Church and Spaceship Archive

Separation of Church and Spaceship VI

Posted September 22, 2006 By John C Wright

By one of those odd (may I say Providential?) coincidences, someone answered by challenge to write a fantasy in a Christian background.  I had just been writing about Job, and lo, here is a modern take on the oldest and saddest tale still in print.

I was just sent an advanced reading copy of THE BOOK OF JOBY by Mark J. Ferrari. I don’t know when the book is going to hit your bookstores, but probably not this quarter, since the publisher is still soliciting quotes for the dust-jackets. Maybe by Spring of next year? Usually I cannot recommend the books I am sent; some are bad, some I have no time to read, and I do not want to lend my name to a work I cannot confidently recommend, lest my recommendations be no longer honored.

But this one … this one … is something special.

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Separation of Church and Spaceship V

Posted September 22, 2006 By John C Wright

The worst attempt at Christian SF it has ever been my misfortune to run across is by a brilliant up-and-coming author named Ted Chiang. If you haven’t read his short stories, you are doing yourself a bit of a disservice. You might want to rush right out and buy a copy of STORY OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS. http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others-Chiang/dp/0765304198/

But don’t tell him I sent you, dear reader, because I must now criticize his most famous story from that collection in the harshest terms. Since he is a better writer than I am, this exercise cannot be taken too seriously: a slow man is telling a fast man how to run a race.

Of course, even a slow runner can tell when a faster one has gone seriously off the track.

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Separation of Church and Spaceship IV

Posted September 18, 2006 By John C Wright

After I posted that last post, I thought of an SF version of “ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE” by which I mean a tale that takes Christian mythology as accurate, and treats it in a perfectly respectful way (as respectfully as SF authors treat the laws of physics, at least, cough, cough).

My candidate for lighthearted Christian fantasy is ON A PALE HORSE by P Anthony. There is a scene where Death arranges, as a last request, to have a church choir come by and sing. God is clearly a character in those books, and it is a basic nondenominational Protestant God, sort of along the lines of George Burns.

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Separation of Church and Spaceship III

Posted September 16, 2006 By John C Wright

I have been wondering if either fantasy or “mainstream fantasy” shows the same disinterest in religion that SF usually does. My conclusion is that it does not. A muggle will read a book or watch a movie in it that has a fantastic or unearthly element in the tale without wincing provided the fantasy element is treated in an unsurprising, and frankly unfantastic fashion.

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Separation of Church and Spaceship II

Posted September 15, 2006 By John C Wright

A reader asks:

But must science fiction be hostile to religion? I have seen reams of hostility towards Christianity from the likes of Charlie Stross and Robert Silverberg; is this simply an unjection of the author’s personal prejudice, or is rejection of the supernatural and metaphysical a pre-requisite of science fiction?

My answer:

Science Fiction is not required by law to be hostile to religion.
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Separation of Church and Spaceship I

Posted September 14, 2006 By John C Wright

On the question of whether religion and science fiction are at odds with each other, I think the answer is a qualified yes.

Portrayal of religion as a human institution, is, of course, part of SF or any literature, much the same way that portraying the odd customs of distant islanders is part of a travel literature. The fact that Ming of Mongo worships the Great God Dyzan is merely an interesting bit of local color, and so is the fact that in 200000000 AD, the people of Gonwandaland, the super-continent arising from the seas of the post-historic future, will worship Ptath, Ineznia, and L’Onee.
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Separation of Church and Spaceship

Posted July 14, 2006 By John C Wright

On the question of whether religion and science fiction are at odds with each other, I think the answer is a qualified yes. The question is explored over these columns:

 

 

 

 

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