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Find out more about The Big Domino in the Sky
Atheists spend an awful lot of their time focusing on what's correct and what's incorrect. I ought to know, I'm an atheist myself. We get all uptight writing treatise after treatise about how the arguments for religion are weak and how the logical alternative is atheism. I think it's important for us to do so, if for no other reason than to clarify our own thoughts. After awhile, however, all this treatising gets really dull. Sometimes we atheists really need to loosen up.
Michael Martin tries to do so with his book The Big Domino in the Sky. His intention is to add a work of atheist fiction to the libraries full of atheist non-fiction. A collection of short stories written from the atheist perspective is a great idea whose time has come.
Unfortunately, the execution is not so great. Although this book is technically a work of fiction, it ends up reading like non-fiction. The problem is that each story is actually a treatise. Sure, there are characters, but they end up doing nothing but debating the merits of different aspects of atheism. For example, one story set in the future consists of nothing more than a series of letters written back and forth between two academics. What do they write about? Atheist theory!
The Big Domino in the Sky hits the reader over the head with its literal focus. What atheist fiction needs to do is to incorporate the power of metaphor. Religions have been doing this for ages, to strong effect. It isn't necessary to talk about atheism to talk about atheism. Atheism can be more than a denial. It can be an assertion as well. An atheist mythology would go a long way toward proving this point.