Do you cringe while you’re watching “Star Wars” and Han Solo says the Millennium Falcon did the Kessel Run in lower than 12 parsecs, because a parsec is a unit of distance, not time? Are you offended that Chekov and Khan recognize one another in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” because by Star Trek canon they’ve never met? Do you think that “John Carter” is the worst movie ever for the way in which it bastardized the vision of Edgar Rice Burroughs?
You simply could also be a sci-fi nerd.
One among Pope Francis’ favorite books is Robert Hugh Benson’s 1903 sci-fi classic Lord of the World.
You’re in good company. Barack Obama was an enormous fan of the Chinese author 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 among his favorite books is Robert Hugh Benson’s 1903 sci-fi classic Lord of the World, which was reviewed greater than a century after its publication by Robert E. Hosmer in America in 2016.
While science fiction hasn’t been covered often within the pages of America, a couple of authors figured the method to an America editor’s heart: Make the review about religion as an alternative.
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 authority 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 distinguished figures within the Catholic lay motion movement in america in the course of the late Nineteen Forties and early Fifties.
McNelly’s article shows his encyclopedic knowledge of English-language science fiction. (It also demonstrates his enormous vocabulary and willingness to employ it: I used to be sent to the dictionary thrice, for “jongleur,” “deliquesce” and “extrauterine recapitulation.”) “At first glance the 2 terms [science fiction and religion] seem almost antithetical, yet an in depth examination of much of one of the best science fiction of the last decade reveals just the alternative,” McNelly wrote. “[R]eligion or religious themes have provided contemporary speculative literature with a few of its most cogent extrapolations, and, perhaps not coincidentally, with a few of science fiction’s easiest novels and short stories.”
At first glance science fiction and religion seem almost antithetical, yet an in depth examination of much of one of the best science fiction of the last decade reveals just the alternative.
While recognizing that “the standard antagonism between science and religion should surface in science fiction” was probably inevitable, McNelly also noted that the mainstays of science fiction who emerged within the Nineteen Forties and after—Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Williamson and more—weren’t a lot anti-religious as nonreligious. Further, the many years since have produced quite a few distinguished sci-fi authors who’re either fluent in religious themes or explicitly brought them into their work, including Frank Herbert, John Boyd, Robert A. Heinlein, James Blish (McNelly was incorrect 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 best works yet produced in science fiction” in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Dick’s The Man within the High Castle, but had branched out beyond the standard religious constructs of Christianity or Islam or Judaism—Le Guin with the Tao and Dick with the I Ching of ancient China.
“What of the long run of faith and science fiction? I would really like to enterprise one quiet, modest prediction, very quietly and really 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 lots of others—the synthetic dichotomy between science and religion, indeed, between science fiction and ‘Literature,’ with a capital ‘L’ will fade, or to make use of a scientific term that I find particularly applicable here, deliquesce.”
The mainstays of science fiction who emerged within the Nineteen Forties and after weren’t a lot anti-religious as nonreligious.
When America ran a special “Space Issue” in 2019, it gave Tom Deignan a likelihood to ask a curious query: “Why do Catholic priests keep popping up in sci-fi?” He has some extent: Just about all the aforementioned authors and lots of 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. Way back to the 1620s, the Anglican bishop Francis Godwin included Jesuit priests as characters in his The Man within the Moon.
Further, Deignan notes, most of those depictions aren’t the stock caricatures or superstitious villains one might expect. “It might sound as if Christianity—especially Catholics, and particularly Jesuits—can be a simple goal for sci-fi writers. But science fiction has also treated Jesuits and other religious figures and concepts with admirable complexity,” Deignan wrote. Further,
at a time of such open disdain in certain (especially bookish) quarters for religious matters generally—and Catholicism, particularly—perhaps we should always also not overlook the worth of those generally sympathetic depictions of spiritual people, struggling openly and truthfully with sex and love, faith and mortality, not to say an alien race or two.
In a passage that may 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 can 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, once they explored the unknown western ocean,” he wrote. “Man stands now on the brink of a way more breathtaking discovery, and so it is just not unfitting for the theologian, symbolically or otherwise, to placed on an area suit.”
Catholics in space? It was also the topic of probably the most fun America story I actually have ever had the possibility to jot down, one which asked one other query: “What would a chapel on the moon appear like?”
“It is just not unfitting for the theologian, symbolically or otherwise, to placed on an area suit.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Thurible of Belief” by Tom Delmore. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
On this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular author or group of writers (each recent and old; our archives span greater than a century), in addition to poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope it will give us a likelihood to offer you more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to a few of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
Theophilus Lewis brought the Harlem Renaissance to the pages of America
William Lynch, the best American Jesuit you’ve probably never heard of
The Catholic faith (and pessimism) of J.R.R. Tolkien
Parish priest, sociologist, novelist: The various imaginations of Father Andrew Greeley
Leonard Feeney, America’s only excommunicated literary editor (up to now)
Joan Didion: A chronicler of contemporary life’s horrors and consolations
Completely satisfied reading!
James T. Keane