Five years ago, I started pondering this question and people have clicked on this essay nearly a thousand times, making it the single most-viewed thing I’ve ever posted. I’d like to continue thinking out loud on the issue now that I’m older and the world has changed a bit...
When I talk about Christianity disappearing in space, I'm talking about the observations that I've made in the reading I've done. I'm a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and am currently on the Norton Award Committee. As part of that group, we read and recommend new SF and F written specifically for middle school/high school/early college aged young people. So far, out of over a hundred novels I've read or previewed, only one character has been a professing Christian. The others curse, talk to gods, goddesses and other minor deities and engage in any number of normal, mundane things -- but they don't appear to be Christians.
Don't get me wrong, it's not amazing to me that author's biases, beliefs, and orientations -- their personalities -- come out in their writing. Someone once made a comment that eventually became an aphorism, "Want to be a writer? Just open up a vein and bleed." An author's philosophy of life becomes clear when we read their writing.
C.S. Lewis, my favorite writer, observed, "We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy's line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects with their Christianity latent." (GOD IN THE DOCK)
What I am talking about is that evangelical Christians (or for that matter, evangelical Buddhists, Hindus or Confucianists) have either a) made little or no effort to write stories and novels with latent faith -- or b) Christianity is being supressed by evangelical atheists in the SF/F world. (c) is a hard one for me to consider, but here it is: that Christians, Muslims and Taoists all write bad SF/F. It's possible but on the face of it, unlikely. After all, despite Philip Pullman's rants, people still read Tolkein and Lewis more often than they read him and both of them are Christians.)
Christianity will NOT disappear from space. Christians will "boldly go where no one has gone before" -- as will Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists. Christian writers need to write GOOD science fiction with Christianity latent in every story. Atheist/agnostic editors and publishers need to quit panicking in fear that publishing stories with Christians in them will somehow undermine their atheist or agnostic beliefs and quit pretending that Christianity (and other faiths) will somehow disappear when the real exploration of the Universe begins. They need to be bold in their willingness to look at futures that might include faiths other than insipid atheism or militant agnosticism...
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19 comments:
Notice what CS Lewis actually said, though: we need Christians who write things with their Christianity latent. It's quite likely that some of those hundreds of stories that you read were written by Christians that specifically chose not to make their characters Christian, but to explore their Christianity in other ways.
I say this for myself, because I'm a yet-unpublished Christian scifi writer, and I've never felt compelled to write a story about a Christian whose belief were similar to my own. I've written about wacky Bible-based terror cults and fictional religions that resemble Christianity in some ways, but never the sort of religion that I actually practice. I don't do this because I'm avoiding it, but because I've never needed it for the kind of story I'm trying to write.
I've read Lewis extensively and clearly understand what he meant by "latent". I'd love to read a story where you explored your Christianity using a Bible-based terror cult...
I agree that there is relatively little depiction of christianity and christians (especially in a positive light) in the work of top SF writers. I also think its perfectly reasonable to explore the question of why this is so.
But I think you have overstated your case and, thereby, somewhat weakened the credibility of the points you're making.
A good example is the following:
Atheist/agnostic editors and publishers need to quit panicking in fear that publishing stories with Christians in them will somehow undermine their atheist or agnostic beliefs and quit pretending that Christianity (and other faiths) will somehow disappear when the real exploration of the Universe begins.
In a year where EIFELHEIM, a novel that has Christians as central characters and depicts them in an extremely positive light, was not only published but nominated for the Hugo for Best Novel this seems especially hyperbolic.
I know what you're trying to say, however, a quick check of the stats on the 2007 Hugo shows the following:
Ballots cast for Best Novel = 471
Votes for EIFELHEIM = 96
It placed fourth in a field of five.
While this is obviously good, the numbers are hardly significant in themselves. The group that nominates and votes on the Hugo is very elite -- made up of people who were able to fly to Japan for the event. It's also not made up of "hard core" SF people. I've never been to a WorldCon before, but I have seen pictures and spoken with people who have. It's great fun, exciting and uplifting -- but I doubt that it that it is a representative example of science fiction readership.
In other words, I stand by my statements.
Unless you can point to an actual example of a quality SF story suppressed by editors because of its christian themes or characters the statement I quoted above remains nothing more than a baseless accusation.
And you didn't address my central point in that post. You accuse SF editors of suppressing books with prominent positive portrayals of christianity but exactly such a book WAS published last year, positively reviewed and widely praised. The fact that Worldcon attendees aren't "a representative example of SF readership" doesn't even address the point I raised.
And the final point is that I intentionally raise points to be irritating -- not necessarily because I believe what I say. I DO believe that there is a bias against the Christian world view in science fiction. That said, it is inherently unprovable because I would have to survey editors and ask them if they ever rejected a story because they hated Christians and not only would that be rude, I doubt anyone would want to hurt feelings by answering bluntly. HOWEVER -- there is a bias against the Christian world view in the non-Christian world; by definition. And there has to be a bias between science and faith as they are mutally exclusive: science deals only with visible, provable, repeatable evidence; faith deals belief in the invisible, unprovable and miraculous. Science fiction has a built in bias against Christian (or any other) faith -- inescapable...but as all biases are, repairable.
Such a bias as you describe is, in effect, a bias in favor of rationality---something which I happen to like about my favorite works of science fiction.
Just so you don't think I'm totally out to lunch with this, I received the following response from a well-known and repected SF writer to my essay:
"Your essays are not "possibly" irritating. They are blasphemous. You do not understand one thing about the world....I do hope that Guy Stewart will not further disturb my life by sending me these INSANELY stupid essays any more!! Go and read books by Richard Dawkins about evolution, if you want to understand the world as it really is. So far, however old you may be, you have no understanding of real life whatsoever. By the way, Madeleine' L'Engle's books were idiotic and extremely offensive. Any book for which the solution is to say the word "Love" becomes instantly meaningless. Would that ever work in the real world? Try to think about it for one second, Guy. If you are capable of rational thought at all. Seeing as how you call your essays "possibly irritating," I feel I am allowed to express my extreme irritation. I am a scientist. Not a closed minded superstitious bigot."
Comments?
Personally, I don't find your essays irritating.
I just think you shoot yourself in the foot by overstating your case.
I don't know anything about L'engles writing (I might have read A WRINKLE IN TIME when I was around 8 or so but I cant recall a single thing about the book).
Something I thought you might be interested in. I came across a novel that's described as christian cyberpunk:
FLASHPOINT by Frank Creed
Ever heard of it? Anyway, here's the link to it on Amazon if you want to check it out:
http://www.amazon.com/Flashpoint-Book-Underground-Frank-Creed/dp/1934284017/ref=sr_1_1/105-2917086-3423632?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190569028&sr=1-1
Don't know if you've heard of this one. A science fiction trilogy (THE EVIDENCE, THE PROOF and THE RETURN) by Austin Boyd.
http://www.austinboyd.com/myBooks.htm
The previous one I mentioned, FLASHPOINT, doesn't sound very good to me but Boyd's books actually sound pretty interesting.
I ran across FLASHPOINT but not the other three -- I'll check around and see if I can find them. Thanks!
Here's something else that might be of interest:
http://www.christianscifi.com/
Its bookstore has many christian sf titles. IN HIS IMAGE, a book about an attempt to clone Jesus from cell found in the shroud of Turin, can be found there. It sounds like an intriguing premise.
I've never heard of most of the books that can be found there but it turns out that there's actually quite a few more christian sf novels to be found than I had imagined.
To take a different path down the same argument...
I feel that the reason that Christian scifi fails (and right now it is failing) is that it is Christian scifi rather than scifi with some Christian overtones. It's often heavy handed and insulting, even to me, someone born and raised in a Christian home. Evidently many christian writers haven't fully grasped the nuances of 'latent'.
Mainstream Christian stories, (not just in the scifi genre)as a general rule, end horribly. There is the moment of climax when you wonder how someone could possilby triumph against such odds, only to suddenly have the protagonist suddenly realize he simply should have relied more heavily on Jesus. This kind of ending should make even evangelical christians throw books across the room or possibly through plate glass windows. As the Anonymous Angry person said:
Any book for which the solution is to say the word "Love" becomes instantly meaningless.
(While there are few novels that are actually as painful as I just made them out to be, many unfortunately fall into trying to subtly slide this subject in past a readers guard and inevitably fail to do so.)
Getting a bit long here, but I would also like to point out that Christian Characters aren't unheard of even in non-christian writers works. Orson Scott's Card entire book Xenocide took place in a Catholic colony, and in doing so in a neutral never made me want to beat my head against a wall.
A bias may exist but could it perhaps be that the writers of Christian scifi are writing in far too narrow of a scope? Current religions are avoided so as make sure that the reader will fully open his mind to the possibilities, and not bring his preconceived notions to the novel. Are we to honestly expect a reader to not associate an openly evangelical character with a matronly figure at a bake sale or (God forbid) Pat Robertson? While a dearth of religious scifi characters exist, their absence perhaps makes it easier for a reader to step into a characters world.
Current religions are avoided so as make sure that the reader will fully open his mind to the possibilities, and not bring his preconceived notions to the novel.
I think that this is an important point. As a writer who sometimes wants to present or explore Christian ideas, it is often easier or preferable to do so in a religion that is not explicitly Christian, to get past the audience's resistance. The more explicitly Christian your themes are, the more it may be necessary to distance yourself from literal Christianity to make yourself heard. This may be especially true for shocking doctrines like the Incarnation that have lost their bite through repetition.
It's often heavy handed and insulting, even to me, someone born and raised in a Christian home. Evidently many christian writers haven't fully grasped the nuances of 'latent'.
I think that's probably right on the mark. Christian writers today should study CS Lewis's OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET. I'm reading it for the first time and am 47 pages into the short (160 page) book.
So far, it has mentioned religion exactly one time---only briefly---on page 35.
"...Christianity latent." CS Lewis
latent: potentially existing but not presently evident or realized; "a latent fingerprint"; "latent talent"
not presently active; "latent infection"; "latent diabetes"
From the Nothing New Under The Sun Department, I'm about three-quarters of the way through The Blood of the Lamb, which won the 1992 Bram Stoker for best novel (which is odd, because it sure doesn't seem like a horror novel to me). The hook: a clone has been made from the blood on the Shroud of Turin. The people who made the clone (a secret cabal within the Vatican--of course) are starting to question whether it's really Jesus they cloned, but the description of In His Image earlier in this thread of comments could just as easily have been written about this book. (I see that In His Image is the first book in a trilogy, by the way.)
There are some interesting ideas for theological exploration in The Blood of the Lamb, but so far none of them have been fleshed out to any degree, which is too bad. As it stands, I think it's a fair-to-middlin' thriller--fine for reading on the bus, but nothing more.
Regarding Flashpoint: Book One of the Underground
Guess it depends on what you are looking for; Flashpoint is billed as Christian cyberpunk, but, because so many Christians are wary of the concept of "cyberpunk" Creed has begun to call it endtimes fiction. He has had excellent reviews even though it won't be available until later this month: you can read some at frankcreed. com.
The next book in the series is due out in '08: War of Attrition.
Frank also has 3 short stories (Chairman, Miracle Micro, True Freedom) in Light at the Edge of Darkness in the same cyberpunk setting--same writer's voice but for a more sophisticated audience.
--cyn
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