RELIGION AND SCIENCE FICTION: My TechCentralStation column, which is Matrix-related, is up. I wish that this piece by Adam Gopnik from The New Yorker had been up when I wrote it. I’m not sure I buy the Catharist angle, but it’s interesting. My favorite quote, though, is here:

The only thing setting Zion apart from the good-guy planets in “The Phantom Menace” or “Star Trek” is that it seems to have been redlined at some moment in the mythic past and is heavily populated by people of color. They are all, like Morpheus, grave, orotund, and articulate to the point of prosiness, so that official exchanges in Zion put one in mind of what it must have been like at a meeting at the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard before Larry Summers got to it. (And no sooner has this thought crossed one’s mind when—lo! there is Professor Cornel West himself, playing one of the Councillors.)

Heh. Of course, there’s a certain pot-and-kettle quality to charges of bloviation coming from Gopnik. On the other hand, Emmanuelle Richard loved the film, though she agrees there’s too much speechifying. And Sgt. Stryker says that Agent Smith should worry about the RIAA more than Neo.

UPDATE: 20,000 Canadians say they’re Jedis.

I’m guessing that Chretien isn’t one of them.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Justin Katz thinks I’m wrong — but I think it’s because he expects more of religion than I do.