Let Them Eat Dog.

Let Them Eat Dog: The Spectacular Hypocrisy of the Anti-Yulin Movement.

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” said the great princess. And how contemptibly naïve she was. For those words would hasten forth the ringing of the death knell for the French monarchy.  L’Autrichienne had issued a statement so trite, so appallingly unaware, so out-of-touch with popular opinion in France that the people, the French people, normally so calm and considered and averse to the idea of strikes and demonstrations, had no choice but to revolt.

The mass ‘anti-brioche’ movement had been born, and, with overwhelming verve and vigour, the people signed en-masse a petition condemning such cruelty to Vienoissaries, and calling on the government to ban such a gross demonstration of culinary immorality.  

There followed a revolution, during which sense and decency was restored. Brioche was allowed to live a long and happy life, bread was restored as the basic ingredient in the national diet, and the rest, as they say, is history. 

Except that it isn’t.

For one, the great princess to whom Rousseau attributes that memorable phrase was almost certainly not Marie Antoinette. But that is a minor quibble. No, the most important fact of the matter is that the first iteration of the French Revolution was not a popular reaction to the Dauphine’s goute immorale but a protest against the appalling conditions faced by the French citizenry; conditions that, incidentally, had forced many to resort to far more desperate acts and means than being cruel to man’s best friend. 

The anti-Yulin protest is as inaccurate as the above parody. The Yulin dog-meat festival, a ‘tradition’ that has been celebrated in the Guangxi city of the same name since the mid-‘90s and that received State approval in 2009, might appear to be an expression of particularly poor taste. But, as is so often the case, those campaigning against it are disinclined to explore beneath the surface of the issue. I contend that the festival, and the uncountable equivalents which will escape condemnation by avoiding the attention of viral-moralists, is caused by human suffering. I contend that those who truly wish to see an end to expressions and exercises of barbarous cruelty would better serve their mission by focussing not on one trivial example of it but on that which causes such things to be popular.  

Friends and colleagues have been inclined to highlight the hypocrisy demonstrated by signatories to Change.org and other petitions; those who will lambast the Chinese government for allowing such a festival to occur before settling down in front of the television with a burger made of the less-appetizing remains of a tortured pig or cow or chicken. They are correct to do so. And, as someone who unashamedly salivates over the prospect of a good sausage, I could hardly claim to be bastion of coherent morals if I were myself to have signed the petition. 

But my objection to it, and the particular hypocrisy which I have found most galling, is different. And I should request here, now that I find myself just past the outset, that the reader does not mistake this as a piece by one in favour of battering Chihuahuas to death with sticks and stones. (I am not. Not least because, if the purpose of this capital punishment were that the executioners should be able to devour the carcass, it would be more efficient – it would produce a higher yield - to find and kill a real rat.) Rather, the objection contained herein is to a moral theory that places fluff and paws and cuteness above the rights and liberties of nasty, carnivorous human beings. 

It’s inconvenient, isn’t it? The Chinese… no, the human race in its entirety is not particularly attractive. We’re not fluffy and cuddly. Our noses are often protrusions of unappealing dimensions. Our faces so often lack the features necessary to redeem their lack of symmetry. Our ears are dull, we have hands and not paws, we lack tails, and we are obese and bipedal. And we kill and maim and butcher each other every single day. It’s hard to care, isn’t it? Human suffering produces human apathy. It’s an unpleasant truth, but a truth nonetheless.

But it is worth remembering that China contains perhaps the largest population of disenfranchised people on the planet. Its state, its Party, suppresses dissent with violence and oppresses its people with means that (and clichés are occasionally necessary) can only be described as Orwellian. It brutalizes its ethnic minorities, such as Uyghurs and Tibetans, where it is deemed necessary in order to assuage the Han majority. It is slowly but inexorably bringing its overseas territories and provinces, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, under the complete control of the mainland, against the wishes of their peoples. This is but one facet of a resurgent, aggressive nationalism that is expressed elsewhere in the form of dangerous and flagrantly illegal irredentism, as demonstrated by the hard line and tough stance taken by The Party in its dispute with Japan over the Senkaku islands, and with territorial disputes in the South China Sea. 

The Party, in an exercise in newspeak reminiscent of Airstrip One, counters claims made about its almost total lack of respect of human rights by international observers, not least those of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, by saying that it adopts a different definition of the same. The Party defines human rights in relation to the Four Cardinal Principles, which are: 

1. We must keep to the socialist road.
2. We must uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat.
3. We must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party.
4. We must uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

More recently The Party has expanded its definition. Human rights in China are now considered in relation to its ‘national culture’ and its level of economic growth. (George Osborne would doubtless approve.)

So it is quite proper, says the Party, that China be allowed to execute people (more than every other country that still utilizes capital punishment put together in the ‘90s) who have never seen a trial let alone a jury and then to harvest their organs. It is quite proper that the One Child Policy, and the bizarre and inhumane rules and laws that have spawned from it, should be celebrated; maintained where necessary and redefined elsewhere (with the effect of exacerbating problems of sex-selective back-street abortions and abandonments). It is absolutely right that The Party should maintain strict control of the press, and indeed of all information. It is necessary that it should permit those religious and superstitious practices and traditions that it can control, such as Yulin, whilst seeking to eliminate (in the case of Falun Gong) or impose its own doctrine (in the case of Tibetan Buddhism) on those that defy The Party’s rule. The Party is the religion, and all condoned festivals and ceremonies and traditions are condoned because they conform to its doctrines. More on that later. 

It can maintain the absence of a judicial system and workers’ rights. It can treat its rural and migrant workers as subhumans. It is proper that freedom of political expression and opinion be suppressed and that their advocates be treated as ‘counterrevolutionaries’. It is essential that The Party maintains the myth of a common cultural enemy. Orwell’s dystopia never really required anything other than Goldstein and a one-at-a-time rotation of a foreign foe to achieve this effect, but The Party in China has demonstrated its flexibility in continually coming up with new dangers, new pariahs, new enemies.

I am flirting with crass and artless danger. Perhaps there is already too much paint on the canvas. Suffice it to say that all of the above, and the rest of the exhaustive list that I have not the space or the time to include here, are not just condoned under The Party’s definition of human rights; they are the Party’s definition of human rights. All of this, all of these crimes, are human rights, according to The Party, because they are necessary to ensure the upholding of the Four Cardinal Principles and the continuation of economic growth.

What, then, is the real problem? Is it that some Chinese people (and not, as many Twitter morons seem to believe, the entire population of China) have taken part in the ceremony? Is it that some Chinese people eat dog and cat meat? Rest assured, Yulin does not represent the sum total of animal cruelty and questionable culinary tastes in China. Or is it rather that festivals like Yulin are created, and are popular, because the conditions in which the people of Guangxi are forced to live in, and those of other states and cities and provinces, make them popular? 

Surely it is telling that the official response in China, the state-sponsored backtrack, has coincided not with the advent of a large and international animal rights protest – for the festival has been the subject of international protests for years – but by the involvement of China’s rapidly growing middle class; the social group that is becoming increasingly vital in maintaining the country’s economic growth; the class with access to education; the class with expendable wealth; the class that can afford to keep pets, such as dogs, for pleasure. They have the luxury of being able to afford to care; the money to back the morals.

 I return again to the point made previously; that The Party is, intends, and has always intended to be the religion of China. People will often cite the country as a part of a desperate and misguided attempt to defend the crimes of religion. What they seldom realise is that The Cultural Revolution did not seek to eradicate religion. It sought and it was successful in its quest to adopt the religious impulse itself. It has its own clergy, it has its religious hierarchy, it has its scriptures and its incontrovertible truths and its contempt for free thought and liberty. It is especially ironic that The Party, which still occasionally boasts of its adherence to Marxist-Leninism, is itself the very essence of that which Marx argued so forcefully and ably against.

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”

That the Yulin festival has been the subject of an international outcry; a great popular movement that claims to decry cruelty, is, then, spectacularly hypocritical. The Yulin festival is but one tradition, one expression, one festival that was created with the express purpose of maintaining the totalitarian religion. In limiting ourselves to attacking its expression, we ignore the fact that the denial of the rights of the Chinese working class to indulge in such activities will only increase the human suffering (and, by extension, the suffering of animals) whilst The Party, the summum malum, that which creates these illusions to glorify itself, remains in power.

A mass movement? Great. A popular revolt? Fantastic. But it is my firm belief that the eliciting of such a sentiment by nothing more substantive than the suffering of a few cute animals is worse than impotent; it is counter-productive.

It is not unworthy of us, it is not a sin, to focus our attention on human suffering, on the abject facts of the human condition, and on the causes of human depredation and exploitation. Perhaps, if we were able to be exercised by these, and if we were capable and more inclined to direct our ire at that which truly deserves it, we might achieve something more meaningful than the downscaling of one minor festival.

 

 

'Why I'm Joining ISIS'

 There is, at first glance, very little to distinguish Salusbury Road from any other just-off-central London backstreet. Mile after mile of terraced housing, broken only by the occasional shabby chemist, shabby off-licence, or shabby estate agents’ equally shabby offices. But appearances can, from time to time, prove deceptive. Inside one of these unremarkable flats sits a very remarkable man, and I, with curiosity overpowering my apprehension, have been sent to meet him.

Baruch Mendelsohn is surprisingly easy to find. In fact, he’s a well-known figure in these parts, especially amongst the community of drug addicts and homeless people that make up society’s shadow in the Brent Council area. One man, a cheerful old sod with a fondness for Sour Diesel and a beard that wouldn’t look out of place in Middle Earth, sings in praise of Baruch.

“He’s a top lad, Barry,” says the vagrant. He can’t remember his own name, but he’s enamoured by ‘Barry’, who gives him food and money, and occasionally steps out to share a joint on the porch of the old, run-down police station.

This story is repeated, in one form or another, and with varying degrees of erudition and eloquence, up and down the road. By the well-spoken woman with the well-fed dog who begs outside the tube station, by the singing Rasta-man, and by the odd couple who can be found wandering drunkenly, hitting each other with half-full cans of Special Brew and, on this occasion, kicking an unopened pack of sausages up the street. “Top lad,” “Great guy,” “Love him to bits.”

 The Sleeping Man is perhaps the only exception. Huddled in an alcove next to the bookshop, he shouts and swears when I mention Baruch. But then, as I soon discover, The Sleeping Man does little else. He shouts and swears at dogs, at children, at women; at anyone who crosses his eye line. The Sleeping Man does not discriminate.

All very well and good, but how do I square this with the profile I’ve got?

This profile, written and sent to me by Mr. Mendelsohn himself, paints a very different picture. Indeed, I’ve been told that I am to address him not as Baruch Mendelsohn but as Baadir Mohamad, he having “Renounced [his] Jewish faith and [his] kafir ways, turned [his] back on decadence and sin, accepted the truth of the al-Quran,” and so on. B.M. is apparently unaware that one does not need to write ‘the’ before ‘al-Quran’; it translates as ‘the the Quran’. A quibble, but possibly quite revealing.

The mental portrait I’m trying to create is shattered as I’m accosted outside Starbucks and whirled around to face who I assume – who I hope – must be Baadir.

“Mr. Mercer!”

I’d been expecting to be confronted by a cliché; by a Choudary clone or Hamza doppelganger, all wild eyes and austere robes and liberated facial hair. But Baadir Mohamad isn’t any of that. Or rather, he’s not quite any of that. I seem to have caught him in the very early stages of his metamorphosis. An almost indiscernible hint of mania in the otherwise friendly blue eyes, something not-quite-unpleasant in the crooked-toothed, tarnished-silver smile; traces of some artificial colourant in his thinning hair.

“Mr Mohamad, I presume.”

“Please, call me Baadir.”

These introductory niceties having been concluded, Baadir takes me, bizarrely, by the hand, and leads me to a door not ten yards away from the ‘coffee’ shop (I use the term in its broadest possible sense). Two flights of stairs later, and I’m in the unremarkable flat with the very remarkable man.

We’re sitting in his kitchen, which doubles up as a living room. There’s a copy of the Quran next to a bottle of fabric softener on top of the washing machine, and the surface next to that is covered with a sea of unwashed plates. The place reeks of marijuana and cigarette smoke, and I’m hit with a strange and sudden realisation. Sitting here, on this disgusting sofa, it occurs to me that this is how it must feel to be a discarded fag butt.

My first question, the one I’ve been most looking forward to asking, concerns his Jewishness. What does he think of it? Do Jews really control the world?

“They control the media, certainly,” is his reply. He reaches for a pile of papers on the kitchen table and picks one out, seemingly at random. “This,” he says, “is something I was writing for my blog before it was taken down. This should explain it.”

And it does, after a fashion. I can’t repeat much of what I read; it would be impossible to print. It’s called ‘Letter from The Fat Controller’, the title taken from B.M.’s bizarre theory; that the Fat Controller of Thomas the Tank Engine is a metaphorical depiction of our Jewish overlords.

Does he really think Islamic State will accept him? He doesn’t look particularly Jewish, but he doesn’t look much like a Salafist, either. Wahhabi doctrine forbids you from shaving, and Baadir clearly has, and recently. His appearance is somewhat transigent; as though he dresses with one inept eye on fashion whilst the other looks toward the future he claims he desires.

“They will, when I get there. I can’t look the part now; I’m too easily noticed, and they’re watching me.”

This is undoubtedly true. When I ask him how he plans to get to Syria, he explains that he’s already tried, and been prevented. He also tried to move to Birmingham, believing that there might be some truth to the Fox News claim that the city is all but ready to declare itself an Islamic state, but was prevented again. He’s set his sights on a move to Tower Hamlets, from where he intends to plot his escape. Either he’s being coy, or he really has no idea how he’s going to go about it.

When I ask him about his family his expression becomes dark. Born and raised somewhere near Luton, he left home when he was fourteen, arrived in London when he was nineteen, and claims to have never been back. Having been born and raised somewhere near Luton myself, I can attest to the fact that the closer you are to it, the more it f*cks you up.

“My mother,” he says, “is a decadent western whore.”

“How so?”

“She can’t cook. She doesn’t cook. She doesn’t tend the house. She goes out to work and leaves the place to fester. She’s not married; wears makeup and no veil. She made me a bastard. She made me the way I am, or rather, the way I was.”

“Do you still speak to her?”

“Every Tuesday.”

Curious. “You said she made you the way you were. What were you?”

He pauses. “You know the story of Lut?”

I do. Lut, or Lot, is amongst a handful of figures from scripture who have survived plagiarism twice, appearing first in the Torah, then in the Bible and finally in the Quran. His story is contains that of Sodom and Gomorrah.  “Ah,” I say, “so you are-“

“I was,” he interrupts, “but I am cured.”

“But you blame your mother?”

He shrugs, non-committally. “One way or another it’s her fault. And I won’t stop until the black flag of jihad flies above her house. Maybe it’s her nature. Maybe it’s because she had me vaccinated. You know about vaccines? You know the Jews in the CIA invented them for their war on Muslims? They sterilise us, they infect us, they make us mentally ill.”

“Are you mentally ill?”

“Again, I was cured.” The source of these ‘cures’ is to be found in the Finsbury Park mosque, Abu Hamza’s alma mater. Baadir’s conversion owes itself, at least in part, to the toxic blend of Saudi Wahhabism, oil wealth, and Prince Charles, that royal speaker to vegetables. “Allah is the cure,” Baadir continues.

When I ask him about his other diagnosis he waves me away, claiming he can’t remember. Schizophrenia or MPD; one of those. So, as he begins to roll a joint, I ask him… why. Why Islamic State? Conversion is one thing, terrorism is surely quite another.

“You mean you can’t see it?!” he exclaims, gesticulating toward the window. “Look at it. It’s filthy. It’s corrupt. The women are all prostitutes, the men are all beggars and sinners. The scriptures are clear; we do this, and we win. We have to win. There is no way we won’t win. The people who accept that might be saved, but the rest can burn.”

“And you’d be prepared to behead people?”

“Sure, why not.” He shrugs again. “I’ve seen the videos. I could do it. And it’s not as though I’d be beheading real Muslims.”

Alas, our time together is almost over. We both have places to be. Baadir is heading out to the Two Brewers in Clapham, which means I have to change my plans and head elsewhere. The Two Brewers describes itself as being ‘gay friendly’, and it’s full of friendly gays. It serves as a useful staging ground for trips into other worlds. Perhaps Baruch isn’t as dead as Baadir likes to pretend. Perhaps Baruch is still in him, somewhere. Perhaps someone else will be, later.

-----

“One for the road?”

He’s offering me a joint. I hate the stuff, but how often does one get the chance to take a spliff from a wannabe jihadi?

“Sure,” I say.

I’m still wondering, as I make my way back up Salusbury Road, what it is that separates us. We are the same age, we have similar backgrounds, we share many interests. And yet, he fantasizes about joining Islamic State, about beheading infidels and blowing up history, whilst I do not. Quite the opposite. Let the infidels keep their heads, I say, and history has a lot going for it.

The nameless old sod from earlier is sitting on the porch of the old, run-down police station. He eyes me up, meaningfully, as I stride toward him, and beckons with his gnarled old claw. Well, why not?

“Alright, Barry?” he asks, as I squat down beside him.

“Barry?”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Never mind, old sod. Got a light?”

Grokking a Wrongness: Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land

Grokking a Wrongness: Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Stranger Land.

"I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers... It is an invitation to think, not to believe."

So wrote the author, Robert Heinlein, when put a question which might be fairly summarised as follows: Stranger in a Strange Land is a comment on society. But is it a fictional comment on a fictional society, or a comment on actual society made by the medium of fiction?

Heinlein’s response is disappointing. Given the opportunity to account for an exceptional novel (I do not say a good novel, for that is something else), Heinlein forgoes the certainty and the conviction that characterises his own creation, and opts instead for the stock response of a coward.

A shame. Whatever else may be said of it, Stranger in a Strange Land is not a cowardly book.

Published in 1961 (though the unexpurgated version was not printed for another thirty years), Stranger tells the story of one Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars and raised for two decades by Martians. The book begins with Smith’s return to Earth, and follows him as he attempts to learn about and to fit in with the society of a people who, though genetically his own, are alien in every meaningful respect.

Numerous parallels have been drawn between Stranger and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and The Jungle Book. These may or may not be deliberate on the part of the author. Though I have yet to find any first or even second hand testimony to the fact, one of the most frequently recounted tales of the origin ofStranger involves a discussion between Robert and his wife, Virginia Heinlein, in which it is suggested that a science fiction adaptation of Kipling’s classic (The Jungle Book) might be an interesting project.

(This kind of transliteration is more common than one might think. Isaac Asimov’s infinitely superior Foundation series was conceived as something like an adaptation of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire whilst Asimov was working alongside Heinlein at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.)

The comparison only goes so far. Prone to fits of jingoism, Kipling would almost certainly have found more to like in Heinlein’s earlier novel, the hysterically militaristic, slightly racist and thoroughly anti-democratic Starship Troopers, published in 1959.

Starship Troopers made Heinlein a popular figure amongst the worst elements of the American Right, and it was eventually placed on the reading lists of three of the five branches of the United States military. But, only two years later, Stranger in a Strange Land was earning him plaudits from hippies, libertarians, and other factions in the early 60s counterculture movement. Guns in Stranger are 'grokked' by Mike to be a “great wrongness.” The drastically restricted franchise in Troopers, where only veterans and civil servants are classed as citizens, is replaced by a firm commitment to a universal, ostensibly fair society in Stranger. In his brief departure from a steady shift toward the Right, Heinlein leaves the nest of a hawk and takes flight as the most opulent of doves, preaching the desirability of free love (especially polyamory) and criticising the corruption in and of politics and organised religion. It forms a central part of his wider campaign to challenge, in his own words, the “public mores,” without going to the extremes found in later books, such as Farnham’s Freehold, which disturbed even some of Heinlein’s most devoted fans with arguments apparently favourable toward incest and ‘self-creation’. The latter art is explored in Heinlein’s 1970 book I Will Fear No Evil, in which a 94-year-old billionaire has his brain implanted in the body of a 28-year-old black woman, and then has that body impregnated with the frozen sperm of the previous body. (Not to overuse the comparison, but in The Light That Failed, Kipling has one character opine that “Four-fifths of everybody’s work must be bad.” This maxim certainly applies to Heinlein.)

Stranger in a Strange Land is a novel which reformed its genre, introducing – or at least emphasising – a split between “hard sci-fi” and other, more readable variants. But its problems – and there are many – mirror those of Heinlein's life and career.

There are few better openings in science fiction. Michael's return to earth sees him overawed; a child thrown through the wardrobe into Narnia. He is kidnapped by a government that would use him for its own purposes, and held prisoner as his would-be protectors wonder how they might go about rescuing him. He is oblivious as one of them, a journalist, is attacked and kidnapped himself, and withdraws into himself as he is hidden in a suitcase and dragged to safety; the home of the ageing doctor, writer and philosopher, Jubal Harshaw.

Their efforts to protect him and help him grow lead to numerous intriguing encounters, from a meeting with the Secretary General (head of the United Nations which, in this world, could easily be a precursor to one of the superstates in Orwell's 1984) in which they must defend Michael's claim to sovereignty over the planet Mars, to a visit to the Fosterite Church, via damaging and destructive encounters with the police.

But one can detect the first hints of nonsense very early on. When his friends are accosted by the police, Michael makes them 'disappear', an ability he will reuse several times throughout the novel. Guns are a “great wrongness,” but making your enemies disappear is not a problem. Disappearing a policeman is, I would argue, not worthy of much praise. Disappearing a priest for his evangelism gives one a certain guilty satisfaction, but is a morally suspect act. Heinlein almost succeeds in circumventing this moral quandary by explaining that death, which Martians call discorporation, has a very different meaning for Mike. (Martians are known to voluntarily discorporate at moments of intense emotional suffering, or by committing minor offenses against society.) But the fact that Mike soon 'groks' the difference does not stop him condemning enemies and inconvenient people to summary disappearance.

The character of Harshaw, who is one of the most likeable characters throughout the novel, quickly reveals another problem: Heinlein is fond of speeches, and often treats his characters as puppets in order to put his own views across. This is tempered by the knowledge, or rather the hope, that his characters cannot always be presenting his own views as the overarching morals of Stranger are very different to those in his other books. Nevertheless, it is often the case that his characters have no characteristics or personalities of their own; rather, they are extensions of a single narrator. (The closest modern equivalent is Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and the deservedly maligned The Newsroom.) Harshaw, for all one might find him agreeable, is seldom anything but a vehicle.

His lifestyle, too, cannot be relativized out of trouble, especially as Heinlein's fans will often claim that he is a remarkably progressive writer. They are right, to an extent. Heinlein made a point of including protagonists and key characters who are black, and some of his strongest characters are women. (Though it should be remembered that Farnham's Freehold has a premise that is not all that dissimilar from Michel Houellebeqc's new novel, Soumission, which is garnering a good deal of deserved criticism for its treatment of Muslims.)

Nevertheless, Harshaw lives with a concubine, or a sexless harem, of four female secretaries. Though Heinlein gives them a veneer of independence, their sole purpose in the novel is, first, to wait upon Harshaw (albeit with no small amount of back-chat and good natured joshing) and then, later on, to fall pregnant, and then, later still, to serve as members of Mike's new church.

Lines like “Nine out of ten times if a girl gets raped it's partly her fault” are not made any more acceptable because they are spoken by a woman, even one as ostensibly powerful and independent and important to the story as Jill, Mike's first protector, teacher, and the first of his many lovers. Jill is also implicitly homophobic, which is a subject on which the book otherwise makes no mention.

(Again, Heinlein's position cannot always be derived from the character's opinion. One can see from his letters that he was not strictly straight, and his comments on homosexuality are almost uniformly accepting of it. His criticisms of the gay rights movement mirror those of Mary Renault, whose novels The Charioteer and The Alexander Trilogy are amongst the most beautiful portrayals of homosexual love and relationships one can find.)

The creation of Mike's church, which is formed toward the end of the novel, represents the departure from good writing and the advent of the novel's ridiculous final section.

The Church of All Worlds still exists today as a neopagan religion which regards Heinlein as something of a prophet. Though the story of a bet between himself and L. Ron Hubbard over who would be the first to found a religion appears to be apocryphal, it is nevertheless true that Heinlein convinced his first wife to accept the creator of the Church of Scientology into an open relationship; a decision which is thought to have contributed to her later battle with alcoholism. (To this day she is the subject of no small amount of vitriol and unjust criticism from members of the Heinlein Society and the devotees of the Church.)

Like the fictional church from which it is derived, the Church of All Worlds involves its members in water rituals (water being of particular significance to the Martians) and polyamory. And, like its fictional counterpart, its theology does not and cannot address the bizarre 'realisation' - made by Mike in one of the book's most egregiously pseudo-prophetic passages - that all religions are wrong and all faiths are right. Their vague devotion to the 'Old Ones', who can be made to exist in the book (in another of its more childish scenes) but not in reality, shows us little except what we already know: that New Age spirituality is not particularly new or revolutionary. Mike's apparent sacrifice, which is an allusion to Jesus that Heinlein does not bother to hide or to make subtle, also serves as testimony to this fact.

The book has much to recommend it, and not only to those who are familiar with science fiction. (It suffers as a genre because, for every Foundation or The Forever War there are ten books as bad as Hyperion.) There is just as much for which is worthy of condemnation, and I cannot deny that I stuck with it primarily because I enjoyed criticising it. Nevertheless, it is reasonably well-written, and it offers an insight into what we might vaguely term 'the spirit of the '60s', and it occasionally serves to make one think. With that in mind, I encourage the reader to pick up a copy. It can be found for as little as £2, and it is worth that much, at least.