'You’d think that SF was intrinsically atheistic.'

Listening to some science fiction (SF) authors – and indeed to some narrow-minded Christians – you’d think that SF was intrinsically atheistic, says Philip Purser-Hallard

The genre’s emphasis on rational thought, its repudiation of unthinking superstition and (perhaps above all) its optimistic insistence that humanity can and should better itself unaided – all seem, from these two particular points of view, diametrically opposed to the religious mindset.

Naturally, given the subject of these columns, I think otherwise – and I know I’m not the only one. A great many of the Christians I meet turn out to be aficionados of SF, and a fair number of the SF fans I know are religious believers of one kind or another.

This isn’t particularly surprising, of course – none of us are defined solely by our faith (or if we are, we really shouldn’t be), and I’d expect there to be Christian SF fans just as I’d expect there to be Jewish stamp collectors or Buddhist football supporters.

Dependence Day

I have the feeling, though, that for many of us there are good reasons why we find ourselves occupying the vesica piscis of this particular Venn diagram.

Many of us, consciously or otherwise, are seeking similar fulfilment from our popular culture as from our faith.

This might involve a sense of the numinous and wondrous in creation, the potential for transcendence, or a confirmation that the limited lives we live, in tiny stretches of one planet during (at the most) two centuries, are not the totality of existence.

For some, admittedly, this is a form of escapism. Most believers, and most SF fans, are accused at one time or another of denying reality.

Certainly some stories, where the discovery of a vast, benevolent authority relieves us of the responsibility to educate, preserve and take care of ourselves, must represent an infantile nostalgia for parental protection. This is true whether the yearning is for First Contact or the Singularity, the Rapture or the Second Coming.

Just as limiting are our tendencies towards sectarian division. SF fandom is a broad church, covering a highbrow appreciation of the subtleties of a Samuel Delany novel or Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris as readily as an uncomplicated enjoyment of E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith orThundercats.

It’s perfectly possible to find SF fans with less in common than a U.S. televangelist and a Coptic Orthodox nun.

Canon Lore

What’s sad is when fans – or believers – take their personal preferences as evidence of something more fundamental. The fannish subculture which I’m most familiar, Doctor Who fandom, is rife with factional division.

Fans champion specific eras or Doctors at the expense of all others, or insist that only one ethos or style of storytelling represents ‘the spirit of Doctor Who’.

Debates concerning ‘canon’ abound, with sola scriptura fans insisting that only the old and new TV series and the TV movie are reliable, rejecting all spin-off novels, CDs, comics and the like as ‘apocryphal’.

Which is, very nearly, where we came in. The idea that a narrow understanding of reality – whether it’s that of science or the Bible, Doctor Who or Star Trek – represents the One True Way, is damaging and corrosive. For some reason, it’s also particularly prevalent in these overlapping groups.

The best SF – like the best religion, of whatever tradition – is about questions more than answers. It seeks to widen our view of reality by breaking open our conceptual barriers, far more than it seeks to narrow it by reinforcing them.

At their best, SF and religion are allies, engaged in the same enterprise of reaching towards increasing and expanding knowledge in an infinite universe.

(Although Star Trek’s still rubbish, obviously.)

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