Abstract
This new volume comes from the Cascade Companions series, which has as its general aim to make accessible the body of Christian theology to the broader reader. James F. McGrath has already established himself as a leading critic in a field even now only receiving patchy attention. His 2011 volume Religion and Science Fiction has become a classic and directly counters the grand narrative of technological progress which used to be taken as underpinning science fiction. As its title suggests, Theology and Science Fiction is an exercise in comparison between two fields which have been quite distinct. McGrath’s agenda is simply to invite the reader to consider possible connections between the two domains and each chapter ends with a number of suggestions to readers of how to develop further issues raised. The volume is thus a practical handbook on how SF might help our understanding of theology. Because of the nature of the series perhaps, McGrath does not have the space to develop a complex model of reading SF. Thus, when he suggests that the latter can make the ancient gods more “real” by giving them representations in narrative, that rather blurs the nature of SF, whose classic trope is the voyage into space, a way of figuring the reach of the imagination outwards to speculative possibilities. Although McGrath approaches his subject from theology, the whole volume shows an even-handed awareness of the characteristics of both domains.
Some of the key terms which McGrath uses, however, carry quite different connotations in the two contexts. Take the case of a canon. His examination of Star Wars in the present volume and elsewhere presents a convincing case that the episodes dramatize ethical choices through its serial quest narrative. In fact a whole body of critical writing has arisen on the series, including Michael Kaminski’s The Secret History of Star Wars (2008), Will Brooker’s Star Wars (2009), and Douglas Brode’s collection Myth, Media and Culture in Star Wars (2012), to name only three of the many studies. However, the analogy between a franchise and a canon is problematic for a whole number of reasons. As McGrath recognizes, there is no real equivalent to a single voice informing a religious canon, but rather a whole sector of scriptwriters carefully maintaining consistency of character and plot. When he refers to fandom as “communities of faithful followers” (18), he is drawing an analogy between fandom and faith communities, where the classic example would be with Star Trek in its assemblies (conventions), icons, and exegetical commentary. McGrath’s own preferred examples are Star Wars and Doctor Who and his exploration of this analogy marks an interesting start to his discussion, raising many issues like the impact of film and TV as against the medium of print, or the potential appeal of these series in contrast with religious organizations. Of course this kind of analogy has been used for satirical effect in classics like Brave New World, where the cult of Fordism ritualizes mass production and truncates the Christian cross to a letter T. It is debatable which group the novel satirizes most—the enforcers or the acquiescent citizens. In any case, the novel contrasts ritual with thought, and it cannot be stressed too heavily that thought is a key imperative throughout McGrath’s volume.
The popular use of the term “canonical” in connection with literature usually carries a perception that a writer is formative or central to a body of writers—a writer like H.G. Wells, for instance. In works like First and Last Things (1908) and God the Invisible King (1917) he engaged forcibly with what he perceived as the inadequacies of religious creeds in conveying the true force of the deity, a position which he maintained right into the 1930s. His writings were applauded by Rev. Alexander H. Crawford whose 1909 book The Religion of H.G. Wells praised the writer’s perceptions that scientific knowledge is provisional and that “religion is essentially an intensely social matter” (15). Two points emerge here. The first is that from the very beginning SF was a disobedient mode of writing, challenging the orthodoxies of the day. The second is that, as McGrath has shown in his critical writing, religion was much more evident than has been recognized in SF from its formative years onwards. In Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), for instance, the drama of alien invasion has overshadowed the fate of the curate pushed to the brink of insanity by the destruction of his church. Self-evidently he represents one of the many casualties in the action, but it does not follow that the novel is hostile to religion. On the contrary, near the end the narrator registers his relief over having survived as follows: “I extended my hands towards the sky and began thanking God” (end of chapter 8). This moment is even more marked in the 1953 movie, which ends with a collective tableau of thanksgiving.
One of the main questions which McGrath asks is: How hostile is SF to religion? The overt hostility shown by a writer like J.G. Ballard is actually much rarer than cases of engagement, like Frank Herbert’s complex assimilation of Islam, Sufiism, and Zen Buddhism in his Dune series; or C.S. Lewis’s incorporation of the Fall of Man into his Space Trilogy. The concluding volume to this series, That Hideous Strength (1945), literally demonizes scientific experimentation by showing links between malign beings and the participating scientists. Lewis drew on Mars for his fiction, as did Ray Bradbury. In “The Messiah” (from The Martian Chronicles, 1950) a discussion between religious leaders of their mission to the Red Planet segues into a priest’s apparent vision of a Martian as the resurrected Christ. In these cases other-world locations enable the dramatization of spiritual issues.
How can theology be expressed through SF? To answer this question McGrath cites two stories: Robert Silverberg’s “Good News from the Vatican” (1971) and Jack McDevitt’s “Gus” (1991), the former describing the election of a Pope who is a robot. In a 2000 interview in Strange Horizons, Silverberg himself stated that he is “utterly unable to connect with any sort of conventional religious faith,” and so on the face of it the story could be read as a satire of Catholic ritualism. On the other hand, it could equally be read as a parable of ecumenical change when one bishop claims that the election should encourage more “people of synthetic origin” to join the Church. Rather than directly expressing any theological concept then, the story humorously sets up a notional space in the near future where change can be debated.
In the course of his discussion McGrath constantly offers suggestive examples of intersections between religion and SF. He rightly stresses the relevance of Gnosticism to the post-apocalyptic world of the Matrix movies and describes Philip K. Dick as a “Gnostic theologian in the Valentinian tradition” (36). Apart from drawing on Dick criticism, this statement underlines the special relevance of this writer in the present context. Dick’s fiction is packed with dualistic worlds, usually malign in one way or another, but in the last years of his life he divided his writing between novels and recording in a journal (his famous Exegesis) his visionary experiences from a source he named VALIS. This Vast Active Living Intelligence System might have been an aspect of the deity or a near-Earth satellite. Attempts to understand this source underpin the novel VALIS, whose protagonist, Horselover Fat, is clearly an alter ego of Dick being a translation of his name from Greek and German. Exactly how far he saw himself as a teacher or seer remains an open question. Despite its title, the Exegesis reads more like a spiritual journal with its narrative of revelations and visitations.
Virtually by definition, SF repeatedly registers impatience with institutional religion, but also its evocation of wonder. As G.K. Chesterton famously stated at the end of his title essay in Tremendous Trifles (1909), “the world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder,” and here a role for SF opens up as McGrath suggests a number of times. The transcendental climax to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) takes us into a sublime, less material phase of being, repeatedly evoked through increasingly sophisticate special effects in SF movies. And this is usually achieved without an appeal to theorized belief. As Alan Gregory has shown in Science Fiction Theology (2015), this evocation of the sublime has offered ways of imagining God throughout the history of SF.
The final intersection McGrath considers is that between SF and philosophy, the subject of studies like Stephen Clark’s How to Live Forever (1995). Here McGrath rejects the cliché of “soulless machines” (69) and argues instead that SF can help the reader to reflect on the nature of rights and on the “possibility of transferring a human mind into another copied body” (71). Here again the simplicity of the language is misleading in suggesting that the mind is a “content” of the body, but then moves into a more fluent discussion of sentient organisms and sentient bodies separate from humans even as in the 2009 movie Avatar. McGrath draws his volume to a close by stressing that his argument is to propose a meaningful interaction, rather than integration or synthesis, between SF and theology, taking as his model the interdisciplinary scholar Ian Barbour’s 2000 study, When Science Meets Religion. The broad rationale for the present volume is that both SF and theology “naturally explore and reflect on big questions, key moments and ultimate mysteries” (81). McGrath’s conclusion is not a summing up of the case, but three brief SF stories designed to raise further questions about the possibility of resurrection, conflict with extra-terrestrials, and single-cell organisms. It is no mean achievement that he manages to maintain a lucid and accessible line of discussion over such huge areas without ever dumbing down his subject.