Witek Kaczanowski
James Morrow is widely regarded as the foremost satirist in science fiction. His new novel, Galapagos Regained , tells the story of a Victorian actress named Chloe Bathhurst who attempts to use Darwin’s theory of natural selection to disprove the existence of God. Morrow spent six years writing the book, then a few more trying to sell it. In recent years atheist-oriented films like The Golden Compass and Creation have faced a public backlash, and Morrow isn’t sure whether that might have made some publishers leery of the book.
“The publishers who turned it down came up with other reasons,” Morrow says in Episode 132 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “So I’ll never know if they thought it was just too incendiary.”
Galapagos Regained is a novel of ideas, full of politics, philosophy, and theology, but it’s also a globe-spanning tale bursting with battles, shipwrecks, and narrow escapes. In this Morrow was influenced by the journeys of Darwin himself. Today we tend to picture the famous scientist as a white-bearded patriarch or quiet invalid, but in fact his theories were shaped by a lifetime of wild adventure.
“The young Darwin was indeed this kind of Indiana Jones figure,” says Morrow. “And I very much had that in mind when I conceived of Chloe’s escapades.”
Those escapades, which take Chloe from the halls of Oxford to the Amazon jungle to the rocky shores of the Galapagos, are beset by uncertainty and doubt, but for Morrow the question of God is more clear-cut.
“If there were such a thing as a disproof of God, if there could be such a thing, it seems to me it would look a lot like Darwinian materialism coupled to the argument from evil,” he says. “And I think that one-two punch, for me, causes God to go belly up.”
Listen to our complete interview with James Morrow in Episode 132 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.
James Morrow on South America:
“I wanted the book to be entertaining. I’ve always liked the truism that all art is entertainment, that all drama is melodrama—it doesn’t work the other way around, not all melodrama is drama and not all entertainment is art. But I love epics, I love Jules Verne. A lot of the South American material is an homage to Voltaire’s Candide . And I said, OK, I just want to see what happens if I put my characters down in that zone. … I had read several books about Amazonia as part of the research, because Chloe has to find her way across the continent of South America after she’s shipwrecked off the coast of Brazil. And when she gets to Peru, she gets caught up in the Great Rubber War. The research I’d done had given me a lot of information about the rubber industry and how horribly exploitative it was of the natives—of the Indian population. The mistreatment that’s documented maps on to the historical facts, sad to say. There was not actually an event that was called the Great Rubber War—that’s sort of a poetic conceit on my part—but a generation or so after the events of Galapagos Regained, there is a terrible conflict in the country of Colombia, on the Rio de Mayo, that does correspond to the middle section of my book.”
James Morrow on Charles Darwin:
“I can appreciate why many people would regard Darwin’s theory as bad news—he brought bad news back from the Galapagos Islands. But for me the story doesn’t end there. There’s something exhilarating, for me, about our interconnectedness to everything that’s alive right now, and has ever lived, and ever will live. I think Darwin’s sin, the reason he makes people so nervous, is not that he killed God, but that he replaced God. He didn’t just make a case for atheism, he also made a case for something that’s equivalent to God, it just happens to be materialist. … He replaced God with something that for me is far more magnificent than anything one finds in scripture, far more magnificent—complex, detailed, exhilarating, transcendent—than anything ever encountered in the zone of prophets insisting that their revelations are the case. He pushed the reset button on the whole of the Western psyche, you know, he refreshed the screen, except something brand new came up that we weren’t expecting. The Christian narrative … is beautiful, it’s coherent, it’s very satisfactory, but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the world that we’re actually in.”
James Morrow on Rosalind Franklin:
“[Her] work was crucial to Watson and Crick’s unraveling the structure of the DNA molecule—the X-ray photographs she took and also her interpretation of those photographs. It’s sometimes forgotten that what James Watson pilfered from her files was not simply the pictures, but was her understanding that the phosphate chains of the DNA molecule were anti-parallel, and this strongly suggests a double helix. Rosalind Franklin was famously and notoriously ignored and forgotten. When Watson and Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared their Nobel Prize, they did not even mention her from the podium. … If you read James Watson’s book called The Double Helix , while it offers many fascinating insights into how scientific research actually progresses and what an all-too-human enterprise it is, he takes such a sardonic and childish and—to be sure—sexist view of Rosalind Franklin that you want to throw the book across the room.”
James Morrow on Teilhard de Chardin:
“This was a time when the Catholic Church was not reconciled to Darwin. They’ve done better in recent generations, although I think there’s still more work to do. He was almost kicked out of the Jesuit order, given his passion for evolutionary theory. I think the Holy Office—which is the euphemism for the Inquisition—the Holy Office regarded him as a borderline heretic. … [He was] quite unequivocal that evolution had occurred on this planet, that Darwin had nailed it, that the theory of natural selection accounted for the transmutation of species in a way that the Book of Genesis never begins to do. But Teilhard took it into this mystical realm, this teleological realm, where we are a transitional species—which of course Darwin would have agreed with, but not in the sense that Teilhard meant it—where we are transitional in that we are on our way to a rendezvous with the Cosmic Christ, and all human minds are going to meld, and the consciousness that we enjoy, day in and day out, will seem feeble, pathetic, a mere whisper, compared to the transcendent chorus of our eventual fusion with the divine, and our union with this Omega Point that lies outside of time and space. It’s very clever, and it’s satisfying in an intellectual way, but as I said before, it doesn’t seem to describe the world that we’ve actually inherited.”
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