to go boldly...

Okay, let's talk sci-fi (but let's do it without splitting infinitives). More specifically, let's talk sci-fi spirituality. Does sci-fi have a spirituality? Most popular forms of sci-fi have an unambiguously humanist slant: when-we-have-the-technology-to-find- god-he-turns-out-just-to-be-an-incredibly- powerful-being-from-a-parallel-universe- type-of-thing, Star Trek being one of the worst offenders. In original Star Trek Spock the scientist is the one with all the answers (a classically Modern view). In the Next Generation the all-knowing one is Deanna Troi, the ship's counsellor (ooh, touchy-feely; a hint of Postmodernity, anyone?). But there are some spiritually challenging examples of sci-fi out there (as bsbrev has recently noted in the past few months), Firefly and the most recent incarnation of Battlestar Galactica being just two.

But if you stray off the path of mainstream sci-fi and enter the nerdy world of hardcore sci-fi writing, there are more than enough authors presenting content challenging and even uplifting for the Christian reader. I came upon just one example today. I'm currently reading Dan Simmons' The Fall of Hyperion (sequel to Hyperion, the two novels deliberately borrowing from Keats’s poems of the same names), and it's excellent, mind-bending stuff. One of the characters sent on a pilgrimage to a desert world to appease a wrathful god-like creature is a scholar called Sol Weintraub. This how Simmons describes Sol's academic work:

"For most of his life and for all of his career, Sol Weintraub the historian-cum-classicist-cum-philosopher had dealt with the ethics of human religious behaviour. Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice. Sol's most famous book... dealt with Abraham's hard choice of obeying or disobeying God's direct command for him to sacrifice his son.

Sol had written that primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark night of the ovens which pocked Old Earth history - and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever form God now took in human consciousness - whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution - humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God's name. Sacrifice and agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.

Yet hours ago, ages ago, Sol Weintraub had handed his only child to a creature of death."

Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion (London: Gollancz, 1990) pp. 506-507

Simmons at no point rules out the existence of God but presents a universe in which the majority have selected a more humanistic form of 'spirituality'. The Church still exists (in the form of Roman Catholicism - hopefully not a comment on the vitality of the Anglican Communion, but then again, he is American...), but faces the challenge of being a dwindling community in a society even more pluralistic than our own. Although the future universe is one of incredible scientific advancement, it faces the same philosophical and theological challenges as our own, the morality of the application of scientific knowledge just one example.

But in the passage quoted above we are presented with a theologically nuanced argument that should challenge our own concepts of God, of the goodness of God, and leads the Christian reader to an interpretation of the Isaac story that I've never considered. Ultimately Sol comes to the conclusion that the reason Abraham agrees to go through with the sacrifice of his son is that the whole episode is as much Abraham testing God as God is testing Abraham:

"By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right - in Abraham's eyes and the hearts of his offspring - to become the God of Abraham."

The fact that some sci-fi author makes an unorthodox interpretation of scripture doesn't mean it's right. But the fact that it's a sci-fi author making the interpretation doesn't mean that I won't benefit from considering it, even if I do end up rejecting the conclusion. There's more to be gained from the reading of sci-fi than the loss of a social life (D&D anyone?) or fashion sense (what's wrong with black T-shirts and white trainers anyway?).

Sci-fi is here to stay, and not only do I love it, but it enriches my faith.