Where are the Christians writing science fiction?

Also, a review of Georgi Boorman's new "Liminal Wake"

One of our fellow students in physics graduate school was Josiah Lewis, who wrote a sort of Narnia-like book called The Sketchbook of Scarlet. The Amazon page there implies it is the first of a trilogy but, so far as I know, the other two books were never written (if you’re reading this, you can reply and correct me, Josiah!). That book is more fantasy than science-fiction, but back when I first read it, he and I did talk sometimes about how “the future” as portrayed in most science fiction is missing some stuff we think ought be there.

For example, if you are a Christian reading this, you think Christianity is true and therefore it’ll be around forever. So if you’re reading a novel that takes place in the year 2260, there ought to be some Christians around practicing Christianity (depending on your eschatology, you might think that by 2260 that should be almost everyone)… OK, you almost never see that (perhaps books like A Canticle for Leibowitz would be unique exceptions).

Y’all know I enjoy Star Trek. Side comment, I actually watched an episode yesterday that referenced the “bynars”, a species that has part of their brain removed shortly after birth and replaced with circuitry, so they can maintain constant contact with their world’s computer. So, you know, TOTALLY NOT LIKE US IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER. (That same episode, which is from 1988 mind you, also features one character falling in love with an artificial intelligence.)

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is perhaps unique in that the religion of the Bajorans is a critical part of the show, from the first episode to the last. The Bajorans call their gods the “prophets”, and as the show goes on, the existence of their gods is empirically confirmed, they are aliens who actually do live outside of time (makes ‘em pretty good at prophecy), and who communicate with the Bajoran people. Yet despite what is basically empirical proof for the truth of the religion, when admirals from Starfleet (think, elite future humans) show up, they still ridicule people who take the Bajoran beliefs seriously, I suspect because the show writers still had this sense of “religion = arbitrary thing about feelings, not a serious thing” even though they’d already written the validity of the religion into the show.

Where are the Christians writing science fiction?

So why aren’t more Christians writing science fiction today? Part of the genesis of this post is because Georgi Boorman recently published her new and first novel, Liminal Wake. She gave it to me (and several other people) to read ahead of time so we could publish reviews of it on the launch day and get the word out, which I was and am happy to do, because I quite enjoyed it. She published some of her own thoughts on Christian storytelling at the end of May, under title The Ghettoization of Christian Storytelling. For example, although I think the situation is improving these days, especially if you think back a few years, and compare your reaction to “movie” and “Christian movie”, I think there was an expectation that the latter would likely be inferior and probably cringe. Why?

You can read her whole piece there, but let me quote a section of it which is, I suspect, at least part of the explanation. I know we have a diversity (many traditions) of Christian readers here, so some of you will probably say “amen!” to this, and others will be terribly offended and begin shouting at your phones or monitors, but here you go.

More than that, there seems to be little appetite for broad, nuanced, or ambiguous storytelling among Christians—at least not for stories written by Christians. Why? I think the hyper-literalistic framework that has dominated Protestant Christianity in America for a century is largely to blame: Yes, it’s six literal days of creation. Yes, it’s literally a flood over the whole planet. Yes, it’s literally a rapture into the air, literally a physical mark of the beast, literally a seven-year tribulation, and so on.

It’s not just that evangelicals believe these things—it’s that any alternative interpretations are branded as theological liberalism, and getting that black mark leaves few avenues for even moderate success with Christian audiences. (Never mind that many church fathers didn’t hold literalism as the gold-standard hermeneutical framework, but this isn’t about that.) This rigid framework has spilled beyond doctrine and into storytelling, so that any speculative work that could possibly be “interpreted” as heresy probably will be, and sooner rather than later. Many Christian influencers won’t see speculative stories as places to dig deep into themes like sacrifice, salvation, and human dignity—they’ll see a Christian “failing to do their job” or “wandering off the path.”

She might be overstating things there a little bit, BUT… I think she has a point. Very generally what happened, I think, was… dial it back to the Protestant Reformation. The new Protestants look at Roman Catholicism and see what looks to them like a whole bunch of human-built accretions that are a distraction from the heart of the Christian message, and decide a lot of that stuff needs to be trimmed away (and indeed, one difference between the various Reformers is how much they decide to trim). Over time (up to the present day), from a desire to avoid recreating the same mistakes they just got away from, Protestants get spooked about “speculating” or “reasoning” or “elaborating”, or however you want to say it, past what scripture actually says (coming to manifest itself, for some, as this hyper-literalistic framework).

And, now that I’ve offended all the Protestants, I think that stings us in areas outside of just fiction writing. With some shining exceptions like Carl Trueman (who, incidentally, references a whole lot of Roman Catholic writers), an inordinate amount of the good commentary about modern anthropological and technological questions, from a Christian perspective, is coming from Roman Catholic thinkers. Why? Well, I think it’s some of the same thing. If you want to write about how Christians should think about artificial intelligence, in the most literal way anyway… there are no Bible verses about artificial intelligence (though I do enjoy jokes about Joshua destroying Ai). The same goes for many other modern topics - you absolutely should source your thinking in scripture, but you have to reason from and past that, in a way, and incorporate insights from an examination of the natural world and order of things, and I think Roman Catholics are just more comfortable operating in that way. (But I do think the modern classical education movement, actually, which involves many Protestants, is also more comfortable operating in that way.)

Finally, Liminal Wake

Let me end here by talking about a book I did enjoy!

In my opinion, good science fiction does two things. One, and especially if it is the first entrant in a new “universe”, it engages in interesting world building. Why we humans enjoy that so much is a question, but I suspect it helps satisfy the human desire to explore and even, in our imaginations, create. We want to mentally live in this place for a while.

To that end, Liminal Wake presents a plausible near-future. Action takes place in the northwestern United States, now the “Pacific Independent Territory” (and some of you say, “good riddance!”). The Space Needle is gone, and where it used to be, besides a shady red-light district, is The Loop, a new arena that is central to life in the PIT. The Loop fulfills a sort of religious need of the populace, although residents don’t think of it that way (Georgi understanding, I think, that no society ever really gets away from religion), and is also the place where some citizens choose to end their own lives every “loop”. There is a mysterious new life form, absentis liminalis, that just started appearing one day, somehow also critical to operations in The Loop, and (as a science guy) I probably enjoyed watching the investigation and unraveling of that mystery more than anything else in the novel. There is, apparently, widespread chronic illness, largely dealt with through the use of new bionics, many of them controlled by a single megacorporation, but with unlicensed and rebel doctors also off doing their own things.

And secondly, and this connects to some of my comments about Star Trek above, good science fiction helps us to think differently about issues that matter right now, by placing them in an unfamiliar context. Without “preaching” about anything, just by being a good story, Liminal Wake raises questions about: how the infirm should be viewed and treated by society (obviously including the possibility of people choosing to end their own lives); transhumanism, which really is THE societal conflict we have today, in this case especially as it concerns the replacement or augmentation of biology with technology; duties of loyalty and rebellion in a broken system; interactions between mega-corporations and political authorities; and the personal complexities of human relationships, major characters in the novel being a father and his teenage daughter (the mother now deceased).

All that to say, I found this an enjoyable and intelligent read. If you’re looking for a new science fiction read, you might check it out. It is the first of two planned books (the second already written, in this case), so not every mystery created is entirely unraveled in this first book!

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