To be sure, some science fiction writers during this period utilized specific religious myths, such as the Genesis story or the flood myth, as constructs for their fiction. So also with George Orwell's 1984 where scientific statism substitutes Big Brother for God. Scientific determinism, Huxley seems to say, is as evil and perhaps as inevitable as religious determinism. If religion is an opiate, so also is science when it becomes a surrogate religion. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World carried science so far with its extrauterine typology and soma as a soporific communion substitute that it seems almost a parallel answer to the excesses of religiosity. Religion was ignored, but in its absence, science of the scientists became the hero.Ī few "mainstream" science fiction novels of this era also substituted an evangelistic science for more traditional beliefs. Instead they constructed probability worlds or potential futures where science or its off-shoots reigned supreme. Clarke-all of whom were developed in the 1940's under the tutelage of either Gernsback or Campbell-rarely betrayed a specific antireligious bias. in bio-chemistry), Jack Williamson, Robert A. To be sure, many notable science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov (who holds a Ph.D. In this approach writers and editors merely reflected the views that had been started earlier by such mainstream writers as H.G. These stories, in turn, deified scientific achievement or an angry humanism extended either into space or the future, and both positions excluded almost any aspect of traditional religion. Both scientifically trained, they emphasized hard core science in the stories they selected for publication. That the traditional antagonism between science and religion should surface in science fiction was probably inevitable, considering the personalities of the two editors who were responsible for the growth of the modern American genre, Hugo Gernsback and John W. In this view, religion becomes superstitious hokum prostituting science to nefarious ends. Here a rigid, stratified, hierarchical monasticism utilizes the effects of science, which the monks, as sole custodians, maintain as secrets under threats of excommunication and use to enforce their privileged position at the expense of the believing but unlettered masses. Typical of the novels of this era was Fritz Leiber's Gather, Darkness (1940). There was no god but math or science, and Einstein-or his fictional counterpart-was its prophet. ![]() Wells, depicted scientists as the new saviors of humanity. The pages of the old Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction in the 1930's and 1940's were cluttered with fiction which depicted the church, any church, as narrow, intellectually debilitating and corrosive to independent thought. For decades after Hugo Gernsback reinvented science fiction as a ghetto genre in 1926, its writers reflected the traditional antipathy of science toward religion. Such cooperation between these two apparently divergent philosophies has not always been the case, of course. They range from a serious examination of a pre-Vatican II but renascent Catholicism some hundreds of years into the future in Walter Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz to an extrapolative messianism based upon the Islamic mystique in Frank Herbert's Dune. The range of the religious themes as a result of the imaginative projections created by the authors is amazingly extensive. Religion in the hands of the creators of speculative fiction may be intransigent religiosity, dominant institutionalism, a simple frame of reference, or serious examination of the role of a new-or old-religion either on earth or some far distant planet in the future. ![]() Huxley!Īt first glance the two terms seem almost antithetical, yet a close examination of much of the best science fiction of the last decade reveals just the opposite: religion or religious themes have provided contemporary speculative literature with some of its most cogent extrapolations, and, perhaps not coincidentally, with some of science fiction's very best novels and short stories.īoth religion and science fiction are, in a sense, undefinable, admitting of extreme diversity in approach. ![]() Science fiction and religion walking-or jetting-hand in hand? Shades of the Scopes trial or Bishop Wilberforce and T.H. Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the issue of America as “Science Fiction and Religion.”
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