Do you love sci-fi and religion? You’re not alone.

America ^ | James T. Keane

[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.”

[NetAddicted]

Peruse later.

[muir_redwoods]

A bit too on the nose maybe but “The Star” by Arthur Clarke fits in here.

[Daveinyork]

May the Schwartz be with you.

[reviled downesdad]

Missed CS Lewis. Also Lewis and Tolken debated Christianity,not sure if Tolken accepted Christ.

[PIF]

Very obscure

Philip Mann

The Eye of the Queen
https://www.amazon.com/Eye-Queen-Phillip-Mann/dp/0877954623/ref=sr_1_1?crid=31MW8YAGLTXNG&keywords=Philip+Mann+eye+of+the+queen&qid=1667130122&sprefix=philip+mann+eye+of+the+queen%2Caps%2C110&sr=8-1

Anthropologist goes to distant planet to study primitive non-humans, discovers God.

[Tax-chick]

“Ok what living organism lives centuries?”

Trees.

[scrabblehack]

Blish - terrible writer or terrible editor? Maybe it doesn’t matter but he did apologize for calling McCoy “Doc.” He said he had written “Bones” but the editor changed it to “Doc.”

More modern editors of Star Trek novels and novelettes are accepting “Bones” though.

[Dr. Sivana]

Star Trek in definitely not what you would categorize as hard sci-fi.

Your original statement didn't include the "hard" qualifier. I knew someone decades ago who put Star Trek et al as "Science Fiction" and the more realistic stuff as "s-f", which he preferred. There is not yet an agreed upon vocabulary.

[Dr. Sivana]

Ah, well. It was still a good show.

It was. Almost all series television outside the most mundane warm family dramas require a huge helping of disbelief. Perry Mason would get the dramatic murders that a top criminal law attorney MIGHT get once in a lifetime, his happened 39 times a year, and he was doing simple contracts and wills as well. Plus, his rates were low even after his reputation was established. You just go with it.

[sima_yi]

...Solo was bragging that he took the Falcon through a "shortcut"

I always took it as that his run was shorter in distance because the Falcon was a better ship and he was a better pilot. I never thought he was talking about time.

[married21]

Tolkien was Catholic. He talked Lewis into Christianity. His argument came from myths (in the non-pejorative sense of a story of how things came to be). He said Christianity had the best myth. He was bummed when Lewis became Episcopalian instead of Catholic.

[ExGeeEye]

The "anthology" movie, Solo, not only explains but portrays it, while also serving as an origin story for Han, his friendship with Chewbacca, and possibly the Rebellion.

[Telepathic Intruder]

My original statement referred to “good” science fiction, which is an opinion of course. Specifically, sci-fi in which the story is based on and built around realistic science. I don’t consider something like Star Wars even science ficiton, more like space fantasy. The “suspension of disbelief” will only stretch so far, and spaceships maneuvering like airplanes and asteroid fields acting like potato storms all add up into something that isn’t believable anymore, and ruins the immersion into the story.

[MayflowerMadam]

I love Christianity, but not “religion” in general.
I despise sci-fi.

[glennaro]

Interesting commentary, although it's good to bear in mind that these are two distinct genres
To me, there seems to me to be a more significant correlation between religious beliefs and quantum physics.

[Dr. Sivana]

The “suspension of disbelief” will only stretch so far, and spaceships maneuvering like airplanes and asteroid fields acting like potato storms all add up into something that isn’t believable anymore, and ruins the immersion into the story. The audience of ten year old boys buy into it, and the stories get more and more fantastic.

I grew up on DC Superhero comics, and Superman, Flash and most of the Silver Age Heroes tried to place a veneer of "science" around the character. If you read the original one page Superman story, a real attempt is made to come up with a serious "scientific" explanation for his then quite limited powers (e.g. could jump far, but not yet fly). What happens with series is powers accrue, and both heroes and villains get stronger. Attempts to further explain Supes' powers falls into the realm of pseudo-science-silliness and before you know it, he's blowing out suns like birthday candles.



I know this is far afield from science fiction, but the genres are intertwined. "Realistic" science fiction set into the future can only guess at the outcomes of further study of physics. Even early masters like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne were pretty light on the science part, though they have to be considered foundational to modern science fiction.

[Zionist Conspirator]

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 doesn't sound right. First of all, sacramental Xianity is very collectivist. And second, there's plenty of miracles, supernaturalism, and (while magic is forbidden) qabbalah in Judaism. And as for "this worldly?" This guy seems to have never heard of ha`olam haba'.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Tolkien was Catholic. He talked Lewis into Christianity. His argument came from myths (in the non-pejorative sense of a story of how things came to be). He said Christianity had the best myth.

Translation: he didn't believe in Adam and Eve.

[TexasBarak]

ERB wrote John Carter (and Tarzan and everything else he did) purely to make money- he didn’t have some overall “artistic vision” he was pursuing. He’d have been thrilled with a huge check from someone making a movie from his books. The real crime is the Starship Troopers movie.

[married21]

Do you want to believe that he wasn’t a faithful Christian, despite lifelong evidence of Christian faith? Are you trying to emphasize that those who do not interpret Genesis as a literal history book are not truly Christian? Well, Tolkien still gets the credit for helping Lewis find Jesus anyway.