SFF: Is science fiction obsessed with religion?
SFF: Is science fiction obsessed with religion?
Well yes. But what's the origin of the preoccupation?
Good Week Reader,
First of all, it’s been a lovely jubbly surprise to find some of you eagerly investing yourselves in my novel already. To reward the flurry of enthusiasm, those who have joined the paid subscription receive a second email alongside this one. It contains an advance reading of The Messiah Algorithm’s prologue and first chapter.
As a teaser for everyone else I have plopped the first coupled of paras of the novel at the end of this article. (Those on the freebie subscription can sign up below and access the full chapter now as well, or hold out for October 1st and get it then.)
One more awesome piece of news. Two very talented graphic artists have decided to join the project, which means every chapter will be accompanied by some cool artwork, and we will also have a few posts showcasing their schnizz.
I hope you enjoy the article.
The sky in this graphic is a hubble telescope portrait of R136, which NASA describes as ‘a tapestry of creation and destruction’.
Whether it’s Arthur Clarke's transcendent odyssey into the infinite; Frank Herbert’s Maud’Dib and his understanding of the universe so perceptive as to envisage all possible futures and spark a holy war in his name; or Margaret Atwood’s Offred, courageously railing against a dysmorphic and (more) violent Christianity, it is clear that science fiction writers love examining mysticism and religion.
The subject matter of my novel looks to bridge a similar gap, drawing upon the already blurring line between the biological and the artificial (transhumanism) and the theology of a recently rehabilitated radical jesuit priest.
There are clear parallels between the scale and drama of science fiction’s speculation over humanities future, and religion’s somewhat flawed efforts over the millennia to deduce and quantify its routes to the human telos.
Having read it all over a period of years, Clarke’s writing leaves me with such a residue of sanctitude that I had to google to reaffirm he was an atheist. His is a very Christian sort of SF. And it’s surprising just how many writers over the years have attempted to bridge that gap between messiah and human.
As an atheist raised in the Christian tradition I always liked the idea of a god. Putting aside the myriad of unusual human prescriptions that surround the idea itself, the notion of an infinitely powerful entity carving our destiny out of the nothingness is all the things a good science fiction story should be. It’s cosmic and epoch spanning, epic in scale and full of poetry.
Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was always banging on about that relationship to the infinite. Ironically, it’s one that SF fans, who tend towards atheism, know well. It’s the effort we put in from time to time to try and for a moment comprehend the sheer massiveness of what existence contains. It’s the daydream about our seemingly unending journey through time, space and possibilities; how it will continue with or without us, and beyond the fringes of this tiny blue speck of dust.
However, for atheists all religions tend to fall down in the same place. It’s that moment a follower attempts to literalise the infinite.
‘Hey there, Buddy,’ A stranger quips in the pub. ‘Just wanna say, God really exists. Y’know? Yeah imagine that. All powerful and wise. Oh, and did I mention, he has a penis and is a massive homophobe.’
Søren Kierkegaard preferred a more extreme example, but still a classic God prank nonetheless. One time he popped out from behind a cloud and shouted, ‘Hey Abraham, memba how you love me? Then prove it. Murder your son. No pal, no, you heard me right.’
Great craic.
This sets up a paradox for Abraham. How to explain? If he tells his wife that God told him to commit this horrific act she will clearly think him insane. Social services will be a knockin’. Similarly, if he goes through with it and keeps schtum, people will think he’s a psycho anyway. In this sense Abraham’s relationship with God is an absolute one. No one else can understand it or comprehend it. It’s his and his only. If I may, I’d like to briefly park this God/kill/crazy thing in order to change channel for a…
True story:
Once when I was 19 it was the middle of the afternoon and I was stood in my garden smashing paving slabs with a hammer. I have no idea why. There I was when I looked up and caught sight of triangle zipping along in the sky at an incredible speed. As soon as I saw it the thing came to a dead stop in the air, hovered for a moment, and then pinged vertically upwards, and disappeared from sight.
‘Fucking hell,’ I thought.
I never told anyone about it. I think I deemed myself a smart person and weighed up the social capital1 I would expend being that guy: going around town, banging on about what I’d witnessed, against the fact that, well, in the grand scheme of things I’m not sure that me saying anything to anyone about it would change anything or matter much. So instead, I just stood there for a minute absorbing, and eventually I carried on with my slab thing.
Now, unless whom or whatever orchestrated their journey documented the flightplan on a blockchain, there is no evidence that what I say happened did ever happen. As such, it is my own mystical moment in history. My own encounter with the infinite. It’s realness to everyone else but myself is totally reliant on how much people reckon they can trust my word or deem me sane. It’s my own Abrahamic paradox.
I’m a person who thinks the balance of probability dictates we are not the only form of sentient life to exist, and that to believe so is an example of human exceptionalism. I didn’t find the experience life changing. It was just, sort of, personally satisfying. And as time went by there were years when it didn’t ever enter my mind.
Then one day in 2020 the NY Times published an article stating that UFOs ‘are not a matter of belief anymore’. Barack Obama went on the telly saying something like ‘Oh, no, yeah, actually, that’s a thing. Our best pilots confirm: they saw those triangles every day for two years off the Atlantic coast.’
The Atlantic Coast and also the Binley Road in Coventry, it appears. So, despite the whole thing seeming a bit insane to both you and I, the fact is that with the passing of time and the development of technology2, what was once unbelievable now has a far greater probability of being true.
And this is why science fiction has its obsession.
Where so much of the very best science fiction succeeds, and what religion can not and never will be able to do, is to convey the infinite in a way that is not psychotic, but is instead reasoned, and even feasible. Demystified. Yes it’s fiction, but it is fuelled by logic, is explainable, and in some instances even inherently likely.
The power therefore of science fiction is that it shows its working. It does not pretend to be true, but instead aspires to be possible. It gives us the chance to peek over the horizon, to glimpse a sense of feasibility surrounding what may, on the one hand, be stupendous in scale, yet still may become. It even brings us a little closer to achieving those things, if only through painting a portrait of our future.
In ‘Fear and Trembling’ Kierkegaard asked us to comprehend the horror of a universe without God, but poor old Søren clearly didn’t have Asimov’s Foundation to keep him company. If he did he might have concluded that the meaning we human beans create in the universe is strong enough for us to build anything we want to upon it.
Next week: 7 Super-Scifi foods to help you shed that belly fat.
JT.
The Messiah Algorithm: Page 1
Only a single functioning electric charge pump remains in Saidnaya, a town of about 25,000 people, in the mountains just north of Damascus. It sits alongside the eight regular pumps at a gas station overlooking the town. The electric pump is only used once a month, always on the same day and always by the same person. And it’s been like that for just over thirty-seven years.
Every 16th, without fail, the same impossibly polished, black, Lincoln town car drifts down the winding roads from the mountain top, skirts the edge of the valley and pulls up in the dusty forecourt. The window comes down as the attendant connects, then fills the car with power, occasionally talking to the occupant about business or events in the town, and sometimes about strangers that might have passed through…
In hindsight I had no social capital to expend.
That technology being firstly an ability to detect and report on such objects; secondly a government’s level of understanding reaching a threshold by which it deems it appropriate to pass on the information to the public.