The Fredösphere

Ambigrams.  Wow, and double-wow.  Plus, a bearded dragon named Fred.

Today's post is about religion in science fiction.  I wanted to write something that aspired to comprehensiveness, but that vain hope was quickly dashed.  These days there is so much fiction being written and commented on that fits that description.  Just finding all the blogs devoted to R & SF is too big a task.

Ted Chiang, author of the excellent (and award-nominated) The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate displays the stereotypical SF author's attitude:

All science fiction is fundamentally post-religious literature. For those whose minds are shaped by science and technology, the universe is fundamentally knowable. Faith dissolves, replaced by a sense of wonder at the complexity of creation.

Yet Chiang's alternate realities subvert that belief, out of a playful sense of adventure, if for no other reason:

In "Tower of Babylon," a group of miners climb until they reach the vault of heaven, hoping to find God on the other side of the carapace of granite that enfolds their world. "Hell is the Absence of God" tells the tale of one Neil Fisk, whose wife is killed in a visitation by the angel Nathanael to a downtown shopping district. In Neil's thoroughly contemporary world, God exists beyond a doubt. Angels behave like weather phenomena, the miracle of their appearances tracked, quantified, and reported on the nightly news.

Another point of view is represented by this expert who correlates belief in aliens with Jesus and going to the bathroom while employing logical rigor to a degree I don't recall ever encountering before.

Whole blogs devote themselves fully or mostly to religious SF.  Old Testament Space Opera is the first to come to mind.  An impressive list of websites and more impressive steampunky graphics are maintained at Christian Science Fiction & Fantasy Central.  I also found a list of recommended titles and a list of authors by religious affiliation.  (The latter really needs to do some wheat-chaff sorting; I suspect a lot of these guys are nominals, which is a far more important distinction than how they fall out in the dreaded Congregationalist-Methodist schism.  For example, calling that Olaf Stapledon a Quaker is ridiculous in light of the letter he wrote to his unborn great-grandson urging him to fall off the religion wagon without delay.)  Finally, the unfortunately-named topic of "Christian science fiction" has its own Wikipedia page, wherein this tragedy of the publishing business is documented:

Christian bookstores, like some of their secular counterparts are often unsure how to deal with such stories, and may shelve what few they carry under the rather generic and somewhat unhelpful label "futuristic literature".

Catholics are everywhere in SF and speculative fiction generally--call it the Chesterton Effect.  For example, Insidecatholic.com likes the hard-to-categorize Tim Powers, author of Declare.  This link recommends other authors, and makes this observation:

That's a curious thing when you think about it. Science fiction is a genre whose founding fathers and mothers tended very often (though not exclusively, of course) to be the sort of people who were hard-boiled atheists of the Arthur C. Clarke/Isaac Asimov mold -- people who spoke the word "Science" either with a sort of religious reverence or with the sort of stentorian triumphalism of a Thomas Dolby tune. Some of them, like H. G. Wells, managed to achieve both science worship and stentorian triumphalism in their work, writing books which were combinations of fun narrative and some of the preachiest, creakiest, antiquated prophecies in print.

Outgrowing God is indeed a favorite theme of science fiction and fantasy. Evolution/technology/aliens/time travelers from the future/computers/whatnot are always just about to prove that God does not exist, life after death is a fantasy, the soul is a function of matter, man is but a sophisticated meat machine, Jesus never existed, etc.

And yet the astonishing thing is that science fiction and fantasy are absolutely awash in theological speculation. Lots of it is pagan, in the Chestertonian sense. That is, it is an attempt to reach God through the imagination, hampered by the inability to conceive of something truly outside of the created world. The result is a sort of quasi-supernaturalism that acknowledges planes of existence beyond the human, but refuses to entertain the notion of angels and demons.

I'd like to give more attention to religious themes other than Christian ones in SF, but I lack the knowledge or the time.  Once again, Wikipedia is a (meager) starting point.  I tend to hear about mostly the scandalous examples, like the rise of the Jedi Knights in the UK, or (most deliciously) graven images of Kirk and Spock.

SF Signal's symposium on the question, "Is Science Fiction Antithetical to Religion?"  One participant was John C. Wright (see him at livejournal.com) whom I have blogged previously.  John is an interesting case; he's an adult convert from skepticism to Christianity who nevertheless is pessimistic about inserting religious characters into fiction.  Does the new retro-space opera Space Vulture prove him right, or wrong?  Mostly right, I'd say, but there is plenty of contrary evidence from writers with higher ambitions and, frankly, better skill.  Take C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, for example.

Nevertheless, he's right to be skeptical.  Blending religion and SF does go wrong sometimes.  Oh yes, terribly, terribly wrong.

UPDATE:  Calvin College joins the party.

Labels: sci-fi, VarietiesOfReligiousArt