Alien Gods

Religion and Science Fiction; Part 1. Will I be Saved by the Starship Enterprise?

There is a case to be made that all SF is religious in nature. There is also a case to be made that SF is an atheistic genre par excellence.

Let me start with the second claim, supported by such luminaries as Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson. SF, they argue, originates in the secular values of the Enlightenment and embraces the secular ethos of science. Science and religion, according to this view, are incompatible. Even though there have been many believers among scientists (Francis Collins, for example, is an evangelical Christian), science excludes supernatural explanations by definition. So, insofar as SF follows the rules of science, it has to be atheistic in the strict sense of the term: non-theistic. Even though SF does not necessarily follow the facts of science, it follows what Suvin calls “the conceptual horizon” of scientific inquiry., Fantasy, on the other hand, is born of a “proto-fascist revulsion against modern civilization, materialist rationalism, and such”. ¹ (For my discussion of whether fantasy is in fact a fascist genre, see here).

However, contrary to Suvin’s assertion, there are three ways in which SF and religion intersect. They are borrowing, in which the genre simply adapts familiar religious plots; speculation, in which theology is taken seriously but not literally; and appropriation, in which SF becomes a religion.

The first one, to me, is the least interesting kind. Every serious SF fan can instantly name a bunch of books that, overtly or covertly, borrow plots and settings from religious scriptures or mythological sources (all myths were scriptures once). Some random examples: Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967) is based on Hinduism. Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) incorporates elements of Islam. Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953) is basically an SF rewriting of the Christian Book of Revelation. Note that this borrowing does not assume any kind of actual belief on the part of the writer or the reader. You might say that this kind of SF treats theology as fiction.

On the opposite end of the scale is appropriation, which treats fiction as theology. SF has the unfortunate history of being embraced by cults and religious extremists of various kinds. Scientology was the invention of an SF writer Ron Hubbard. Charles Manson’s murderous “Family” was enthralled by Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo that released poisonous gas sarin in the Japanese underground in 1995 incorporated elements of Heinlein’s and Asimov’s novels into their teachings. The Heaven’s Gate cult members who committed mass suicide did so in expectation of a visit from the Starship Enterprise. There is even a theory that the founder of Al Qaeda tried to imitate Asimov’s Foundation (Al Qaeda means “foundation” in Arabic).

In being adopted as a cult belief, SF stops being fiction and becomes the “truth”. The inability to distinguish between fiction and reality, between metaphorical and literal, between the truth of a story and the truth of science, lies at the heart of some of the most obvious social pathologies of our time. Immersed in the online world, in which the line between “real” and “pretend” is as invisible as the line that separates a mockumentary from a documentary, people lose narrative competence: that is, the ability to understand fiction as a kind of “what is” game. Consider the speed with which most outlandish conspiracy theories spread on the internet. Consider also the idiotic notion of “cultural appropriation”, in which authors who write fiction rooted in their imagination and their understanding of other cultures are excoriated for inauthenticity”, as happened to Jeanine Cummins with her novel American Dirt. The way literature is taught today, often emphasizing nonfiction and expressing “your own truth” in writing, creates generations of narratively incompetent readers. I would not be surprised if another round of SF-generated cults is coming soon.

Between these two extremes of borrowing and appropriation, lies speculation, which takes religion seriously but not literally. Paul Nahin, the author of a book about the intersection of SF and religion, suggests that SF treats theology as science: that is, as the starting point for philosophical, social, and metaphysical debates. SF is “a body of texts of an examination of absolute values and the hypothetical construction of alternative modes or living.”² This is theological SF, which is neither the simple borrowing of religious or mythological plots nor the cult-like transformation of fiction into a scripture.

If Nahin is correct, and SF uses theology as science, what theology is it? Many people embrace the liberal belief that all religions are the same because they are founded on the universal ethical principle of the Golden Rule. Nothing can be further from the truth. “God is not one”, as Stephen Prothero writes in his book of the same title. Even if all religions share some basic elements, such as the belief in a higher power, they disagree on everything else.

“Religious folk worldwide agree that something has gone awry. They part company, however, when it comes to stating just what has gone wrong, and they diverge sharply when they move from diagnosing the human problem to prescribing how to solve it”. ³

Even the Golden Rule is not universal, as I argue in my book Beyond the Golden Rule.

Since different religions ask different questions, not just provide different answers, theological SF has to be rooted in the theology of a particular religion. In Anglo-American SF, this religion is Christianity and occasionally, Judaism. Jewish SF is a topic for another essay. Here I want to talk about three different aspects of Christian theology in SF: forbidden knowledge; theodicy; and human transcendence. For obvious reasons, “here” means in the next several instalments. There is simply no way to cover it all in a single essay.

So, in the next instalments, I am going to talk about Frankenstein and Paradise Lost; Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass and H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau; Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice and Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey and Childhood’s End, and Mary Russell’s The Sparrow. And perhaps other novels you, dear readers, can suggest.

1. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 68

2. Nahin, Paul J. 2014. Holy Sci-fi! Where Science Fiction and Religion Intersect. New York: Springer, 26.

3. Prothero, Stephen. 2010. God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World - and Why Their Differences Matter. London: HarperCollins, 2010, 11.