy, and Switzerland. Rosenbaum's first professional person story sale was "The Ant Rex: A California Fairy Tale" (2001), followed by more than than a dozen sales to magazines including Asimov's, McSweeney's, Harper'south, and Nature. He was nominated for 3 major awards in 2005: "Embracing-the-New" (2004) was a Nebula nominee; "Biographical Notes to 'A Soapbox on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes', by Benjamin Rosenbaum" (2004) was a Hugo finalist; and "Start the Clock" (2004) made the Sturgeon shortlist. He attended Clarion West in 2001, and his chapbook of Borgesian brusque-shorts, Other Cities, appeared in 2003. Rosenbaum at present works for the National Science Foundation, and lives in Virginia with his wife, Esther, and their young children, Aviva and Noah. |  Photo past Beth Gwinn Benjamin Rosenbaum'southward Page |
Excerpts from the interview:�I like alienation. Part of what I like near science fiction is reading a text and going, 'Wow! This volition be dissimilar!' Just science fiction shows a tension between the literature of breach, where yous're really dandy somebody's head open, and the literature of familiarity. In a way it'south reassuring to see Horatio Hornblower in space, or people from at present in space. The people in the dandy old science fiction that I beloved, from the Foundation books or Time Plenty for Dearest to The Dispossessed and Dune and The Forever War, are far more than similar to united states of america than Jane Austen's characters are, in terms of their values. And that seems weird to me. We are very much shaped by the technological and cultural niche we live in; we're not going to retain the aforementioned values and anxieties and taboos and preoccupations as the globe changes wildly around u.s.a..
�In the New Wave, people started thinking most this issue of alienation seriously. Delany got it correct in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. He tried to go into the heads of people who were very dissimilar. Bester attempted to imagine that kind of fundamental shift of mores in The Demolished Man -- he was predicting the Sexual Revolution but getting information technology wrong. I imagine him, writing in the '50s, sort of extrapolating from Kinsey, with a sense that promiscuity was on the rise and was going to change club, and trying to imagine what that world would exist like. But the women in the book are withal kind of in the '40s mode, and in their sexual liberty there's a sense that they're 'ruined' or 'fallen,' even if they embrace that ruin. The real effect of lowering the sanctions against sex outside of matrimony, by my generation anyhow, was to create a social norm that says recreational sex is healthy and cuffo and nondescript, something we should do more often, similar jogging. How could Bester accept predicted that?�
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�My parents always encouraged me to write (they have poems I wrote when I was iii!), and as far every bit I know I always loved scientific discipline fiction and fantasy. Somebody said the earliest matter we all read is Dr. Seuss, and so we ever begin with fantasy and scientific discipline fiction. Certainly past the time I was 8 or ten I was voraciously devouring it, reading Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and besides the archetype children'southward fantasy similar Le Guin'southward Earthsea and things past Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper.... That's the foundation. In high schoolhouse, when I was however reading voraciously but start to exist more sophisticated almost my taste, I imprinted on two things which I think you can see in my stories. I was reading what was broadly called New Wave 5 or x years after it was written, and it influenced me more than the Cyberpunk that was being written at the fourth dimension. Le Guin, Delany, Russ, Varley -- all that remaking of science fiction. The other big thing which influenced my piece of work was people like Barthelme, Calvino, Borges, and Lem -- the heirs of Kafka who were active at that fourth dimension -- and some of the European philosophers. Delany and others in the New Wave were certainly very engaged with them. In Delany's Tales of Nevèrÿon, the outset of each chapter is a quote from Derrida or Foucault, somebody from this European philosophical tradition that is talking about the limits of logic and the applesauce of the world (that'southward an oversimplification).�
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�I go along drawing on both my college majors, information science and religious studies, in my writing. I always had a natural tendency toward religiosity. I grew up reading the Hebrew Bible a lot, and it formed many of my worldviews. The affair is, information technology'south not logical. It was written in the historic period of the epics -- the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Iliad and the Odyssey -- where the earth is mysterious and in that location is no requirement that God be an arithmetic expression of all virtues. Later, Aristotle and the Athenians come in maxim God has to be the maximum of good, and the maximum of this and that, trying to give explanations for all the anthropomorphism, the capriciousness of God, that you meet in religious texts, on the basis that God is this infinitely overnice, infinitely orderly Being with a Plan. The God of the medieval philosophers is predictable, and can be reduced to a formula. 'It follows that God would not practise that.' Merely God'south really weird! In the actual Bible, God does things, then regrets them. And that's interesting. God can exist pissed at some people and love other people. At that place's a capriciousness to God, and that makes sense to me equally a model. The universe does seem arbitrary.
�I am a religious postmodernist. I recollect religion is a communal homo labor to create an emotional context for the crazy, inscrutable nature of the world. It's all metaphor; only equally a postmodernist, when I say that, I'm not wimpily saying 'Well, it'due south not actually true, only it's dainty to think that way.' I hateful it's a powerful metaphor, 1 of the tools nosotros tin can use to get at the world -- always provisionally, always temporarily. Like art, and science. In my religious worldview -- and I recollect this is actually very Jewish -- I call up whatsoever time you think you know what God is or can proclaim with certainty what God wants, you're guilty of idolatry.�
Source: https://www.locusmag.com/2005/Issues/10Rosenbaum.html
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