The Enclave 3: Bad points and conclusion

Karen Hancock's The Enclave has some strong negatives, but they're a bit hard to present tidily. Some are geek issues; for example, if you really could shoot a laser or heat ray out of your eye, the power demands would be incredible, and the waste heat would blow your head off. Also, it's extremely naïve to claim that an explosion could be dismissed as an earthquake. Then there are literacy issues--putative sentences that really don't parse and transitive verbs used intransitively. But I'll stick with the theological problems. Let's start with a simple one that really ticked me off.

Surviving the Flood. Would you believe that a bunch of guys blew off Noah and his Love Boat and still survived the Flood? I wouldn't, but it supposedly happened.

Evilution. [sic] There are a number of false dichotomies and bad assumptions in Cameron's debate about Christianity. For example, while 1 Peter 3:15 tells us to be ready to give unsaved people a reason for our faith, it never mentions giving scientific proofs. A testimony will do. (I've mentioned this before.) Otherwise you just get into an argument, as Cameron does. Note that when people come up with old lines such as, "If there is a God, why is there so much evil/suffering in the world?" they are wasting your time. If they really wanted to know, they could look it up. Refutations and simple responses are easily found online. In any case, I don't believe I've ever encountered anyone asking such a question honestly.

But what's odd is that Cameron states that evolution and Christianity "are two antithetical belief systems that cannot be reconciled" (p. 282). Now, I'm not an evolutionist, but there are Christians who accept evolution. I consider them factually in error, but they aren't going to Hell as a result. So how can evolution be the Devil incarnate?

It isn't. However, atheism is incompatible with Christianity--there aren't any true Christians who deny that God exists or created all things (whether directly or by indirect, evolutionary means). So what Cameron's actually talking about is not the old "Creation/Evolution" debate, but the more important "Design/Chance" debate. Why not just say so? Because the loudest proponents of Design tend to attack Evolution instead of Chance. They are dead set against theistic evolution for the simple reason that they agree with its assumptions but disagree with its conclusions. Both Creation Science and theistic evolution twist Scripture and exalt human expectations; it's hard to say which is worse.

And there are various places where the unbiblical sensationalism of Creation Science shows up. We have the old joke about the Nephilim being the result of demonic rape, for example. They weren't: if you read Gen. 6:1-4 carefully, you should find at least one reason (if not two) to reject this idea. We also see very briefly the ideas that it never rained before the Flood (p. 448) and that there was a vapor canopy over the Earth (p. 449). The Bible implies neither, and the second implicitly contradicts Scripture: Psalm 148:4-6 tells us that the waters above the heavens (i.e., clouds) are permanent.

Speculation is fine; just keep it in line with the Bible.

Send in the clones! Clones are a theologically tricky topic. Some say that clones are the same as identical twins, so there's no theological problem. Nonsense. The mechanisms are drastically different. Identical twins occur when a fertilized egg cell splits into two fertilized egg cells, instead of simply dividing and redividing. Cloning as currently practiced involves yanking the nucleus out of a fertilized egg cell and replacing it with another nucleus and its genetic material. It takes materialism--the view that we are no more than the sum of our physical parts--to assume this makes no difference. It's a complex issue and calls for more depth than we find in the story.

An unhappy ending... I know a lot of people will disagree with this one, but they'll do so based on the surrounding culture, not the Bible: While Lacey is a widow, Cameron is merely a divorcé (note the single "e"). So based on 1 Cor 7:10-11, it's doubtful that their relationship can properly go anywhere. (Yes, I've seen a lot of attempts to get around that, but they amount to saying that Paul could and would over-rule God.) That somewhat messes up the romance.

Conclusion. This is another case where the more you know about the Bible, the more annoyed you'll get. Unfortunately, that will leave a lot of people unfazed. Yet there are certainly good points as well. In fact, there's more to be said for and against than I've had time to mention, so if you're wondering whether to bother, check the other reviews for a better idea of the story:

Brandon Barr
Jennifer Bogart
Keanan Brand
Grace Bridges
Canadianladybug
Melissa Carswell
Valerie Comer
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Janey DeMeo
Jeff Draper
Emmalyn Edwards
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Heather R. Hunt
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Dawn King
Mike Lynch
Melissa Meeks
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Mirtika
Eve Nielsen
Nissa
John W. Otte
Crista Richey
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Stephanie
Rachel Starr Thomson
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Elizabeth Williams

The Enclave 2: Good points

Karen Hancock's The Enclave has various good points. Some involve the writer's craft; others derive from content.

Characterization. The characters are well-defined and credible. I suspect that a skeptic would find at least some of them stereotypical, but stereotypes usually have a factual basis--otherwise they wouldn't endure. And the stereotypes are certainly the credible sort that arise from personalities and traits we've probably all encountered. In any case, I cared about the characters more than I usually do.

Pacing. On the whole, the story is fast-moving. I bogged down a little early on, but I think that was just me: the detour into the Enclave threw me. But after I got past that, the story was a fast read.

Faith-based systems. There's a place where Cameron gives a defense of Christianity that has its good and bad points. One of the good points was that he identifies evolution as a faith-based system. This is true: given the disciplinary breadth of evolution, hardly anyone knows enough to critique the whole thing properly. A geneticist probably can't truly follow the paleontology, a paleontologist probably can't altogether understand the genetics, and so on. (Similarly, someone with a good grasp of Biblical languages and cultures may not really get the theology.) At some point you have to take things on faith, whether evolution or the Bible, though you can get a feel for the relative probabilities and explanatory powers involved.

Divine guidance. I liked the way God got involved with the characters and did a little intervention when the going got tough. That was my favorite part; it demonstrated a God-orientation that ought to be typical of Christian fiction. Yet it's not a simplistic deus ex machina gimmick: Hancock sets it up so that it's believable when it occurs.

Tomorrow I'll look at the negatives, which unfortunately are more complex, being theological, philosophical, or scientific. Try to bear with me...

Meanwhile, check out what the other CFRB bloggers have to say:
Brandon Barr
Jennifer Bogart
Keanan Brand
Grace Bridges
Canadianladybug
Melissa Carswell
Valerie Comer
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Janey DeMeo
Jeff Draper
Emmalyn Edwards
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Heather R. Hunt
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Dawn King
Mike Lynch
Melissa Meeks
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Mirtika
Eve Nielsen
Nissa
John W. Otte
Crista Richey
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Stephanie
Rachel Starr Thomson
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Elizabeth Williams

The Enclave 1: Intro

Karen Hancock's The Enclave is a sci-fi epic (nearly 500 pages) about monsters, mad scientists, and the women who love them. (Or wind up carrying their babies, anyway, which is Modern Romance for you.)

The story begins with Lacey McHenry, a relatively new hire at the Kendall-Jakes Longevity Institute. She's hot and bothered. She's hot because, as a typical heroine, she's just kind of built that way. She's bothered because resident absent-minded professor Cameron Reinhardt has unwittingly unleashed a plague of frogs, and she has to put them back in their place. (Frogs seldom know their place. Ask any ancient Egyptian.)

But Lacey soon becomes even more bothered. First, it turns out her ex-husband (now ex-living as well, which was a do-it-himself project) was abusive and tried to turn her mind into a cuckoo clock. But she also discovers that she has an unannounced assistant who helps with the frog problem by eating them--or their legs, anyway. She eventually calls him Frogeater, even though (minor spoiler) he isn't French. He is kind of violent, though.

In the aftermath of Frogeater's visit, Cameron (the aforementioned absent-minded professor) tends to her wounds in a remarkably professional manner. In turns out that he used to be in Special Forces before having a Terrible Experience that did turn his mind into a cuckoo clock--and one that doesn't keep accurate time, either. It takes practically the whole book for him to get all the way through his flashbacks of the Terrible Experience to regain a Terrible Truth or two.

Meanwhile, there is a major cover up of Frogeater's visit, apparently on orders from Parker Swain, the dashing pseudo-young megalomaniac who runs the place. His hobby is rewriting personnel records to make everyone else look as psycho as he is. He's also a lady-killer. Perhaps literally. Oh, and he has zero tolerance for Christianity. He believes Lacey is in remission, but Cameron is active and possibly even contagious.

Then there's the Enclave. There about had to be one somewhere, given the title. It's a group of subterranean post-apocalyptic cultists herded around by Enforcers, who sport black clothes and a third eye. Enforcers are always grouchy because they really look funny with glasses.

So what does the Enclave have to do with the rest of it? A lot, actually. We'll go into some of that over the next couple days; tomorrow I'll focus on the good points of the story.

Meanwhile, check out what the other CFRB bloggers have to say:
Brandon Barr
Jennifer Bogart
Keanan Brand
Grace Bridges
Canadianladybug
Melissa Carswell
Valerie Comer
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Janey DeMeo
Jeff Draper
Emmalyn Edwards
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Heather R. Hunt
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Dawn King
Mike Lynch
Melissa Meeks
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Mirtika
Eve Nielsen
Nissa
John W. Otte
Crista Richey
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Stephanie
Rachel Starr Thomson
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Elizabeth Williams