Christianity and Anti-Christianity in Fantasy and Science Fiction

A new book of mine has just been released with the same title as this post. It was published in Spanish by CEU Ediciones, and in English by Amazon.

There is a fairly widespread idea that we shouldn’t speak about Christian literature as a literary genre, except perhaps in fantasy, where the Christian character of such famous literary works as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings or C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia cannot be denied. In science fiction, the matter is not so clear. However, no one doubts that atheist literature does exist.

My book starts from the premise that an evident Christian literature exists in both genres, and demonstrates this by analyzing a series of authors and literary works, without neglecting anti-Christian literature, to which almost a third of the work is dedicated.

My predilection for fantasy and science fiction has been clear in this blog, given that over almost 12 years I've dedicated 34 posts to those two genres in literature and film; in other words, more than 6% of the posts.

The book consists of four chapters, preceded by an introduction and followed by a conclusion. The chapters are further divided into 69 sections, with the following structure:

1.      Christian Fantasy (20 sections).

2.      Generalities about Science Fiction (6 sections).

3.      Christian Science Fiction (23 sections).

4.      Non-Christian and Anti-Christian Authors (20 sections).

Walter M. Miller Jr.

In the book, I discuss many novels and a number of short stories from the two genres considered. Among them, there are some that I liked very much, others that I liked somewhat, and a third group that I didn't like at all. In every case, I explain why. My tastes intersect with the chapters, since I describe some Christian works I didn't like, together with some non-Christian books I did. Thus, of my two all-time favorite science fiction novels, one can be considered Christian (A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.) and the other not (Orbit Unlimited by Poul Anderson).

Of course, the work is not exhaustive. There are many books that are not mentioned, for several reasons:

n  I haven't read them. This applies to a great many books, because their number is so huge that it's impossible to read them all. One of my fundamental principles in literary criticism is that you shouldn't judge or criticize a book without having read it. This principle is applied strictly here. I only consider books that I have read throughout my life, even if it's been many years ago.

n  I don't know if the authors were Christian or not. There are quite a few authors who refuse to define themselves, and their beliefs are also unclear in their works. In these cases, which are also many, I decided to leave them out rather than try to guess what I couldn't find out, even though I looked for information in various sources. That's why works like Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun don't appear in the book, even though I've read it and its author received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 and has written other science fiction works.

n  I know that the author followed other religions. An example would be Kenji Miyazawa, a devout Buddhist, who introduced some Christian ideas in his book Night on the Milky Way Railway, but on the whole, he cannot be considered either Christian or anti-Christian.

As a sample of a few of the 69 sections of the book, I'll include here the titles of a few, chosen among those less well-known by the general public:

C.S. Lewis

14. Meriol Trevor: Sun Slower, Sun Faster

27. Edward Bellamy: Philosophical Sci- Fi

40. Zenna Henderson: Food to All Flesh

45. Michael Flynn: Eiffelheim

46. Corinna Turner: I am Margaret

47. C.D. Verhoff: Comet Dust

48. Andrew Gillsmith: Our Lady of the Artilects

52. H.G. Wells: The World set Free

67. Ted Chiang: The Story of your Life

Since I am an author in both genres, two of the sections discuss my works, one about my nine fantasy novels, the other about my eleven science fiction novels. 

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Literature and Cinema: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

127 Years of The War of the Worlds

In October 30, 1988, the Sunday supplement of La Vanguardia (a major Spanish newspaper) published an article I had written, commemorating the 90th anniversary of the publication as a book of Herbert George Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds. (It had been published in instalments the previous year). That year also marked a half-century after Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of that novel, which caused panic in part of the United States, because many people didn’t realize it was an adaptation of a novel and thought that the Martians were invading Earth.

This year marks the 127th anniversary of the publication of this novel, perhaps the best-known of works of H.G. Wells. A generation after Jules Verne, Wells is the second great precursor of a literary genre (science fiction) that enjoyed enormous expansion in the 20th century. In light of this anniversary, I wonder: Why do these celebrations always take place when the number of years is a multiple of 25? Why can't the 127th anniversary be celebrated? 

William Crookes, Unorthodox Scientist

William Crookes

One of the most surprising scientific figures of the second half of the 19th century in England was William Crookes (1832-1919), whose scientific career was spectacular, although his activities related to spiritualism, which was then in vogue in England, were also widely known.

Here's a list of Crookes's scientific achievements:

·         An expert in spectroscopy, in 1861 he discovered a new chemical element, thallium, number 81 on the periodic table, located in the same column as boron, aluminum, gallium, and indium, whose chemical properties it resembles. Thallium was discovered simultaneously and independently by the French chemist Claude-Auguste Lamy, who is considered a co-discoverer, although it was Crookes who named it, from the Greek word θαλλός, meaning green twig, in reference to the green line in its spectrum that helped him discover it. This discovery led to his appointment as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1863.

Do people with Down Syndrome have a right to life?

A post I published in this blog in 2017 ended with this paragraph:

Why are human beings conceived with trisomy of chromosome 21 (Down syndrome) denied the right to life, to the point that, in many Western countries, in practice they are not allowed to be born?

In another post, published in 2015, during the first year of this blog's existence, I calculated the probability that the triple and quadruple screening tests, then in use to detect trisomy of chromosome 21 (the cause of Down syndrome), would produce false positives. The conclusion was this:

Science fiction and the multiverse

In several previous posts (see one here), I have argued that multiverse theories are not science, as they cannot be proven false, but rather science fiction, purely imaginative creations. Further proof of this is that the idea of the multiverse did not originally arise from science, but from science fiction. Some of my reading this summer has helped me complete the proofs for this assertion.

The most common form of the multiverse, the M-theory multiverse, appeared for the first time in science fiction literature in a short story by Clifford Simak, published in 1939, which the author later developed into a novel, Cosmic Engineers, published in 1950. In this novel, the protagonists must confront the invasion of our universe by malevolent intelligent beings from another universe, who want to destroy us. To defend themselves, Earthlings establish an alliance with a civilization made up of artificial intelligences created by long-gone extraterrestrial beings, who warn them of the threat from the other universe.

Humanoid robots at home?

Technological companies are investing huge amounts of money to develop humanoid robots for use in the home. One such company, Figure AI, claims that the introduction of humanoid robots into the home will revolutionize elder care and the performance of routine household tasks. Goldman Sachs predicts that the humanoid robot market could be worth $38 billion by 2035.

In an article published in IEEE Spectrum, Maya Cakmak of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington describes a study conducted with students on the acceptance of the introduction of humanoid robots in the home. Their survey concluded that people generally prefer special purpose robots over humanoids. They see special-purpose robots as safer, more private, and ultimately more comfortable to have in their homes… a Roomba for cleaning, a medication dispenser for pills, a stairlift for stairs… Humanoids were described as bulky and unnecessary, while specialized robots were seen as less intrusive and more discreet.

Hallucinations or Lies

My hallucinations by August Natterer

Since ChatGPT appeared in late 2022, I have been warning that the answers provided by Large Language Models (LLM; I refuse to call these tools Artificial Intelligence) are unreliable and should be treated with the utmost caution. Often, these answers seem plausible and are written linguistically correctly, but they are false. These types of answers have been called hallucinations.

This is not surprising. It is a logical consequence of the algorithm used by these programs, which I described in another post in this blog, which I simulated by means of a program with only 18 instructions. The algorithm works by adding words extracted from the most frequent ones that follow the previous words, chosen from billions of files taken from the Internet. It is evident (just think about it) that this algorithm cannot guarantee that the answers these tools provide are true.