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.”
GOOD sci fi that is. There are too many bad ones.
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Like the one that was on my telly tonight (again), very possibly the worst sci-fi movie ever made:
“Cowboys and Aliens”
The Mansions of Space by John Morresy
Essentially a 30th century search for the Shroud of Turin
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2763645-the-mansions-of-space
When I read that book it was akin to when I discovered the blues listening to Led Zepplin, as opposed to listening to it because it was rock. I heard those riffs everywhere and gained a new appreciation for Pink Floyd (specifically Shine on You Crazy Diamond). I thought about that book for a long time after I finished it and see echoes of it in many sci fi stories.
Star Trek in definitely not what you would categorize as hard sci-fi. All the science is fake because it is secondary to the plot. Hard sci-fi puts the science first, and the story is build upon it instead of the other way around. Star Wars contains even less real science, if any at all. I will concede the point, however, that far future science fiction must include some made-up science, or it wouldn’t be possible. But it should never break fundamental physical laws, like a lot of popular sci-fi does. Because if you can do that, it’s just pure fantasy.
Intersteller space travel is impossible. It will always be impossible. All science fiction involving that premise is science-fantasy.
Ah, yes. John W. Campbell. The guy who “developed” a lot of the “greats” ...
No, interstellar travel is definitely possible, it just takes a long time. Decades at least if you have a ludicrous amount of energy at your disposal, or centuries with more moderate amounts. Or if you want to travel very far, millennia or even millions of years. But it’s definitely possible using real science available today. Although to attempt it today would require an insane budget and some vey good engineering.
Life extension is scientifically possible, as far as we know. There’s nothing to rule it out, anyway. Modern medicine has already improved average lifespans from just a century ago. Old age is actually programmed into our DNA, to make room for later generations. If they can isolate and “turn off” the aging gene (although I’m sure it’s not that simple), humans could potentially live for centuries. Then we could reach other stars within a human lifetime. But if not, multigenerational starships are not unknown to science fiction.
“Bill Mumy”
My first crush 55 years ago!!
I don’t mind “what if’s” that appear impossible by the science we know today, as long as they are followed reasonably consistently. Babylon 5 was one of the better TV Sci-Fi shows in that regard.
The biggest problem I have with Star Trek is that it purports to create a somewhat consistent galaxy (or at least a portion of one), but particularly in TOS, the gallant crew in several episodes meets super-powerful / “magical” species, initially banging heads with them, and then by the end of the show befriending them (or at least getting a little respect!)... and then we never hear of these beings again. Whatever happened to the Melkotians? Talk about some useful allies! The “First Federation” (Balok). The Organians? The Metrons?
Ah, well. It was still a good show.
Agreed, multi-generational ships are a fairly common item in sci-fi. IF we pushed, I think they could be practical in 100 years or so.
I imagine living your whole life in a space ship would not be too unlike modern urban life in New York or L.A.
Michael Crichton was a master of this.
To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion. If the former is individualistic, magical, and salvationist, the latter is collective, technical, and this-worldly.
That said, this Catholic never much cared for fantasy. Trolls, elves, dragons, and wizards all seemed silly to me.
(I have stopped reading sci-fi as well as other casual pursuits that showed they have no eternal benefits, not even self-preservation.) Knowing the Resurrected Human and His Will in the real sense is my preferred occupation, not merely only time-consuming profitless activity.
If you do then you ought to read CS Lewis’s triology. It’s very good
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