A Reading List of Mormons and Aliens

This morning I had the great privilege to read my paper “One Great Whole: An Exploration of the Alien as the Self in Mormon Science Fiction” as part of the Association for Mormon Letters 2023 conference. You can watch a recording of the whole panel on YouTube, and you definitely should because my co-presenters Paul Williams and Jesse Christensen brought some great thoughts about Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series and Brazilian missionary novels respectively.

I meant to get this annotated reading list up before the panel, but better after than never. So, here are some interesting readings to consider about Mormons and aliens, divided into fiction and nonfiction and listed in the order discussed in the paper:

mosaic alien on wall
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What I Read: March 2023

It certainly felt like “always winter and never Easter” around here this month. Not only did Utah get continually dumped on with snow (breaking all time records), but it was another tough month of sickness around here with one of my kids missing two weeks of school with a fever topping out at 106. I finished running the school read-a-thon (yay books!), so at least my PTA commitments are finally wrapped up. I’m trying to look positively on them as I won’t have time to participate as much in my kids’ classrooms next year but man, I am really burned out on volunteer service right now.

flower sprout from the ice covered ground
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One of the main reasons I wanted to move back to Utah was to have greater access to Mormon studies events, which tend to concentrate here for obvious reasons. This month, I attended a really interesting talk at the University of Utah by Ben Spackman about the history of evolution in the Church. I’m always interested in the interaction between science and religion. I minored in chemistry (the best science) at BYU and remember receiving some form of the packet on the Church position on evolution that was discussed in this talk. Ben has a recording and notes up on his website, and I highly recommend looking through it. Lots of the situations he described have application for the anti-science movements of today, which, while not sweeping through the Church, are definitely present in most wards today.

My biggest writing news this month is that my essay “Knit Together” received second place in the 2022 BYU Studies Essay Contest! Such an honor as many of my creative nonfiction heroes have also won this contest (and the prize money certainly doesn’t hurt either). I really love this essay, and I’m glad that someone else did as well. I’m excited to share it with you when it’s eventually published in BYU Studies.

On the podcast side, we put out three episodes in March on the two recent Pinocchio remakes, the scifi film Arrival, and the best-picture nominee The Whale. We also received a write-up in the April issue of The Season, the online arts journal hosted by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. I highly recommend checking out the good work they are doing to highlight LDS creators in all aspects of the arts.

In other news, the program for the Association for Mormon Letters conference is up. I’ll be presenting at 9 am MT on Saturday; you can watch live on YouTube all three days. I’m particularly interested in the two Friday evening sessions with papers on some LDS genres I’m less familiar with like interaction fiction and FAQ as a genre, and the panel of LDS speeches (I wrote and presented a paper about LDS rhetoric during my undergrad). Lots of fascinating thoughts to be had!

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Five Stages to Acceptance of the Brandon Sanderson Wired Article

This article also appears on the Association for Mormon Letters blog

1.

Someone tagged me on Discord–“Calling Liz Busby!”–with a link to a profile of Brandon Sanderson on WIRED.

The tagline got me really excited: “He’s the biggest fantasy writer in the world. He’s also very Mormon. These things are profoundly related.” Yes! Yes, they are!

Studying the humanities can be very lonely, especially when your passion involves the intersection of a genre typically looked down on by the academy and a religion looked down on by both the religious right and the secular left. Reading through the article, my only thought was, “This is great! Someone else recognized that Brandon Sanderson’s work is influenced by Mormonism. And look at that great quote from Brandon. I’m totally using that in a future paper!”

I posted on Twitter that I was disappointed that they hadn’t consulted my work for the article, but overall, I was pretty happy with it.

2.

Then I started chatting with Mormon lit friends about the article. Most of us were excited for Brandon to be getting this recognition and even that someone in the mainstream media had almost recognized that Mormon lit is actually *a thing.*

Then the little doubts started dripping in. “Isn’t it weird that he insults Brandon’s writing to his face?” Yes, but even Brandon admits he’s not a flowery writer. We aren’t here for the prose, and acknowledging that is fair. “What’s with the author’s elitist attitude towards pretty much every restaurant in Utah?” I guess understandable. I myself miss Seattle’s Asian food after moving back here. “Are those side-long insults Brandon’s family and friends?” “Or towards the fans at Dragonsteel 2022 when he claims to read predominantly science fiction and fantasy?” “Is this author attempting to do a ‘why do people love these books so much’ article and just forgetting to actually include the upswing?”

I open the article again and as I reread it, and suddenly it’s everywhere. The snide reference to Dragonsteel employees as “people/Mormons,” the putdowns of Brandon as “unquotable” and “boring” seemingly because he’s a family man without a dark past or drama of any kind, calling his writing group lame because they eat apple crisp instead of drinking cocktails.

Have I just read an anti-Mormon article and had the whole thing go over my head?

3.

The rage across LDS author Twitter spreads quickly. Many of them are friends of Brandon, personally slighted in the article by name (or omission) or by association. Even those who don’t read or like Brandon’s work are baffled that a mainstream publication would put out such a poorly written article. The craft is frankly bad, not to mention the outright rudeness of insulting someone who lets you stay in their home and eat dinner with their children. It drips of coastal elite-ism, something that both Mormons and fantasy fans are familiar with wiping off their faces.

And there’s even more anger in the Sanderson fandom sites. I feel vindicated as the messages of wrath pour into the 17th Shard Discord. I compulsively watch YouTube takedowns of the article to assure myself that I am justified. Though most of them focus on the disrespect of Brandon’s person life, his success writing commercially successful books, and the speculative fiction community writ large, most of them also find the side-eye comments about Mormonism to be weird and inappropriate.

Most of this anger is put back under wraps after Brandon’s response to the article is posted. I vicariously pat all Mormons on the back for taking the high road and get a few chuckles out of the Reddit comments, thinking I’ll move on with my life.

4.

Then another pattern.

Jessica Day George sums it up beautifully: “Hot take: You can denigrate a poorly written article about a Mormon author without adding that you hate the Mormon church and all Mormons.” I am reminded again of the comment made to McKay Coppins, now ubiquitous in these kinds of discussions: “your people have absolutely no cultural cachet.”

I think back to the YouTube takedowns and how they were careful to say that it’s okay to criticize Mormon doctrine because, who wouldn’t disagree with those crazy people? A recent Pew survey shows that Mormons are the most universally disliked religion in America, and the only one that also likes all other religious groups. Sometimes being Mormon feels like you’re that one nice kid in middle school who just can’t seem to make a friend. The one who probably reads large fantasy novels during lunch to hide that he has no one to talk to.

Now I consider Brandon’s carefully worded response in a new light: is he just continuing the long tradition of Mormons taking it on the nose and then smiling and thanking them for the publicity? Taking out an ad encouraging people to “read the book” after they’ve watched a play that treats your whole religion as a joke? Some people comment that they wish he had taken the opportunity to at least say, “Hey, this wasn’t cool.”

5.

At this point, I start noticing a pattern in the posts on Twitter: “Man, I wish there was an interesting article about the connection between Mormons and science fiction/fantasy, but this ain’t it.”

Something snaps inside me and I decide to start spamming posts: We’re here! Mormons have been writing about this for a while, and it might do you some good to read what we’ve already said before jumping into the conversation as if you invented it. In fact, there’s an AML conference coming up to discuss Mormon genre fiction in about a month. Watch it on YouTube! Check out these essays! Please listen!

Sometimes it feels like screaming into the void, but at least I can still hear the echoes and know that I was there.

What I Read: February 2023

a person holding a book
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It’s been snowing like crazy here in Utah. The kids even got a snow day, which was unheard of when I grew up here but seems much more common now with remote learning tools. My father-in-law has been keeping track and says he’s shoveled his driveway 20 times this year. It’s definitely been cramping my running style. I know how to run in the drizzly rain of Seattle, but I still haven’t quite braced myself for running 6 miles in the snow.

This month I attended LTUE 41 in Provo. My goal was to attend some classes about plot and structure to help me improve my ability to finish stories (still a struggle!). I also wanted to network with potential guests for Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, which I definitely succeeded at. There was a presentation on “Faith and Film” with a bunch of LDS film people who I’m hoping to follow up with. I also met up with my online writing group, which was formed after the conference last year (Hi, Paper Wizards! You are awesome!) and had lunch with a great group of writers from the Latter-day Saint Authors of Science Fiction and Fantasy group on Facebook.

But the highlight for me was finally getting to hear Nick Fredrick’s presentation “Could Brandon Sanderson Have Saved the Nephites?” (I was so mad that I couldn’t make it up to the Book of Mormon Studies Association conference when he first presented it.) I didn’t realize the title was playing off of a 1994 presentation by Carol Lynn Pearson called “Could Feminism Have Saved the Nephites?” so now I’ve got homework to do. I loved how the paper combined the academic, the theological, and the personal into one cohesive package. It’s exactly the sort of thing I’d love to write someday. Fingers crossed, but I think we’re going to publish it in the genre fiction issue of Irreantum, so you’ll all get to read it!

February was very poor on the writing front. Only hit 2668/8000 words. Probably due to the shortness of the month, LTUE, and other responsibilities getting in the way. Oh well, time to get back to work in March. I’ve got a new short story I’m working on codenamed “Terraforming Project.” Also my proposal for the Association for Mormon Letters conference was accepted, so now I get to write my paper on how Mormons write about aliens. The conference will be streamed free online, so jump in if you’re interested. I’m excited to see what other fun presentations on Mormonism and genre fiction were selected.

In publishing news, my Solar Punk Utah story has found a home! I’ll be sure to post a link here when the story is published. We published two killer episodes on Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree this month. Episode 21 is a crossover with Radical Civility discussing the “Hated in the Nation” episode of Black Mirror and how social media makes us worse human beings. We also released an episode discussing The Chosen from an LDS perspective, including the whole “I am the law” controversy.

And the biggest news of all, which I just got this morning: my application was accepted to BYU’s English MA program, so I’ll be going back to school this fall! It’s going to be a major lifestyle adjustment, but I’m excited to put some more work into my academic side.

And now, on to the book reviews!

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What I Read: January 2023

January was full throttle around here. My kids are finally getting back into the after-school activities that we hadn’t really been doing since the pandemic, so I feel like mom-Uber most evenings. And I’ve been working on my last PTA obligation of the year, the school read-a-thon. I’m keeping it pretty low-key, but it’s still going to be a lot of work. It’s all for the kids, right?

pink rose flower on blue hardbound books
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I nearly hit my word count goal this month, 7242/8000, despite starting a week late due to recovery from the holidays. A lot of those words went into a new personal essay that that the muses dumped into my head right before the BYU Studies contest deadline. I think it turned out really well and my beta readers had good things to say about it. It’s already been submitted to the contest, so wish me luck! I’ve also been working on a fairy tale codenamed “Cats with Footnotes,” though the footnote aspect has yet to appear, so it may just end up being “Cats.” The idea was to write a fairy tale with some elements from my childhood and then have semi-fictional footnotes explaining some of the background. I liked fiction with footnotes (such as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell), and the idea of combining speculative fiction with creative nonfiction was intriguing, so we’ll see if it turns out. I’ve committed to my writing group to get a draft to them by next week.

In February I’m heading Life, the Universe, and Everything in Provo. I’m especially excited to hear “Could The Way of Kings have saved the Nephites?” by Nick Fredrick. Always happy for more literary engagement with Brandon Sanderson! I’m also going to focus on marketing the podcast and taking some classes about plotting, which is my weakness as a fiction writer. If you’re coming to LTUE this year, drop a comment below or send me an email and let’s do lunch!

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