Muslim-influenced fantasy can take us everywhere from re-imagined versions of Al Andalus to Mars. And this week, Matt Ruff arrives with a new novel, The Mirage, that takes us somewhere else entirely: a world where the United Arab States is the dominant superpower, the state of Israel is located in Central Europe, and a devastating attack by Christian terrorists on Baghdad led the UAS to invade America and try to bring democracy to a country torn between warlords like Donald Rumsfeld, David Koresh, and a mysterious man known as the Quail Hunter. But something strange is happening: as Homeland Security agent Mustafa al Baghdadi and his team interrogate terrorist suspects, they tell a story about a world where everything is reversed. A Baghdad gangster named Saddam Hussein is buying up odd artifacts, including a pack of playing cards where he and his henchmen appear as government officials. And Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Osama bin Laden keeps sending out agents of the Al Qaeda security forces to intervene with everyone else’s work.

In other words, The Mirage is a provocative, timely, fascinating intervention in the way we think about not just the post-September 11 world but about American power and popular culture. The novel is full of funhouse mirror details like a television show with the tagline: “Shafiq: he’s Sunni. Hassan: he’s Shia. They fight crime,” where “episodes typically offered one or more moral lessons, the most common of which was ‘Respect the other People of the Book—even if you don’t like them very much.’” It’s an incredibly effective way of both exposing our debates and politics as ridiculous, and of forcing us to put ourselves in Muslims’ shoes by letting them stand in the footwear of the mostly white, mostly Christian cops, politicians and criminals we see on American television. And the magic, when it comes, is wonderfully lovely and inventive, the result of Ruff having researched not just geopolitics but fantastical belief.

I spoke to Ruff yesterday about breaking out of stereotypical images of Muslims in popular culture, how we decide which terrorist attacks to excuse and which to condemn, and how our beliefs about our ability to change history can lead us astray. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’d be curious how you decided which cultural phenomena would survive—or develop naturally—in your alternate history. Personally, I’m glad to hear that Oded Fehr’s still a huge star in the world of The Mirage.

For me, it wasn’t so much a matter of what to include but what to leave out. I’m a huge pop culture fan, so I had tons of ideas that I could have included. It was more a matter of picking and choosing things that were either short and clever and wouldn’t disrupt the plot, or would support it in some way. One obvious case was the Invasion of the Body Snatchers in an alternate version…it was a way of introducing the fact that Samir [one of the Homeland Security agents who works with Mustafa] is fighting his homosexuality…Another idea I had come up with that I didn’t use was the infamous Star Trek mirror world episode. I had thought to have that on TV in the background, the difference being that the Evil Spock would be clean-shaven.

I was also wondering if you could talk a bit about the decision to set the novel in Baghdad instead of, say, Saudi Arabia, and to marginalize oil politics in the novel. Are those resources democratized in the UAS?

There were a lot of specific nuts and bolts questions like that that I left unanswered becuase they didn’t fit what I was doing. The very first incarnation of the book, I had thought to set it in Riyadh. Riyadh became the federal district, it became the alternate Washington, DC, and to have it serve as New York didn’t work. What I wanted to do was offer central roles to people who suffered the real brunt of the War on Terror, so it made sense to make Baghdad Ground Zero because that is Ground Zero of the U.S. response to the War on Terror. These were the folks who I wanted to be in the center of the novel and have their turn on the other side of the looking glass…you’ve go the South representing the more religious vision of what Arabia should be, and then you’ve got Egypt as an alternate, more secular vision but they have lost out on the competition for where the capital should be.
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Jonathan Franzen has been in the news lately for saying two things. First, he told attendees at the Hay Festival that e-readers are a threat to our society:

Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough…a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience…Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change…Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

Then, in the same speech, he apparently voiced some skepticism about whether President Obama should be spending his time reading: “One of the reasons I love Barack Obama as much as I do is that we finally have a real reader in the White House. It’s absolutely amazing. There’s one of us running the U.S. [Although] when I heard he was reading Freedom I thought, ‘Why are you reading a novel? There are important things to be doing!”

Now, I’m obviously a big advocate of having a reader in the White House, both because I think consuming smart culture, whether it’s Freedom or Homeland can provide perspective on both issues and the national mindset, and because I think even presidents need a break. I’ve never particularly understood people who object to presidential leisure, within reasonable limits, of course. The presidency is an incredibly difficult job, probably too large for one person. But if we’re going to have one person do it, that person needs to be saved from burnout and insanity as best as possible, a process that means both vacations and reading things that are not giant briefings with check boxes attached.

On the larger issue of e-readers, I’m not sure I see Franzen’s point. Most e-readers don’t contain the option to alter the words of the text itself, only to highlight, add bookmarks, and marginalia and notes. Having a print copy of a book doesn’t guarantee that it’ll be treated with reverence, as any college student or deeply engaged reader’s marked-up texts can attest. The move from cotton paper to pulp-based paper actually means that our books are less permanent and lasting edifices than they used to be. Digital copies may last longer, and in more pristine condition, than our paperbacks of today do. That doesn’t mean that books can’t be fetish objects, or artwork, of course. But digital can offer its own interactivity, picture quality, etc., and so if you’re just critiquing the form in terms of its permanence, I think Franzen is barking up the wrong tree. The real question should be whether any innovation in the form brings in more readers and gets them to read more books. It’s still early, but research suggests that people who own e-readers are upping their book consumption. From both an economic and an intellectual perspective, that should make Franzen pretty happy.

I haven’t read Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land yet, but her appearance on On Point yesterday, particularly her breathtaking condescension to Salon’s Irin Carmon about the latter’s high school dating life, has to be heard to be believed. During the hour, she spends a lot of time defending the idea that brutish teenaged boys are out to take advantage of teenaged girls. And while I’m in absolute agreement with Irin that if we want to keep girls physically and sexually safe, it makes as much sense to focus on boys as on girls, and with critics who argue that Flanagan has absolutely no insights into non-straight girls, I think there’s another broad exception to that dynamic. Flanagan seems to have no sense whatsoever that boys and girls can be friends, and that encouraging those relationships could help women build better relationships with male bosses, and male coworkers, and male friends.

My male friends are among the most important in my life. The friend I’m most in touch with from high school is a man, who introduced me to action movies and hung out with me after work and at debate team practices. There’s no question my love of campy movies like Starship Troopers and Hackers is a legacy of our friendship, and part of the reason I’m a critic. My best friends in college were the guys I worked on political campaigns with, lived with during my summer in New Haven (contra Flanagan’s domestic ideals, we survived mostly on fried chicken, pancakes, and deeply terrible takeout Chinese), and argued about movies and music with. It wasn’t that I didn’t have female friends — the women I met in college have been critical to my adult life — but there’s no question that these men were formative to my artistic, social, and moral development.

At one point during the interview, Flanagan says, “Girls are hugely interested in boys. That isn’t ever going to change.” But what she — and a lot of the culture she decries — misses is that there are a lot of different ways to be interested in boys. I would hope she’s raising her sons not just to avoid being sexual predators, but to see women as potential friends as well as lovers and wives. And I hope she wouldn’t see their adolescence as failed if they emerged from it with female friends who would last a lifetime instead of having had a bunch of girlfriends.

In December, an Arizona judge upheld a state law that bans classes that “promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” That ruling’s already cost Tucson public schools their Mexican Studies program, and as part of that elimination, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is being removed from classrooms and sent to the district’s book depository. As nuts as it is to think that the Bard’s story of a sorcerer and his daughter could promote a rebellion in Arizona, there are a lot of other books that could fall under scrutiny if this law is allowed to stand.

1. Paradise Lost, John Milton: Sure, this is supposed to be John Milton’s repentance of his republican apostasy, but what if red-blooded American kiddies get confused by the eloquence of that wily creature Satan? That whole “Farewel Remorse: all Good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my Good” thing could cause all sorts of kerfuffles and uprisings, like those darn video games my grandson is always playing.

2. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens: It’s a short leap from Marquis Evrémonde to Mitt Romney, and we wouldn’t want to invite that comparison, now would we? Darnay is such an avatar of the politics of envy.

3. The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling: This one might be a squeaker. Sure, the hero advocates strongly against the anti-Muggle, Squib, and Mudblood race politics of Voldemort and his cronies. But that Potter kid is awfully disrespectful to the Minister of Magic and forms of authority in general.

5. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card: Pre-teens plotting an overhaul of world government and resisting the efforts of the military that’s recruited them to manipulate them. Total recipe for disaster. Especially now that blogging is an actual thing that kids can do. Nuke this one. And parents, shut down your kids’ Tumblrs just to be safe.
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I’m super-excited to be judging the quarterfinal round of this year’s Tournament of Books at The Morning News. For those of you who haven’t done it before, 16 critics read through 16 of the top books published in the previous year, and they advance through the brackets in concert with the NCAA season. So if you’re looking for a good read, check out State of Wonder, The Sisters Brothers, Swamplandia!, The Cat’s Table, The Marriage Plot, Green Girl, The Art of Fielding, or Open City. Their fates will be in my hands!

Father Gabriel Amorth, the former Vatican chief exorcist who’s been warning about the risk that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels will tempt children into Satanism since 2000, is at it again, and this time he’s inveighing against both kid wizards and yoga practitioners. Per the New York Daily News:

“Practicing yoga is Satanic, it leads to evil just like reading Harry Potter,” Father Gabriele Amorth said this week. Those seemingly “innocuous” Potter books convince kids to believe in black magic, he said. “In Harry Potter the Devil acts in a crafty and covert manner, under the guise of extraordinary powers, magic spells and curses,” said Amorth. As for yoga, it leads to Hinduism and “all eastern religions are based on a false belief in reincarnation,” the 86-year-old priest said.

In an odd way, I respect the honesty of this kind of statement, even as I think it’s ludicrous and somewhat paranoid to see the Harry Potter novels as anything other than a reaffirmation of the power of Christian theology. There’s a refreshing honesty in admitting both the power of ideas, and the fact that your doctrine may have trouble competing with other worldviews. I tend to want to be in the scrum, in part because I think well-articulated progressive visions tend to have a pretty good shot at winning the battle of ideas, and because I don’t think those ideas can survive only if they don’t face competition or opposition. But I do respect people who withdraw from the things they consider temptation entirely.

The problem for folks like Amorth is that abstinence, whether from sex or from generation-defining young adult fantasy series, isn’t likely to be a particularly effective pitch. And when you can’t convince people to abstain from culture voluntarily, bans or purges from libraries like the one instituted by a Catholic priest in a Massachusetts parish school in 2007, who said he was just instituting a “spiritual peanut butter ban on Harry Potter,” like rules that are meant to avoid exposing children to possible allergens, seem likely to result even if only on a small scale. But if I were a member of the Catholic hierarchy, I look at book bans as a fallback position rather than a victory. There are only so many enclaves you can carve out that are untouched by the larger culture. And settling for enclaves at all is an acknowledgment that your ideas have a limited appeal.

Pursuant to our discussion about fantasy earlier this week, Salon has an interesting piece on N.K. Jemisin and David Anthony Durham, fantasy, race, and class. Both authors have some interesting thoughts on the form. Jemisin talks about the inherent limitations of telling stories that fall into a pattern of a “MacGuffin of Power being brought to a Place of Significance.” And Durham points out how useful changing the framework can be when you want to talk about thorny issues, ranging from slavery to Halliburton, saying, “I have some readers who are quite liberal and some that are more conservative than I am, but they still engage with the book that I wrote, with all the components that are at play in it, in a way that I think they wouldn’t if they perceived me to have a political agenda right from the start.” And towards the end, both raise a point that I think merits serious consideration: should we do away with racial and ethnic sections in bookstores?

Durham’s second book, a literary novel titled “Walk Through Darkness,” about an escaped slave and the man tracking him, “never made it to the front of the store, really, because it was immediately shelved as an ‘African-American novel.’” Now, “my stuff is being read by more and a wider range of people than it was in the early days.”

Jemisin has been annoyed to learn that her first novel sometimes gets shelved in the same section, which means that readers searching the science fiction and fantasy area can’t find it. “The inherent danger of that section,” she said, “are the ideas that, a) only African-Americans would be interested in it, and b) African-Americans are interested solely because there is something African-American associated with it — usually the writer. I don’t see the novels of white authors who write black characters getting shoved into that section.” This is all the more irksome when, as was the case with her first novel, people assume her narrator is black; Jemisin envisioned the character and her people as similar to the Incas. “Just because I am black,” she said, “does not mean I am always going to write about black characters.”

I’m sympathetic to both sides here. As someone who is interdisciplinary by profession, it can be really useful to have fiction, history, sociology, etc. on similar themes in juxtaposition with each other,though in reality, that’s not really how African-American or Women’s sections in bookstores tend to work. And just putting books next to each other aren’t a guarantee that someone who comes in for a romance novel will leave with that and something like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

I also think that shelving situations that create and promote semi-artificial differences in taste aren’t useful. The idea that Jumping the Broom or Waiting to Exhale are so vastly different from The Wedding Planner or Julia Quinn’s novels that they need to be shelved separately is just bizarre, and separating them keeps readers who might like them from coming across things they might not otherwise seek out while browsing. Yes, of course, we also bear responsibility to get up and explore new things if we want to be widely read. But if we can’t count on most people to do that, I think I’d favor putting a greater diversity of things in the average browser’s path.

As a side note, would folks be interested in starting a side reading project that explores fantasy that draws from religious traditions other than Christianity and by non-white authors? I’m going to start Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan this weekend, and while I’ll probably blog it no matter what, if folks wanted to read it specifically for discussion in a few weeks, I’d be more than game to set up something like the Pop Culture and the Death Penalty Project or the book club.

If you’re confused about the point of Occupy Wall Street, here’s a great essay by Matt Stoller.

Or you can go even deeper (and weirder) and read Distraction, Bruce Sterling’s wildly entertaining and spookily prescient 1998 satire of American society in 2044. The book begins with our protagonist, political operative Oscar Valparaiso, trying to understand a video that shows a group of seemingly uncoordinated people showing up in a town and working together to demolish a bank in just a few minutes. (Sterling was describing a political flash mob five years before the term “flash mob” was even coined.) Throughout the course of the book, Oscar comes to understand the power of social-network political action and its implications for American democracy.

Oscar and his campaign crew — having just won a U.S. Senate election and now at loose ends — cross over into Texas from Lousiana, where they’re stopped by members of the nearby Air Force base for “voluntary contributions” to their “Air Force bake sale,” because the federal government’s budget crisis is so bad it’s unclear whether the base is being funded any more:

It had never occured to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the same grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus cause large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities.

It was no longer fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave.

The American economy collapsed years before the book takes place, with a vast divide between the moneyed elite and nearly everyone else, whose abilities have been made economically obsolescent by computing technology, international competition, and the demise of intellectual property. In one exchange, the campaign bus driver tries to explain to Oscar that the forgotten Americans are figuring out how to “make their own lives by themselves”:

“Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs, man! You don’t care about ‘em! You don’t have any use for ‘em! You can’t make any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”

“A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”

“Man, that’s the creepy part — they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization, they sure got plenty of that stuff.”

And this is only one piece of Distraction‘s complex, silly, and dark world, which involves a war-time romance between Oscar and the brilliant neuroscientist Greta Penninger, whom he helps take over a scientific research facility on the budget chopping block as she works on remapping cognition. They then have to defend the facility from the takeover attempts of the insane governor of Louisiana, who is trying to save his state’s people as global warming puts it underwater. Meanwhile, the President is waging war against the Netherlands, and the senator Oscar elected, an eco-architecture billionaire, becomes mentally ill after conducting a hunger strike with all of his vital signs monitored by millions over the Internet.

Sterling’s extrapolations from 1998 into the near-distant future verge on the absurd, but it’s the absurdity of a world changing faster than most people can adapt, one where reputation on social networks can translate into real political power, where it’s hard to tell if things are working great or broken beyond repair. In other words, it’s a lot like the world we live in today.