I argued yesterday, commenting on an interview with Lois McMaster Bujold, that “fantasy and science fiction, at their highest, appeal to an essentially theological impulse in the human spirit.” This morning I followed a link from that interview to the Mind Meld blog on SFSignal, where they asked a number of science fiction writers to answer the question, “Is science fiction antithetical to religion?” What I found is that, not only did very few answer “yes,” several of them agreed with my thesis.

Gabriel McKee:

Samuel R. Delany wrote, and I agree, that “virtually all the classics of speculative fiction are mystical.” Regardless of the stated beliefs of its authors—who aren’t all atheists, by the way—SF works best as a genre about the Big Questions of being and meaning, and any halfway-satisfying answer to those questions has to have a bit of religious flavor.

Carl Vincent:

Speaking entirely from personal experience, one of the things that science fiction drives me to do over and over again is to step outside and look at the night sky. While doing so I not only dream of space travel and daydream about whatever world I was just reading about, but I also stand in awe of my Creator and the wonder of the universe He created. Science fiction has never been antithetical to my personal religious experience, it has always enhanced it. Science fiction makes me think, makes me question things, and makes me not only evaluate my universe but also makes me evaluate my place in it.

John C. Wright:

Let us be honest. Science fiction is not necessarily about the science. It is about the wonder. Any writer man enough to portray religion as a source of wonder, as Gene Wolfe does, can make it a fit matter for science fiction.

I doubt many of these folks have read Rudolf Otto’s classic book The Idea of the Holy, but they have the clear sense that the best SF, for all its rationalist foundation, has at least a touch of the numinous.Perhaps the most interesting response along these lines came from a chap named Adam Roberts, who contends that “science fiction as a genre has its roots precisely in the religious conflicts of the Reformation.”

I think it’s a complex and evolving discourse still determined by its Protestant roots, a mode of art that is trying to articulate a number of core fascinations essentially religious in nature: questions of transcendence (‘sense of wonder’ as we sometimes call it, or ‘the Sublime’ in the language of literary criticism); atonement and messianism in particular.

He makes a compelling thumbnail argument; I’m going to have to pick up a copy of his book, The Palgrave History of Science Fiction, in which he argues his case at length. If he’s right, then it’s not merely that “fantasy and science fiction . . . appeal to an essentially theological impulse in the human spirit”; rather, going a step further, they arise out of that impulse as an expression of our need for transcendence—which is to say, ultimately, our need for God.

Lois McMaster Bujold is one of my favorite fantasy/science-fiction authors, so I was glad to read this interview with her on the blog Fantasy Book Critic (which looks, btw, like a good one for those who enjoy that kind of literature). She’s a sharply perceptive writer who doesn’t simply write conventional “genre fiction,” but who takes full creative advantages of the opportunities of her genres. (For instance, in her fantasy novel The Curse of Chalion, she created what might well be the first truly believable serious theological setup in fantasy since Tolkien.) As such, I was particularly interested in her analysis of genres, an analysis sparked by her experience in writing The Sharing Knife, in which, as she says,

I wanted to see what would happen when I tried to make a romance the central plot of a fantasy novel—and wow was that ever a learning experience, not only about what makes a romance story work, but, more unexpectedly, uncovering many of the hidden springs and assumptions that make fantasy work. It turns out to be a much harder blending that I’d thought, going in—after all, I’d had romantic sub-plots in both my fantasy and my SF books before, and wasn’t it just a matter of shifting the proportions a bit?Well, no, it turns out. The two forms have different focal planes. In a romance in the modern genre sense, which may be described as the story of a courtship from first meeting to final commitment, the focus is personal; nothing in the tale (such as the impending end of the world, ferex) can therefore be presented as more important. . . .Viewing the reader response to the first two volumes of TSK, it has been borne in upon me how intensely political most F&SF plots in fact are. Political and only political activity (of which war/military is a huge sub-set) is regarded as “important” enough to make the protagonists interesting to the readers in these genres. The lyrical plot is rare, and attempts to make the tale about something, anything else—artistic endeavor, for instance—are regularly tried by writers, and as regularly die the grim death in the marketplace. (Granted The Wind in the Willows or The Last Unicorn will live forever, but marginalized as children’s fiction.)I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.)

There’s a lot of truth in that, but I don’t think it’s quite right. As regards mysteries, I’ve written somewhere on the idea (which I ran across somewhere else—I’ll have to track that down) that the appeal of mysteries is the restoration of order to chaos; justice is a central component of that (the restoration of moral order), but not all of it by any means. That’s why so many of Agatha Christie’s novels end with two members of the surviving cast heading toward marriage—it’s another dimension of the restoration of order. With science fiction and (especially) fantasy, I think the appeal is the restoration of order to chaos on an epic scale; this scale demands political activity, but to characterize these plots as merely political is to overstate the point, for in fact they often transcend politics. One thinks for example of Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, in both of which the aim is nothing less than the destruction of the source of evil in the universe (though the two works construe that source drastically differently); these are nothing less than fantasies of theological agency. Another example would be the great exploration stories of science fiction, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama; I’m not sure how one would label that, but it’s clearly not political in its appeal.Though there are definitely fantasy and science fiction stories which can be accurately described as “fantasies of political agency” (most especially the classic “male teen power fantasy”), I think there’s a broader story here. Fantasy and science fiction tap into the desire for the epic that we see reflected in literature going all the way back to works like The Illiad and The Odyssey, Beowulf and The Tain; it’s the desire for a view of reality that’s big enough to satisfy our sense of ourselves, our sense that “there’s more to life than this.” We want stories that are “larger than life,” by which we really mean we want stories that show us that life is larger than the ordinary routines of the day-to-day; we want the sense that there really is a bigger story out there, if we can just find it. As such, I would argue that fantasy and science fiction, at their highest, appeal to an essentially theological impulse in the human spirit.

I am, and have been for many years, a fan of fantasy and science fiction. Fortunately for me, as an English major, I attended a college with an English department that was generally open to such things, without too many professors who drew a distinction between ““genre fiction” and “real literature.” (I could go off on a rant about how “literary fiction” is just another genre, and indeed one of the more rulebound, hidebound and unprofitable ones, but . . . some other time.) I appreciated that at the time because it meant I didn’t have to feel put down (very often) for my reading preferences; over the years, I’ve come to appreciate it even more as I’ve come to realize just how constraining the standard academic view of literature really is. John W. Campbell, Jr., founding father of modern science fiction, famously argued that science fiction is the only real literature because it alone encompasses all possible pasts, presents and futures (and thus includes all literature); I think his conclusion is overblown, but he has a point.

It seems to me that what distinguishes real literature from efforts which don’t rise to that level is that real literature opens our eyes, our minds, our ears, and our hearts—it helps us to see, hear, and understand people, including ourselves, for who we are, and our world for what it is. The thing about science fiction, moving forward and backward along the axis of time (including onto the parallel tracks of alternate history), and fantasy, moving sideways along the axis of alternate worlds, is that they offer far more angles from which to do this. Indeed, by adopting an “unreal” setting, I think they make it easier for us to see and understand our world and ourselves more deeply than we can within a “realistic” frame of reference. (The flip side to this would be the way in which “reality shows” are the most unreal things on television.)

Now, I’ve been convinced of this for a long time, and in the process I’ve learned a lot of good theology from fantasy writers like C. S. Lewis (no surprise), J. R. R. Tolkien (ditto), and Stephen R. Donaldson (which might be a little more unexpected); but it’s not a case I’ve heard many people make. Now, however, along has come Alison Milbank with her book Chesterton and Tolkien As Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real to explore the truth of this in the work of these two great English Catholic writers. I can’t comment directly on the book, since even on Amazon, it’s going for $93.60, and that just isn’t in the budget right now; but from the review Ralph Wood wrote for the First Things website (in “On the Square”), I’m very much looking forward to reading it. In Chesterton and Tolkien (among others), we are caught by the understanding that the world is more real, and high and beautiful and perilous and terrible, than our senses tell us it is; and from what Wood has to say, Milbank captures this well.

Both writers resorted to fantasy as an escape into reality, as Tolkien liked to say. They were fascinated with fairies because Elfland, as Chesterton called it, enabled them to envision the world as wondrously magical no less than terribly contingent: as “utterly real and enchanted at one and the same time.” Whereas conventional Christian apologists often cast theological stones at the obduracy of atheists and materialists, Tolkien and Chesterton answer them with dwarves and ents.

Beautiful. I look forward to reading this book.

keep an eye out for Noah Farlee. Heather McDougal at Cabinet of Wonders met him, I’m not sure where, and has a splendid post up about him; at 16, he’s already a fresh, original, creative, and truly interesting storyteller. (Check out his short story “Giskard the Genius”—warning, it’s a PDF file, because it’s graphic fiction, not merely text—and you’ll see what I mean.) I also appreciate this statement of his: “With Giskard, I wanted to prove that you could still tell a story for a story’s sake. I wanted a story that was enjoyable to people of any age, instead of just ‘acceptable’ for all ages. No gritty violence, no brooding main characters or political commentary, but also no distracting morals or nauseating innocence. Just plain clean fun.” That’s a worthy goal, I’d say, if you can pull it off—and especially if you’re honestly funny enough. This guy can, and he is, and I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next.