In The Last Witchfinder, James Morrow covers some of the same territory Doctor Brin points us toward and should be a novel of interest.
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/interviews/sfw12472.html Quote: A second tributary feeding the cataract that became Witchfinder was the creeping theocracy, gimcrack spirituality and anti-Enlightenment irrationality that saturated my native republic during the '80s and '90s. These tendencies are flowering fully under George W. Bush, but they go back to the Reagan era. Then, as now, the American affection for nonsense was ubiquitous. On the one hand, you had postmodern academics dismissing the Enlightenment because it supposedly places destructive technologies and specious arguments at the disposal of oppressors. On the other hand, you had religious conservatives detesting the Enlightenment because it leads to secularism and the satanic Mr. Darwin. On the third hand, there were the New Age mysticism-mongers, who hated the Enlightenment for allegedly engendering a cosmically clueless scientism. My satiric bone began to vibrate. I postulated that if you ever got the postmodern left, the religious right and the mystic fringe agreeing on anything, it couldn't possibly be true—and so I resolved to write a novel celebrating the Enlightenment. xponent Topical Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
