After starting with “Utrisque Cosmi” last weekend, I’ll just continue discussing the stories in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Edition, a.k.a. YBSF 27, edited by Gardner Dozois.
Steven Gould’s “A Story, With Beans” gives an example of something all too common in history. It addresses two forms of bigotry. One form has been recognized and deplored for centuries, but the other is practiced by some who think themselves enlightened. “A Story, With Beans” occurs in a future American southwest which has become a zone filled with dangerous metal-eating bugs. The southwest doesn’t get much love in YBSF 27. In Geoff Ryman’s “Blocked,” matter meets antimatter, destroying Arizona. “Beans” features an isolated desert community, the City of God, which houses a religious cult, the People of the Book. The City of God evokes St. Augustine’s book of the same name and the New Jerusalem it advocates. The cult’s name also has historical links. Islam identifies Christians and Jews as the People of the Book, and some Jews and Christians embrace the term.
Maybe David Koresh’s compound in Waco inspired Gould’s City of God, or maybe it was Colorado City and its sister polygamist communities. The cult punishes a book peddler for corrupting a girl by giving her a forbidden book. Gould’s People of the Book embrace only one book and ban many others. This isn’t the only story in YBSF 27 where religious fanatics ban Shakespeare’s plays. “A Story, With Beans” portrays the cult as cruel due to its strict adherence to seemingly foolish superstitions, its repression of women, and its attempts to keep its members ignorant of ideas the cult frowns on. However, Gould doesn’t cast a positive light on the government forces in conflict with the cult either. In some ways, the attack on the City of God reflects the siege of Koresh’s compound, and in other ways, it’s a microcosm of the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. In both cases, force makes sense, but there are consequences.
Cult members kill a judge and the rangers sent to punish them following the book dealer’s ordeal. So the government condemns the community and drops leaflets warning cult members to abandon the City of God. While some refuse to leave, there are others with little choice. The cult forbids women from reading and doesn’t teach girls to read. This means that many of the women in the City of God can’t read the warnings for themselves. The narrator himself mentions the children. Plus, there’s one person who was injured after helping the book dealer and who is physically unable to flee the attack. The government uses particularly horrific tactics considering the zone’s nature. As happened when Koresh’s compound went up in flames, sometimes the victims of the cult and the victims of government intervention are one and the same.
Should the government sit back and do nothing while a repressive religious cult tortures and kills people? On the other hand, is the government action - which inflicts suffering and death on the innocent along with the guilty - worth it? At the very least, Gould sounds a cautionary note.
While “A Story, With Beans” appears to ride the current wave of anti-religious bigotry (the intolerance currently in vogue among certain self-proclaimed paragons of tolerance), it’s actually more nuanced. Considering the story’s events, a response, even a harsh response, by the government is understandable. The government isn’t wholly evil. At least it gives cult members a chance, however flawed, to give up by abandoning the City of God. Yet, the government also seems just as inflexible and dogmatic as the cult. We see many of the bad things which result from religious zealotry, however the secular government response leaves the cult’s victims even worse off. This isn’t limited to member/victims either or to those who die in the government assault. It reaches to outsiders and survivors too.
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