Science Fiction, Fantasy and Faith - my small contribution

Over on Claw of the Conciliator Elliot has written a multiple part essay on high quality works of fantasy and science fiction informed by the religious faith of their authors. It's worth reading.

I have responded to several of his observations. He doesn't believe that Dune by Frank Herbert should be there because while Herbert saw the importance of religion he seems to throw it in almost as a satirical aside. Perhaps. I can see the point, but when I first read it I thought it had a, well, perhaps 'spiritual' sheen to it - perhaps that was simply Herbert funning with us. One of the comments sent by Bernhardt for the Claw was that Herbert 'doesn't seem to have a clue what it's actually like to be a believer' but then goes on to say the novel isn't a bad way to get a sense of what a mahdi like jihad was like. I think that is almost a contradiction. Jihad's, Butlerian or otherwise, are the work of believers. I think the first point though is more valid if you mean a monotheistic believer in Abraham's god. But surely there are other types of religious faith that might be worth teasing out. I admit though that the Dune series might not be the work to start with (note to Elliot: if you got through three of the series, stop: Herbert was suffering a degenerative version of your SAS disease).

Elliot also asks "Am I the only one who pictures a mob of irate butlers smashing the robots who put them out of a job?" Very likely. I myself always pictured a futuristic Cromwell in a type of English Civil War that ran amok (which is a bit like saying a riot that turned riotous). The Orange Bible that Herbert kept quoting from always interested me but now that I recall it was probably a lame pastiche of King James-like prose.

Many of the books Elliot mentions are like taking a walk through my second and third decades. I read a great many of them then. Somewhere in my 11 years of grad school I stopped reading much fantasy or science fiction. But more on that later.

One of the authors he mentions whom I liked was Marion Zimmer Bradley, at least her Darkover novels which I devoured as an adolescent boy. And that was about the kind of reader they were first written for. I always felt they viewed Christianity with a very jaundiced eye. As her feminist viewpoint developed this became more obvious. Oddly enough this did not dim my appreciation of her Darkover series. Later I tried to read her Arthurian novels - The Mist of Avalon started them off. It is an historical period I know pretty well, but I simply could not get through her neo-pagan Goddess claptrap. It's a professional prejudice I suppose. On the other hand, my wife just finished Mists and thought it revealed Bradley as a gifted storyteller - but that she needed a good editor to cut it down by a quarter (creeping SAS?).

G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories are also quite good but I am not sure they fit the genres we are discussing. Aside from the fact that Father Brown is a Catholic priest, the stories were often imbued with Chesterton's sense of Christian ethics. Two examples particularly appealed to me. In one story Father Brown explains that he can solve the most difficult crimes by finding the same traits inside himself that in the criminal led him to commit the crime - even murder. All of us have motives that are potentially evil, and Brown can find his, understand them, and then figure out how similar feelings would have led the criminal to do whatever he did. The second one was when he solved a mystery because he simply paid attention to the people who served him, the waiters and valets, treated them like people instead of instruments, and actually talked with them. Remember that the next time you pass a janitor or dismiss a waiter.

That's all for right now. I'll write at least one more post on this. In the meantime, if the topic interests you, go see what Claw of the Conciliator has to say about it.