I’m currently watching the Netflix adaptation of The Three Body Problem (or 3 Body Problem, as they have styled the title). The dialogue and exposition writing is so much better than the recent Avatar: The Last Airbender that I could cry. I finished episode six last night, and it’s taking a lot of my willpower bandwidth to continue working on schoolwork instead of finishing the final two episodes. It’s been a while since I read Liu Cixin’s book, and I have not read the other two books in the series, though with the amount of enjoyment I am getting from the show, they may move to the top of my summer reading list.
With all those caveats on my own ignorance in place, I’ve noticed an interesting religious theme in the show. In the first episode, Vera, a scientist who’s shortly going to commit suicide, asks another, “Do you believe in God?” This question is seemingly related to the fact that the particle accelerator they both work at is spitting out “Alice in Wonderland”-type results, like all the other colliders in the world. This implies that the only reason to consider religion is because you encounter things that don’t make sense.
Revelations in the show make it seem likely that Vera, like another protagonist, has also encountered a mysterious human who tells her that “the Lord” will take care of her if she stops her research and perhaps force her to commit suicide if she doesn’t. Later, it becomes clear what this group of fanatics refer to as “the Lord” is actually a group of technologically advanced aliens. This is a common enough science fiction explanation for God, but what makes this framing interesting to me is that these humans know that their Lord is a group of aliens. They are under no illusions that anything supernatural is going on. All of the aliens’ marvelous capabilities are scientific in their minds, and yet they still frame the aliens as a god, one who cares deeply about humanity’s best interests, and worship them accordingly.
I’ve recently returned from the 45th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Since I’m an introvert and have to push myself to network, I set a goal before the conference to talk to three new people each day and have at least one interesting conversation. Well, that goal was absolutely an underestimate of how much fun I had talking to all these wonderful scholars and creatives. It was an absolute dream to attend. When you want to study fantasy and science fiction, there are a lot of people in English departments who won’t take you seriously. Being in a place where everyone else is also interested in what speculative fiction has to say was so refreshing.
My presentation was part of a panel of two papers on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It was a fascinating panel in that my co-presenter and I came to exactly opposite conclusions about whether the novel supported or denied the idea of Escape into the fantastic, as theorized by Tolkien. John Pennington (whose work on George McDonald I’m going to have to look into when I finally get around to reading Phantasties) framed the novel as rejecting the premise of a secondary world in favor of a world that is deeply intertwined with, and even formed from, the primary world. He also cited a lot of postsecular theorists in his discussion, which gave me a whole different way to understand the book that I’m going to need to spend some time working on.
My paper, “‘The Beauty of the House is Immeasurable’: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi on the Uses of Speculative Fiction for Escape During the Covid Pandemic,” took an opposite tack. I looked at the relationship of the protagonist to the artistic and symbolic world he lived in as representative of our relationship with speculative fiction, coming to the conclusion that the book demonstrates how Tolkien’s idea of constructive Escape functions. I tied in the public reaction to the book when it was published in the early pandemic as well as my own experiences using media to cope with 2020.
I was blown away by the discussion which brought up ideas that could spark at least 3-4 other papers about the novel. (Edited collection on Piranesi, anyone?) It was an honor to be in a panel with such an intelligent audience. I felt like I finally experienced the purpose of an academic conference: getting feedback on your ideas from people who really care about the subject.
David G Hartwell Award co-winners, Liz Busby and Sasha Bailyn
I guess the people running the conference also liked my paper, because at the closing banquet, I received the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award, along with Sasha Bailyn, whose interesting publication Inglenook Lit combines creative nonfiction and speculative fiction which blows my mind. I’m really honored by this award; it gives me real validation and encouragement for my crazy desire to spend the rest of my career focused on speculative fiction.
Below are some comments and notes on my favorite papers and panels that I attended. (There were so many good panels that I didn’t get a chance to attend as well!)
If we’re going to talk about the connection between postsecularism and speculative fiction, there can perhaps be no better example than Arthur C. Clarke. According to his Wikipedia page, Clarke described himself throughout his life as an atheist or logical positivist. He demanded that no religious rites of any kind be associated with his funeral and famously said, “One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.” On the other hand, Clarke praised C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, which as a work of science fiction is just about as explicitly religious as possible. He was fascinated throughout his life by supernatural phenomenon, hosting several television series about unexplained events. He had “pantheist” printed on his WWII dog tags, and he sometimes claimed to be Buddhist (while insisting it wasn’t really a religion). Clear as mud, right?
This internal conflict is written all over Childhood’s End, Clarke’s third novel and the one that made him famous as a science fiction writer. The beginning of the book subscribes thoroughly to the secularism hypothesis, the idea that as science advances, religious belief will naturally decrease to the point of extinction. Childhood’s End begins with the invasion of Earth by a strange alien vessel that forces humanity and its governments to start acting in a logical, humane way. Working through the middle manager of the United Nations, the aliens stop all wars and conflicts, including the torture of animals. People’s standard of living increases dramatically overnight. Everything seems to be going for the best.
There are those who resist the alien takeover, and their resistance is portrayed as “a religious one, however much it may be disguised” (11). They claim some secular reasons, such as the right to self-determination and agency, but ultimately the narrative makes clear that these are all desperate excuses for their real concern. The UN Secretary General receives this perfect summary of the secular hypothesis from the Overlord when he explains the resistance to the imposition of a utopia:
“They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now” (19).
These religious resistors are portrayed negatively in the first half of the book. They kidnap the Secretary General in an attempt to get to the Overlord and are easily swatted away by his superior technology and benevolence. Their resistance is one of irrationality in the face of the obvious superiority of rationality and science-based progress.
At some point in the book, there is a turn in perspective. Mankind has everything it wants; people thrive in the post-scarcity culture brought on by the logical dictatorship of the Overlord. Yet something is dreadfully wrong. Humanity has lost almost all interest in the science of new discoveries, preferring simply cataloging of various species and other naturalistic pursuits. Additionally, the production of new art has almost completely stopped. The Overlord acknowledges this connection between the loss of humanities “superstitions” and the loss of human creativity near the end of the novel: “I am well aware of the fact that we have also inhibited, by the contrast between our civilizations, all other forms of creative achievement as well. But that was a secondary effect, and it is of no importance” (198). One scientist still seems to pursue the big questions in spite of the general malaise, and an artist colony nation forms in an attempt to reinvigorate the human spirit that has been somehow lost in the comfort of having all its needs provided for, but they are the exceptions fighting against the spirit of the secular age.
Why would someone who believed in the triumph of science write this? It becomes apparent that even though Clarke considered science edging out the old superstitions a good thing, he also believed something would be lost as it happened, and that this something was an essential part of humanity. The loss of religious belief seems, according to this book, to lead directly to the loss of everything that made humanity worthwhile.
Near the end of the story, humanity arises from this doldrum through what can only be called an ascension narrative. Children all over the world begin transforming from individual human beings into a metaphysical Overmind, eventually leaving their bodies behind to become part of the noncorporeal superbeing that sent the Overlords to Earth in the first place. There’s really nothing to distinguish this Overmind from a sort of supernatural God, other than the idea that it is the natural end-state of the evolution of most species. The Overlord describes it as something, while not identical, at least adjacent to the Latter-day Saint conception of God: “We believe—it is only a theory—that the Overmind is trying to grow, to extend its powers and its awareness of the universe. By now it must be the sum of many races, and long ago it left the tyranny of matter behind. It is conscious of intelligence, everywhere” (200). It is seemingly omniscient and omnipresent, and though it acts by commanding dead-end species like the Overlords, one could argue it is omnipotent as well.
This sense of the need for something beyond the rationality of science, the sense that in leaving behind religion we have lost something essential, is one of the major thrusts of postsecular literature. While science fiction might be the genre where we’d expect rationality to be celebrated, in fact I think we can find many authors, even in the golden age of sci-fi, who show this conclusion to be naive, including Arthur C. Clarke.
This semester I’m taking a postsecular literature course from Mikayla Steiner. Postsecular is a term complicated by a multitude of definitions, but in essence, it represents the “religious turn” in modern literature. The death of religion predicted by those who worshipped at the temples of rationalism has mostly failed to come to pass, and many writers have turned back to the ideas of religion (in all shades of orthodoxy and non-orthodoxy) to seek the consolation that had been lost in modernism. (Understand that this definition is based on three weeks of reading and is certain subject to the flaws of my current naiveté, though it fits with things I had noticed but never been able to articulate.)
However, as we’ve been reading foundational essays on the topic preparing to study novels that fall under the postsecular umbrella, I’ve noticed something strange: many of these essays cite as examples books that could also fall under the moniker of speculative fiction. John McClure in Partial Faiths points towards Thomad Pychon’s Nebula winning novel Gravity’s Rainbow as a prototypical example of the half-in, half-out nature of postsecular faith. Rita Felski uses Miyazaki’s portal fantasy masterpiece Spirited Away as an example of the enchantment that the postsecular seeks to return to literature in Uses of Literature. Her argument on the importance of being transported by a work grasps at the exact same ideas as Tolkien’s discussion of escape On Fairy Stories while managing to never cite it. (“Who would speak loudest against escape? Jailers.”) Now I’m digging into the first novel of the term, Lousie Erdich’s The Round House, and I find that not only are the chapter titles all drawn from episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that the show seems to be a major metaphor within the text.
The connection between the spiritual or religious in literature can seem obvious. Both deal with things that the rational mind would consider impossible. Angels are just as unbelievable to a rationalist as dragons. There’s just as little evidence for believing in miracles as there is to believe in magical realism.
But is the connection really that simple? Does it really make sense to align fantasy which is transparent about being fictional with faith-based ideas that claim to be about ultimate reality? It seems to align with those who accuse believers of being blinded to reality by a story, and not even one as interesting as the latest installment of Star Wars at that.
Granted, I’ve seen some believers make the same conflation. Some worry that fantasy will confuse readers about their faith. You know the sort of thing: Harry Potter will teach your kids witchcraft; D&D is at best a waste of time and at worst Satanic; a visit from Santa Claus will cause them to doubt Jesus’s existence; even simple unease about studying Greek mythology and the worship of false gods.
But these concerns usually come from people who don’t actually read or enjoy fantasy. Among those who are religious and also enjoy speculative fiction (and if the size of the first Salt Lake City FanX is any indication, there are many), there’s no confusion about products of the imagination and the equally impossible things that they believe are real. Perhaps there are believers who have been led away from the faith by reading fantasy novels, but I’ve never met one.
Perhaps the key to the massive overlap between the literature of speculative fiction and literature concerned with spirituality is that both tend to leave behind concerns with the everyday and focus on ultimate concerns. Despite the recent turn towards cozy SF, a good percentage of fantasy novels focus on epic events that are country-, world-, or even universe-imperiling. Even when the plot is smaller, the magic system or technological innovation at the center of the “speculation” often deals with the deep forces of the universe–at a word, metaphysics.
Related to this large scope is the attitude of wonder that pervades the speculative and the religious. Whether we call it awe or the sublime, both genres put humanity in its place as a smaller part of something vast, something in the end unexplainable by logic and reason. Even the science in science fiction is less based on logic (except in the hardest sci-fi) than on what Sanderson calls the “rule of awesome.” Though I’m sure he didn’t intend it, it’s easy to see the connection to our human impulse to awe in speculative fiction.
Does this mean that speculative fiction is intended to be a substitute for religion? I’m certain some stridently atheistic authors might see it that way. I recently read Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke, and it’s clear that he is substituting the sublime of cosmic aliens for the sublime impulse of religion. Yet this substitution fails to account for the vast number of believers who read and enjoy speculative fiction. I was not really surprised to find in our podcast episode about Mormons watching Star Trek that three out of the four of us shared the experience of watching Star Trek with our very religious families growing up.
I would argue instead that religious people are drawn to speculative fiction precisely because it flexes the same intellectual muscles that they use in their faith. It’s like cross-training for our spiritual sensitivities. When done well, fantasy scratches the same itch for deep meaning that we seek in religion, but rather than a replacement, it acts as a supplement for our ability to think and believe abstractly in things beyond our everyday experience.
