As the world goes on and history continues to be one damn thing after another, I often hear people comparing present events and circumstances to various dystopian novels—1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World being constant favorites. However, on the rare occasions that I make the mistake of turning on the news, I am reminded most of an obscure series of children’s chapter books called the Spirit Flyer series, by John Bibee.
I had not read these books since I was a small child, and they were intended for a niche readership, so when I recently went looking for them, I expected to have to dredge up informational tidbits from dark corners of the internet. However, it turns out that the books have their fans, and three of them (there are eight in total) are currently available on Kindle.*
The first of these books, The Magic Bicycle, was published in . Written from an explicitly Evangelical Christian perspective, The Magic Bicycle is an early example of what came to be known as “CBA fiction” (CBA stands for Christian Booksellers’ Association). It also comes from the era of the so-called “Satanic Panic,” which informs much of its imagery. It is a precursor to the most successful, or at least best-known, CBA novel, Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness (), which it somewhat resembles, albeit without Peretti’s stylistic finesse.
Peretti’s work is largely responsible for popularizing a movement within Pentecostal Christianity called “Spiritual Warfare,” which involves finding out the names of “Territorial Spirits” who control various places and things, and presuming to command them. (Older Christian sects would consider such activities superstitious, dangerous, or both.) In any case, at least one site sees a link between the Spirit Flyer books and the Spiritual Warfare movement, which may or may not be accurate.
Although an adult reader will immediately notice their shortcomings, the Spirit Flyer books stuck in my mind after I read a handful of them as a child. They contain exceptionally weird imagery and a set of villains capable of terrifying the youngest readers; indeed, I recall that I attempted to read one of these books (I think it was book 3, The Only Game in Town), and quit because I found some of the content too disturbing.
Premise
The series follows a group of children, starting with eleven-year-old John Kramar, who come into possession of magical bicycles, called Spirit Flyers, that can fly through the air and have various other powers. Seeking to destroy the Spirit Flyers and kill or enslave their owners is an evil, globe-spanning megacorporation called Goliath Industries, which is actually a front for an army of supernatural beings from the Deeper World.
Among the weirdest images in the books are funnel clouds that transform into giant cobras, invisible chains by which the villains can manipulate people and force them to do their bidding, and windows of black glass that lead from our world to the Deeper World. The books are also shot through with unexpected transformations reminiscent of Ovid, evil Doppelgangers, and all sorts of supernatural happenings. Although Bibee’s prose is pedestrian, the events he narrates read like a fever dream.
Bicycle Hills
I think I was lucky, as a kid, that I did not start the Spirit Flyer series from the beginning. The first book I read was volume 4, Bicycle Hills, which gave me full opportunity to appreciate the weirdness. In this volume, Goliath Industries’ lastest plot to entice unsuspecting children involves luring them with drug-laced candies to a new bicycle park where those with enough social credit (I’ll get to that in a moment) can enter a hidden cave system to play a paintball game called Caves and Cobras.
The reference to Dungeons & Dragons is of course obvious and intentional; as I mentioned already, the Satanic Panic informs the books’ background. Anyway, to make a long story short, Goliath Industries’ scheme with this underground make-believe game is to use a magical box to transform the children into mutant snakes before feeding them to their evil Doppelgangers from the Deeper World.
Like I said, pretty weird. It’s nothing very special to an adult reader, but it was mind-bending and troubling to a grade-schooler.
The Backstory
Although the novels have a continuous story arc, I think it is best to begin in the middle because that’s the only way to appreciate how bizarre they can be. If you start from the beginning, Mister Exposition shows up two-thirds of the way through The Magic Bicycle to explain all the weird goings-on in a massive infodump that delivers all at once what should have been meted out gradually over the course of the series.
This is one of CBA fiction’s most common problems: Because CBA books are about the Christian message as much as they are about entertaining storytelling, the authors spell everything out because they don’t trust their readers to interpret their books correctly.
As it turns out, the backdrop of Spirit Flyer is Charismatic Christianity with the serial numbers filed off and some names changed. The Spirit Flyers are the creations of the Three Kings (representatives of the Holy Trinity), who are battling a rebel angel called Treason (Satan), who rules over the Daimones (demons), which include the giant snakes, Doppelgangers, and other agents of Goliath Industries. The flying bicycles are an unorthodox allegory for the Holy Spirit; and, following a Charismatic theology, the owners of these bicycles are most effective when they stop acting intentionally and instead let their bikes take control. This leads to some narrative problems since the protagonists are always passive during the climactic scenes.
Re-reading these books as an adult, I find it interesting to note what Bibee felt the need to allegorize and what he didn’t. There is an equivalent to the Bible in the world of Spirit Flyer (it’s called The Book of the Kings), but there is no equivalent to the Church and no equivalent to the Christian sacraments: Characters find their Spirit Flyers individually, often by chance, and keep their own counsel on how to use them.
Criticism
While these books have some striking qualities, the backstory is a letdown. Bibee’s simple worldbuilding is considerably less interesting or rich than the Christian mythos on which it’s based: There’s a lot of lore in Judaism and Christianity that CBA authors could draw on, but they rarely do, preferring to stick to a safe, American brand of Evangelical Protestantism. Although Bibee comes up with some fascinating imagery, he is hampered by his attempt to build the world of angels and demons from scratch.
Social Credit
The reason Bibee’s books have been on my mind even though I hadn’t read one in years, is because of recent talk about “social credit.” China’s social credit system, which monitors citizens’ behavior and awards them points based on government approval or disapproval, is remarkably similar to the “Point System” that Bibee introduces in his third book: In the world of Spirit Flyer, Goliath Industries monitors children’s behavior, popularity, success at sports, and grades, and assigns them a rank, which is computed by a device called the Big Board. Only those who rank high enough have access to entertainment venues or Goliath-brand toys. Children in this world live in fear of being declared “Rank Blank,” that is, losing all their social-credit points. And the fastest way to lose points, of course, is to be associated with a Spirit Flyer bicycle or someone who owns one.
Bibee’s apparent intent with the Point System is to represent peer pressure in the public school system, which creates an informal hierarchy with the cool kids at the top and the nerds at the bottom. But that’s what a real-life social-credit system is—a codified, peer pressure-based hierarchy. We already have something similar in the West, though it is more informal and therefore more spotty, managed largely by Twitter mobs that can be ginned up to harass people out of their jobs for the slightest imagined offenses.
Formalizing this mob justice with a system that officially decrees who is in favor and who is out, as China has done, is an obvious next step, and there are those interested in making it happen. For example, ResearchAndMarkets.com recently released a report predicting an increased interest in the infrastructure for social-credit systems in the near future:
Social credit systems represent the ability to identify (mostly people but also some things) and track activities for purposes of grading behaviors and applying social credit scoring. A given grading/scoring methodology depends largely on social credit system objectives and metrics. However, most systems will have socially acceptable behavior at their core. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity as a combination of government, companies, and society as a whole must determine good, bad, and marginal behavior within the social credit market.
That is an almost exact description of what Bibee has in his books. The internet was still a science-fictional dream when he penned the Spirit Flyer series, so it is remarkable that he so accurately gaged the implications of the panopticon we are swiftly constructing. Bibee even correctly understood that the initiative to create these things would come largely from corporations rather than government, or from an unholy alliance between the two.
And this is something that, in general, CBA fiction writers have understood better than most other science-fiction writers. Back in the 1980s, most sf dystopias assumed that the megacorps of the future would be motivated purely by greed. The Christian writers, on the other hand, recognized that the evil megacorporations would be motivated not by profit but by ideology. Perhaps it had to be that: After all, running a panopticon is taxing, so only someone with sufficient motivation would be willing to do it. As C. S. Lewis once noted,
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
As time goes on, and as I watch the world around me changing, I have come to appreciate that the badly written dystopias gathering dust in Baptist church libraries contain some of the most accurate prognostications in sf literature. Many of those books are, frankly, deeply stupid … but we live in a deeply stupid time.
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