A famous author once said, “Any sufficiently opaque science fiction narrative is indistinguishable from a Christ allegory.” (Or something along those lines.) We should expect any movie set in low earth orbit to at least consider why we don’t see any dudes with harps perched on clouds. Science fiction draws theological metaphor to it like ravenous bug aliens to abandoned space stations, but reviewers and critics tend to avoid discussing the spiritual roots of a lot of contemporary genre fiction. Instead, the critical conversation is almost entirely about the technical wizardry needed to simulate zero G, or what type of underwear astronauts dress in.
Genre fiction has long been a realm for grappling with religious ideas, and critics should know better than to expect a movie set in space to only be about jetpacks and oxygen levels. For early science fiction novelists, the Moon was as distant from day-to-day life as heaven was. Is it a surprise, then, that C.S. Lewis went from converting to Christianity to writing about going to Mars and Venus? The leaps of intuition and imagination needed to picture what life would be life in the future or on other planets mirror those needed to embrace religion.
So we get Lewis’s Space Trilogy, and we get heavy Catholic themes in Tolkien, and we get Madeline L’engle being ham-handed about angels and aliens in a way that’d make the History Channel blush. That thin veneer of fantasy just becomes a way to grapple with existential angst and predestination and prophecy without having to put on our most learned robes and our spectacles.
This connection works both ways – without getting too blasphemous, it can be edifying to imagine religious texts as a form of pre-technological speculative fiction. The Book of Job serves well as a short story interrogating the nature of evil precisely because of its mythopoetic elements. Without the argument between Satan and God, it would just be a depressing bit of literature about a good dude who has bad things happening to him. Likewise, Revelation is straight up and down a speculative story about the future, complete with deadly meteors and horrifying hybrid monsters. Without getting too far into a theological swamp, the speculative aspects become a lens used to look at the promises made by religion, and to promise how they will end.
There is a shared interest in extremes – extremes of morality, extremes of behavior. If there are no atheists in foxholes, surely there are no Unitarians in hard vacuum. Sometimes this is explicit, as in Mary Doria Russell’s Sparrow’s depiction of a Jesuit-funded mission to a new planet. She implies that only the devoutly religious would be willing to risk their temporal selves on the dangerous journey to a distant world with alien life, and maybe that’s true. Or perhaps it’s more that incredible risk and existential peril forces characters to pick a side: nihilism or zealotry.
Most recently, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity told a story of a woman who’s lost her child and must learn how to continue living in the face of her own despair. As a series of unfortunate explosions kills every other astronaut, Dr. Stone (Sandra Bullock) must go to increasingly baroque lengths to survive. At several points she almost gives up; at several points she finds the strength to go on. When she attempts suicide in an escape capsule, it becomes clear to us that it is far easier for her to die than to live.
The film literalizes the idea that for someone who has lost their only child, continuing to exist is a struggle. The simplest thing to do would be to let the oxygen run out and to fall asleep. Instead, she learns how to continue to live when she’s not even sure if she has anything to live for. The film forces both the protagonist and the viewer to experience the crushing, omnipresent nearness of death in hard vacuum and the transition from suicidal terror to faith in the value of life. She learns to pray, mirroring the radio messages she sends to “Houston in the blind,” not sure if the NASA space center can even hear her, let alone help her. Meanwhile, the camera lingers on a Russian ikon and a statue of Buddha.
None of this is subtle! In fact, I would argue that the roller coaster ride of the plot exists only to provide a framework of disaster on which to hang Dr. Stone’s crisis of faith. So why aren’t we talking about Gravity as religious science fiction?
In some ways, it’s not surprising that these recurring themes in sci fi go undiscussed. Genre fiction has a long history of talking about one thing (religion, mortality, the nature of humanity) while appearing to talk about another (space ships, clones, robots with very strong fists). Probably we should blame the USSR. One of the earliest dystopian novels, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, was a thinly veiled allegory about the dangers of Bolshevism, written after the Russian Revolution and projecting the threat it posed to society into the distant future. The only way to grapple with the utopianism of Soviet mythology was to write a counter-utopia.
The prescriptivist pop culture of the Soviet Union forced filmmakers to layer their ideas under genre convention, leading to Art films that hid their intent behind layers of genre and adventure and lush camerawork. The easiest example is Tarkovsky: an incredibly Christian director living in a time where that was simply not allowed, but still driven to make movies about his faith. He buried his thoughts – on Christ, on charity, on death – in movies about sneaking into abandoned and overgrown industrial complexes to get wishes granted, or about alien planets whose oceans can recreate people from your memories.
Tarkovsky’s Solaris is the most direct example of the theme of hiding God in outer space. On its surface, it’s a slow-paced thriller about a research space station studying a mysterious ocean on an unexplored planet. But the sea’s habit of recreating the dead loved ones of the researchers isn’t played for action. It’s a structure to let the lead scientist monologue at length on ideas of universal love and the nature of loss. We never learn whether there is extraterrestrial intelligence at play – it is unclear if the ocean is responding to unconscious prayers of the researchers. In a more contemporary and shallow sci fi movie, we would demand an explanation of what exactly was happening on that planet. But in the end, the scientist chooses to accept what is offered to him without understanding it. His descent to a newly-risen island in the alien ocean becomes a kind of personalized rapture: going to a place where his dead loved ones still live without having to die himself.
By layering genre tropes over the religious message, Tarkovsky was able to slip his Christian theology past atheist censors. The only way for him to make a movie about the limits of rationality and the role of faith in his life was to adopt the form of science fiction. Some of his successors were even subtler with their themes.
In Duncan Jones’ Moon, what appears to be a hard sci fi story about illegal corporate activity buries its themes of alienation, personal growth, and development under a thick sediment of implanted memories and clone disease. The question of how to grow, how to become a better person, when to sacrifice a part of yourself – these are spiritual issues, which are confronted by leaving the main character absolutely alone with himself. Where a 19th-century Russian novelist might have his protagonist reading a Bible in solitary confinement, in the 21st century Duncan Jones has him talk to his own clone on the Moon.
Apparently, it may be too hard for critics to recognize the religious messages in the text of genre fiction. But given this history of deeper intent in science fiction, shouldn’t they be expecting it? The ending of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica received a lot of flack from fans for its overtly religious message, despite their being told from the beginning that God has a plan for all the characters on the show. Yet some fans expected a materialist explanation for the protagonists’ mystical visions.
And so, we watch a movie about a woman who must learn how to keep living and can only talk about whether the explosions were accurate enough. We watch a movie about a man who must confront the brash and fucked-up personality of his own past self and can only talk about how realistic its portrayal of moon mining is. Much as animation is viewed as a genre instead of a medium, we’ve been trained to see science fiction as a genre focused on science. We should work instead to see the edges of what is being shown to us – to talk about how space ships demonstrate both the might and the limits of rationality.
Tags: battlestar galactica, christian brown, cs lewis, gravity, moon, religion, science fiction, solaris
this seems as good a SPACE as any to remind everyone that this absolutely batshit novel a) exists, and b) is waaaay better than it has any right to be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_on_Mars
(note: it is still quite bad (misogyny like whoa), but not quite as bad as that Flaming Lips-esque title might lead you to believe)
Too bad that Philip José Farmer’s awesomely crazy ideas didn’t go to someone with better writing chops! I still love him, though.
I have nothing intelligent to say about this right now except YES YES YES
I have a shit-ton to say about this right now, but none of it is intelligent enough so I’ll just say YES YES YES too.
(Your user name is the best, by the way!)
I’ve been reading Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ recently, and one of the most surprising things about it is that it involves an intentionally manufactured religion based on an entity called “The Galactic Spirit.” An entire population is sold on the idea that nuclear energy is a spiritual force and all the technology that uses it must be supervised by a priesthood. This is presented as a shrewd and necessary move by a far-future scientific community. (Less surprising is that there are hardly any female characters.)
Yeah, Asimov’s stories have relatively few female characters, though I definitely was fond of Dr. Susan Calvin when I was younger, if only because female scientist characters are still rare in science fiction.
I agree that critics and other people who write about science fiction often don’t spend enough time on the religious and other human themes in the works, and there are obviously some science fiction works where the religious themes are explicit. I’m not sure, though, whether it’s that religious themes are showing up in science fiction or that these universal themes show up in both religion and science fiction. Are stories of noble self-sacrifice references to Jesus, or is the story of Jesus is so compelling because of a larger human reaction to that kind of sacrifice? Or is it both, since certain religious stories and themes have thoroughly permeated Western culture?
Like Hyperion Cantos! Aenea is a Jesus who is an Anti Jesus. The whole story is about human beings vs the theocracy. It’s great, and it’s sort of a religious story about the dangers of religion, the danger of everlasting life.
YES, exactly; I mean, half the point of SF is to explore reality through metaphor. (The other half is to make it possible for characters to go to different time periods/parallel universes and have sex with themselves.)
But I did want to ask about this line: If there are no atheists in foxholes, surely there are no Unitarians in hard vacuum. You can be Unitarian and have a strong belief in God – or am I misunderstanding that paragraph?
Oh, sure. (Full disclosure: I attend and had my wedding in a Unitarian church.) My point was more that extremes of condition force people to extremes of belief, and I’m not sure that Unitarianism is the most common response to those pressures.
Who married you? Did they know that you hate Sherlock? (jk, <3 u, Christian.)
My wife is – I am not even joking – the only person who hates Sherlock even more than I do. If you mention Sherlock to her, you will get a five minute tirade against it and its crimes against the canonical SACD Holmes. Oh man she HATES Sherlock.
NOPE, don’t believe it. She is a wig on a volleyball. Stop living a lie.
The ending of Battlestar Galactica was offensively stupid not because it was religious, but because it made no sense. It presented authorial fiat as religious revelation: why do the colonists throw away their culture, which they’d desperately tried to preserve? Because Ronald D. Moore thought it would be poetic if they suddenly believed in the power of blood to pass on ideals! If that’s all religion has to offer–unimpeachable, nonsensical revelations–then it’s no wonder it’s not very popular when it’s tacked onto our stories.
On the other hand, written SF does quite well with these ideas. Greg Egan’s novella “Oceanic” (readable at the link), or novel Permutation City, which is the most impressively Christian allegory I’ve ever seen from such an atheistic creator.
(It’s also worth noting that the arbitrary, unmotivated ending of Battlestar Galactica came at the end of literally years of assurance by Moore and the show promos that yes, there was totally an explanation for everything, it was all totally going to make sense in the end, and all appearances to the contrary, they absolutely had not been completely winging the plot for a year and a half.)
I had friends who went from recommending Lost every time we saw them to cursing Abrams’ name based solely on the finale. I don’t think anyone really manages to plan things out that well. Maybe J. Michael Straczynski.
When Head Six and Head Baltar are walking around in modern-day Earth, one mentions “god” to the other, and they respond “you know he doesn’t like to be called that.” I believe I actually shouted “no; he likes to be called Ronald D. Moore!” at the screen at that point.
I thought I’d gotten all of my vitriol out of the way here, but apparently I’m still angry about that show. (The writers voted to pick the Final Five! Seriously! Apparently the writers’ plan was about as well defined as the Cylons’.)
I think it’s an incredibly myopic reading of The Sparrow to say that “she implies that only the devoutly religious would be willing to risk their temporal selves on the dangerous journey to a distant world with alien life.” Fully a half of the crew isn’t Jesuit (SPOILERS: After the death of Alan, the Jesuits are outnumbered by the laypeople): Sophia is culturally Jewish, but it’s unclear what her beliefs are. George is nearly silent on the subject, and Anne is loudly agnostic if not atheist–and just as invested in the mission as Emilio. The jury is out on Jimmy Quinn–we know that he was raised Irish Catholic, but he also isn’t super vocal on questions of faith.
Absolutely Emilio got to Rakhat to find God, and absolutely Russell uses science fiction to explore religion, but I don’t think any character comes away from that mission firmly in camp nihilism or camp zealotry.
(Full disclosure: The Sparrow is my favorite book beyond all reason, and I will defend it with my dying breath even to the point of absurdity. The rest of this article is super fascinating and smart and interesting.)
I think no one starts the mission firmly in camp nihilism or camp zealotry, but I think Emilio spends a fair amount of time in camp nihilism.
Maybe I’m conflating camp nihilism with camp very sad.
Camp all my beliefs got ripped out and stomped on and then stomped on some more.
Camp affectionate portrayal of liberal hubris.
As a devout Christian turned adamant atheist, The Sparrow is also my favorite book beyond all reason, and I will be beside you defending it! I am disappointed in this reading of a nuanced and fascinating book.
Interesting that you consider Solaris a religious work when interpreted in film by Tsarkovsky, even though the film adaptation is very true to the novel, and Lem was pretty direct about his atheism. I think choosing to count the work as religious is part of a pattern of Christian writers who choose to disregard or cannot understand the contributions of atheists to metaphysics. I’m not saying Christian Brown is deliberately excluding atheists here, only that it’s consistent with a Christian tendency to conclude, if an artist is exploring the deeper meanings of existence, that he is writing about religious topics. But a work can be spiritual or existential without being religious. Maybe the reason more critics don’t interpret science fiction films in religious terms is because it’s an unnecessarily exclusionary thing to do, when we can talk about all of these topics without excluding any faiths or lack of faith.
Hi, I am Christian, and also I am not christian. (har har) I’m an agnostic unitarian, so I guess don’t blame me for claiming that Tarkovsky was religious and made religious movies when he was incredibly, astoundingly christian!
That said, yes, of course, you can wrestle with Big Ideas while being atheistical. But I don’t think the sci fi/fantasy community is especially interested in letting you forget about the existence of atheism.
Thanks for the fascinating article. Funny how I (being, admittedly, an atheist with only a mild interest in science fiction) never really thought about all those connections before seeing them laid out so clearly.
HOWEVER: There is an important omission/ unclarity in the Tarkovsky bit. Yes, he did direct “Solaris”, but the screenplay was not original. It was based on a novel (under the same title) by Stanislaw Lem, the amazing Polish science fiction legend. You may wish to at least add a tag!
Absolutely. Lem gets a lot of the credit here. I think, tho, that Tarkovsky’s “thing” was taking a straight genre piece and through his lens and editing and casting and etc. putting in the undertones of religiosity and spiritualism. He took the strong lines of sci fi and then added a ton of subtext between them.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, well done. Don’t have much to add other than 1) I remember liking The Space Trilogy but I also seem to remember that the thin veneer of fantasy washes away toward the end of the last book and is blatantly Christian no? and, 2) Sam Rockwell is my favorite actor and I need to re-watch Moon…and Hitchhikers Guide…and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind for that non-sci-fi matter.
Great article.
I’ve been re-watching Deep Space Nine and it actually has some interesting things to say about, at a meta level, about materialist explanations of religious phenomenon (with the whole Gods-live-in-the-wormhole thing).
Go on…
Well OK to be fair the *setup* is probably more interesting than what they actually do with it. Especially given Trek’s general baggage of unexamined woo-woo New Ageism, what with the life forces and telepathy and all that mystical crystal stuff that TNG especially went in for. [DS9 also has magic crystals.]
Actually, maybe Star Trek just predicted Brooklyn. Everyone is “spiritual” but no one is religious; civilians are all in artisanal jobs like farming, running a restaurant, or being a tailor, or they are artists/scientists; and despite being surrounded by/depending on advanced technology people still spend a lot of time on yoga and juice cleanses. Also, beards are IN.
Oh man I loved Moon but i watched it in a vacuum (no pun intended) of criticism. I had heard nothing about it except “hey it has Kevin Spacey” which was basically the selling point to me. I thought it was a brilliant way to have someone literally confront their past incarnation and I had no idea people thought it was just a straight up sci-fi movie. Wouldn’t have called it a religious thing but still – do people really not read into sci-fi that way anymore? I thought that was the whole point of sci-fi.
I mentioned in another thread that I am unhappy with how this piece reads The Sparrow, and on second read I’m also disappointed in the dismissal of Madeline L’Engle as “being ham-handed about angels and aliens in a way that’d make the History Channel blush.” She is an excellent example of a speculative writer who grapples with religion, and yes, her books are for children, some metaphors are pretty heavy, there’s a cold war metaphor draped over a lot of it, but there is also nuance and intelligence.
We absolutely need to be talking about how science fiction interacts with religion. It is so common and so interesting, and something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. But in this piece, the focus seems to be on how not-subtle these metaphors are, such as here: “There is a shared interest in extremes – extremes of morality, extremes of behavior. If there are no atheists in foxholes, surely there are no Unitarians in hard vacuum.” Not only does this not apply to The Sparrow, but I think it equally doesn’t apply to most well-written works of science fiction that deal with religion. There is definite subtlety. There is definite grappling, doubt, characters with different points of view, etc.
Christian here. I agree with all of this! I suppose I should add that my thrust is more towards film and television than writing. While there’s definitely a critical ghetto that SF writing gets put in, it seems like there’s more room for nuance and religious/thematic suppleness than in our conversations abt genre film and tv. I think this is probably for a few reasons – first, there’s not much of an equivalent to blockbuster genre novels (unless you count like The Hunger Games) and also novels never make money anyway, so who cares how they’re sold to audiences? (Imagine a trailer for Gravity that is entirely dialogue about the importance of not giving up. Nobody would go see it!)
My point with the refs to The Sparrow, Wrinkle In Etc., were more to draw a historical thread between religious ideas and sci fi. I absolutely agree that my blithe, two sentence summaries here are not what they deserve – but I also think it’s important to note how tightly bonded religion and genre have been historically so we can talk about how they are still present in contemporary examples.
Tch! I came here just to comment on the dismissive tone (the echoed “thinly veiled,” to me, has always implied deliberate concealment? which, no), so good on you for taking the wind out of those sails.
Anyway, I am unChristian, with a storied background of faking it without ever, ever making it, churches full of Enthusiastic Youths, Professionally Christian parents, etc. But I’m not an atheist, either, and my historical spiritual bankruptcy left me with a lifelong love of stories of rapturous faith and certainty and monks in the desert and what have you. BSG’s nonsense was deeply appealing to me, at least until the robot montage made me laugh out loud (because, what). I genuinely love that stuff. Still, I’ve found that unless the religious content is that overt, a lot of what reads as critical/popular discussion disregarding religious themes is more like the way an average person disregards a flashing-light message in Morse code. It’s a matter of can’t versus won’t. Everyone knows Aslan is Jesus, sure, but anything more subtle or complex than Spot the Christ seems to get lost more often than not. (This isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty of dismissal based on lack of interest, but that seems to happen more on the critical side than the popular.)
On the flipside, those of us who’ve dedicated enough time and thought to more domesticated, delineated forms of faith have an overwhelming tendency to slap the big G on even the faintest reflection. I agree with the commenter from yesterday who pointed out that you don’t need religion to grapple with these issues, but I’d go a step further and say that, in many cases, God only appears through a very specific experiential lens. The first thing I think of is always His Dark Materials, because admittedly that was the first time I was struck by the difference. I had heard so much about how the main characters “kill God” and all the rest of that kerfluffle (and was even prepared to take some offense), but I found the books to be deeply religious. They euthanized the weary figurehead of an oppressive institution under the guidance of a benevolent, omniscient, omnipresent force that shaped the creation of intelligent life. Um? But Philip Pullman is a cranky old super-atheist. I see God, he sees Dust.
That’s why I don’t think you can label something like Gravity as religious science fiction. It implies a universality to the experience that simply isn’t there. The crisis of faith is a fact, but faith in what depends on the viewer’s lens too much for labels as weighty as “religious.”
I had friends who went from recommending Lost every time we saw them to cursing Abrams' name based solely on the finale. I don't think anyone really manages to plan things out that well. Maybe J. Michael Straczynski.
When Head Six and Head Baltar are walking around in modern-day Earth, one mentions "god" to the other, and they respond "you know he doesn't like to be called that." I believe I actually shouted "no; he likes to be called Ronald D. Moore!" at the screen at that point.
I thought I'd gotten all of my vitriol out of the way here, but apparently I'm still angry about that show. (The writers voted to pick the Final Five! Seriously! Apparently the writers' plan was about as well defined as the Cylons'.)
Wonderful piece! But as to the line “There are no Unitarians in hard vacuum”–as it happens, there has been at least one. (Which is not insignificant, given the tiny number of human beings in all of human history who’ve been in space.) Laurel Clark, a mission specialist who died in the Columbia disaster, was a Unitarian Universalist.
I think I get your point–extreme conditions inspire extreme reactions in people–but as a UU myself, it got me wondering