Category: BEST POSTS

I took part in a panel discussion on this recently at the British Science Festival at Bradford (along with Steven French, Una McCormack,  Shana Worthen and Katy Price).   Coincidentally  (and very usefully), my friend Prof Rowlie Wymer had delivered an inaugural lecture on this very same theme the previous day at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. He plans to write a book on the subject.

On the face of it, it’s odd how often science fiction (which after all has ‘science’ rather than religion in its title) deals with religion.  But it’s a perennial theme (my own The Holy Machine being one example). Rowlie Wymer pointed out that even avowedly atheistic writers such as Stanislaw Lem or Arthur C. Clark can’t leave religious themes alone.

There are several connections.  Firstly, SF is a form of fiction that is interested in Big Questions.  It deals with people’s relationship with the universe, and not just people’s relationship with other people.   This is something it has in common with religion.   Secondly, SF is interested in how people and societies cope with new and unfamiliar environments.  It would be impossible to seriously deal with this question without considering religion, which up to and including this point in history, has provided one of the means by which people explain to themselves how they fit in.   (In Dark Eden, I show a society that is beginning to evolve its own religion).  Thirdly, SF traditionally deals in ‘sense of wonder’ which (as Rowlie Wymer pointed out) is not unlike some forms of religious experience.

We live in a world in which religious fundementalism frequently makes itself the enemy of science.  In that battle I’m definitely on the side of science.  A set of beliefs about the world that are based on accepting as literally true an old book written one or two millenia ago versus a set of beliefs based on systematically examining the evidence.  There’s no contest.  To dismiss the latter in favour of the former is just infantile intellectual vandalism.

But I don’t align myself with atheistic fundementalism either.  To reject religion in all its forms as worst than useless is, in its way, also intellectual vandalism.   It is to ignore the fact that science looks at the world from a particular perspective which is not the perspective from which we actually live our lives, and is least good at answering the messy complicated questions which most concern us as human beings (for most of us are not going around worrying about what happened in the Big Bang or the precise nature of the fundemental building blocks of matter).   There are a whole set of questions about life which cannot be answered in terms of cause and effect, cannot be answered at all, in fact, in the way that science answers questions, but which can be assuaged by stories.

Stories are pretty basic.  Every night in our sleep, our brains weave our experience into stories.  Stories are what we naturally do, not causal explanations, and religions have provided or inspired a pretty good batch of stories.

I am not defending literal-minded religion, or even religion at all, but I am saying that ultimately facts are not what our lives are about.   In order to engage with the world, and other people, we need imagination.

 

 

Most people who read or write science fiction identify a “sense of wonder” as part of the original appeal of the genre.   This was certainly true for me.  Reading SF as a teenager with an as yet unjaded palette, I enjoyed the almost spinetingling sense of strangeness that it evoked.

I think one of the things science fiction can usefully do, is remind us that, outside the tiny tiny realm which has come to seem ordinary to us  as a result of habit and familiarity, this is a very strange universe.   (Science fiction has a particular way of doing this, but you could argue that all artistic-type activity ought to be aimed at tearing away the veneer of ordinariness.)

Science fiction can however contribute itself to a kind of dulling and deadening:  a kind of inflationary process exists which is in danger of debasing the currency of wonder.   The first time you see or read about a gigantic space ship, for instance, it inspires wonder.  When you have seen the same thing repeated over and over again, it grows tedious – and just making the spaceship even bigger does not help.  As Ian Sales says:  ‘Scale is not sense of wonder, and a lot of sf confuses the two.’    I wonder if it is possible that a failure to understand this fact has led to the decline in prestige and popularity of SF?

This is a related, but not identical point, to that made by the proponents of Mundane SF who propose that science fiction ought to be more scientific, more committed to the world that actually exists, and confine itself  to futures and technologies that might actually occur.   Faster-than-light-travel and galactic empires, are really just escapist fantasies, on this argument.  They will almost certainly never happen, and to write about them as if they were possible futures is perhaps to downplay the uniqueness and importance of our home on Earth, possibly dangerously so.

I go along with the spirit of this argument, but not entirely with the letter of it.   I agree that it is important that SF should connect with the world we actually inhabit and I am not interested in SF that doesn’t (not just for reasons of principle but also because I find it very tedious).   But sticking literally to what is actually possible is not the only way of reflecting and exploring the world we  live in, and not only SF but all branches of literature work by taking some liberties with the literal truth.

I’ve read a couple of books lately about the Tudor era: Anna Whitlock’s book about Mary Tudor, and Chris Skidmore’s book about Edward VI (Edward and Mary being a brother and sister under whose reigns first Catholics and then Protestants were persecuted).   I also recently saw the film The Other Boleyn Girl, which I enjoyed, and seemed true to what I had read about the Tudor world-view, though I gather its not that strong on historical accuracy.

I was struck by all of these – as I also am when I see Shakespeare plays – with how different people’s world view was.  The acceptance of extraordinarily cruel punishments.  The killing of political opponents as more or less standard procedure.   The way that family duties flow upwards (children to parents) rather than downwards, and the way that the needs of a family’s ‘head’ trump the wishes of individual members.  The strange mix of a very frank and earthy way of talking about sex with strict rules about marriage and inheritance.  The massive double standards about chastity and sexual fidelity.  The seemingly cynical manipulation of religion oddly combined with a faith so intense that people are willing to die horribly for it…

The Tudor world-view  seems strange and even perverse from the perspective of now, and I wonder what about our own present western world view will seem equally strange and perverse from the future.  My guess is that we will be seen as having elevated the human individual to an odd degree: with individual freedom of choice as the supreme good, or in any case held up as such.  (For of course just like the Tudors we are capable of holding something up as supremely important but not necessarily treating it consistently as such in practice) .

I’m not very well-read in these matters but I guess this sanctification of individual choice is a product of capitalism.   The customer is always right.  (Again, as a matter of theory and rhetoric, though not necessarily in practice).  In the modern UK,  even the citizens of the  state are constructed as its customers, always justifiably aggrieved by the poor service, and always deserving of a better one.   In Tudor times, from what I can see, the idea of ‘citizens’ as customers of the state would have simply seemed bizarre.  Rather they would have been component elements within it, each one supposed to play a part, like cells in the body politic.

I guess there are other ways of seeing this relationship between individual and society, perhaps as yet inconceivable.