Cheers!
********
At the end of history, our epilogue will be epic
But first we'll be dethroned within the animal kingdom and left to rot...yet not to die
Howard Rhodes, an NSA cryptanalyst, engineered the zombie apocalypse. So said the President of the United States in his shocking final address to the nation, which served as the nation's epitaph. Four years later, the old world is in ruins and is stalked by the living dead. Some of the survivors keep journals to record their travails in the hope that their lives still matter.
There's Jenna, a sardonic loner who is forced to care for others; Douglas, a young boy who wants to see the world outside his bomb shelter and make his dead mother proud; an old vagabond who has made his peace with the harsh truths he learned living in the margins of society; Thaddeus, a family may who will nevertheless do anything to see what comes after humanity; Hernando, who sees the dark humor in the new world; and Eric, Hernando's mentally ill neighbor in Richmond, VA, who yearns for an adventure to shake up his routine and who just might know where to find the world's most profound secret, hidden in the bowels of NSA headquarters, a secret from another star, the secret of why the world ended...of why God decays.
Sounds nifty! Though that you didn't use the same D for both the end of god and the start of decay, in a symbolic union, is just a travesty! ;) Who did your cover work?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what you mean by "the same D." Are you saying (jokingly) that "decays" shouldn't be capitalized in the title, because when I speak of the pantheistic god I don't capitalize "god"? In this case, it's actually the monotheistic God that's decaying. Readers of my blog will certainly have a head-start in understanding the big ideas in this book, but there are some new ideas in it too.
DeleteI did the cover. And now unfortunately I got back the Amazon review and while they say there are no major issues, somehow the cover image is less than 300 dpi. Plus, I want to change a couple of words on the back, so I want to resubmit it today after I figure out how it lost some resolution. What a pain in the neck all of this preflight file conversion business is!
Hey Ben, congratulations on the book. Best of luck.
DeleteI think Callan means that both D's are smudged in the exact same way. BTW, let me know if you want those greek letters in the back to spell something intelligible (at the moment you're safe for accidental profanity).
Hi Evan. That's an actual font on the cover's title, so that would be why the Ds are smudged the same way. The symbols in the back are meant to be esoteric, arcane formulas. I'm glad they don't accidentally spell anything profane or silly. Most of the symbols are Greek letters, but not quite all of them. I had to work with only freeware fonts, so I couldn't find anything more seemingly esoteric to English speakers.
DeleteHmm... if you used a Math font, you would understandably run into trouble when trying out standard fonts. Since you still have work to do on the cover, this might help.
DeleteΩθΨφ 001 αζΔΦ
∃ΔΠητδφεσχβ
δπωΨθΔ = ξςΛΞβ
ΞγληφπθΓ∂
That's your text in plain Unicode. It should allow you some flexibility in font selection (all standard Windows fonts should support Greek). Also, remember that greek letters also have a numeric value (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals). You could easily play around with that concept (in the equation in the 3rd line, for instance).
Actually, it was the letters themselves I might have changed if I could have found another freeware font that includes more far-out symbols. The font I used there is just Symbols, but I might have preferred to throw in more runic or other non-Greek letters, including made-up ones. I wanted it to look like a cross between scientific and magic formulas. I think I achieved that, although Greek-speakers will be less impressed. Then again, because there's an equation in there, along with numbers and pi and so forth, you needn't think those symbols are Greek. That is, they're taken from that language, but just as in physics, they're being used to refer to arcane concepts. So who knows what's being said there?
DeleteAnd I figured out the resolution thing and already re-uploaded the cover several hours ago. Thanks anyway, though.
Have you seen my latest rant against theism, "The Comedy of Theism"?
Yeap, I've read it and earmarked it for translation. It's certainly an intriguingly unconventional take on the subject. I'll post my comments over there, once I get a chance to read it more in depth (which is one of the reasons I enjoy translating material).
DeleteOh, I almost forgot. Here's a neat coincidence: You release your book, just as I post my finalized translation of Thomas Paine's theological works; a rather lengthy leftover of my early experimentation with Deism and biblical criticism (PDF available through the image).
DeleteI've got another one on religion coming out this Monday and it will connect a number of ideas, I think, including mythopoeic cognition, the existential aspect of Judaism, modern alienation, and a metaphor-based theory of meaning (intentionality).
DeleteHave you reached some conclusions as to how the Bible should be interpreted? Do you subscribe to a certain school of thought on the matter? What do you think of Panbabylonism? Do you agree with the Jesus Seminar's demythologization of the NT plus its liberal salvaging of NT morality?
I just mean linking both words with one large D - God above with the D big enough that it can also begin the word Decay at the bottom. Possibly all lower case except for the D. I'm thinking *glam!* symbolic linkage here, bro! :)
DeleteWithout ranting too much, I can safely say that John Shelby Spong's direction is the only viable long-term solution for Christianity. I've also seen at least one Orthodox theologian shift to a similar view and given that the Orthodox are usually the most stubborn to make deep doctrinal changes, I'm inclined to believe that it is being recognized that the onslaught of scientific thought doesn't leave much room to maneuver other than this. I suspect Europe and the liberal US will more or less shift to this perspective in a couple of centuries, if not sooner. The wild card is really African Christianity; namely the inroads US fundamentalism is making there, the parallel pressure of Islam and the mistrust of the cultural products of Colonial Europe; I can't really hazard a guess as to what theology might congeal there.
DeleteAs for Panbabylonism, I pretty much view it in the same light as Jesus Mythicism: possible, but they haven't made an effective case yet.
Looking forward to your article ;)
(Damn, second time in a row I forget something; feel free to merge the comments if it's a bother)
DeleteHere's an intriguing snippet I came across online today. It's from the writings of an controversial Greek philosophy professor that eventually withdrew in self-exile in the mountains of Sparta in 1998; he basically dropped off the face of the earth and his body was discovered in 2005. (Sometimes I wonder if he was trying to emulate Nietzsche's Zarathustra, though the prevailing opinion is he was following in the steps of Empedocles).
I agree that Spong's liberal theology is less obnoxious and embarrassing than the literalistic kind, but I don't think liberal Christianity is particularly inspiring. That sort of religion slides off into atheism or New Age do-it-yourself, feel-good movements . For example, another well-known Canadian liberal, who was a Rhodes Scholar and the religion columnist for the Toronto Star was Tom Harpur, who became a Jesus mythicist, writing The Pagan Christ which relies on the work of other mythicist authors to argue that the whole Christian story is a myth deriving from the Egyptian Osiris cycle. He maintains that true Christianity is Gnostic and spiritual and metaphorical, and so on, but really, where can a Christian go once she comes to think the whole gospel is a metaphor about the Christ within? The religion becomes a self-help movement.
DeleteInteresting letter praising Nietzsche, but I'm not so hot on the word "tragicness."
What a coincidence: I just now Googled this, thinking "I wonder what ever happened to Ben Cain's novel?" and here it is! Cannot wait to get this.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I can't wait for the book to be out so I can get started on the next volume.
Delete