Welcome back to Psychology for Writers, a series in which I (a psychology professor and writer of fiction) talk about a wide range of topics in psychology that might be relevant for writers. This is the third and final entry into my trilogy of posts about the psychology of lie detection. In the first post, I drew upon the work of researchers like Paul Ekman on the possibility of detecting lies by examining body language. In the second post, I looked at narcoanalysis (“truth serum”). Today, I am going to focus on the polygraph, also called the lie detector.

Origins

The principle underlying polygraphy is that lying is stressful. The belief that lies should be accompanied by physical indicators of nervousness has a long and globe-spanning history (Vicianova, 2015). Around 1000 BC, there was a practice in China of having an accused person hold rice in his or her mouth; if the rice was dry when spat out, then the accused was lying. The idea that liars get dry-mouth was also behind the Middle Eastern Bisha’h test, which involved licking a hot ladle. If the accused’s (dry) tongue is burned, he or she is guilty (Ginat, 2009).

In the 3^rd Century BC, Erasistratus believed that he could tell who was lying by measuring the pulse. There are also stories of heart rate being used to catch cheating spouses in the Middle Ages (Trovillo, 1939), and by the Spanish Inquisition to catch heretics (which sounds like a much more delightful form of interrogation than the Inquisition’s more-famous methods).

The use of a machine to show if somebody is lying begins in the late 19^th Century, with Labroso’s glove, a device invented in 1881, that measured blood pressure.

In 1897, psychologist Harold Sticker suggested using a galvanometer to measure sweat gland activity (sweating being another indicator of stress) to detect deception (Gordon, 2017). In 1914, Vittorio Benussi examined changes in breathing when lying (Synnott et al., 2015). In 1921, a team of psychologists combined devices for measuring breathing, blood pressure, and galvanic skin response into a single device (Vicianova, 2015). Thus the first lie detector was born. It is called a “poly” graph because it gives real-time indicators of multiple physical systems.

By far the most interesting figure in the history of the polygraph was William Moulton Marston. Marston was the first person to be appointed “Professor of Legal Psychology” at American University in 1922, and is a foundational figure in forensic psychology. Marston further improved, and popularized, the earlier version of the polygraph, and was the first person to argue for including lie detector results in court (United States v. Frye, 1923). He did not succeed, as polygraphy was a new and unproven technology. FBI Director Herbert Hoover was also not a fan of the forensic applicability of the polygraph, saying in a 1939 memo that Marston was a proven “phony.”

What makes Marston a more interesting figure (to most of us) than Labroso or Benussi is his other career. Marston was interviewed in 1940 for a magazine article, in which Marston argued that comic books had potential as an important form of media.

Because of this, he was hired as an educational consultant by the co-owner of two companies that would later merge to form DC Comics. While employed at DC, Marston was offered a chance to create his own comic book. Using the pen name Charles Moulton, he created Wonder Woman, who makes use of her “magic lasso,” that forces anyone caught in it to tell the truth.

Moulton also used Wonder Woman as a vehicle for some of his… other interests… but that takes us too far off topic.

Current Polygraphy

Today, polygraphs are essentially the same as they were in the 1920s, in that they provide three indicators: heart rate, respiration, and skin conductivity. The major difference is that, while the original machines produced a paper readout, current versions have a digital record.

The most widely used method for asking people questions is one that was developed in the 1940s: the Control Question Technique (CQT; Synnott et al., 2015). In this technique, the interviewer alternates between three types of questions: relevant, irrelevant, and comparison. Relevant questions are connected to the crime (“Did you murder Mister Body?”). Irrelevant questions have nothing to do with the crime (“Is your name Bob?”). Comparison questions are not connected to the crime, but are the kind of thing that almost everybody would lie about (“Have you ever in your life stolen anything at all?”). The irrelevant question are meant to give a physiological baseline. Guilty people should show stronger scores when asked the relevant questions, while innocent people should respond more strongly to the comparison questions. Attempts at creating reliable and valid computer-based scoring systems have largely failed, so the polygrapher is expected to use his or her judgment about what level of reaction counts as “strong.”

Does It Work?

Not really. There is some evidence that an alternate test called the Guilty Knowledge Technique is effective at showing who might be lying, but in general, studies vary widely in showing the validity of the polygraph, and there are multiple problems with the research. Horowitz and colleagues (1997) found high accuracy, but combined with a huge false-positive rate. The National Research Council reviewed the overall pattern of evidence, and concluded that the polygraph is too unreliable to be taken seriously. Similarly, the American Psychological Association concluded that the high error rates and low quality of most studies render the technology unreliable and invalid. There have been some attempts at developing a lie detector that uses brain activity, but these have generally not been any better than the old traditional methods (Vrij, 2008).

So, for those of you who want to include a cool polygraph scene in your fiction, you will have to deal with the unrealistic portrayals of accuracy in most fictional works. You might find a workaround, by claiming that your character has an amazing new technique or technology, or have your story set in a fantasy or sci fi world in which reliable lie detectors exist (or bring in a telepath).

Beating the Machine

If we come at this from the opposite angle; what if you want to write a character who uses countermeasures to defeat a lie detector? There I can help you. There is an established research literature on methods and usefulness of tricks for beating polygraphs.

There are two general categories of trick. First are physical techniques. If the classic way to test for lies is to see if people show higher arousal during relevant questions than irrelevant questions, then one way to beat that is to increase arousal during the irrelevant questions, so that there is less of a difference between baseline and lies. This can be done by tensing muscle groups (legs and buttocks are popular options, as is pushing down on the floor with the soles of the feet) to increase excitation, or by inducing pain by doing something like pinching oneself or biting one’s tongue. Having the character prepare for the interrogation by using biofeedback to learn to control physiological systems could be another option. Get creative.

Next we have mental techniques. Envisioning exciting images (including sexually arousing thoughts) can bring baseline levels up during irrelevant questions, while envisioning calming images (like puppies or a field of flowers) can bring down arousal during the relevant questions. Distraction also works: have the character “dissociate” from the events in the interrogation room by mentally repeating a word or number, counting backwards, or focusing on an object in the room. If your character has time to prepare, one option that I have seen suggested by the professionals, but never scientifically tested, is systematic desensitization. If you’ve taken Intro Psychology, you’ve probably heard about this as a way to treat phobias. The client is trained in calming techniques, and exposed to the fear-producing object until he or she can be around it without fear. It might work for someone to use this method while exposing the character to repeated polygraph-based interrogations, so that the character does not respond with anxiety when asked about their crime.

Hontz and colleagues (1994) tested the usefulness of physical and mental countermeasures, and found both to be equally effective. Half of their participants were able to beat the machine using these techniques.

I hope that you found these three brief forays into the world of deception detection to be helpful in some way. The degree to which you take any of this advice will vary depending on how firmly tethered to reality your story is, but even fully-realistic stories contain the potential for creatively dealing with the difference between fact and baloney when it comes to investigators and interrogators using a variety of methods for uncovering the truth. I welcome all comments and criticisms in the comments section below.

When I post the next installment of Psychology for Writers, it will be about something completely different. Be sure to hit the Subscribe button so that you don’t miss it.

See y’all next time!

Yesterday, I announced that my debut novel, Chosen by the Sword, has been republished, and was available in ebook format. The paperback is now available, so if you want the embodied experience of holding a physical book in your hands, now that’s on the menu as well!

Chosen by the Sword is the first in the Professor Howard Chronicles. All Dave Howard wanted was a decent position as a psychology professor, but his dreams were crushed by the pandemic and a terrible academic job market. What he got instead was an unwilling induction into a world of flesh-eating monsters, eccentric wizards, vampire hunters, blood magic, conspiracies, and a secret family legacy. His allies are not all entirely human, and his haunted sword has a real attitude problem. As Dave struggles to understand his new life and find his place in it, come along with us and see an ordinary man rise from being a nobody to become a warrior, a leader, and a shaper of the destiny of worlds.

Chosen by the Sword is the first in the Professor Howard Chronicles. All Dave Howard wanted was a decent position as a psychology professor, but his dreams were crushed by the pandemic and a terrible academic job market. What he got instead was an unwilling induction into a world of flesh-eating monsters, eccentric wizards, vampire hunters, blood magic, conspiracies, and a secret family legacy. His allies are not all entirely human, and his haunted sword has a real attitude problem. As Dave struggles to understand his new life and find his place in it, come along with us and see an ordinary man rise from being a nobody to become a warrior, a leader, and a shaper of the destiny of worlds.

This urban fantasy book, my debut novel, had been published by Cannon Publishing until very recently. As I mentioned earlier, I recently got the rights back for this title, and am in the process of exploring other publishers. In the meantime, it’s listed as Independently Published. This novel was highly praised by readers (sadly, I lost all the reviews of the previous edition in the transition), and was nominated for two awards.

If you enjoyed my short fiction and want more, or if you just need more urban fantasy in your life, give this a try. The paperback should be available soon, and I’ll let you know when that comes out.

Wish me luck as I start searching for a new home for Dave, Baldrick, Jackie, and the rest of my cast of misfits and oddballs. See y’all next time!

I haven’t posted an Author Update for quite a while, and there was a reason for that. So we’ll start with the Big News, and then catch you up on the events going on at the Desk of Hackney.

The Big News

My debut novel, Chosen by the Sword, was put out by Cannon Publishing, and I want to express my gratitude for them for taking a chance on a totally unpublished newbie. The novel was well-received, reaching #19 in its category at Amazon, and being nominated for two awards. Readers loved it:

Sadly, that enthusiasm did not translate to sufficient sales. Back in December, I was informed that I had been dropped from the Cannon roster, and they would not be publishing the second book in the series. While I waited for Cannon to get the rights reverted to me, it was like being silently stuck in some kind of limbo, like I’m Schrodinger’s Writer: neither published nor not-published, just staring out into the universe like General Zod in the Phantom Zone.

One awkward situation that was created by this was that I had already sent them the manuscript for the second book eight months previously, and then wrote a short story for an anthology, set after the events of the second book. That story was published without the second novel having seen the light of day. So if any of you read “Professor Howard and the Perilous Conference Paper,” and felt a bit confused, that would be why.

After an extended process, I have now officially gotten the rights back to Chosen by the Sword. I am in the process of putting it under my name at Amazon, and will shortly begin pitching the manuscript to other publishers, along with the completed second manuscript in the series. I have come to love these characters over the years, and they need a good home.

In Other News

A lot has happened since my last update.

1. I have had three short stories published, two of which are in the Professor Howard world. “Professor Howard and the Lethal Lab Monkeys” sees Dave Howard battling an old enemy and giving lessons in knighthood to a rhesus monkey. In “Professor Howard and the Perilous Conference Paper,” Dave is ‘voluntold’ to help Trueman College host an academic conference dedicated to all things supernatural. It does not go as planned. “A Gift of Poison” is not a Professor Howard story. In this one, an expert in antiques is put on the trail of an impossible artifact, leading to a world of madness, murder, an evil curse, and hillbilly music.

2. I have submitted several more stories to various anthologies. Some of them have been rejected, and some I’m waiting to hear about. I’ll keep you posted. There is also an anthology submission window coming up in a couple of weeks for another story that I had way too much fun writing. So keep your eyes on this Substack for announcements!

3. In the world of nonfiction, I had an academic article published in the Journal of Psychology and Christianity, in which I bring together certain streams of thought in psychology, philosophy, theology, and politics. In short, I argue that many of the theories of “the self” that we see in psychology are reflections of a particular narrative told in the foundational political worldview of the West. Check it out if that kind of discussion lights your intellectual fire.

Going Forward

My major academic writing project is my collaboration with the great Eric Johnson on an Introductory Psychology textbook. I am also being made a Senior Fellow at the Christian Psychology Institute, and will soon be publishing a series of psychology blog posts for them.

I have begun work on the third book in the Professor Howard Chronicles, confident that this series will go on, one way or another. I am also in the process of pitching my space fantasy novel Charged Objects: Pile of Bones (first in a planned duology) to publishers. This book is set in an alternate world in which magic is used in the place of technology. Our two heroes—a prizefighter whose career is ruined when he is gifted with the power to heal, and a naïve bookworm who believes that death-magic is not necessarily evil—are thrown together in pursuit of a dark sorcerer who possesses a stolen book of tremendous power, intending to use it as the key to universal conquest. I have spent a number of years on this story, and I have high hopes that readers will enjoy it.

I will also continue to publish book reviews, and more installments of Psychology for Writers. And hopefully I will be able to provide more-frequent Author Updates, now that I’m no longer stuck in the Phantom Zone.

See y’all next time!

Detectives, Sleuths, and Nosy Neighbors III, published by Inkd Publishing, is now available to order.

This anthology includes my story “A Gift of Poison”: An expert in antiques is asked to verify the origin of an impossible artifact, the investigation taking him down a trail of madness, murder, and hillbilly music.

The Story Behind the Story:

One of the courses I teach as a psychology professor is Theories of Personality. When we get to Henry Murray’s needs-based theory, we spend some talking about the Thematic Apperception Test. The TAT is a projective test, like the famous Rorschach inklobts. The participant is shown a series of pictures, and asked to create a story for each picture: what is happening, what led up to it, and what will happen next. In class, students produce a wonderful array of stories, and it occurred to me that the TAT cards could be good writing prompts. I therefore have been on a personal project of picking a genre and a card, and seeing what happens.

“A Gift of Poison” is based on the “Violin Boy” card. I wanted to write a horror story about the little dude, but it turned out to be too dark for some publishers, so I eased back on the gore and emphasized the mystery elements.

I hope you enjoy “A Gift of Poison.” See y’all next time!

The anthology Brave Knights and Heroic Courage, published by Bayonet Books, is now available! It includes my story “Professor Howard and the Lethal Lab Monkeys.”

Here’s the pitch:

By all appearances, Dave Howard is an ordinary and unimpressive college professor. But he is also the latest in a thousand-year line of warriors, chosen to wield a haunted sword and empowered to defend humanity from the horrors that lurk in dark places. When a marauding band of escaped lab animals is on the rampage, the trail leads to an old enemy. Now Professor Howard must face the man who defeated him, navigate a confluence of magic and science, protect a friend, save the innocent, and try to give lessons in knighthood to a rhesus monkey.

If you enjoyed Chosen by the Sword, and want some more Professor Howard adventures, check this one out. Coming soon, I will be posting an Author Update (lots of stuff has been happening that hasn’t been public knowledge), and the next installment of Psychology for Writers (Let’s talk polygraphy). Click the Subscribe button so you don’t miss out.

See y’all next time!

I am a huge fan of the folks at Raconteur Press. They have done us a considerable service with their work in bringing short fiction (sci fi and fantasy) to appreciative readers, in their many anthologies (full disclosure: three of these anthologies include my stories). If you pick up a RacPress anthology, you will find action, heroism, humor, and sincerity. So if you want old-school fun adventure fiction without nihilistic subversion or dreary navel-gazing, Raconteur Press is your kind of people.

Recently, RacPress has expanded their offerings to include novels, and I just finished reading Rick Cutler’s debut novel, published by Raconteur Press, Colt Ostergaard: A Man With A Gun.

Without spoilers, here are my thoughts.

This novel is more like a collection of short stories, in chronological order, with an overall connective narrative tissue. That’s because Colt Ostergaard began as a recurring character in Cutler’s short fiction. However, the gathered tales fit together to form a coherent story of a man’s travels, obstacles, enemies, and friends.

The story is a “space western,” set on a faraway planet, where future humans struggle to live, work, and raise families in an unforgiving environment. Futuristic technology coexists here with old-west tropes: Cowboys ride six-legged alien steeds. Ranchers defend their homesteads against raiders, using railguns and clunky power-armor alongside their six-shooters. The wanted posters for fugitives are uploaded to the planetary internet. Cutler makes the two worlds (“space” and “western”) fit together seamlessly in a way that feels lived-in and believable.

Colt himself is a hero in the classic style. A wandering gunslinger with a mysterious past, he lives by the code of honor he learned as a soldier. Wherever there is injustice, wherever innocent farmers are oppressed by the powerful and corrupt, wherever there is a friend in trouble, Colt just can’t stop himself. He has to put his neck on the line to help those who need it.

Cutler is talented, with an authorial voice that is well-suited to the genre, and I look forward to more tales from his pen. And I can’t talk about this book without mentioning the beautiful illustrations, provided by the always-awesome Cedar Sanderson. Her artwork is a perfect fit for Cutler’s storytelling.

If you like classic cowboy themes, you’ll love this book. If you like main characters who show moral integrity and self-sacrifice, you’ll love this book. If you like two-fisted action tales with life and death on the line, you’ll love this book.

I greatly enjoyed Colt Ostergaard: A Man With A Gun, and now that I’m done reading it, I’m handing it off to my son. Because we all need heroes.

Today, instead of wearing my Writer Hat, I’m firmly in Psychology Professor mode. My new scholarly article, “The Biblical Narrative and the Story of the Liberal Self in Psychology,” has just been published in the Journal of Psychology and Christianity.

Back in Ye Olden Dayes, when I was working at Redeemer University in Ontario, my office was next door to David Koyzis, a political scientist with a PhD from Notre Dame (I named a werewolf in one of my novels after him). For several years, I’ve been impressed with David’s take on political ideologies, and recently something occurred to me.

In his book Political Visions and Illusions, Koyzis says that worldviews have a narrative built into them; a foundational story about how reality works and where things are going. He begins with the Christian worldview, as provided in the Bible. The story of the universe takes place in three acts:

(This is the super-simplified version. For a fuller treatment, see Creation Regained by Albert Wolters.)

Koyzis argues that the major political ideologies of our age are idolatries, in that they take some legitimately-good part of the world and elevate it to ultimate status (Socialism treats the State as if it were God. Liberalism elevates the individual. Conservatism elevates tradition. Nationalism elevates the nation.). Further, the ideologies have their own mutated version of the Creation-Fall-Redemption storyline.

Liberalism, for instance, tells this story:

(Again, this is the super-simplified version. Read Koyzis’ book. I also need to point out that, when I say “liberalism,” I am talking about the general liberal tradition that serves as the foundation for the Western democracies. I am not specifically talking about Democrats in the US, the Liberal Part of Canada, etc.)

What occurred to me was that this same foundational story is told, over and over again, in the theories we find in modern psychology. Basic human nature is described as good (Creation), but societies and relationships mess us up (Fall). Linley and Joseph (2004), for example, argue that the causes of evil in the human condition are entirely “within the absence of facilitative social-environmental conditions, rather than as an inherent aspect of human nature per se.” Movement toward mental health and psychological maturity (Redemption) involves “outgrowing” social entanglements in favor of individual autonomy.

In these theories, anything good and healthy will serve to liberate and fulfill the autonomous self. Anything that gets in the way of autonomy and individual subjective gratification is by definition unhealthy. My career, my friendships, my religion, my marriage; these are good things only if they satisfy my liberated self. I support this claim by looking at three examples: McAdams’ theory of the narrative self, Loevinger’s theory of ego development, and Kohlberg’s theory of moral development.

The idea that psychological theories are reflections of the theorist’s worldview is commonplace by this point. My argument is that most modern psychology is the product of people who are swimming in the waters of liberalism, taking for granted that this is the truth of the human condition.

But what if it isn’t? There are other political ideologies out there besides liberalism. What kinds of psychology would they produce? Koyzis claims that Christians can step back from political ideologies, declining to elevate any aspect to the world to ultimate status, and focusing on the biblical Creation-Fall-Redemption narrative as our way of understanding humanity and society. Can we do the same thing as psychologists?

Maybe. Some of us are trying.

As always, this project left me intoxicated by ideas, and with more questions than answers. Contact me if you want me to email you a copy of the article, and please give me your thoughts in the comments section below.

See you all next time!

The anthology Brave Knights and Heroic Courage, published by Bayonet Books,includes my story “Professor Howard and the Lethal Lab Monkeys.”

By all appearances, Dave Howard is an ordinary and unimpressive college professor. But he is also the latest in a thousand-year line of warriors, chosen to wield a haunted sword and empowered to defend humanity from the horrors that lurk in dark places. When a marauding band of escaped lab animals is on the rampage, the trail leads to an old enemy. Now Professor Howard must face the man who defeated him, navigate a confluence of magic and science, protect a friend, save the innocent, and try to give lessons in knighthood to a rhesus monkey.

This anthology is available for pre-order in Kindle format. I will post updates when it becomes available in paperback. If you enjoyed Chosen by the Sword, and want some more adventures featuring the Knight of the Ghostly Blade, check this one out.

From time to time, my book reviews venture into the world of nonfiction, such as my takes on Determined and The Unbiased Self. Today, I want to talk about Carl Trueman.

Trueman is an intellectual historian, meaning that he looks at the origins of ideas, how they change over time, what happens when they come into conflict with other ideas, and how they affect real-world outcomes. His most successful publication so far is The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, in which he looks at how our current ideas about identity and authenticity came about. Histories like these are useful in helping us to get at the root of key concepts that influence current rhetoric and practices, providing clarity and understanding.

Go Woke

One word that is inescapable in our current debates involving culture and politics is “woke,” and part of the problem is that different people mean different things when they use the word. Take, for one example, the recent cancellation of the TV show Starfleet Academy. The arguments that I’ve seen on social media have become utterly predictable: Someone will say “go woke go broke,” and point to the obnoxious identity-based sociopolitical messaging saturating the episodes. Someone else will say “Star Trek was always woke,” and point to Original Series episodes like “Plato’s Stepchildren” (interracial kiss) and “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (parti-colored aliens). A third person will object that these don’t count as “woke.” And then the discussion either becomes name-calling, or an argument over the meaning of the word “woke” (or both).

If “woke” means a specific ideology, rather than just a generic concern for a vague sense of justice, then it is an ideology grounded in Critical Theory. In To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, Carl Trueman turns back the clock to consider the roots of Critical Theory. In doing so, he helps shed some light on certain intellectual trends that are driving current cultural debates.

Why Are You Nazis?

After establishing the importance of understanding Critical Theory, Trueman sets the stage by providing a very brief introduction to the works of Georg Hegel and Karl Marx. This chapter is not meant to be anything close to a full exploration of these scholars or their bodies of work; the point is to note certain foundation stones that lie beneath what comes later. Hegel argues (among other things) that history unfolds according to a set pattern, and Marx argues (among other things) that cultural ideologies are illusions that conceal and justify the truth: behind the illusion, real reality is the struggle between oppressor and oppressed. Marxists were confident that the unfolding of history will lead to advanced capitalist countries moving to the next inexorable step in the process, in the direction of communist overthrow of the bourgeois oppressors.

That did not go as planned.

Proper Marxism was not well-equipped to explain why Germany, perhaps the most advanced capitalist country in Europe, turned to antisemitism and fascism instead of communism. There was also the problem of Russia going communist, when they were neither advanced nor capitalist. The theory needed work.

Marxism Becomes Critical Theory

The bulk of Trueman’s book focuses on key figures in the development of Marxism-inspired thought, associated with the Institute for Social Research (often called the Frankfurt School). These scholars maintained the general Marxist approach (e.g., exposing illusions that shield oppression and prevent liberation), but introduced substantial innovations and expansions. Trueman introduces the reader to such figures as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich.

In this survey of scholars, we get to see the early 20^th-century growth of ideas such as:

1. a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth (Statements are not “true” or “false” based on their accurate description of reality, but on whether or not they serve liberation),

2. anti-essentialism (The meaning of things is not within the things themselves, only what is assigned by the powerful in society),

3. rejection of free speech (Freedom only serves to maintain the oppressive status quo),

4. the abolition of the traditional family (Monogamy is bourgeois repression), and

5. weaponization of the media (Mass culture should be used to undermine everything).

Trueman is a Christian, and in each section he provides a brief reflection on the themes that emerge as Critical Theory takes shape. His overall message in these sections is that Critical Theorists are often responding to genuine problems in society, but with flaws in their diagnoses and prescriptions. These flaws are so foundational to the approach that Trueman counsels Christians to avoid trying to use the tools of Critical Theory to address social problems.

So Should I Read It?

To Change All Worlds is a short and concise introduction to thinkers whom you might not have heard of, but whose impact is still being felt. If you are not familiar with Critical Theory, it can be a valuable resource.

The fact that this is a good introduction is also a source of the weaknesses of the book. If you are already familiar with Critical Theory, and want a more in-depth examination of these impactful thinkers, or a more thorough Christian critique of the movement, then you might want to find something else to read. As a psychologist, I enjoyed the bit that we got involving the interesting relationship between Critical Theory and psychoanalysis, but I wanted to see more about Adorno and his claim that fascism is the product of messed-up personality development, given the prominence of authoritarianism research in current social/personality psychology.

The other part of this being an introduction is that Trueman stops too soon for my taste. Once we get to the 1940s and 50s, the story ends, with Critical Theorists developing their analyses of sex and media. There is barely a mention of later, non-Frankfurt-School, theory development (at times, Trueman cops an attitude about current Critical Theory, describing it as a weaker and dumber iteration of superior early scholarship. Your vocabulary word for the day is epigone). For myself, I would have liked the book to be twice as long, showing how early Critical Theory developed into its current forms.

That being said, if you go into this fully aware that you are getting a basic introduction to the early roots of Critical Theory, To Change All Worlds is readable and accessible. It does a good job of showing the issues that Frankfurt School theorists were wrestling with, and how those led to certain core concepts that still echo in today’s political arguments, especially including the “woke” perspective.

As for me, my next project is to use this book as a stepping stone toward taking a deeper look at the Frankfurt School roots of Adorno and The Authoritarian Personality. Maybe I’ll post on that topic later.

I hope that you found this review helpful. Let me know what you think in the comments below. See y’all next time!

The end of a semester is always a time of madness, so I haven’t been posting a lot lately. Stay tuned for updates, publications, book reviews, and more as my schedule loosens up slightly.

Welcome everybody, to another edition of Psychology for Writers, a series in which I combine my role as a psychology professor with my love of writing, to provide bits of advice to authors about how a knowledge of psychology can help you write well (for example, this post about introducing characters using social psychological research on first impressions). One of my recurring themes is the importance of getting psychology right. Many writers don’t, and it just makes us look bad. Examples include my articles about the insanity defense, and the myth that we only use 10% of our brains.

In my most recent installment of this series, I talked about the idea that it is possible to detect lies by reading somebody’s body language. That got me thinking about forensic psychology and truth (that, and the fact that I just finished teaching a Forensic Psychology course), so now I’m turning this into a trilogy. Part One was lie detection and body language, and I’ll follow today’s installment up with a few words about polygraphy (the “lie detector” machine) in Part Three. Today, I want to talk about truth serum.

Truth serum might be my favorite example of bad psychology in pop culture, because the badness goes all the way back to the beginning (For a good scholarly summary, track down Alison Winter’s 2005 article on this topic in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine). Early 20^th-Century psychology was a time of great optimism, when psychology was being established as a science instead of a branch of philosophy (Don’t get me started about that. I have Opinions. Big Loud Opinions). Applied psychologists at that time visualized themselves as heroically providing scientific tools for solving humanity’s problems. But as we saw in our previous entry, they tended to oversell the validity of their techniques (looking at you, Hugo Münsterberg).

The Origins of Truth Serum

In 1916, a physician by the name of Doctor House (no, not that one) was working as an obstetrician, and he found that administering scopolamine to his patients, as an anesthetic and anti-nausea medication, sometimes made them sleepy and talkative. In 1922, he was allowed to test the idea that people who are doped up on scopolamine can’t stop themselves from answering questions, by administering the drug to two alleged criminals in the Dallas County Jail (click here for the paper House presented about this test).

This is where the bad psychology and pop culture comes in. The popular media caught wind of House’s work right away, and immediately started cranking out the 1920s version of “clickbait” articles, loudly proclaiming the existence of a “Truth Serum” that is 100% guaranteed to make anybody tell the truth about anything (The likely origin of the term “truth serum” is a 1922 article in the Los Angeles Record). It was baloney, but it was a good story.

Being a good story, truth serum was picked up by fiction writers, and became a staple of pulp adventures, mysteries, and espionage thrillers. The earliest example that I could find was in a Dick Tracy comic published September 19^th, 1933:

If anybody can find an earlier example, I definitely want to know about it.

The Most Common Approach

Around the same time that Dick Tracy was giving Slicer his “shot in the arm,” another physician, Erich Lindemann, was working with sodium amytal, and he noticed that patients who had been given amytal became willing to discuss what he called “very personal matters” when under the influence of the drug. Partly motivated by the unpleasant side effects of scopolamine, amytal because the new go-to substance for “truth serum.”

My favorite example of getting truth serum wrong is a scene in the 1994 movie True Lies, in which Jamie Lee Curtis’ character finds out that her husband (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) has been leading a double life as a super-spy. The two are captured by terrorists, and brought in for interrogation. Click here and watch the scene, because I’m going to break down the falsehoods.

Everything about this scene is bogus. To begin with, sodium amytal is a barbiturate that has its effect by reducing the activity level of the central nervous system. At low doses, it produces drowsiness; at higher doses, the patient falls asleep. The goal when administering amytal (this is called narcoanalysis, or amytal-assisted interviewing) is to keep the individual at the perfect level of intoxication: too little, and there is no effect; too much and you have an unconscious person. In the scene in True Lies, the creepy dude just jams Harry with a full syringe and then walks away. Harry would have passed right out. Actual narcoanalysis involves a steady amytal IV, with continuous monitoring to make sure the individual stays in the sweet spot of “twilight” between consciousness and unconsciousness: dopey enough to let something slip, but not falling asleep.

The next error is the classic. Harry becomes incapable of doing anything but answering questions with the unvarnished truth. The actual result of an amytal-assisted interview is closer to drunken babbling. When Gerson and Victoroff (1948) administered amytal to convicted criminals, the majority of the criminals confessed, but the confessions came out in a stream-of-consciousness garble of truth, falsehoods, fantasies, and delusions. Redlich and colleagues (1951) found that participants were entirely capable of lying while under the influence of amytal. Piper (1993) published a review of the research on the effectiveness of amytal, and nothing had really changed in over 40 years of studies. Administer amytal (properly) and you still get a highly-unreliable tangled mess of verbal spew. You don’t get humorous scenes like in True Lies. This is one of the reasons why amytal-elicited testimony is generally considered inadmissible in court.

Writing Truth Serum

Given all of this, if you want to write a truth serum scene, you have two options. One possibility is to accept reality and have narcoanalysis be unreliable in your story. The fact that a lot of people think that amytal (or a similar drug) works, when it really doesn’t, could itself be an interesting wrinkle to your story.

The other option is to come up with some kind of workaround. You might have a sci fi story set in the distant future, when scientists have finally come up with a drug that works (Robert Heinlein did this a few times). In a fantasy tale, magic potions don’t have to follow the science (Veritaserum in the Harry Potter books). Or you could just pretend that we’ve got a new drug that is neither scopolamine nor amytal; I won’t tell you what it is but it’s full of science and it totally works, as they did in Ant Man and the Wasp.

I hope that you found this informative and helpful. If you want more, check out my other posts, and be sure to hit that “subscribe” button. Our next Psychology for Writers entry will close out the trilogy by talking about polygraphy. Can you beat the machine?

See you all next time!

Now available (Kindle format at the time of this writing—paperback coming soon!), Fantastic Schools University is the twelfth book in the Fantastic Schools series of anthologies. My story in this book is set in the Professor Howard Chronicles universe. In “Professor Howard and the Perilous Conference Paper,” Dave Howard is “voluntold” to help Trueman College host an academic conference dedicated to all things supernatural. It does not go as planned. I wrote this one drawing from—among other things—my own experiences with the many ways that conferences can go haywire.

Check it out, and if you like what you see, take a look at the other anthologies in the series.

A while back, I posted an analysis of Harry Dresden from the Dresden Files series of novels. That was based on an example paper that I created for my psychology students (I sometimes have them pick some selection of entertainment media and analyze it using the relevant theories and research). The recent announcement that plans are in progress to bring back one of my favorite TV shows (Firefly) has me in a browncoat state of mind. And so I present another example paper that I created, giving my thoughts on how the psychology of atheism may be applied to the character Malcolm Reynolds. I hope you enjoy it.

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Malcolm Reynolds’ Loss of Faith

The television show Firefly (Whedon, 2002a) centres around a crew of misfits who operate on the space vessel Serenity. The show is set in the distant future, a time in which Earth has become overpopulated, and humanity has responded by moving out into space and terraforming a number of planets and moons into suitable habitats. At the time in which the events of the show take place, the inhabited planets had recently been unified, with or without their consent, by the Alliance. Malcolm Reynolds (often called “Mal”), the captain of Serenity, had fought on the losing side of this conflict, and he and his crew now eke out a living on the fringes of the Alliance, supporting themselves through smuggling and other criminal activities.

In this paper, I will focus on one aspect of Malcolm Reynolds’ character. In the pilot episode of the series (Whedon, 2002b), we see that Mal took part in a pivotal battle (the Battle of Serenity Valley) between the Alliance and the “Independents” who resisted the Alliance’s hegemony. Mal was a Sergeant in the Independents’ forces, and he is shown to have been a person of cheerful optimism and sincere Christian faith. Mal believed that God would provide victory for the Independents and their righteous cause. When the Independents were crushed by the Alliance, Mal’s faith was similarly crushed. Six years later, Mal (now captain of a spaceship named after the place of his defeat) has become hardened and embittered (though he retains a sense of humour and a deep nobility of character), and he demonstrates resentment toward religion in general and God in particular. In the few episodes of Firefly that were produced, and the spinoff film Serenity (Buchanan et al., 2005), this is demonstrated primarily in his interactions with Shepherd Book, a wandering priest who joins Mal’s crew.

In this paper, I will examine Mal’s loss of faith, drawing from the small but growing research literature on the psychology of religious conflict and apostasy, examining certain “risk factors” in Mal’s background and personality, known to increase the likelihood of apostasy. I will analyze Mal’s reaction to the Battle of Serenity Valley as a case of disappointment and anger directed toward God. Finally, I will consider some possibilities about Mal’s future as it relates to this issue.

Factors that Predispose Mal Toward Apostasy

The psychology of atheism (lack of belief in a god or gods) and apostasy (renunciation of one’s religion) are understudied topics when compared to the research that falls within the category of “psychology of religion,” whether one chalks this discrepancy up to ideological biases within the social sciences (Stark, 1999), or to less sinister methodological difficulties (Bainbridge, 2005). Psychologists who examine the irreligious, in the same way that psychologists of religion investigate variables that influence conversion into a faith (e.g., Granqvist & Hagekull, 2001), investigate variables that influence deconversion out of a faith. Several such investigations are relevant to an understanding of Mal’s transformation from religious to irreligious.

In the Firefly episode “Our Mrs. Reynolds” (Whedon & Curtis-Hall, 2002), Mal mentions having grown up without a father. Instead, he was raised by his mother and “about forty hands” on his mother’s ranch. Paul Vitz (1999) argues that some atheists adopt their position as the result of unresolved difficulties involving their fathers. Vitz employs the same logic that Sigmund Freud used in The Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1927) to explain belief in God. Freud connects belief in God to a desire for a caring and protective father. One’s feelings toward one’s father are connected in Freudian psychoanalysis to the Oedipus complex (Freud, 1913), which occurs as a part of natural personality development between the ages of three and six. Children at that age begin to comprehend the concept of gender, and they feel attraction toward their opposite-sex parent. This makes the same-sex parent a rival, and the child experiences hatred and resentment toward the same-sex parent. Even if this conflict is resolved in a relatively healthy manner, Oedipal urges are never entirely dispelled. But if the Oedipus complex is not properly resolved, it may result in a fixation at that stage of development, influencing the way in which the child comes to understand authority and sexuality. As Freud describes God as a projection of our father image onto the universe, a desire to be loved and sheltered by one’s “earthly” father can result in a desire that there be a loving and sheltering “heavenly father.”

Vitz extends Freud’s theory, connecting rejection of God to unresolved Oedipal issues that result in animosity toward one’s own “earthly” father. Such animosity may come about for a number of reasons, including the father being “absent through death or by abandoning or leaving the family” (Vitz, 1997, p.9), as is clearly the case with Mal’s father. As Gordon Allport put it nearly five decades before Vitz: “It seems curious that Freud insists that belief in God is a projection of dependence and love associated with the earthly father, he overlooks the fact that by the same token atheism may be construed as the projection of ambivalence or hatred associated with the male parent” (Allport, 1950, p.118). As partial support for his “defective father hypothesis,” Vitz offers profiles of such prominent atheists as Karl Marx, Madelyn Murray O’Hair, Baron d’Holbach, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Sigmund Freud himself, all of whom had fathers who were absent or weak or abusive. Mal’s fatherless childhood may have predisposed him to respond with resentment when God appeared to fail him at Serenity Valley.

Another aspect of Mal’s character that may have predisposed him toward apostasy is the relative maturity of his faith. When we see Mal in the Battle of Serenity Valley, there is no questioning the sincerity of his faith. But the maturity of that faith is a separate matter. We are shown only one clue in connection to this issue in the Battle of Serenity Valley. Mal announces his intention to shoot down an enemy aircraft, and when his comrade Zoe asks if he thinks that they can succeed, Mal holds up the cross that he wears around his neck and says “You even need to ask?” (Whedon, 2002b). What we see here is Mal connecting his belief in God to victory in battle. This kind of “magical thinking” (a focus on supernatural forces or beings bringing about what one wants) characterizes what Gordon Allport (1950) called “immature religion.” When confronted with suffering and evil, the religiously-immature person typically cannot continue as before. “A faith centered in self-advantage is bound to break up” (p.120). The outcome of such a crisis will either be an intensification and maturation of one’s faith, or else a collapse into turmoil and doubt. Allport recounts two cases of veterans (both of Protestant upbringing) who were severely wounded in battle. One’s reaction involved a deepened spirituality and commitment to God, while the other became a militant atheist.

Religious struggle provides opportunities for either psychological growth or deterioration, depending on how one handles the situation (Exline & Rose, 2005; Raiya, Pargament, & Magyar-Russell, 2010). One aspect of this is the attempt to find an explanation for one’s struggle that fits within the pre-existing religious framework. Hunsberger, Pratt, and Pancer (2002) examined how young people dealt with their struggles and religious doubts. Those who sought out and consulted “anti-religious” literature for guidance were more likely to have become less religious two years later, while those who sought out “pro-religious” literature were more likely to have increased in religiousness and decreased in doubt two years later. Would Mal’s religious struggle have ended differently if he had “done his homework” after Serenity Valley? It is impossible to say, but a study of scripture and history might have shown Mal that, whether one is talking about the Christian samurai at the Battle of Sekigahara, the fall of the Roman Empire, or Israel enduring the Babylonian Exile, being one of “God’s People” has never guaranteed victory in military conflicts.

God is Not Welcome

One particularly telling moment in relation to this issue takes place in the episode “Train Job” (Whedon, 2002c). In this episode, Mal says to Book, “If I’m your mission, Shepherd, best give it up. You’re welcome on my boat. God ain’t.” There are any number of ways that Mal could have phrased that, but he said it in a way that implies personal resentment toward God.

Julie Exline is one of the leading researchers in religious struggle (e.g., Exline, 2002) and the experience of anger toward God (e.g., Exline & Martin, 2005). A dominant theme that she has found in her research is resentment toward God as a reaction to undeserved suffering (Exline, 2003). Even when the suffering is inflicted by humans (instead of being a natural disaster or illness), God can be blamed for not having prevented the trauma. The experience of undeserved suffering can disrupt one’s belief in a meaningful universe (Kauffman, 2002; Pyszczynski & Kesebir, 2011), producing confusion and anger (Baumeister, Stillwell, & Wotman, 1990). Exline, Yali, & Lobel (1999) found that people who had difficulty in resolving their anger God for allowing something bad to happen were more likely to experience anxiety, depression, generalized anger, and difficulty forgiving others. In some cases, this can lead to an “emotional atheism,” in which the individual expresses his or her resentment toward God by concluding that God does not exist (Novotni & Peterson, 2001).

In a recent series of studies (Exline, Park, Smyth, & Carey, 2011), Exline and colleagues examined anger toward God in response to traumas such as cancer and the loss of a loved one. They found that participants who viewed God as both cruel and responsible for the traumatic event, and who failed to find meaning in the event, were more likely to feel angry with God. Those who saw God as responsible, but were able to find meaning, were less likely to see God as cruel, and thus experienced less anger toward God. Negative feelings toward God were associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms, higher levels of physical distress, and lower levels of life satisfaction. If the anger toward God persisted or increased over time (as assessed in a one-year follow-up study of cancer survivors), then the outcomes were even worse.

Where do We Go from Here?

Will Mal be able to get past his resentment toward God? When Exline and colleagues conducted their study of cancer survivors, it was in the context of a one-year follow-up. Firefly is set six years after the Battle of Serenity Valley, and the film Serenity takes place in the year after that. Mal has retained his resentment toward God for seven years. Mal’s emotional state seems to have worsened at the beginning of Serenity. His moods are darker, his approach is more ruthless, and one of his crewmembers comments that he has “driven” two other crewmembers off the ship through his behaviour. This deterioration may be explainable in connection with other factors, such as the abortive nature of his relationship with the character Inara or the increased stress of trying to survive outside of Alliance control, but it is also consistent with the research literature on religious struggle. However, during the events of the film, Mal seems to turn a corner. He reconnects with lost friends, he chooses to make a principled stance in the face of evil, and at the end of the film he makes a speech about the power of love. It is possible that these events will lead him toward some sort of resolution, either a return to a renewed and more mature form of his earlier faith (Exline & Rose, 2005) or the establishment of a more secure irreligious identity (Strieb et al., 2009). It is unfortunate that Firefly was so prematurely cancelled, as we will not have the opportunity to observe Mal’s long-term grappling with matters of faith and meaning, or to reflect on what Mal’s struggles might have shown us about our own struggles.

Another unfortunate result of Firefly’s early demise is the conspicuous lack of evidence on which we can base an analysis like this one. With so few clues present in the series and the film, this paper has by necessity been short on data and long on speculation. What can be said is that the few bits of data that are available to us line up fairly well with the existing scholarly literature on the psychology of religious struggle and apostasy.

References

Allport, G. W. (1950). The individual and his religion. Macmillan.

Bainbridge, W. S. (2005). Atheism. Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, 1, 1-24.

Baumeister, R. F., Stillwell, A. M., & Wotman, S. R. (1990). Victim and perpetrator accounts of interpersonal conflict: Autobiographical narratives about anger. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 994-1005. https://doi.org/10.1037/00223514.59.5.994

Buchanan, C. (Producer), Lester, D. V. (Producer), Mendel, B. (Producer), Tager, A. (Producer),& Whedon, J. (Writer/Director). (2005). Serenity [Motion picture]. Universal Pictures.

Exline, J. J. (2002). Stumbling blocks on the religious road: Fractured relationships, nagging vices, and the inner struggle to believe. Psychological Inquiry, 13, 182-189. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1303_03

Exline, J. J. (2003). Anger toward God: A brief overview of existing research. Address presented at the 111th convention of the American Psychological Association. Toronto, ON.

Exline, J. J., & Martin, A. (2005). Anger toward God: A new frontier in forgiveness research. In E. L. Worthington, Jr. (Ed.), Handbook of forgiveness (pp. 73-88). Routledge.

Exline, J. J., Park, C. L., Smyth, J. M., & Carey, M. P. (2011). Anger toward God: Social-cognitive predictors, prevalence, and links with adjustment to bereavement and cancer. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 129-148. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021716

Exline, J. J., & Rose, E. (2005). Religious and spiritual struggles. In R. F. Paloutzian & C. L. Park (Eds.), Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality (pp. 315-330). Guilford Press.

Exline, J. J., Yali, A. M., & Lobel, M. (1999). When God disappoints: Difficulty forgiving God and its role in negative emotions. Journal of Health Psychology, 4, 365-379. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/135910539900400306

Freud, S. (1913). The interpretation of dreams (A. Brill, trans.). Macmillan.

Freud, S. (1927). The future of an illusion. W. W. Norton and Company.

Granqvist, P., & Hagekull, B. (2001). Seeking security in the new age: On attachment and emotional compensation. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 40, 527-545. https://doi.org/10.1111/0021-8294.00075

Hunsberger, B., Pratt, M., & Pancer, S. M. (2002). A longitudinal study of religious doubts in high school and beyond: Relationships, stability, and searching for answers. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 41, 255-266. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5906.00115

Kauffman, J. (Ed.). (2002). Loss of the assumptive world: A theory of traumatic loss. Brunner-Routledge.

Novotni, M., & Peterson, R. (2001). Angry with God. Piñon.

Pyszczynski, T., & Kesebir, P. (2011). Anxiety buffer disruption theory: A terror management account of posttraumatic stress disorder. Anxiety, Stress & Coping, 24, 3-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2010.517524

Raiya, H. A., Pargament, K. I., & Magyar-Russell, G. (2010). When religion goes awry: Religious risk factors for poorer health and well-being. In P. Verhagen, H. van Praag, J. Lopez-Ibor, J. Cox, & D. Moussaoui (Eds.), Religion and psychiatry: Beyond boundaries (pp. 389-411). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Stark R. (1999). Atheism, faith, and the social scientific study of religion. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 14, 41-62. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537909908580851

Strieb, H., Hood, R. W., Jr., Keller, B., Csöff, R. M., & Silver, C. (2009). Deconversion: Qualitative and quantitative results from cross-cultural research in Germany and the United States. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Vitz, P. C. (1997). The psychology of atheism. Paper presented at New York University. New York, NY.

Vitz, P. C. (1999). Faith of the fatherless: The psychology of atheism. Spence.

Whedon, J. (Producer). (2002a). Firefly [Television series]. 20th Century Fox Television.

Whedon, J. (Writer/Director). (2002b). Serenity [Television series episode]. In J. Whedon (Producer), Firefly. 20th Century Fox Television.

Whedon, J. (Writer/Director). (2002c). Train job [Television series episode]. In J. Whedon (Producer), Firefly. 20th Century Fox Television.

Whedon, J. (Writer), & Curtis-Hall, V. (Director). (2002). Our Mrs. Reynolds [Television series episode]. In J. Whedon (Producer), Firefly. 20th Century Fox Television.

Whedon, J. (Writer), & Minear, T. (Writer/Director). (2003). The message [Television series episode]. In J. Whedon (Producer), Firefly. 20th Century Fox Television.

Yesterday, the announcement went up that the surviving cast of Firefly are taking active steps to bring us a second season of the show, in the form of an animated series, set in the time between Season One and the Serenity movie. Here is the Instagram post with the announcement.

I love Firefly. A major part of my growing relationship with my wife was her introducing me to the oeuvre of Joss Whedon, and we’ve spent many happy hours playing the Firefly board game. And I just recently found out that my students keep a running tally of the number of Firefly references I make when I’m teaching (apparently, this semester we’re up to twenty).

I’m not sure how to feel about this announcement, though. Corner Gas Animated tells me that it is possible to do an animated “continuation” of a live-action show, with most of the original cast, and have it be fun. And realistically, animation is the only way to get around the fact that everybody’s twenty years older; there’s no way a 64-year-old Adam Baldwin is going to be jumping on trains and dodging reavers. But we’ve been burned by so many terrible adaptations/spinoffs/reboots in recent years that I don’t know if hope is an option.

One big sad hole in the plan is the death of Ron Glass in 2016. This means that they will either have to cast a different voice actor for Shepherd Book (That’s how Corner Gas Animated handled the passing of Janet Wright), or make do without the character. And this brings me to my main topic for today: Firefly and religion.

Joss Whedon has, on more than one occasion, attempted to walk a line between his own beliefs and a recognition that other people (and therefore fictional characters) believe differently. Whedon is, going by his comments in interviews and remarks in DVD commentaries, a committed—and sometimes aggressive—atheist. But he also famously had Captain America say “There’s only one God” in the first Avengers movie, and defended it by saying that his own atheism doesn’t mean that Steve Rogers has to be an atheist. With the character of Book, Whedon attempts a similar move in Firefly, creating a sympathetic, wise, and complex preacher to be a part of the Serenity crew. This provides a counterpart to Malcolm Reynold’s often-rude atheism, even if Book’s faith is the kind of watered-down and hollowed-out religiosity that a Hollywood atheist would find palatable. Book seems to not care about the truth of Christianity, only the psychological effects of it, as can be seen in his interactions with River in the episode “Jaynestown,” and his final words to Mal in Serenity.

This puts Firefly/Serenity squarely in the “Age of Authenticity,” as described by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age. Taylor’s take on secularism is that we currently live in an era in which neither belief nor unbelief are taken for granted in society. Instead, people are presented with a wild array of spiritual options, and encouraged to mix-and-match our way to a fully-individual personalized religious journey based solely on whether or not the beliefs and practices make the individual feel fulfilled (“You do you, and we don’t judge.”). Tara Isabella Burton surveys the resulting religious landscape in her book Strange Rites.

However the showrunners handle the Ron Glass situation, it raises an interesting question. At the moment, it doesn’t look like Joss Whedon will be actively involved in the project (not surprising, considering the accusations that have tanked his reputation). Without Whedon, how might the new writers handle faith in the Firefly ‘verse? The original series and the film are products of the early 2000s, a time when the so-called New Atheists were in ascendancy, and snarky anti-religious messages were the hip thing that all the cool kids were doing. Times have changed. New Atheism peaked in 2012, then fractured and collapsed. Those who identify as “nones” on surveys have turned out to be far more religious than the vitriolic followers of Dawkins would have predicted, and there are indicators of a resurgence of traditional forms of religion in many parts of the “secular” world.

Could the writers of Firefly Season Two have gotten the memo? Could we see a recognition that traditional religion has a lot to offer, and plays a central role in the lives of billions of people? Or would we be looking at a writers’ room filled with people who still think it’s 2002, but lack even Whedon’s attempts at balance? Since we’re only one day post-announcement, I have all the questions but no answers. What do you think?

Since this is on my mind now, I plan to follow this up by posting a paper that I wrote about Firefly and the psychology of religion, focusing on the character of Malcolm Reynolds. Keep your eyes open for that to come in the next few days.

Until then, fellow browncoats. Find a crew. Find a job. Keep flying.

There should be a few Author Announcements coming up soon, as I have not been idle. Today’s article, though, is for a lighthearted moment of psychology. It is, by this point, commonplace to point out that we live in a profoundly self-obsessed society, in which we are repeatedly exposed to messages that the only thing that really matters is the glorious self, and that our only real problem is life is that we are not sufficiently in love with ourselves. Today, I want to share a few example of how we are encouraged, by media and schools and governments, to focus on self.

There are all pictures that I’ve taken, noticing a certain theme. Yes, I’m strange. That’s life as a psychology professor; whenever I see another example of the culture of narcissism at work, I have to stop and take a picture of it.

I can’t even go out for Chinese without being told that I’m not narcissistic enough.

I have a scholarly article that should be coming out in a few months, all about how our society’s obsession with self has warped (almost) the entire field of psychology. So I guess I have this topic on the brain lately. What do you think? If you have some more good examples, leave a comment below and help me expand my collection.

To learn more about the psychology involved in this cultural shift, a good pace to start is Jean Twenge’s book Generation Me.

See y’all next time!

Alone, I flew to meet the Saecsen host. Alone, I hurtled toward them, bereft of sense and feeling…

Insane.

The final episode of The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin drops next week. And I have thoughts. This TV series is based on the novel series (also called The Pendragon Cycle) by Stephen R. Lawhead.

Lawhead was born in Nebraska, but moved to Oxford in 1986 to begin the research process for his treatment of the legend of King Arthur. Lawhead’s take on Arthur is based on his study of Welsh tales, especially the Mabinogion and the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, which makes The Pendragon Cycle very Celtic, and very Christian (though Lawhead’s theology is, let’s say, questionable at times). The first three books in the series (Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur) tell a complete story, from the destruction of Atlantis to the reign and tragic end of the High King himself. Lawhead followed these up with two “interquel” novels set during Arthur’s time on the throne, and a sequel set in the present day (Arthur returns when he is most needed). Most recently, Lawhead published a prequel novel telling the story of the mother of Uther and Aurelius, two characters in Taliesin.

I absolutely loved these books back in the 90s, reading and rereading them so many times that my copy of Merlin is held together with tape and good intentions. In my opinion, the first three books are all that we needed; those are outstanding fantasy novels and one of my all-time favorite takes on the Arthur legend. As far as I’m concerned, the interquels are okay but didn’t need to exist, and I actively dislike Avalon (the 21^st-Century return of Arthur). I have not read Aurelia (the prequel novel). But I gave my copy of the original trilogy to my kids, and my oldest has become even more of a Pendragon nerd than I am.

[Note for Parents: I would call the books PG-13. Post-Roman Britain is a violent place and many characters face gruesome deaths. There are instances of sex. Neither are explicit or gratuitous, and I would call the novels appropriate for teenagers and up.]

Being such an intense fan of the trilogy, when I heard that plans were underway for a TV adaptation, I stopped in my tracks and started muttering “pleasedontmessthisupppleasedontmessthisup” over and over. The past few years have not exactly been a bumper crop for high-quality adaptations of fantasy books. But I was very happy with what we got.

The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is produced by Daily Wire, and is available on the DailyWire+ streaming service.* The first two episodes of the series are a speedrun through Taliesin, introducing us to main characters like Charis, Taliesin, Avallach, and Morgian. Episode Two ends with the birth of Merlin. The remaining episodes cover the events of the novel Merlin, giving us a nonlinear treatment of Merlin’s youth as a child of both Atlantis and Britain and a pupil of both druids and Christians, his time as a warrior king, his years of madness, and his role in events leading up to the birth of Arthur. Click here for the trailer.

[*I might as well take a moment to talk about the politics, since it seems unavoidable. The Daily Wire is a conservative/libertarian news organization that branched out into documentaries, and then into entertainment productions. If your politics lean to the left, and your first reaction to the existence of this TV series is to recoil in disgust because it was made by those people, I encourage you to step back from partisanship long enough to appreciate the show on its own merits. I would also remind you that your emotional reaction is one small taste of what your right-leaning friends experience every day of the year when interacting with the politics of Hollywood, so this could also be seen as an exercise in the development of your empathy.]

The production values in this show are outstanding, giving us amazing visuals and making it look like the work of a major studio instead of a startup. I wasn’t able to find out how much it cost per episode, but it was definitely money well-spent. The costumes and set designs are a good middle ground, neither too clean and bright (as we got in the 50s and 60s, as if the entirety of medieval Europe was vacuumed and dry-cleaned) nor too filthy and run-down (as we have been getting in the past few decades, as if everybody before the twentieth century spent their days rolling in dung like the peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail). The acting was effective and enjoyable; Tom Sharp’s portrayal of Merlin is exactly what it should have been for the character as presented in the book (He even looks exactly right if you have this edition of the novel). Brett Cooper as Ganieda was an absolute delight. Rose Reid’s Charis has depth and fire.

One lesson that the mainstream studios need to learn (but often seem to fail at) is this: When adapting a beloved work of fiction with an established fan base, be faithful to the source material. Don’t “subvert” it, thinking that you’re so much cleverer than the original creator. Don’t “re-imagine it for modern audiences,” thinking that the vast multitudes of pre-existing fans, ready to shower you with truckloads of money if you just give them a good adaptation, are a bunch of knuckle-draggers who need you to re-educate them. Don’t hollow out the IP and turn it into a shallow vessel for whatever social issue happens to be hot this week. In this, The Pendragon Cycle succeeds brilliantly. The story told is the story told in the books, and it is done well.

In my family we have two people who are fans of the books, and three who haven’t read them. The two of us who are fans loved the show and wanted more. The three who haven’t read the books were able to follow the narrative just fine, and enjoyed it a lot.

I have only two complaints. First, while I know that the showrunners made a deliberate and valid artistic choice in rendering the storyline nonlinear, revealing Merlin’s past in extended flashback scenes, it did create a bit of confusion in the members of my family who haven’t read the books.

Second, like I said, I wanted more. If I were King of TV, I would have three seasons, with at least a dozen episodes for each book in the trilogy. But I understand that first-time audiences might not be interested in a full season of Taliesin, so I forgive the showrunners (sort of, but not really) for cramming an entire novel into two episodes. We got hardly any Elphin, and nothing at all of his falling in love with Rhonwyn. (Rhonwyn barely existed in the show!) There was no explanation of why there was a rift between Charis and Avallach, and what a princess was doing as a bull dancer. A bunch of characters were cut, and the Taliesin narrative was bare-bones. A lot was cut from the Merlin book. A few changes and additions were made as well.

All in all, The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is an outstanding TV adaptation. If my biggest gripe is that it was awesome but too short, that should tell you something. So my recommendation is that you watch the show, then read the novels and see all the stuff that got left on the cutting-room floor.

If you’ve seen the show and want to talk, or if you’re a fan of the books and haven’t seen the show, or if you think I’m off base with my review and want to tell me all the ways that I’m wrong, lay it on me in the comments section below. If you want more reviews, updates, short fiction, or any of the other things that tumble out of my brain, be sure to hit that Subscribe button.

See y’all next time!

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods. The book, published in 2001, won multiple awards, and has been adapted as a comic book series, a full-cast audiobook, and a three-season TV series. I enjoy Gaiman’s writing style, and have some of his works on my bookshelf (When my kids were at the right age for me to read books to them, one was The Graveyard Book). I read American Gods many years ago, so I decided to revisit it for its anniversary. One of my areas of scholarly interest is the psychology of religion, and American Gods plays with ideas about belief and culture in ways that invite examination.

Given how long this book has been out, I will not bother avoiding spoilers here. I will also not be discussing Gaiman’s alleged sexual misdeeds or what the resulting controversy has done to his career; plenty of people have already weighed in on that. I want to examine American Gods on its own.

[Note for Parents: This book is not for the kids. It had been many years since I last read American Gods, and re-reading it for the anniversary, I was struck by just how horny this book is. Whatever powers the gods have, keeping their pants on does not seem to be among them. I will say a few words about the TV series later, but the gratuitous nudity and sex in the show is actually pretty faithful to the level of explicit material in the book. So don’t let the kids watch the show either.]

The Book

To briefly summarize the plot: the main character of American Gods is a man named Shadow Moon. Shadow has served a three-year prison sentence and is about to be released, when he finds out that his wife has died in a car accident. Shortly after that, he finds out that his late wife had been having an affair with his also-dead best friend (the two died in the same accident) while he was behind bars. A man with everything taken away from him, Shadow meets Mister Wednesday, a con man who offers Shadow a job as a driver, errand runner, and backup muscle in Wednesday’s shady dealings. This plunges Shadow into a world populated by creatures of mythology and folklore, and Shadow plays a pivotal role in a war brewing between old gods and new gods. Wednesday is Odin, and Odin is about to play the biggest con ever.

Central to the plot is the idea that gods come into existence through the power of belief. The more worship and sacrifice they receive, the stronger they become. And when people begin to forget the gods, those gods weaken and fade. In the novel, we see the lingering voiceless remnants of gods that came across the land bridge from Siberia, worshiped by peoples who were themselves lost to time. Each wave of migration and immigration brought with it a new pantheon: gods from Europe and Africa and Asia now rub elbows with gods that were born in the American tundras and mountains and grasslands.

And we meet the new gods. The modern secular age has pushed the old gods into the margins, where they eke out a marginal living as laborers, prostitutes, hustlers, and small business owners. In their place have risen new divinities, “gods of computers and telephones and whatever” (p. 395). The gods of technology and media play prominent roles in the book as major players in this faction of spiritual powers.

As one of my areas of academic interest is the psychology of religion, it is this aspect of the novel – that old gods have been replaced by new ones – that I want to focus on.

The Gods

Our current age has been called disenchanted by some, with faith in traditional religion on the decline. But the simplistic secularization thesis offered by scholars like Weber has been challenged on multiple levels. Some look to a surprising rebirth in traditional forms of faith. Others note that the vacuum left by the retreat of traditional forms of religion has only resulted in the proliferation of nontraditional forms of religion. Psychologists and sociologists have documented the rise of “nones”: people who officially proclaim no formal religious identity. But a closer look at those “nones” shows us that the proportion of the population who are genuinely atheist (in the Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens sense) has not substantially changed. Most “nones” are not unbelievers; they merely decline to give their allegiance to the formal institutions of religion, preferring a dizzying array of idiosyncratic ideas and practices. Throw out the Christian God, and we do not get a generation of Richard Dawkinses; we get a generation of Deepak Chopras.

What is a god? The word makes us think about gothic churches or Egyptian statues or rough altars in forest clearings. But that is a very restrictive understanding of them. Like technology and media in Gaiman’s novel, gods are whatever hold the power to infuse our lives with meaning. Or to put it another way, they are whatever we have infused with meaning, and given power over ourselves. In 1529, Martin Luther claimed: “That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God,” Much more recently, the eminent psychologist of religion Kenneth Pargament proposed a “psychology of idolatry,” in which many of our problems can be traced to an elevation of something unworthy of worship to an ultimate level. When money is our god, we get the psychological problems associated with materialism. Narcissism, with its attendant psychological toxins, is worship of the self. David Koyzis has demonstrated how the dominant political ideologies of our age can be seen as mutated “gospels,” offering salvation by elevating some part of society to ultimate status.

When American Gods was adapted into a television series (click here to watch the opening title sequence), one of the questions was whether or not to change the gods to reflect how society has shifted in the past couple of decades. The showrunners updated their portrayal of some gods: Technical Boy (the god of technology) in the show became a Silicon-Valley “tech bro” billionaire, while in the novel he was a stereotype of a pimply 1990s basement-dweller; Media (TV and movies) was killed off and replaced by New Media (an obnoxious online influencer); The character Mr. World was repurposed into a god of globalization. Other gods were introduced, such as Argus Panoptes, who represents today’s omnipresent surveillance. Vulcan lives comfortably in the new world, having reinvented himself as a gun manufacturer.

While these changes make sense, and convey certain messages about the things that we currently elevate to divine status, it seems to me that they missed an opportunity to look deeper. In the case of Vulcan, for instance, the showrunners claimed that (some) Americans worship guns. But do they? Is it really about guns, or is it about what guns mean? Examples that I have seen put forward include independence, national identity and heritage, and self-reliance.

In the novel, Shadow Moon notes that the new gods are fearful. They are the product of our ever-changing priorities in what we give our time and attention to, which means that they have to “keep up with the times” or risk falling into obscurity and oblivion. The new gods are strong and arrogant, but fragile and shallow.

Maybe the new gods are ephemeral because they are cultural flotsam. Maybe the true gods who currently run the world are deeper and stronger and more dangerous, with characters like Gaiman’s being mere fragments or temporary manifestations. Paul Kingsnorth describes cultural specters that he claims represent the true power behind technology and media, and they have names like Control, Desire, and Money. And these are themselves components in a vast malignant spiritual force that Kingsnorth calls The Machine. To give a second possibility, Christopher Lasch would say that the real great god of our age is named Self, and Charles Taylor would likely agree. Whether these represent conflicting visions or complementary ones is a topic that calls for further thought.

While gods that represent surveillance and globalization and Silicon Valley give us a chance to say something about the current state of our society, what would it look like to go beyond American Gods, and think about a world in which humans serve The Machine while worshiping ourselves? I imagine it would have been a more challenging novel to write, and it might have required greater courage to confront these deeper forces that command our allegiance. So we might think about Gaiman’s book as one possible place to begin a conversation about the gods that claim dominion over the human race. And how we are to respond.

Welcome to another installment of Psychology for Writers, in which I (a full-time psychology professor and part-time fiction writer) present information on various topics in psychology that might at some point be helpful to writers. Past topics have included defense mechanisms and the myth that we only use ten percent of our brains. Today, I want to focus on a commonly-encountered trope: the idea that we can use somebody’s nonverbal behavior to know if they are lying.

For many years, both writers and psychologists have been fascinated by the idea that there was some kind of scientifically-grounded method for catching liars through body language, In 1908, Hugo Münsterberg (founder of forensic psychology) claimed that we would eventually be able to do away with judges and juries and lawyers, because psychologists can tell when somebody is lying based on cues such as their posture and the movements of their knees when sitting. Freud once said: “He who has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

In the 1998 film The Negotiator, a pivotal scene involves Samuel L. Jackson questioning another character, and knowing that he is lying because of how his eye movements relate to brain activation patterns. Look up and to the left, and you are telling the truth, look up and to the right, and you are making it up, because memory and construction involve different parts of the brain.

This idea comes to us from neurolinguistic programming, which is a theory that describes connections between words, behaviors, and brain activity. Although NLP uses a lot of scientific-sounding words, the theory is not supported by evidence, and it is widely regarded as a pseudoscience. In a series of three studies, for example, a team of (mostly) British researchers found no connection at all between eye movements and truth/lie statements, leading the researchers to conclude that there was “no evidence to support the notion that the patterns of eye-movements promoted by many NLP practitioners aid lie detection” and that it would be “irresponsible for such practitioners to continue to encourage people to make important decisions on the basis of such claims.”

So if the eyes do not give us a surefire lie signal, are there other options? Most theories of nonverbal lie detection center around two basic ideas: (1) that lying is stressful, and (2) that lying is difficult.

The first set of theories involve looking for nonverbal indicators of anxiety (this is the same logic that underlies lie-detector machines, which I will talk about in a future installment). Researchers like Miron Zuckerman have focused on behaviors such as fidgeting, response latencies, blinking, and higher voice pitch (due to tightening of the throat) as indicators that the speaker is under greater stress when saying some things compared to others. In the entertainment media, this is something that every Daredevil fan knows, as his super-hearing allows Matt to hear physiological indicators of stress.

The problem, though, is that this is based on the assumption that people are not experiencing stress when telling the truth, especially in situations like interrogations where they are facing accusations of wrongdoing. I’m pretty sure that I would be stressed out if I were being falsely accused of arson, murder, or jaywalking, especially if there were dire consequences to the accusations. My palms might be sweaty during a job interview because I am lying about my qualifications, or because I am anxious about missing out on a great career opportunity.

The second set of theories involve looking at errors in control. When we communicate, the literal meaning of the words that we speak comprise only a small proportion of the information being conveyed; the rest is things like tone of voice, hand gestures, interpersonal distance, eye contact, posture, and so on. That is a lot of channels of communication to keep track of, and there is every possibility that something might leak.

The most well-known of these theories comes to us from the recently-departed Paul Ekman, who had been a leading researcher on facial expressions since before I was born. You are probably already familiar with some of Ekman’s work, since his theory of universal emotional reactions was the basis for the Pixar film Inside Out.

Ekman connected his work on emotional expression to deception with his studies of “microexpressions.” Microexpressions are tiny, almost-uncontrollable facial expressions that last for only a few tenths of a second, and Ekman’s argument was that a person might (for example) say “I’m not angry” while a micro-snarl flashes on his face. The words and the face contradict each other. Ekman worked as a consultant with multiple military, intelligence, and law enforcement organizations, and his website offers microexpression training. Save your money, though, as Jordan and colleagues found that training people to read microexpressions did not in fact improve their ability to detect lies. The TV show Lie to Me was based on Ekman’s research, with Tim Roth’s character Cal Lightman serving as a stand-in for Paul Ekman.

On balance, I found the show to be a fairly accurate representation of Ekman’s theory (I stopped watching because I was having trouble forming an emotional connection to the characters, not because of the psychology). The part of the show that was unrealistic was the way in which Lightman and his colleagues read people’s microexpressions. In reality, researchers have generally found microexpressions to be detectable indicators of deception, but such studies use detailed, generally computer-driven, frame-by-frame analyses of video. As you can see in this clip, in Lie to Me the main character is able to just eyeball somebody and accurately detect microexpression in real-time. That’s not how it works. As an amusing note, Levine and colleagues found that showing participants an episode of Lie to Me actually made them worse at lie detection, because it increased the instances of false positives.

The bottom line for writers is this: The best way to detect lies is the old-fashioned way. Look for inconsistencies between hard evidence and the person’s words. If you want to have a character who is a pro at reading body language, you will have to come up with some extraordinary reason why the character is a human lie detector. Dr Samson in the 2008 Incredible Hulk film claiming that he can always tell because he’s a psychiatrist is not good enough, as Ekman and O’Sullivan found that psychiatrists are not better than chance at detecting lies (the same was found to be true of cops, judges, and employees of the FBI, CIA, DEA, and NSA). In Lie to Me, the explanation given for Cal Lightman’s accuracy is that we are meeting him after something like twenty years of intense study of microexpressions. Daredevil has superhuman senses. In the third Terminator film, the T-850 can perform complex physiological analyses in moments, because he’s a cyborg. Us mere mortals are terrible at detecting lies.

I hope that you found this informative and helpful. If you want more, check out my other posts, and be sure to hit that “subscribe” button.

See you all next time!

By Charles Hackney

The desert wind, cold and dry, came in through the open window. It carried with it the scent of creosote and citrus and ancient night. The wind caused the lightweight curtains to ripple in the moonlight, it rustled the leaves of a potted African violet, and it stroked the thin hair of the old woman.

The old woman stirred in her sleep, seated in her most comfortable chair, her hands resting on a crochet blanket. Her eyes slowly fluttered open, and she breathed deeply, drawing the night air deep into her lungs. A smile touched the corner of her toothless mouth as she cocked her head to one side as if listening to the desert wind.

“Yes,” she said, looking around at her living room. “I expect it’s about that time.”

The old woman rose, slowly and carefully. She was alone in the house, and her voice was the only sound. On unsteady legs, she made her way to one of the many bookshelves that lined the living room. She selected a book and lightly ran her fingers across its beautiful cover. “I remember you,” she said. “I picked you up in that charming little shop in Inverness.” The smile widened. “It turned out I could have gotten you for half the cost if I had just waited until we were back in the States, but I didn’t mind. It was such a nice shop, and the owner was such a sweetie.” The old woman placed the book on the floor behind her.

She picked other books from the shelves. A history of Arizona that she bought after moving to the area. A well-worn collection of short stories about a priest who solves crimes. The poetry of Tennyson. A biography of Mark Twain that she had purchased with every intent of reading, but had never got around to. She lingered over each one, taking a moment to honor the memories attached to each. They were each then added to the collection growing in the center of the room.

Finally she held a volume that bore her name. “I worked so hard on those poems. I never thought they were good enough, but George was so insistent. He believed in me so much more than I did. I remember how nervous I was when he sent them off to the publisher, and how proud he was when they were accepted. I remember thinking, if he stuck out his chest any farther, he was going to throw his back out again.” The collection of verses joined its fellows on the growing pile.

Moving to the mantelpiece over the seldom-used fireplace, the old woman’s face took on an aspect of tragedy as she picked up a frame, worn from much handling, containing the photograph of a teenage girl. “Isabel,” she whispered, “my shining dancer. You were taken from us too soon.” Another picture in another frame showed a middle-aged married couple. “Max,” she smiled broadly now. “You take care of Lydia and the twins, and try to remember to put your socks in the laundry.” A third picture was of a tall, thin woman standing at a workstation in a chemistry laboratory. “Michaela, you never could get me to understand gas chromatography, but you always had time to listen to me rattle on about whatever book I had been reading lately.” The photographs were added to the collection in the middle of the room.

Tired now, the old woman rested for a minute before climbing the stairs to the attic. She returned with her arms wrapped around a massive bundle of white fabric.

The wedding dress was reverently laid atop the pile.

One photograph remained above the fireplace, and the old woman looked back between it and the dress. “George,” she said to the old man in the picture, “you never understood me.” An affectionate look spread across her face. “But then again, nobody really did. And you came as close anybody could. I wanted to tell you. I planned to tell you.” Affection now mingled with grief. “But the illness got to you before I could work up the nerve. How do you explain something like this? Would you have believed me?”

The picture of the old man joined the wedding dress. “Maybe it’s better this way, with you never having found out. I guess all you really needed to know was that I loved you like I’ve never loved anyone. I still do. For the time that we had together, you were everything to me. My whole world, condensed into five feet and nine inches of flesh and bone, gray hairs and gentle arms. My perfect George.”

The old woman looked around the living room with an expression of calm satisfaction. Then slowly, awkwardly, she climbed to the top of the pile and sat down.

There was a box of matches in her pocket, and she put them to their intended use.

The paper in the books caught first, and the fire spread quickly. By the time the flames reached the old woman, the surrounding carpet was now on fire, and her most comfortable chair was beginning to smolder.

The paint in the living room walls blistered as the old woman began to cry out in pain. The cries turned to screams as flesh blackened and hair shriveled. All of the furniture was now on fire.

By the time the fire spread to the rest of the house, the screams had stopped.

A neighbor, awakened by the primal warning carried by the smell of smoke, called 911. By the time the county fire department arrived, the house was fully engulfed in flames, and it was determined that the structure was too unsafe for the firefighters to enter. The building was a total loss, so, as the crowd of neighbors gathered, the firefighters focused their efforts on making sure that the blaze was contained and none of the surrounding houses were in danger. Later, as the house fell in on itself, they made sure that what was left of the place was thoroughly soaked. Eventually, satisfied that the situation was resolved, the crowd dispersed and the fire trucks departed. There would be time in the morning for searching through debris for any human remains, time to look up who the owner of the house had been, and time to contact family members, if any.

Hours after that, silence hovered over the scene, and the desert wind pushed ashes back and forth. The first sunlight of a new day touched the tops of trees and chimneys, and gently crept down to warm the desert.

Below, the remains of the house stirred, and now the movement of the ashes had nothing to do with the wind. A dirty finger pushed its way out from beneath the rubble, followed by a hand. A figure slowly emerged, digging out from the debris, scattering clouds of ash with every motion.

The last tattered shreds of burnt clothing fell away as the figure stood tall and straight.

The young girl was slender and pale, moving easily and gracefully as she brushed the grime away from her unblemished skin and shook the ashes from her shining hair. She picked her way out from the charred wreckage. A small shed stood at the far corner of the property, distant enough to have been in no danger from the conflagration, and containing the supplies the old woman had stored there several days ago: clean clothes, newly-forged documents, and sufficient cash for a new start.

The young girl wriggled her toes, relishing the feel of the grass beneath her bare feet as she walked toward the shed. If the neighbors happened to see an unclothed form walking across the backyard, it didn’t matter; she would be gone soon enough. Spreading her arms, she let the desert wind swirl around and caress her skin, and she looked past the shed to the dawning horizon.

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “That was a good life.”

She smiled widely. ”Let’s see what the next one will be like.”

The End

If you liked what you saw, be sure to subscribe for more! See you all next time!

It is appropriate that this is the season of Advent, because I am in a time of waiting in darkness. My academic psychology article has been accepted by the journal editor, and I am waiting for word about the next step in it being published. The manuscript for the second Professor Howard novel is with my publisher, and I am waiting for word on that project. I have two short stories in upcoming anthologies (both are Professor Howard stories), and I am waiting for them to be published.

And here I sit, staring into the dark night of a Saskatchewan winter, grading student papers and plugging away at other writing projects. Keep your eyes here for a new short story, and another installment of Psychology for Writers, both coming soon. And if you are thinking about a gift for someone in your life who loves sci-fi and/or fantasy, cast your gaze over toward my books.

Advent turns to Christmas, and light shines in the darkness. So, in the spirit of a certain “shining beacon in space, all alone in the night,” here are some Babylon 5 Christmas memes that might even cause a Vorlon to smile.

See you all next time!