 Winner,
World Fantasy Award
Finalist,
Nebula Award
Finalist,
John Campbell Award
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ONLY BEGOTTEN DAUGHTER
Call it a miracle. Call it an accident at
the sperm
bank. But Murray Katz, the celibate keeper of an abandoned
lighthouse near Atlantic City, has been blessed with a daughter
conceived from the union of his own seed and a holy ovum. Like
her half-brother Jesus, Julie Katz can walk on water, heal the
blind, and raise the dead.
But being the Messiah isn't
easy. Poor
Julie, bewildered about her role in the divine scheme of things,
is tempted by the Devil and challenged by firebombing
neo-Christian zealots--and that's just the beginning of her
fantastic odyssey through Hell, a seceded New Jersey, and her own
confused soul.
Harvest Books * ISBN
0-15-600243-4 * $12.00
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A COMMENT BY THE AUTHOR
It's been gratifying to read the reviews of
Only Begotten Daughter and to discover that, whatever else
may be transpiring in this novel, I've evidently managed to
avoid facile religion-bashing. What straw man could be more
desiccated than Christian fundamentalism or Roman Catholic
authoritarianism?
But beyond facile religion-bashing lies
complex religion-bashing--speculative theology, it's
sometimes called--and therein lies the territory in which I'm
attempting to maneuver. I join Kurt Vonnegut in lamenting the
peculiar assumption among the literati that the big
questions--Why existence? Wherefore people? Is there a God? What
happens after death?--are pretty much settled, and canny
novelists will therefore please confine themselves to
interpersonal relationships and their various ethnic
heritages. I am not against interpersonal
relationships. I have several. I don't mind ethnic heritages.
I have one. But in fact the big questions aren't settled
(except for death, but the answer here is depressing, and I
won't go into it further), and if speculative-fiction writers
are the only people who worry about such matters, then so be it.
The future of eschatology could be in worse hands.
Reprinted from SFWA Bulletin
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
"A summary ... can barely suggest the dense,
hyperkinetic plotting of James Morrow's novel, its welter of
acute detail (which occasionally welters just a bit too blinking
much), or the vigor of its cartoonishly sharp-edged characters.
Only Begotten Daughter is a rich, intelligent tour
de
force. It contains any number of brilliantly funny vignettes,
like this one: A female sinner, in Hell, approaches Jesus with
the question, 'Does the wafer literally turn into your flesh
and bones?' And Jesus, who hasn't looked up from his work
in 2,000 years, who hasn't heard of His church because
He's been too busy soothing the damned, responds: 'Does
the what do what?'"
Jack Butler
New York Times Book Review
Imagine, if you will, Joseph Heller at
his
satirical best writing The Satanic Verses. Sort of
a
Catechism-22. What you would have would be close to James
Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter, a delightfully
devilish novel that tiptoes along the fringes of science fiction
while treading heavily on imperious practitioners of Western
theology ... As in any parable, the final interpretation of
Only Begotten Daughter should be left to the reader. However,
Morrow points us along many paths toward satiric enlightenment.
Be assured, there is something here to offend
everyone."
David E. Jones
Chicago Tribune
"It's probably an insurmountable
challenge for a reviewer to try to capture in a few hundred words
the captivating delirium of this runaway carrousel of a book.
Only Begotten Daughter is full of jarring, radical images ...
Morrow seems to have written a manic Satanic Verses
for
the Judeo-Christian world. Yet, at the same time, Morrow's
novel is suffused with a peculiar innocence, an earnest inquiry
into the nature of godhead, and an enduring if battered optimism
about the importance of love ... Juxtaposing lyrical interludes
that could be outtakes from Disney's The Little
Mermaid with hellish spectacles worthy of de Sade, Only
Begotten Daughter defies ready categorization ... But it is
clearly no mere exercise in idol-toppling and totem-skewering. If
the narrative makes us flinch, it's only because it is itself
so unflinching in its dissection of human foibles and cruelty.
Ultimately, Morrow has given us a frank and fascinating novel
that provokes rather than offends--a remarkable work of fiction
with the power to disturb our complacency and challenge us to
consider anew the thorny questions of life and
faith."
Michael P.
Kube-McDowell
South Bend Tribune
"A cheerfully secular rendition of the
Second Coming ... Morrow's ambitious and wide-ranging satire
plays straight with Scripture, reserving as its targets the
intolerances and vanities of fallible humanity ... Morrow's
divine comedy embraces a Technicolor tour of Hell itself, which
proves to be filled with the just and unjust alike ('Of
course it's unfair. Who do you think's running the
universe, Eleanor Roosevelt?') ... Only Begotten
Daughter is an intelligent, humane, and unusually funny
novel."
Gregory Feeley
New York Newsday
"James Morrow has been gradually
establishing a position as the most provocative satiric voice in
science fiction, willing to take on the Big Themes without
pulling punches, and not afraid to step outside the genre's
usual borders ... Morrow unerringly targets nerve endings that
most readers won't know they have until he zaps them,
throwing out wild bits of social commentary and incidental barbs
with impeccable timing."
Peter
J. Heck
Washington Post
"Several notable novels of this
gloriously
multi-faceted type have been published within living memory;
examples include Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle,
Bernard Malamud's God's Grace, and Jeremy
Leven's Satan. James Morrow's Only
Begotten
Daughter is the latest, the most vivid, and perhaps the best
of the lot. It has enormous chutzpah and schmaltz by the
bucketful, and despite the relentlessness of its darker side it
still contrives, against all odds, to carry its due quota of pure
mechaieh ... Only Begotten Daughter
is a
righteously wrathful book which will, like all righteously
wrathful books, enrage many of its readers ... I can only say
that I was proud to share each and every atom of fervor which is
in it."
Brian Stableford
New York Review of Science Fiction
"Like many who see the world clearly,
Morrow is driven frantic by the insanities committed in the names
of the gods. He was written a work of satiric imagination as
compassionate and horrifying as the book's publisher bills it
... It has fangs, and it bites. It is also very warm, very human,
very humane."
Thomas Easton
Analog
"We may be witnessing the birth of a
classic, folks. So stick around ... Only Begotten Daughter
is, indeed, shocking, not in its heretical set-up,
but in
its insistence that religion, to be worthy of human belief,
should be amenable to reason, and that God should measure up to
human standards. Here we are back in Mark Twain territory, with
God as the malign thug, but with a difference. Twain insisted
that mankind was inferior to the 'high
animals,'i.e. the beasts, because of his moral
sense.
Morrow says that moral sense is our salvation, and that God and
the godly shouldn't be allowed to commit all manner of
atrocities the rest of us couldn't ever get away
with."
Darrell Schweitzer
Aboriginal Science Fiction
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