Posted on 10/29/2022 7:49:21 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Ursula Le Guin, Isaac Asimov and Cixin Liu (Composite image by James T. Keane) Do you cringe when you’re watching “Star Wars” and Han Solo says the Millennium Falcon did the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, because a parsec is a unit of distance, not time? Are you offended that Chekov and Khan recognize each other in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” because by Star Trek canon they’ve never met? Do you think “John Carter” is the worst movie ever for the way it bastardized the vision of Edgar Rice Burroughs?
You just may be a sci-fi nerd.
One of Pope Francis' favorite books is Robert Hugh Benson’s 1903 sci-fi classic Lord of the World. Tweet this
You’re in good company. Barack Obama was a huge fan of the Chinese writer Cixin Liu’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy. Two editors in chief of America were sci-fi buffs. So too is Pope Francis: One of his favorite books is Robert Hugh Benson’s 1903 sci-fi classic Lord of the World, which was reviewed more than a century after its publication by Robert E. Hosmer in America in 2016.
While science fiction hasn’t been covered often in the pages of America, a few authors figured the way to an America editor’s heart: Make the review about religion instead.
In 1981, America published a feature-length article by Dr. Willis E. McNelly on “Science Fiction and Religion.” An English professor at Cal State Fullerton and an expert on Geoffrey Chaucer, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Shakespeare and William Butler Yeats, McNelly was also a fierce evangelist for science fiction as a literary genre. He authored The Dune Encyclopedia (a companion to Frank Herbert’s Dune novels) and edited several textbooks on science fiction as serious literature. He and his wife were also prominent figures in the Catholic lay action movement in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
McNelly’s article shows his encyclopedic knowledge of English-language science fiction. (It also demonstrates his enormous vocabulary and willingness to employ it: I was sent to the dictionary thrice, for “jongleur,” “deliquesce” and “extrauterine recapitulation.”) “At first glance the two terms [science fiction and religion] seem almost antithetical, yet a close examination of much of the best science fiction of the last decade reveals just the opposite,” McNelly wrote. “[R]eligion or religious themes have provided contemporary speculative literature with some of its most cogent extrapolations, and, perhaps not coincidentally, with some of science fiction’s very best novels and short stories.”
At first glance science fiction and religion seem almost antithetical, yet a close examination of much of the best science fiction of the last decade reveals just the opposite.
While recognizing that “the traditional antagonism between science and religion should surface in science fiction” was probably inevitable, McNelly also noted that the mainstays of science fiction who emerged in the 1940s and after—Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Williamson and more—were not so much anti-religious as nonreligious. Further, the decades since have produced numerous prominent sci-fi authors who are either fluent in religious themes or explicitly brought them into their work, including Frank Herbert, John Boyd, Robert A. Heinlein, James Blish (McNelly was wrong about Blish, he’s terrible), Walter Miller Jr., Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin.
The last two, he noted, had not only produced “two of the finest works yet produced in science fiction” in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, but had branched out beyond the typical religious constructs of Christianity or Islam or Judaism—Le Guin with the Tao and Dick with the I Ching of ancient China.
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From 1980: Science Fiction and Religion Willis E. McNelly
Parish priest, sociologist, novelist: The many imaginations of Father Andrew Greeley James T. Keane “What of the future of religion and science fiction? I would like to venture one quiet, modest prediction, very quietly and very modestly,” McNelly concluded. “As science fiction and the mainstream increasingly merge—and we see this happening in such writers as Nabokov, Lessing, Pynchon, Durrell, Barth and many others—the artificial dichotomy between science and religion, indeed, between science fiction and ‘Literature,’ with a capital ‘L’ will fade, or to use a scientific term that I find particularly applicable here, deliquesce.”
The mainstays of science fiction who emerged in the 1940s and after were not so much anti-religious as nonreligious. Tweet this
When America ran a special “Space Issue” in 2019, it gave Tom Deignan a chance to ask a curious question: “Why do Catholic priests keep popping up in sci-fi?” He has a point: Almost all the aforementioned authors and many more, including Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, Walter Miller Jr. and Mary Doria Russell have made priests the protagonists of stories or entire novels. As far back as the 1620s, the Anglican bishop Francis Godwin included Jesuit priests as characters in his The Man in the Moon.
Further, Deignan notes, most of these depictions are not the stock caricatures or superstitious villains one might expect. “It might seem as if Christianity—especially Catholics, and especially Jesuits—would be an easy target for sci-fi writers. But science fiction has also treated Jesuits and other religious figures and ideas with admirable complexity,” Deignan wrote. Further,
at a time of such open disdain in certain (especially bookish) quarters for religious matters in general—and Catholicism, in particular—perhaps we should also not overlook the value of these generally sympathetic depictions of spiritual people, struggling openly and honestly with sex and love, faith and mortality, not to mention an alien race or two.
In a passage that can sound a bit cringeworthy today, the Rev. Clifford Stevens, a U.S. Air Force chaplain, made the case in a 1967 issue of Liturgical Arts that priests would be central to any colonization effort in space. “Priests stood with Columbus and Magellan on the journeys into the unknown, and with the Vikings, too, when they explored the unknown western ocean,” he wrote. “Man stands now on the threshold of a far more breathtaking discovery, and so it is not unfitting for the theologian, symbolically or otherwise, to put on a space suit.”
Interesting read. Thanks for posting
You are welcome.
Both science fiction and religion are means of coping with the anxiety generated by uncertainty and being unable to understand or define the factors that seem to affect the present and future lives of people and events. Both help people cope and on occasion motivate and offer insight.
Both explore the meaning of life, our purpose, and what lies beyond all this...this planet, this solar system, this universe, this mortal coil.
It is not surprising that sci-fi incorporates elements of religion in subtle ways. Even when it intentionally tries to remove all aspects of God, the results can be dark indeed.
Messiah of the Cylinder by Victor Rosseau
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6402975-the-messiah-of-the-cylinder
I like sci-fi, hold the religion.
The Search for Fierra by Stephen Lawhead
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/463592.The_Search_for_Fierra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Wolfe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._A._Lafferty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Wright_(author)
The best Christian sci-fi authors who write explicitly Christian Sci-fi/fantasy in my experience.
Freegards
Pervs or not Catholic priests have always served many roles.
Does anyone really want emotional women on a spaceship?
Somewhen Obscurely by R.P. Nettelhorst
https://www.amazon.com/Somewhen-Obscurely-R-P-Nettelhorst/dp/0977386937
Thanks, I’ll look them up!!
I can’t understand how Pope Francis can praise Lost of the World; it seems to be the antithesis of everything he stands for.
I don’t consider being lumped in with Francis or Obama as “good company” but I have always loved science fiction.
GOOD sci fi that is. There are too many bad ones.
Clarke is a good writer and has good plots but just cannot keep his sexual perversions out of his stories, especially the later ones. I’m not interested in him pontificating at me about sexual mores when I’m reading a sci fi book.
I did until they went woke
Hmmm, no mention of A Canticle for Liebowtz. That book was a great fusion of religion and sci-fi.
Walter M. Miller had a tragic story. Pray for him.
Freegards.
Good science fiction is real science combined with fictional stories. But what you find with a lot of science fiction is fake science and fictional stories, especially in TV shows and movies. What you find in really, really bad science fiction is authors trying to use science to disprove God, which doesn’t work. Science and religion do not mix on the level that you’re using one to prove or disprove the other.
And, on consideration, although science applies materialism as a simplifying assumption, modern physics, in quantum mechanics, validates consciousness as real and essential. As the great German physicist Max Planck, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, explained, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Considered by many to be the best Sci-Fi story ever written, ‘Who Goes There’, can be found on-line for free. I read it every Halloween.
No conflict between sci-fi and religion here.
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