Phy
03-28-2008, 12:27 AM
Imagine walking down an endless mall and generating a powerful hunger, only to find food court after food court of cotton candy and twinkies. While that food can be tasty, it is ultimately bad for you and has no positive substance. And to add insult to injury, it costs an arm and a leg.
And then you spy a place that provides the best corn-fed beef and free-range chicken. And it's free.
That's what this link was like for me - there's so much here to sink your metaphoric teeth into. We hear from a host of sci-fi authors and pundits who write from both sides of the aisle. The one surprise here is that 'religion' receives perhaps a more respectful treatment in the comments than I would have expected from such a quorum of sci-fi thinkers.
I was interested in the answers by Jay Lake (a self-admitted atheist) and Larry Niven. I expected to see a little focus on C. S. Lewis and was not disappointed. I was delighted that R. A. Lafferty got some love, as well as a personal favorite, Cordwainer Smith. I was very pleased to see James Blish get mentioned more than once. Even my personal hero, Roger Zelazny gets a mention. But it is John C. Wright who scores the home run strike here. Based on his post, the ball is still flying, and is due to escape Earth's atmosphere sometime during the night!
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/006457.html
The most egregious example of this anything-but-Western one-sidedness is in Variable Star by Spider Robinson. In this tale, we learn that only Zen Buddhists can pilot starships, because the quantum uncertainties involved in the star drive require transcendental meditation in the observers. Or something. This is marketed and sold as science fiction. Yet imagine if Mr. Robinson had written Variable Saint, and it was the same story with one detail changed: in this future, it was discovered that the laws of high energy physics required that a Roman Catholic priest in full canonicals, with miter and alb, had to bless the drive core and sprinkle it with holy water out of an aspergillum before it could ignite!
I assume most readers would not regard that as a proper science fiction speculation. Eastern mysticism is not more scientific than Western, but it is more novel to us, so we wonder at it.
It is telling that there is not a single science fiction story where Eastern gods or Eastern mysticism is treated as false and contemptible. In Star Trek, if an Indian, excuse me, a Native American, introduces a starship captain to his "spirit guide", this spirit never turns out to be a computer in disguise or a lying energy being. On the other hand, if anything remotely like the Christian God shows up, Spock shoots him with the forward phaser battery. This is because Progressives do not (as yet) regard any religion as antithetical to their world-view aside from Christianity. Perhaps Christianity is hard to tame.
Progressives can, and always have, use science fiction as a tool to put across their social commentary and satire. Religion is part of society and is fair game for comment and satire. But they are arrogant if they claim that science fiction is necessarily loyal to Progressivism.
Other writers, not of that faction, can and always have used science fiction to put across their world-views as well. We would have to narrow the definition of Science Fiction artificially to exclude the science fiction stories that take place in a religious moral atmosphere.
I am currently reading In Green's Jungles by Gene Wolfe: there are both godlike beings in this tale and ghostly visitations, and other things that may or may not have a scientific explanation. Whether this tale counts as "science fiction" depends on your definition. But the moral atmosphere is hauntingly, even majestically, religious; nay, it is specifically Christian, both the acute pessimism and the otherworldly hope of that ancient faith are present, even though no Christian deity or doctrine is ever named. A book, science fiction or not, that breathed the same atmosphere would be Christian, even if nothing supernatural ever happened in the tale.
But if we fiddle with the definition of SF merely to throw out Gene Wolfe as a science fiction writer, then we Science Fiction writers lose the single best writer in our field today.
I was personally a bit disappointed that nobody mentioned Timothy Zahn. His novel Deadman Switch is a personal favorite sci-fi novel that features a Christian character and worldview in a positive light.
The first-person protagonist in this story is named Gilead Raca Benedar and he is a Watcher. A Watcher is a person intensively trained from childhood to observe things minutely and use deductive (and inductive) reasoning on what you observe. In other words, like Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes doing. Only in this case, every minute of every day. When observing people, his primary job, he is practically telepathic. And forget about lying to him. It cannot be done (except possibly by another Watcher).
But the catch is that Gilead in particular, and Watchers in general, are devout Christians. And they are shunned and persecuted too, for two reasons: (1) people fear their "power" (although it's nothing more than observing and reasoning, remember that Sherlock could scare people, too) and (2) a charismatic Watcher leader had tried the inevitable some years before the beginning of the story, that is, to use his "powers" and those of his followers to take over a planet. He failed, but it certainly exacerbated problem 1.
So Gilead is an honest, caring Christian man working in a secular environment, loaded with altruism. He is also extremely intelligent. All through the book he solves problems brilliantly, often leaving the reader trying to figure out what happened before slapping his or her forehead and saying, "Oh, yeah, of course!" Again, this often happened with me and Sherlock Holmes.
Since he is a Christian, the book is littered with quotes from the Bible. But this is a good thing: the quotes are to the point and relevant to the plot, not just stuck in to be decorative. This is the only book I know of with a sympathetic Christian protagonist. I find that rather refreshing, as I've seen Muslim, Buddhist, and other such represented.
And then you spy a place that provides the best corn-fed beef and free-range chicken. And it's free.
That's what this link was like for me - there's so much here to sink your metaphoric teeth into. We hear from a host of sci-fi authors and pundits who write from both sides of the aisle. The one surprise here is that 'religion' receives perhaps a more respectful treatment in the comments than I would have expected from such a quorum of sci-fi thinkers.
I was interested in the answers by Jay Lake (a self-admitted atheist) and Larry Niven. I expected to see a little focus on C. S. Lewis and was not disappointed. I was delighted that R. A. Lafferty got some love, as well as a personal favorite, Cordwainer Smith. I was very pleased to see James Blish get mentioned more than once. Even my personal hero, Roger Zelazny gets a mention. But it is John C. Wright who scores the home run strike here. Based on his post, the ball is still flying, and is due to escape Earth's atmosphere sometime during the night!
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/006457.html
The most egregious example of this anything-but-Western one-sidedness is in Variable Star by Spider Robinson. In this tale, we learn that only Zen Buddhists can pilot starships, because the quantum uncertainties involved in the star drive require transcendental meditation in the observers. Or something. This is marketed and sold as science fiction. Yet imagine if Mr. Robinson had written Variable Saint, and it was the same story with one detail changed: in this future, it was discovered that the laws of high energy physics required that a Roman Catholic priest in full canonicals, with miter and alb, had to bless the drive core and sprinkle it with holy water out of an aspergillum before it could ignite!
I assume most readers would not regard that as a proper science fiction speculation. Eastern mysticism is not more scientific than Western, but it is more novel to us, so we wonder at it.
It is telling that there is not a single science fiction story where Eastern gods or Eastern mysticism is treated as false and contemptible. In Star Trek, if an Indian, excuse me, a Native American, introduces a starship captain to his "spirit guide", this spirit never turns out to be a computer in disguise or a lying energy being. On the other hand, if anything remotely like the Christian God shows up, Spock shoots him with the forward phaser battery. This is because Progressives do not (as yet) regard any religion as antithetical to their world-view aside from Christianity. Perhaps Christianity is hard to tame.
Progressives can, and always have, use science fiction as a tool to put across their social commentary and satire. Religion is part of society and is fair game for comment and satire. But they are arrogant if they claim that science fiction is necessarily loyal to Progressivism.
Other writers, not of that faction, can and always have used science fiction to put across their world-views as well. We would have to narrow the definition of Science Fiction artificially to exclude the science fiction stories that take place in a religious moral atmosphere.
I am currently reading In Green's Jungles by Gene Wolfe: there are both godlike beings in this tale and ghostly visitations, and other things that may or may not have a scientific explanation. Whether this tale counts as "science fiction" depends on your definition. But the moral atmosphere is hauntingly, even majestically, religious; nay, it is specifically Christian, both the acute pessimism and the otherworldly hope of that ancient faith are present, even though no Christian deity or doctrine is ever named. A book, science fiction or not, that breathed the same atmosphere would be Christian, even if nothing supernatural ever happened in the tale.
But if we fiddle with the definition of SF merely to throw out Gene Wolfe as a science fiction writer, then we Science Fiction writers lose the single best writer in our field today.
I was personally a bit disappointed that nobody mentioned Timothy Zahn. His novel Deadman Switch is a personal favorite sci-fi novel that features a Christian character and worldview in a positive light.
The first-person protagonist in this story is named Gilead Raca Benedar and he is a Watcher. A Watcher is a person intensively trained from childhood to observe things minutely and use deductive (and inductive) reasoning on what you observe. In other words, like Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes doing. Only in this case, every minute of every day. When observing people, his primary job, he is practically telepathic. And forget about lying to him. It cannot be done (except possibly by another Watcher).
But the catch is that Gilead in particular, and Watchers in general, are devout Christians. And they are shunned and persecuted too, for two reasons: (1) people fear their "power" (although it's nothing more than observing and reasoning, remember that Sherlock could scare people, too) and (2) a charismatic Watcher leader had tried the inevitable some years before the beginning of the story, that is, to use his "powers" and those of his followers to take over a planet. He failed, but it certainly exacerbated problem 1.
So Gilead is an honest, caring Christian man working in a secular environment, loaded with altruism. He is also extremely intelligent. All through the book he solves problems brilliantly, often leaving the reader trying to figure out what happened before slapping his or her forehead and saying, "Oh, yeah, of course!" Again, this often happened with me and Sherlock Holmes.
Since he is a Christian, the book is littered with quotes from the Bible. But this is a good thing: the quotes are to the point and relevant to the plot, not just stuck in to be decorative. This is the only book I know of with a sympathetic Christian protagonist. I find that rather refreshing, as I've seen Muslim, Buddhist, and other such represented.