TruthBook Religious News Blog

Benjamin A. Plotinsky

Once overtly political, the genre increasingly employs Christian allegory.

There is a young man, different from other young men. Ancient prophecies foretell his coming, and he performs miraculous feats. Eventually, confronted by his enemies, he must sacrifice his own life—an act that saves mankind from calamity—but in a mystery as great as that of his origin, he is reborn, to preside in glory over a world redeemed. Tell this story to one of the world’s 2 billion Christians, and he’ll recognize it instantly. Tell it to a science-fiction and fantasy fan, and he’ll ask why you’re making minor alterations to the plot of The Matrix or Superman Returns. For reasons that have as much to do with global politics as with our cultural moment, some of this generation’s most successful sci-fi and fantasy movie franchises follow an essentially Christian plotline.

Hallelujah!” cries a minor character early in The Matrix, the 1999 cyberpunk flick, directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, that took the nation by storm and, together with its two sequels, raked in about $600 million domestically. “You’re my savior, man, my own personal Jesus Christ.” The character is addressing Thomas Anderson, a restless computer hacker, played by Keanu Reeves, who goes by the handle “Neo” and has sold him some precious illegal software. It’s just one of the movie’s many references to its central inspiration. Neo, we learn eventually, is in fact a nearly divine savior, the Jesus Christ of the bizarre world in which he lives.

Anderson doesn’t realize it yet, however. First, a mysterious man named Morpheus must contact him, conveying a shocking truth: the universe isn’t real but is actually a “Matrix”—a “neural interactive simulation,” a “computer-generated dreamworld”—and the year isn’t 1999 but something like 2199. Early in the twenty-first century, Morpheus explains, human beings and intelligent machines went to war against one another. The machines, seeking a constant source of bioelectrical energy, started to breed people and use them as human generators, keeping them in little cells but convincing them, through illusion-conveying cables attached to their brains, that they still lived in an ordinary world. “You are a slave, Neo,” Morpheus says. “Like everyone else, you were born into bondage.”

Yet escape from bondage is possible. “When the Matrix was first built, there was a man born inside who had the ability to change whatever he wanted, to remake the Matrix as he saw fit,” Morpheus tells Neo. “It was he who freed the first of us, taught us the truth. . . . After he died, the Oracle prophesied his return—that his coming would hail the destruction of the Matrix, end the war, bring freedom to our people.” Is Neo this reincarnated savior—the “One” whom Morpheus and his fellow rebels await? We don’t know until near the movie’s end, when a comrade-in-arms betrays Neo and Morpheus. Neo chooses to save Morpheus’s life by surrendering his own. The machines kill him—but then he mysteriously returns to life and obliterates his enemies, to the grand accompaniment of trumpets and a choir. He is indeed the One.

It takes no great perception to recognize how closely this plot tracks the basic Christian narrative, though it conflates the Passion with the End Days, adding the betrayal of a Judas to a messianic Second Coming. Neo’s very name isn’t just an anagram of “One” but also a prefix meaning “new,” a word with important Christian overtones: Jesus is a “new man,” we read in Ephesians 2:15, who says that he brings a new testament.

This is just the beginning of a very interesting and readable article about science fiction and religious influence. Cited are "Superman," and "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," among others...Please click on "external source" for complete article.

Labels: Benjamin A. Plotinsky, religion, science fiction

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Monday, March 24, 2008

For Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically

EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: March 20, 2008

“Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral” were the instructions left by Arthur C. Clarke, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90. This may not have surprised anyone who knew that this science-fiction writer, fabulist, fantasist and deep-sea diver had long seen religion as a symptom of humanity’s “infancy,” something to be outgrown and overcome.

But his fervor is still jarring because when it comes to the scriptural texts of modern science fiction, and the astonishing generation of prophetic innovators who were his contemporaries — Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury — Mr. Clarke’s writings were the most biblical, the most prepared to amplify reason with mystical conviction, the most religious in the largest sense of religion: speculating about beginnings and endings, and how we get from one to the other.

Even the titles of some of Mr. Clarke’s stories invoke scriptural language. “If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth ...” tells of a boy on a lunar colony who is taken out by his father to see their mother planet rendered uninhabitable by nuclear war, an experience that inspires a dream of future return to be passed from generation to generation. In “The Nine Billion Names of God” monks of a Tibetan-like retreat believe that the very purpose of humanity is to write down the nine billion permutations of letters that spell God’s secret name, a project assisted by representatives of an I.B.M.-style company who indulgently supply the equipment so the project can come to its long-awaited close. As the computer experts fly home, “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

Whatever attitude comes through — and it is almost always fraught with ambiguity — religion suffuses Mr. Clarke’s realm. He demands the canvas of Genesis and upon it he enacts experiments in thought. All science fiction does this to a certain extent, trying to imagine alternative universes in which one factor or another is slightly different. What if carbon were not the fundamental element in life forms? What if a society existed that never experienced nighttime?

Mr. Clarke’s enterprise, though, is at the edges of the frame: trying to examine the moments when things come to be and when they come to an end. In the short story “Rescue Party” aliens come to save Earth from an imminent solar explosion. They find that humans, a primitive species that had known how to use radio signals for barely 200 years, had already saved themselves, launching a fleet of ships into the stars, knowing their journey would take hundreds of years.

The rescuers are shocked by humanity’s daring and determination. “This is the youngest civilization in the Universe,” one notes. “Four hundred thousand years ago it did not even exist. What will it be a million years from now?” The story foretells the dominance of this species even though it is outnumbered by the creatures of the heavens — a dominance that, as Mr. Clarke makes sure we feel, will not always be welcome.

Such apocalypse is the bread and butter of science fiction, but sometimes with Mr. Clarke it is also the communion, the sharing of a moment of transcendence in which some destiny is fulfilled, some possibility opened up. Hence the fetus of “2001.” That transformation may also not be something to be desired by current standards. The prospects are just too alien, like the ineffable Overmind in “Childhood’s End” that propels humanity to a new evolutionary stage, inspiring as much horror as awe.

This side of Mr. Clarke’s work may be the most eerie, particularly because his mystical speculations accompany an uncanny ability to envision worlds that are eminently plausible. It is Mr. Clarke who first conceived of the communication satellites that orbit directly over a single spot on Earth and allow the planet to be blanketed in a network of signals. There are many other examples as well.

But overall religion is unavoidable. Mr. Clarke famously — and accurately — said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Perhaps any sufficiently sophisticated science fiction, at least in his case, is nearly indistinguishable from religion.

Labels: Arthur C. Clarke, Edward Rothstein, religion, science fiction

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Sunday, December 30, 2007

Science fiction: the other god that failed

01/01/2008 . Source: Jeet Heer

Science fiction, it is often plausibly argued, is a literature about technology and what it does to humans. But what if this view of the genre is wrong? What if science fiction (SF) is not really about technology at all but something else. What if SF is at its core a religious genre, a literature about the search for transcendent meaning in a post-Christian world?

When L. Ron Hubbard came up with Dianetics, he found a ready and expectant audience in the science fiction world. The first announcement of this new science was in Astounding Science Fiction in 1950, where it appeared as a special “fact” article. Under the stewardship of John W. Campbell, Astounding was the leading magazine of the genre, renowned for publishing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Robert Heinlein “future history” stories.

Astounding prided itself on being the home of “hard science fiction”, SF that adhered as closely as possible to the real laws of physics and extrapolated with rigor future developments in technology. Yet for all his pretences of being a hard-headed just-the-facts engineer, Campbell had a mystical streak to him which Hubbard cunningly tapped. For at least a while Campbell became one of Dianetics loudest advocates. Even after he gave up on Dianetics, Campbell became a perpetual sucker for all sorts of pseudo-sciences. His magazine became a haven for those who believed in extra-sensory perception (or psionics) and the Dean Drive (an anti-gravity device that required an unfortunate suspension of Newton’s third law).

Aside from Campbell, many members of the SF community got caught up in the Dianetics craze: Katherine MacLean, James Blish, A.E. van Vogt, and Forrest J. Ackerman. More importantly, the underlying promise of Dianetics, the hope for a new science of mind that would unleash hidden mental powers, became a central theme in the genre. Telepathy and psionics became staple concerns in SF magazines, as common as guns in detective novels. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, writer after writer dealt with this messianic hope of unleashing the hidden potential of the human mind.

This theme shows up in the most famous and widely read books in the genre, running form Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (1953), to Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human (1953) to Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1963). All these books are charged with a strong transcendentalist yearning, and the Heinlein novel is very explicitly about the birth of a new religion, created by a messianic Martian. By the late 1960s, some hippies had taken the Heinlein book as a new gospel and started to enact communal ritual ceremonies based on Heinlein’s fictional religion.

It’s hard not to find religion in almost all science fiction, a current that is always running a few feet underground. Think of the major movies in the genre: 2001: A Space Odyssey ends on an appropriately mystical note. What is “the force” in Star Wars but a pop version of Zen? In Blade Runner the replicants search for their creator hoping he can offer them immortality.

The true history of science fiction has yet to be written. In most accounts of the genre, Hubbard is treated as an embarrassing digression. He was much more than that: through chicanery he uncovered the true meaning of science fiction. Science fiction is the only literary genre that has led to the creation of a new religion. Why? Because science fiction at its core is a religious genre.

In early 1970s Philip K. Dick, the greatest science fiction writer since H.G. Wells, had a series of bizarre visions and auditions. He heard and saw things that weren’t there. If he had wanted to, Dick could have become the second L. Ron Hubbard. Science fiction fans who heard him speak about his visions were prepared to make him a guru and follow his prophetic teachings.

It is part of Dick heroism, the real bravery of a flawed but honest man, that he chose not to become a God, preferring instead to work his visions into writing and remain a writer of science fiction. Science fiction may be a religious genre but there is no need to make a religion out of every science fiction vision. As Dick proved, the demarcation between literature and religion can be maintained even in the face of the temptation to be worshipped.

Labels: Jeet Heer, L. Ron Hubbard, Philip K. Dick, religion, science fiction