Culture
The 7 scifi books that ALMOST made me a believer
In this episode, we explore seven science fiction novels that intertwine themes of science and religion, examining how they grapple with the transcendent and the sublime. From C.S. Lewis's space ...
The 7 scifi books that ALMOST made me a believer
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It's darkest night and you're lying under the sparkling dome of stars and what
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your feeling is or wonder maybe even terror. There are no words for this fleeting
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moment when we grasp the numinous, the transcendent, the sublime. So we try to
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capture the sublime in a story. As you gaze up into the black what story do you
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see? Do you see the void of space, the atomic fire of infinite suns, the
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Lord of gravity, energy and matter? Or do you see the heavens above a perfectly
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ordered cathedral, all to the glory of a divine creator? This is the story of a
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fight for the transcendent, a struggle over the sublime, a battle between two
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mythic stories that both claim to show us the reality beyond the real.
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One a story of science, the other of religion and it's the story of seven books
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plus a few chucked in for good luck that combine the stories of science and
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religion. The seven theological science fiction novels you must read, have to
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read before you die. It just feels a bit absolute test you don't have to read
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anything. How about the seven theological science fiction novels you might like
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to read? The laws of the universe are never broken. Your mistake is to think
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that the little regularities we have observed on one planet for a few hundred
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years are the real, unbreakable laws. Whereas they are only the remote results which
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the true laws bring about more often than not as a kind of accident.
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C.S. Lewis, that hideous strength. I'm a third generation science fiction
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reader. My grandfather read H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. My mother loved
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Arthur C. Clarke and Kurt Vonnegut. I was lucky to grow up in a home with a lot of
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books and at the heart of my mum's book collection were a pair of bookends
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that held our sacred books. At one end of the bookends was the Holy Bible which
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I have to be honest, didn't get read much. At the other end was J.R.R. Tolkien's
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Lord of the Rings, which had been read so often it was falling apart. And between
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the two was C.S. Lewis space trilogy. Out of the silent planet,
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Parallandra and that hideous strength battered original paperbacks which I didn't like reading
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because I'd already been burned once by C.S. Lewis when I realized that Aslan was Jesus smuggling.
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The space trilogy is a story of spaceships, journeys through space and adventures on other planets.
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The stuff of science fiction. The trilogy stars science fiction's most famous
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philologist, Professor L. Wynn Ransom. Philology is the study of the history of language
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and also happened to be the profession of C.S. Lewis great friend J.R.R. Tolkien.
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While on a walking holiday, Ransom is kidnapped and taken to Mars, known to its inhabitants by its
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true name, Malacandra. From where Ransom is swept into three short novels of adventures.
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But like the Christian allegues smuggled into Narnia, there is more than meets the eye to the
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science fiction of C.S. Lewis. To understand what the space trilogy is really about, we need to
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understand Starmaker by Olaf Stapeldom. Inspired by the revolutions of radio astronomy,
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British philosopher William Olaf Stapeldom wrote Starmaker, a dream journey across the galaxy
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being revealed at that time by science. C.S. Lewis hated Starmaker. In a letter to none other
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than the prophecy clock, Lewis describes the book's ending where we're shown the titular
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Starmakerism, uncaring entity who created our universe at random, as one of many as shared
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devil worship. Starmaker was the new mefas of science fiction.
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C.S. Lewis wrote the space trilogy as an answer, not just to Stapeldom, but to all science fiction,
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where Stapeldom shows space as the darkness of void. Lewis shows space saturated with divine light.
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Where Stapeldom's universe teams with the random products of biological evolution,
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all life in Lewis universe is engaged in a great struggle between good and evil.
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The space trilogy is an attack on what Lewis called,
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Scientocracy or Scientism. A belief in science as the soul and only valid form of human knowledge.
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In favor of Lewis O. Anglican Christian theology, so to really understand the space trilogy,
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read it as science fiction that is against science, account to a revolutionary narrative in the war
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between science and religion for the story of the sublime. But we need to talk about theology.
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C.S. is the old Greek word for God kind of. Logos is the old Greek word for knowing the root of our
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word logic. So theology means something like a logical understanding of God. But because God is so
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vast, theology is more like a logical understanding of everything. So if you're being told that
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you are in a mortal soul in a cosmos created by an all father who will judge you after death,
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or sent his son to do the job, and condemn you to either heaven or hell,
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you're being given the theology of Christianity. And let's make no mistake. Theologies are made
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by people, monks, philosophers, storytellers, sci-fi writers who take the weird ideas and
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strange myths of their time and try and organize them into a logical or at least been
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turnily consistent theology to explain everything. There are many theologies and many more that once
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thrived and were lost. During this walk we're going to see how Christian theology in a couple of
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forms. Buddhist Hindu, Sufi mysticism and even Nostec theology have manifested in science fiction
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to create a new theology of sci-fi. Whatever religious theology offers is something
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beyond the material world. A soul, a heaven, a God or gods. The theology of science fiction in
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contrast insists again and again that these heavens, gods and souls can all be found within the material.
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Where religion keeps hope transcendent, science fiction does everything it can to immunize the
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Eskaton. We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us. We are their
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creatures shaped by their hard defining edges. Gene Wolf, the book of the new sun. We, the science
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fiction community, keep Gene Wolf in reserve for when newbies get cocky. So you've read your
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hind line, lagoon and Octavia Butler and you think you get science fiction now. Do your kid
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first you'll think it's not science fiction. Then you'll realize it is science fiction. Then
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it'll rewrite what the words science fiction mean when your brain hears them.
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You think I exaggerate everyone. Always think I exaggerate. Start reading and keep reading.
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Then read again until you understand. The first thing you'll start to notice about the book of
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the new sun. Within earth, few chapters of the first volume of the shadow of the torturer
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is that this seeming medieval fantasy world is in fact a very far future world under a swollen
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red dying sun. A mythos set at the end of the solar cycle emerging from the gothic fixions of
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Clark, Ashton, Smith and James Branch Cabal through the sublime stories of Jack Vance reaching
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its apogee in the genius of Gene Wolf. On my first attempt to read Gene Wolf's masterpiece,
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I bailed at a description of torture. I feared the book was going to be the kind of sadistic
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torture porn that infests the treetest kinds of sci-fi and fantasy. John Norman's gore with literary
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pretensions. Please rest assured it is not. On my second attempt, I bailed from the book of the
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new sun because I was annoyed by the suspicion that the book's true meaning was going way over my head.
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But on the third attempt, something clicked and I realized that Gene Wolf is the greatest writer,
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ever to write science fiction. No exaggeration. Wolf is the Johann Sebastian Bach of science fiction.
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The layered symbolism, the sheer complexity and deep meaning of the book of new sun,
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the broke beauty of its prose is far beyond all other sci-fi and fantasy. Keep reading until you get it.
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If you persist, you will learn that the book of new sun is the most complete work
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of theological science fiction ever written. Gene Wolf was a Catholic convert and a believer in
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Catholic cosmology. Wolf sets himself the gargantuan task of showing how the entire cosmology
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of patholicism from the alpha to the omega, the dying earth to the new sun, can be proven to be
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an absolutely accurate and higher level description of the same lower base reality described by science
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and science fiction. But to understand what that means, you'll have to read the book of the new
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sun many times. We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them.
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Doris Lessing, Shakasta. It's a widespread and mistaken belief that no science fiction writer
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has ever won the Nobel Prize for literature, but in fact two very great writers of science fiction
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have won both for works that fused the myths of science and religion and both pay a part in this story.
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Shakasta is a fallen world long ago. It was Rohan der a colony of canopas, a galactic civilization
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that had aided the evolution of the planet's ape species into humanity. But a cosmic misalignment
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throws the planet under the exploitation of the evil empire of Shamat. Rohan der becomes
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Shakasta and much later becomes our earth. Canopas sends ematries to its former colony,
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canopas is capable of fast and light travel through physical space, but this path is slow. Instead
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the ematries of canopas journey through spheres of spiritual reality before incarnating on earth
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in human forms. Doris Lessing was a famed feminist author when she published Shakasta in 1979,
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but ironically this led to her science fiction novels being somewhat overlooked by both literary
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and sci-fi readers. Lessing was also a committed follower of the Sufine mystic Idris Shah.
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Sufism is a mystical tradition which teaches that humankind has the potential to
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expand our consciousness, not in the next world, but in this world. Lessing was also a radical
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socialist who believed in the possibility of making a better world through political action.
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And so the mystical and the political meat in Shakasta, canopas ematries on earth incarnate
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first as religious prophets, then later as political radicals and revolutionaries,
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alienated from this fallen world and slowly discovering their divine mission to raise up
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human consciousness and make the fallen world Shakasta, Rohan der again.
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Ironically, Lessing science fiction has been criticised by radical thinkers as colonialist,
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weaver a hander being a colony of Rhodesia and canopas as an idealised fantasy of its British colonisers.
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Nonetheless, Lessing creates a potent new theology in Shakasta. The ideology of socialism
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fused with mystical intensity expressed in the symbolism of sci-fi. Shakasta is theological
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Dispensing absolute truth. Matter is plastic in the face of mind. Philip K. Dick, Vales.
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Brothers. Sisters. Scytheine nerds. Arthave has no true or profit.
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Then Philip K. Dick, PKD became a household name when his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
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was brought to our screen as Blade Runner. He died just months before the premiere in 1982.
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Never seeing the myth he wrote become immortal. Through the 1960s, he showed us the true
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weirdness of reality. In his novels, Yubik, The Man in the High Castle, The Freestigmata of Palmer
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Eldrich. Visions. The Defined Him is the strangest and most prophetic voice in American science fiction.
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Then came 1974. The Pink Beam, a laser from nowhere. Days of visions. A revelation from above.
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In the decade that followed, Dick wrote like a man decoding God's private signals. Vales,
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The Divine Invasion. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Together, The Vales Trilogy. Vales,
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The Vast Active Living Intelligence System. A Divine Information Field. An orbiting satellite
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invading our world to shatter the black ion prison of Nosticism. Raised in the Church, Dick
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died a heretic, a Nostic. To him, the God of Churches was not God at all, but the demi-erge
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of false creator, trapping humanity in illusion. For Dick, the Empire never ended. Rome had not fallen.
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It had metastasized into the Catholic Church, into Western power, into the Republic and Senate,
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we still mimic today. And just behind the stage set of the world are true reality loons,
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a planet run by corporations, a globe ruled by an ancient empire, all reality and ion cage made
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by a mad God. Philip K. Dick was not just a writer, he was the first prophet of science fiction.
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The Turtle moves. Terry Pratchett, small gods. Let's take a brief interlude from such waiting
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matters with the mighty Terry Pratchett and his tale of small gods, which is for my money,
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Pratchett's best book in the massive Discworld series. And is the anti-fesis to theocratic
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sci-fi? The mighty God on decides to manifest on the mortal plane as a bull to ravish some virgins
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only to discover that, even in the heart of the religious empire of Onnia built in his name,
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not a single human still believes in the God. Oh, denuded of power, the God can manifest only
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as a small tortoise. Small gods is the story of the vast distance between true spiritual experience
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and the corrupt husks of religion that form around them, a book which preaches in Pratchett's warm
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voice that the stories we tell about gods have little or nothing to do with actual God.
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Small gods shows us the full military might of Onnia, which has crushed all learning to preserve
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its religion, come into conflict with a smaller nation that values science. Onnia gets it but
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kicked, reason beats religion every time. Small gods also features an argument
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over theology that mirrors the theme of this discussion. The Church of On believes the world
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is a sphere, a story which enforces by persecuting believers in the flat world who share the secret
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the turtle moves. This is Discworld after all. It's not quite right to call Pratchett's perspective
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atheism, skepticism certainly, but it's not that Pratchett doesn't believe in anything beyond the
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material. Again and again in Discworld we come to the edges of life and find death there waiting
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literally. It's just that our stories, myths, faiths, beliefs, churches and religions have
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absolutely nothing to do with whatever lies beyond. They're about us right here and right now
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and our games of power. Worth keeping in mind as we get back to thinking about science fiction
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Theologies. Theory Interlude. Let's take a moment to talk theory. Whilst researching this essay,
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I was suggested science fiction theology by Alan Gregory. I have not been able to read this yet
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but from reading the abstract it seems to explore a similar thesis to the one presented here
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but from a Christian perspective. Why does science fiction as an explicitly secular mephos so
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often borrow and transform the symbolism of Christianity? There's a good reason sci-fi writers call
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the singularity the rapture of the nerds. Christ like Saviour's are everywhere in sci-fi from Joseph
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Cooper to John Conner to Neo. The poster pockleps is quite literally judgment day.
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The Marxist literary critic Frederick Jameson in his book The Political Unconscious Suggest
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an answer to this mystery about science fiction. Someone once said that it is easier to imagine
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the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness
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the attempt to imagine the end of capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world. Frederick Jameson
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Jameson's answer is that we're still imagining judgment day because we're still in the
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civilization of contradictions and injustices that must soon blow itself up. The tensions of
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living together in a human civilization always find expression in our mephos. The symbols of
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Christ and heaven above with a few sci-fi tweaks still express the same tensions. Here in 2025 we have
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a tremendous tension between a super wealthy elite and everyone else. Our next book tackles that
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idea through the theology of Buddhism. No word matters but man forgets reality and remembers words
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Roger Salasney, Lord of Light. Roger Salasney is arguably the most underestimated science
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fiction writer of today. Salasney burst into the sci-fi scene in 1965 aged just 28. The average age
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of new science fiction writers is 128 with the Hugo Award winning this immortal. More ground-breaking
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mind-bending science fiction followed with the dream master and creatures of light and darkness.
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So Salasney then dedicated much of the next 20 years to his sprawling multiverse chronicles of
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a commercial hit in its day but a somewhat watered down Salasney that hasn't aged too well
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stylistically. The lack of a big screen adaptation has left Salasney as an obscure genius of science
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fiction but if any Hollywood or tours wanted to tap into peak Salasney his 1967 novel winner of Hugo
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Nebula Awards is the novel to pick. Lord of Light is set on an alien world long ago colonized by
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humanity but the early commonness used their technology to establish themselves as gods over the
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world. They entrapped that world in feudal serfdom and established themselves as its gods, the Hindu
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gods. But one early colonist named Sam, short for Maharsam Atman, rebels and re-incarnates again
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and again into the world as the Buddha to liberate humanity from their oppressive gods.
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To understand Lord of Light it helps to know that Buddhism is a rebel theology against Hinduism.
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For instance in Hinduism the concept of re-incarnation tells people that their place in the
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social hierarchy is based on actions in previous lives, justifying impression and the worst in
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justices. Buddhism reverses re-incarnation. A high social status means you are more deeply trapped
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in the cycle of samsara. Lord of Light is a science fiction novel about the power of science fiction
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theology. The godlike colonists use a corrupt theology to keep their population in slay,
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denofued or medieval system. Sam delivers a new theology, a theology of liberation to free humanity
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from our oppressive gods, a theology of science fiction. Oh if only it were possible to find
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understanding, Joseph exclaimed. If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory,
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everything tangential. There are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and
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then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as
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development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness.
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Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?
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Herman Hesse, the glass speed game. The glass speed game by Herman Hesse is a novel I've been trying
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to understand for over half my life. When I was 18, my mom who gave me my love of sci-fi died of cancer.
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The next few years were dark ones for me. When I wasn't working or studying, I found refuge
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in science fiction. Many of the books on this list like Shakasta and Lord of Light were read
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that time and had a huge influence on me. I had to say I was underwhelmed by university itself,
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but it gave me access to two invaluable things. A vast library of books and the internet.
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And in that college library, I found a science fiction book written in 1943 that said everything
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about the internet at 1999. The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded for a lifetime body of work,
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but when Herman Hesse, one in 1946, the glass speed game was given a special citation making Hesse the
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second of our two Nobel winners. The glass speed game is the culmination of many themes in Hesse's writing
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in famous novels like Demian, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldman and Journey to the East,
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Hesse contrasts the life of the mind of Vita Contemplar Tiva with the life of the world, the Vita
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Activa. As a young student in the process of dedicating myself to the life of the mind,
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I read Hesse as the torment of being torn between these two paths. Should we, like the handsome
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soldier artist Goldman, f**king fight our way through the world, or should we retreat to the
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monastery and the games of intellect? The glass speed game is Herman Hesse's final attempt at an
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answer. In a near future, after a destructive global war, an order of intellectuals live a
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cloisted life engaging in the ultimate game of the mind, the glass speed game. The game itself is
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never shown, we're only told that players use glass speeds to represent any and all forms of knowledge.
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A bark composition can be synthesised with Einstein's relativity and placed in context with a
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literary theme from Shakespeare. Written at the very dawn of the digital age, Hesse's game is a powerful
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metaphor for our condition today, endlessly and obsessively combining and recombining the knowledge
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we now hold as patterns of ones and zeros. But the purpose of the game in Hesse's novel is to
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illustrate the ultimate futility of intellectual games. The greatest player of the glass speed game
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finally quits the life of the mind for the lived experience of life itself. In our story of
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theological science fiction, then, Herman Hesse gives us a final full stop. The mythos of religions
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and the new mythos of science fiction are both intellectual constructs, mental imaginings,
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dream worlds, fantasms, and it is time to return to the real. This has been a long walk through
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seven of the most complex and intellectually challenging science fiction books ever written.
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Reading and understanding all seven could be a lifetime's work. We began with C. S. Lewis and
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Jean Wolfe, great writers who reasserted religious theologies. We saw Doris Lessing meld the
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ancient mystical with the modern political and Philip K. Dick's prophetic visions of liberation.
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Terry Pratchett and Roger Zalazni brought us back to science and reason. The war between the
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religious theologies of the past and the new theology of sci-fi has been raging for some hundreds
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of years and is only becoming more intense. We ended this walk with Herman Hesse, who I think makes
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the final argument that the sublime truth of reality can never be captured in any story.
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But the stories we tell about the sublime still matter. Religious theologies insist that a better
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world can only exist beyond the material. Heaven, a higher state of reincarnation, this world is
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doomed and mired in sin. This t-shirt is a satire of the original statement by Arch Conservative
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William F. Buckley, do not immanentize the Eschaton which he actually sold as a badge to his followers
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and you can get this t-shirt in the science fiction merch store. And if you really look at the
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conservative critique of modernity, it boils down to their core belief that the material world
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cannot be made better. But in response science fiction has imagined ever more innovative ways to
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immanentize the Eschaton because this is the real power of the new theology of sci-fi. It doesn't
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accept a full and world with redemption in the next. It imagines a better world that we can make real
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in this world. But what about a canticle for Lieberwitz is about religion but not in itself
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theological. Frank Herbert's June is about everything, the sparrow and a case of conscience,
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limbs, salaris and hind lines stranger in a strange land could all be read, theologically.
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Make your nominations for more theological science fiction in the comments. And for more philosophical
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sci-fi, learn about the dangerous philosophy of Ursula K. Laguin here.