The Big God Network
 

Q: What kind of book is The Big God Network?

A: I would call it near-future science fiction mixed with political satire.

 
Q: Who are your literary influences?

A: Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, Voltaire, the Russian science-fiction writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (Roadside Picnic), and Hunter S. Thompson were all significant influences, especially in regards to this book. All are satirists, in different ways. Also Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick.

Q: What is the genesis of The Big God Network?

A: It started with a short story I wrote in 1992, which was a satire of cyberpunk fiction and UFO culture, set in the near future against a backdrop of a divided United States. The West Coast has become part of liberal Pacifica and the Heartland has turned into a fundamentalist New America. The story morphed into a novel that warned of the growing sway of the Christian right and incorporated them into new virtual realms. Set amidst all of this was the story's otherworldly main plot, which involved the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the protagonist's own spiritual journey. I finished the first draft, called Virtual Spirit in 1996, then set it on the shelf for years before completing the new version in 2007.

Q: Were you trying to write “the great Post-American novel”?

A: I wish. [Laughs.] Actually, I've used the term Post-American myself in describing the book. Before starting the book in the early ‘90s, I was certain that we were coming apart as a country. I was deeply concerned about the growth of Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. Believing literally in the Bible, thinking the Earth is only 6,000 years old, discarding Evolution, waiting for the Rapture. It was a descent into medievalist thinking, into superstition, that didn’t bode well for our future. Scared the hell out of me, in fact. There were abortion clinics being blown up in that era, and Christian right-wing militias rising up. All that’s died down for now, but I’m not comforted.

Q: You don’t agree with Barack Obama that there’s room for everyone?

A: I don’t think so. I felt in the ‘90s that there are different groups of Americans who were extremely different from each other, and I’d say it’s worse now. The evangelicals don’t want to be governed by secular liberals, and liberals don’t want to be ruled by a Christian theocracy. These are two extremely different mindsets.

Q: So, in the novel, some twenty years from now, what has happened to the United States?

A: It’s come undone. The Christian Right that has split the country, through their efforts to enforce their fundamentalist sharia and wage their moral jihads. The Republic has fragmented into several new nations. The West Coast has become liberal Pacifica. New York and New England have merged into a new country. Much of the rest of the country is part of conservative New America, a theocracy that Jerry Falwell would have loved. And the Navajos have Dinee, in the Southwest, which plays a small role in the book.

Q: Tell us about the book’s hero.

A: Franz Sampaio lives in Pacifica and hosts a wideband show called Transmigrations that deals with world religions and new Net religions, and his partners are his wife Dolores and their friend Takeshi, who lives in Tokyo. Franz is a spiritual person who’s lost his spirituality, and is reluctantly drawn into defending Pacifica against a conspiracy by New America to take back the West Coast. There is new communications technology developed that could threaten Pacifica’s freedom.

Q: The Christian Right rules New America. Did you research fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity before writing the book?

A: I was always curious about both, and Pentecostalism. I once attended a rally in downtown L.A. with the legendary faith-healer Ernest Angley. For the book, I read a lot of recent books about such subjects. And I was an avid watcher of the TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) channel, the one run by Paul and Jan Crouch, two prosperity-gospel types. They have a weird lavish set that seems like it was designed by Liberace, and Jan looks like a cousin to Tammy Faye Bakker. Late at night, TBN would have people talking about handling snakes, recounting their meetings with angels, getting into a fever about the End Time, and so forth. I took notes and used some of the dialogue in the book. I was fascinated by their use of technology, and having fund-raising drives to pay for communications satellites. They were so high-tech! So I extrapolated, and took their operation into virtual reality. The “Big God Network” is the name of Reverend Jawbone’s evangelical wideband system in the book, and has some other meanings as well.

Q: Are all your evangelicals bad guys?

A: Of course not! In the book, the ex-Yakuza pentecostalist preacher Yuji goes from hit man to hero. I want to say I have great respect for evangelicals who are tolerant and compassionate. Give me that old time religion, those 19^th century evangelicals who were on the side of the poor and downtrodden! I am satirizing greedy preachers who are fleecing their followers, modern neocon Christians who think Jesus was a pro-war capitalist, Pat Robertson-type fanatics who are leading us into a theocracy by mixing church and state, and the end-timers who think the rapture is coming and are ready to ruin the here-and-now for the rest of us.

Q: You’ve got a lot of religion of all types in the book, not just evangelicals. There are UFO cults, new-age religions, and pagan Wiccans, for starters.

A: Absolutely! The witch Owinda, who is the high priestess of a chain of covens in Pacifica, is a wise heroine in the book.

Q: One of the most interesting things about The Big God Network is the way it posits an intersection between science and religion, two things that would seem at first glance to be mutually exclusive.

A: There’s a connection. At its heart, religion is about awe and wonder, and mystery and reverence. Doesn’t that sound like Carl Sagan and Cosmos?

Q: You also bring up technology worship, especially with futuristic sci-tech, when you mention the netopians, technutopians and technopagans in the book.

A:  There is rampant techno-fetishism evident among some science-fiction authors and readers. And think of Wired magazine, which was founded in 1993 and really captured a certain mindset at the time. Wired is a religious magazine on one level, perhaps more so in the ‘90s than now. Their readers and other digerati exhibit cultish behavior regarding technological products and advances. Think of how Apple made headlines when they hired their first Technology Evangelist, a position that’s now common, and employed what were essentially faith-based marketing tactics. On another level, the geeks and digerati reflect a type of millennial thinking in which people are strongly dissatisfied with present reality, with the limitations of their human bodies and the tedium of their human lives. They have this blind faith in technological change, and yearn to live in a futuristic fantasy land, even if it’s portrayed as a rather dark place by some authors. Instead of waiting for a messiah to come, they’re waiting for some transformative high-tech future. It’s future lust, instead of future shock.

Q: Are they just trying to be cool?

A: Yes, a nerd’s strategy of being hipper-than-thou by being ahead of the curve, knowing about the latest gadgets and tech before their peers do, looking down at others who are a few steps behind and moving on before they can catch up. It’s an accelerated pretentiousness.

Q: How did you get into the digital culture?

A: I have always been interested in science fiction and then got interested in interactive entertainment and virtual reality when I was a reporter for Billboard magazine. I wrote about the first immersive video games and interactive laserdiscs. Later I authored a book called Entertainment in the Cyber Zone for Random House, and for that I interviewed people like the VR guru Jaron Lanier, science-fiction writers Arthur C. Clarke and Bruce Sterling, and Will Wright (The Sims). I was interviewed by various NPR radio shows at the time about CD-ROM and multimedia.

Q: Do you see virtual reality as positive or negative? In the book, the cyberspace experienced by Franz and Takeshi and others is quite intriguing. Yet, there’s also the sad experience of the retiree Matthew, who’s been in the Rainbow.

A: Yes, he’s an old coot who’s been tucked away in a rest home where the patients are all hooked into VR and left there, neglected. There’s great potential and great danger in virtual reality. Of course, it could be incredible in terms of exploring new places and interacting with other people. And in the book I try to show it as part of everyday life for most people, either with full immersion or interactions with VR in public spaces. I think that once the technology of virtual reality advances sufficiently, it’s going to be so incredibly seductive that we’ll all be in danger of wanting to spend most of our time in cyberspace. Just look at the popularity of things like Second Life, which are so low-tech. Imagine when the video games and virtual worlds are truly realistic in terms of sight, touch, temperature, smell, etc.

Q: That leads us to virtual sex. What’s your opinion? Pro or con?

A: I’m cybersex-neutral (laughs). Of course that will be a huge temptation. And in the book Takeshi falls prey to the siren call of VR sex. Of course, he meets the alluring Sally Simkin in the Yabyum Palace, so that’s a good thing.

Q:  Back to religion, could you tell us about Baba Ed’s UFO cult in the book, called Offworld?

A: Carl Jung identified the sighting of UFOs as a religious phenomenon, many decades ago. That’s not to say I don’t think something fishy was going on at Roswell. But I’m fascinated with this whole culture of UFO abductees. There are tens of thousands of them all over the world. And so many people strongly believe that governments, of the U.S. and elsewhere, are hiding vital information from them. Covering up divine revelations, so to speak. So Baba Ed is the leader of an extremely wealthy group called Offworld, which worships the stars and UFOs and believes that life came from space. Baba Ed is desperately seeking to contact ETs, and has bankrolled a new technology that involves radio waves, AI and quantum neurology. That’s the tech that New America wants to get its hands on, that Franz reluctantly must help safeguard.

Q: In the Heaven’s Gate tragedy in 1997, members of a cult committed suicide so they could ride aboard a spaceship hiding behind the Comet Hale-Bopp. Did that surprise you?

A: Yes and no. Heaven’s Gate again demonstrated the religious aspect of UFO culture, this time played out to tragic extremes. They wanted to go to the mothership, i.e., heaven. It was horribly weird in the details, but we’ve had so many cults and so much fanaticism in the last few decades. I wondered how such an obvious fruitcake like Marshall Applewhite could have such a hold on those people. Yet we must also ask why so many people follow Pat Robertson, Ayatollah Khomeini, Jim Jones, and other deranged religious leaders. Not to mention Pat Boone.

Q: What about all the cosmology in The Big God Network and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the book. Aren’t those religious elements, too?

A: Guilty as charged. Modern cosmology is part of my personal spirituality. A meeting of science and mysticism, I guess you could say. My personal beliefs are a little like those of  the character Arwin, who worships both the cosmos and Gaia, with awe and wonder. But without superstition, I hope.

Q: When did you become converted?

A: I have long been a nature worshipper, being a lifelong hiker and environmentalist. I think my conversion to cosmos worship really began in the late '80s. I was backpacking with friends in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. We were stargazing at night, watching shooting stars and constellations. One friend, Barry, sipped whiskey from his Sierra cup and rapturously extolled the wonders of the universe, the Big Bang, the strangeness of the cosmos, and the ultimate nature of reality. Barry, an ardent atheist, asked, 'Who needs religion?' I had been a fan of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series, but Barry's enthusiasm for the stars inspired me to plunge further into books by Timothy Ferris, Michio Kaku, Stephen Hawking, and others that explored the universe and cosmic creation. I was also intrigued by SETI and its search for extraterrestrial intelligence via radio waves. All of this is the new religion, I thought at the time. This became a big part of The Big God Network, through the characters of both Baba Ed and Arwin, and their respective groups Offworld and Cosmogaia.

Q: Where is the USA going from here? Are we close to Post-America?

A: Yes, I see great potential for trouble for the U.S. in the decades to come. Americans as a whole have been consistently ignoring the expansive political power and cultural influence of the religious right, which I consider very dangerous for the future of this country. Although the Democrats seem to be gaining power right now, and Team Bush is in disgrace, the country is still deeply divided. Look at how well Huckabee has done, and he has little to offer except his faith. The percentage of Americans who are evangelicals or fundamentalists is still growing. Half the country doesn’t believe in evolution. Or Carbon-14 dating. Faith trumps science. It’s not going to produce innovative scientists, rational politicians, or enlightened human beings.

Q: How did Bush’s election in 2000 affect your rewrite of the book?

A: Well, it confirmed some of my worst fears. I watched with dismay as extremists and fundamentalists gained power in the United States and Dubya stole the election in Florida. My nightmares were becoming reality, and post-America loomed ever closer. As a result, the book became more political, and I amplified my satire of the Christian right. Oh, the horror! The horror!

Q: What kinds of readers do you think would be attracted by the material in The Big God Network?

A: Perhaps those who read books about black holes and baby universes, who are fascinated with world religions and the global village, who are intrigued by cyberspace and immersion in virtual reality, who wonder whether religion will one day split America apart, or who are intrigued by interesting near-future scenarios.

Q: Tell us about the cover art for The Big God Network, which is quite striking.

A: The cover was designed by Brazilian graphic artist Cristina Portella, who combined a Hubble Telescope image of a spiral galaxy with an interior image I shot of a modern cathedral in downtown Rio. She’s done beautiful book covers in Brazil, and CD covers for famous Brazilian musicians, including Maria Rita, Milton Nascimento and Gilberto Gil.

Q: One last question: where would you like to be twenty years from now?

A: In Pacifica, of course! [laughs].

(*J.C. McGowan interviewed by writer and friend C. V. Lord, January 28, 2008).