Lost City Comics

(Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto)

One of the books I read for research for the comic I wrote about the US education system was Clever Lands by Lucy Crehan. Lucy's book isn't about the US, but it is about education systems in Finland, Singapore, Shanghai, Japan, BC and Ontario, and (by way of comparison, because that's where she's a teacher) England. I learned a lot. But let me share with you one of the more unexpected things I learned, and how it connects to comics. 

All through the chapter on Japan, she kept talking about the general Japanese attitude to education. She says that there is a widespread belief that anyone can learn if they work hard. That intelligence isn't something you're born with, but something you develop through effort and given the right conditions. This is a trend that Japan has in common with other countries in East Asia, which she flirts with attributing to Confucianism before immediately rejecting that idea based on Japanese history (apparently it wasn't easy at first for the Japanese government to convince the population of the value of school in the Meiji era when public schools were being made widely available). This is also in contrast with the UK, and Canada, where many people seem to believe that intelligence is innate, like a Dungeons and Dragons stat you rolled at birth. Here I feel the need to state what Lucy also states in her book, that wide cultural trends don't limit individuals. Plenty of people in Japan assume intelligence is genetic, and plenty of people in Canada believe that talent isn't inborn. But a widely held belief affects widely tested data on learning, and this is her theory for why so many countries in this region top international test scores. Interestingly, the Singaporean education system was set up by a president who WAS big into eugenics, despite that not being a widely held view (at least when it comes to school) in his country, and Canadian education systems put equal opportunity first and foremost, despite that not being as widely held a value as I'd like. England just goes all in on eugenics, though. Ask me how I know.

As she was describing Japanese schools, I couldn't help but respond to the audiobook out loud every few minutes that that sure sounds like a "growth mindset." Until she finally just said in the book, "this is a lot like a growth mindset." For those who don't know, growth mindset is the philosophy that has taken over Canadian schools. Essentially, it's the idea that you learn how to learn. It's meta-education. If you approach a new task with the understanding that it will be hard at first, but that that doesn't mean you can't learn to do it through effort and thoughtfulness, you can learn to do just about anything. It is the antithesis of the idea of inborn talent. And while it might be newly named in English, it's not a new idea.

(Crimson Hero by Mitsuba Takanashi)

So, comics. Manga, in particular. If you've read any amount of manga or watched any amount of anime, you will be familiar with the trope of the main character who is annoyingly optimistic and ambitious. They will spend every episode insisting that they can become king of the pirates, or the world's greatest manga-ka, or the best at playing go, and yet fail and suffer more often than they succeed. Often the whole plot is about the main character reinforcing their own crumbling ego against repeated defeats or obstacles. In the past I have often read this as saccharine, melodramatic, and unrealistic. But now that I think about it, this is just a GROWTH MINDSET.

(Bakuman by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata)

It is melodramatic, sure, but this is a fantasy version of reality. A little drama is appropriate. From a purely materialist point of view, it is good... great, even... to have half of your nation's popular literature promoting the idea that trying hard is the most important thing. Forget singular, special-boy wizards who were defeating wizard-Hitler when they were babies by the power of being born that way. Give me more stories about some schlub who got to be the greatest superhero in the world by doing so many push-ups that his hair fell out. 

I don't know why I never made this connection before. I guess my other take-away is that you can read a hundred works of fiction from a country, but if you've never been there, if you're not from there, you might still miss some of its most deeply embedded cultural trends. Fiction exists in conversation with the wider culture of the intended audience, and if you're only reading the books, you're only seeing half of the conversation. Nevertheless, despite this decades-long oversight on my part, I must keep striving to learn more. Ganbatte! 

(Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama)

Here's another bunch of pages from Phobos and Deimos.

I posted this on my Ko-Fi. I post something every month (and then usually forget to repost it on Tumblr), so follow me there... or patronize my page... to get more.

Eid mubarak to everyone who's been observing Ramadan this past month. Today's topic is one I've been thinking about writing about for a while, and I guess Eid is the excuse I needed to actually do it. 

Maida is from Mars, of course, and as we know, there are Muslims on Mars.

So how do things like keeping track of time and space for religious purposes work, in space? Well, the Islamic calendar is based on the moon's orbit around the Earth, so there's no reason for that to change. Muslims celebrate Ramadan at the same time everywhere (or NEARLY the same time everywhere, with some variation based on what time of day it is where you are, and when the new moon can be observed in your area). Elsewhere in the Solar System you won't be able to rely on direct observations of the moon's phases, but it only takes between 3 and 22 minutes for news to arrive on Mars from Earth, so a declaration from Mecca will have to do. Mars' days are 25 hours long, and except for near the poles where weeks without sunrise or sunset would mess everyone up, everyone on Earth uses their local sunrise and sunset to determine their daily routines of prayer and fasting (and eating). Ramadan on Mars will be a day or two shorter, but otherwise the local day cycle should work just fine. Prayers can be directed towards the Earth, which it does take some extra effort to track from a planet where Earth is not always in the same place in the sky, but this shouldn't be difficult. It will impact the architecture of masjids, though, in ways that will probably be interesting.

As for maintaining the calendar in the rest of the Solar System, we'll get to that in a minute.

There is a book that I read a few years ago, Artemis, by Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary. It lives up to Andy Weir's reputation for his books being the most realistic when it comes to describing the physics and practicalities of near-future space travel. The only way to get a more accurate depiction of how to grow potatoes on Mars, or how to mine aluminum on the Moon, is for someone to try it. The main character in Artemis is a (nonpracticing) Muslima. Her father, who also lives on the Moon, has a scene where he is building a device to help him pray facing Earth, deciding of his own accord, without consulting anyone, to set a new precedent for the right way to do this. This is... not how this works.

Now I am not in any position to criticize a non-Muslim author for choosing to write a Muslim protagonist, when I am literally doing the exact same thing. But reading Artemis I get the strong impression, even with my limited perspective, that Andy listened even less to his sensitivity reader than I did to mine. Jazz, the main character, reads to me like an American rather than someone from Saudi with no American ties. Except for her father, she reads like being Muslim was an afterthought, not a main ingredient of her character design. A quick google search confirms that that's not just me. I think it's fair to say that only a Muslim writer is likely to do a good job of writing a character whose dominant trait (or most important trait to the story) is being Muslim. But I believe there can be a middle ground where an amateur outside observer, a white science fiction author for example, can make being Muslim a part of a fictional character, one that informs who they are, on the way to writing about other things, and without treating it like a palette swap you can make that will have no other impact. A character should be able to be Muslim, without that being their only thing, and without it being nothing.

But more to the point of this current essay, we don't need to invent from whole cloth how to be Muslim in space. Muslims have already done that. Muslims have BEEN in space. At least nine of them, so far. So when I say "the correct way to pray is to face the Earth, if you can, prostrate on the ground unless you're in microgravity, in which case just do your best, maybe tie your feet to the wall so you can make the correct motions without floating away," that's not just me speculating. That's based on precedent. Specifically, the case of Malaysia's first astronaut, Dr. Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, and the fatwa that was written for his benefit by a team of Islamic scholars (so he could be free to "focus on the science" when he was up there). The only original scholarship I'm willing to suggest, and only because it seems self-evident, is that on Mars you should be able to use the planet's own day cycle rather than using the clock from whichever time zone you launched from, which is what the current fatwa says to do.