True Stories: And Other Essays by Francis Spufford

Author:Francis Spufford [Spufford, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, essays
ISBN: 9780300230055
Google: 4T4_DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0300230052
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:40:59.797000+00:00

(2013)

WHAT CAN SCIENCE FICTION TELL US ABOUT GOD?

Speaking as a reader of SF who also happens to be a church-going believer – not much, really.

Part of the reason for this is cultural. In theory, speculative fiction’s power to reinvent the world is unlimited: every category can be reconfigured, every familiarity subverted, any conceivable strangeness brought within the household of story. In practice – though enough of that power gleams and lingers to keep us reading, and hoping, and periodically being gorgeously surprised – the genre is as shaped by a particular history as any other school of writing, and it’s got, if not walls round the edges, then very definite centres of imaginative gravity. Its roots in Britain are in the ‘scientific romance’ as H.G. Wells invented it. Its roots in the US are in pulp magazine publishing for an audience of engineers and technicians. The two strands had different defaults in terms of mood, with the British branch doing catastrophe and visions of entropic futility, and the American one a lot more chipper and technology-friendly. But both of them come out of the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century cultural buzz around science; out of para-science, scientism, the zone of cultural meaning and implication and metaphor science always seems to be generating, and in which, from then until now, it tends to look a great deal more certain than it does from within the actual practice of science itself that the enterprise is inherently anti-religious. That the way to understand the world is as a contest between faith and science, with SF naturally serving as reason’s excitable little friend. So SF was watermarked from the beginning by the assumption that its cherished values are anti-religious, or at least un-religious, ones. There’s a hint of the South Place Ethical Society, a whisper of the Rationalist Press Association, in the genre’s DNA from the start.

And recently, it’s been reinforced by the polarising effects of America’s culture wars, which have successfully scared many writers into seeing religion as something they must be hostile to, if they wish to be friends to scepticism, generosity, sexual freedom, tolerance, irony, individual autonomy, and even storytelling as such. The sense of needing to pick a side produces gyrations like this, as Ursula Le Guin reviews a Salman Rushdie novel in the Guardian in 2005:

Science and literary fantasy would seem to be intellectually incompatible, yet both describe the world; the imagination functions actively in both modes, seeking meaning, and wins intellectual consent through strict attention to detail and coherence of thought, whether one is describing a beetle or an enchantress. Religion, which prescribes and proscribes, is irreconcilable with both of them, and since it demands belief, must shun their common ground, imagination.

I revere Le Guin, but this is silly. It cordons off religion as the one domain of the human imagination which is not allowed to be called ‘imagination’, or to resemble the rest of imagination: it may not have any content except authoritarian commanding and forbidding. (And, meanwhile, the

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