Theologians and authors of science fiction (SF) would benefit from talking to each other: this observation prompted the organization by the Ethics chair (ethics, technology and transhumanisms) of the Catholic University of Lille of a symposium on “Science fiction, religions, theologies” on June 10 and 11, 2022. Indeed, there are countless works that mobilize a religious or spiritual discourse in SF, both in films and in literature. We also notice a lack of reciprocal knowledge between the two universes, which often only touch on each other.
Exceptional guest of this colloquium, Serge Lehman, novelist, comic book scriptwriter and author of anthologies devoted to SF, explicit for Life this attraction for religious stories, great purveyors of meaning and imagination.
You will provide the introductory conference of the colloquium. Why does this issue of religion in SF interest you?
I’ve always been interested in science fiction theory. Twenty years ago, I was going through terrible writing difficulties, I looked into the history of the genre and realized that it was literally saturated with images of religious origin and notions metaphysical, while I spontaneously perceived it as a very rational genre, rooted in science and concerned with remaining “in the interval of the plausible” – this is what separates it from the fantastic.
This paradox had already been noted in the early 1990s by the philosopher Guy Lardreau in the essay Philosophical fiction and science fiction (Actes Sud), where he supported the idea that SF had taken over from metaphysics “the task of imagining worlds”. And, in the Great American Encyclopedia of SF by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, the article devoted to God observed that it was one of the most frequent words in the titles of SF novels. There was something to think about…
The idea that SF secretly collected the great metaphysical and religious narratives that were losing momentum in the 20th century sparked debate in France…
When I mentioned this idea in 2009 in the preface to the anthology Back to the horizon (Denoël), it was badly received by part of the French SF community, which is deeply rooted in its rationalist tradition. This tradition is legitimate, because it has made it possible to clearly distinguish SF, which is an artistic form, and pseudosciences, with which it shares certain objects: cryptozoology, ufology, certain conspiracy theories, etc. Hence the virulence of the reactions.
Seeing what had been put out of the door enter through the window made a lot of people bristle. But this polemic opened a discussion, which resulted in a Franco-Canadian university work on the hidden Gods of French and Francophone SF (Bordeaux University Press). The discussion was finally fruitful, since 20 years later a new symposium on the subject was held in Lille.
Why such a resonance of the religious in this literary genre?
SF is like the Mahabharata (great epic poem of Hindu civilization, editor’s note) of scientific civilization. It is a speculative mythology, which tells the story of the possibilities in our universe. From its first steps, at the end of the 19th century, SF recycled images from the Bible or mythology. For example, the Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is subtitled the modern Prometheus, the last SF text by Jules Verne is called the Eternal Adam.
There are stories of the end of the world and the beginning, of all-powerful creatures or entities that can alter the course of events… These situations and these characters left literature at the end of the 19th century when literature was emancipated. the weight of religion, and they migrate to SF. It is a heavy, deep structure: SF is placed at the crossroads between science, metaphysics and art at the precise moment when modernity consists in deserting this crossroads.
We have the feeling of a lack of understanding between the religious circles and those of SF, with their own language, a little hermetic.
Paradoxically, it seems to me that scientific circles have sometimes been more resistant to SF than religious circles. During the second half of the 20th century, there was a discreet but constant interest of certain religious intellectuals in SF, which perhaps echoes the slow recognition of the French theologian Teilhard de Chardin… I see it as an attempt parallel to thinking about religion in the light of an entirely scientific world.
The communication difficulties come mainly from the fact that the word “science fiction” in France has been misused: it very quickly ceased to designate ambitious literature to be used as a synonym for “ridiculous” or “grotesque”. This screed that fell on the reception of the genre was so strong that for half a century it was almost impossible to do serious academic work on the subject.
What connects the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin to science fiction?
In Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, one of the great American SF novels of the early 1990s, the humans who have colonized part of the galaxy practice the “religion of Teilhard de Chardin”. This is how I discovered this captivating theologian.
We feel in him a desire for reconciliation between a universe entirely founded in science and a universe that remains open to transcendence and mysticism, presenting them as convergent.
Teilhard de Chardin is also associated with the concept of “noosphere”, which designates the sphere of human thought. Now, this concept is the intellectual matrix of the Internet. And let’s not talk about the Omega point. For an SF writer, this mental world is immediately familiar.
Is there not among many authors a tendency to see religion as a simple social structure, often oppressive, where creatures create their gods and not the other way around?
This is especially true in France, where the exit from religion has been more radical than elsewhere. The author Pierre Bordage, invited to the colloquium in Lille, expresses well this ambivalence between a strong personal mystical impulse and an immense distrust of established religions.
Personally, that’s not my problem. Outside France, the situation is more complex. There is of course an old tendency in SF to imagine anthropologies and therefore to create imaginary religions, often seen very negatively by the authors. But there are also hundreds of stories that tell of humanity’s encounter with an inexplicable and transcendent entity… And even if the author suggests that this entity might not be transcendent, the dramaturgy of the stories confronts the human species to situations that are.
For example, a novel by James Morrow called By towing Jehovah tells the story of the corpse of God falling into the ocean and being towed to Antarctica to be frozen. James Blish’s Novel A case of conscience tells the story of the arrival of a Jesuit mission on a planet where we discover an all-powerful entity which is not God. SF is fond of these moments of delight and contemplation in the face of situations or entities of a metaphysical type. In my eyes, it is even what is most specific to it.
Do you perceive an evolution in these relations between SF and religion?
A large part of the authors of SF today feel obliged to position themselves in relation to the concept of “singularity”. It is a foresight theory that comes from the worlds of high technology and SF in the United States.
She postulates that if we prolong the pace of technological progress, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, we could end up with a major disruption, such as the advent of a transcendent intelligence at the heart of the global network (Teilhard de Chardin y probably would have seen a rephrasing of the Omega point). It is a techno-religious type theory that irrigates the thought of transhumanists, like Elon Musk and other great billionaires.
Would SF today explore more the relationship of humanity to technology than that of humans to God?
The relationship to technology is central. In the United States, the golden age of SF, in the years 1940-1950, corresponded to the moment when the country became aware of its new status as a world superpower and of the role that science and technology took on. This gave a Promethean, not to say scientistic, SF, in particular on the themes of space conquest and the mastery of energy.
In reaction to this period, authors more interested in the human sciences, such as Philip K. Dick or Frank Herbert, the author of Dunes, tried in the 1950s and 1960s to make a different kind of science fiction, less tech-savvy and more philosophical. This is why there are religious issues there.
These two authors, in particular, worked the question of consciousness to the point of vertigo… Today, films such as dune Where Blade Runner 2049, sequel to Ridley Scott’s film based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, examine these themes in the light of the current period, which is once again strongly scientistic.
Religion would make it possible to challenge the omnipotence of technology…
Yes and no. It contests it, but it can also give it meaning, even justify it. I think, like Michel Houellebecq, that a human society cannot live without religion. The common narrative cannot content itself with biochemical platitudes about the appearance of life 3.5 billion years ago…
We need meta-narratives that embed being. In Submission, Houellebecq makes a fine analysis of the decline of the republican narrative as a sacred narrative of substitution… We believed in it, a republican mystique did indeed exist, but it’s over. Ultimately, the great religious themes of origin and end are still capable of exerting an immediate appeal on us.
What is the nature of this seduction on contemporary minds?
I take an example. A recent and very powerful reformulation of a religious theme intended for the general SF public is that operated by Matrix, where we find a spiritual initiation, the discovery of the world as a veil of illusion that must be crossed to access the truth, the transformation of the hero into a messiah, and finally the encounter with the omnipotent entity who knows everything and referee everything.
It is a compendium of fantasies linked to technological omnipotence and investigations into the deep nature of the universe – into ontology. The existential question remains, but it is reformulated with each generation taking into account the new scientific and philosophical situation of humanity.
What do you expect from the symposium hosted by the Catholic University of Lille?
I come here without prejudice. I’m curious to hear what theologians have spotted in SF texts. It will be a very new experience for me!
“Science fiction is a genre saturated with religious imagery”