Monday, September 13, 2010

On the Absence of the Orthodox from Science Fiction

I have yet to read a science fiction novel that deals with Greek or Russian Orthodoxy. Partly this may be because the Orthodox faith is more precarious than Western Christianity, and therefore less likely to survive into the future (after all, even Catholicism barely survives in the Hyperion series). But I think science fiction's lack of engagement with Orthodoxy, like its lack of engagement with Judaism, is because both of these faith traditions don't allow for the nice kind of fundamentalist\atheist, churchman\atheist simplifications common in depictions of Catholics and evangelicals. For instance, Orthodoxy, so far as I understand it, does not define so much what God is, as what He isn't, and therefore lacks the kind of juridical, judgmental nature of evangelicalism or Catholicism. Judaism, interestingly, emphasizes action over belief, and I think it therefore in many ways scares atheist writers who like to create nice binaries between religion and unbelief, binaries that are largely meaningless in the Jewish tradition. The smartest science fiction writers, like Dan Simmons, acknowledge the complexity of religious belief in these traditions, but the large absence of the Orthodox faith, and the lesser absence of Judaism, is a blind spot in contemporary science fiction that needs to be addressed

2 comments:

  1. It could be argued that these religions are not as evangelical as the others and would seem to dwindle in numbers to those religions that are or to atheism.
    Islam and the protestant religions are so aggressive it is hard to see a future where they aren't dominant.

    Stragely, buddhism (or similar philosophy) is often present in scifi but as the religion of alien races.

    Orson Scott Card had a book in the Ender series where the religion was to be OCD, that was interesting.

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  2. Yea, I think Islam and Protestantism probably are the most likely to survive. Strangely, however, most sci-fi authors prefer portraying future Catholicism than future Protestantism. Hmmm. You're right about the Buddhists. Thanks for the reminder about Xenocide.

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