Fantasy, science fiction, and the mysterium tremendum

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.