SCIENCE FICTION AND THE BIBLE


READING LIST

Over the August Bank Holiday weekend of 2004, I gave two talks at the Greenbelt Festival, on the complementary topics of Science Fiction as the Bible and The Bible as Science Fiction. They seemed to go down reasonably well with the audiences, and I'm now seriously considering working them up into a book for one of the more tolerant Christian publishers in the UK.

I hope at some point in the future – neither distant nor very near – to put some transcripts of these talks here. In the meantime: some members of the audience asked me for a reading list. When I get time, I hope to hyperlink these entries to the relevant pages at Amazon.co.uk, or to online etexts in the case of some of the older texts. For now, though, here are the titles.

SCIENCE FICTION AND THE BIBLE

THE ORIGINS OF SF

Precursors to SF:

  • The Bible. I work from the Authorised Version, for several reasons: it's the most literary translation, it's the one that most of the writers I talked about would have been primarily familiar with, and I like the language. I can recommend both the Oxford World's Classics edition and the individual Pocket Canons editions of Genesis, Job and Revelation.
  • John Milton (1608-74): Paradise Lost (1667). Possibly the most influential poem ever written in English – certainly the most influential on SF.
  • Percy Shelley (1792-1822): Prometheus Unbound (1820). Mary Shelley's husband rewrites Paradise Lost, via the Greek creation myth of Prometheus.

    Mary Shelley (1797-1851):

  • Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1817). An astonishing and seminal novel – Romantic creation myth, Gothic novel and the first work of SF.
  • The Last Man (1826). Later, less successful attempt to follow in Frankenstein's footsteps. Interesting enough in its own right, though.

    H.G. Wells (1866-1946):

  • The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Wells's own take on the Genesis / Paradise Lost creation myth.
  • The Time Machine (1895). The first time-travel story, and simply the classic science fiction novel of all time.
  • The War of the Worlds (1898). The first alien-invasion story.


    SOME CHRISTIAN SF AUTHORS

    Anthony Boucher (1911-68):

  • ‘The Quest for Saint Aquin’ (1951). Classic short story, frequently anthologised. I can't name a currently in-print collection which carries it, unfortunately.

    C.S. Lewis (1898-1963):

  • Out of the Silent Planet (1938). The undeniable classic of Christian SF.
  • Perelandra (1943, aka Voyage to Venus). Lewis's SF retelling of Paradise Lost, complete with happy ending.
  • That Hideous Strength (1945). Includes Lewis's Frankenstein / God-Machine creature, ‘the Head’.

    Walter M. Miller Jr (1923-96):

  • A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960). An acknowledged SF classic. At all costs avoid the posthumous sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (1997), which entirely fails to live up to the excellent original.

    Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger, 1913-66):

  • Quest of the Three Worlds (1966). Linked novellas.
  • Norstrilia (1975). Novel.
  • The Rediscovery of Man (1975). Short stories.
  • The Instrumentality of Mankind (1979). Short Stories.
    Much of Smith's work was published or collected posthumously – his career as an SF author took place mostly in the 1950s and 60s. Apart from some of the stories in The Instrumentality of Mankind, all of the above take place in a single coherent future history.


    SOME ATHEIST SF AUTHORS

    Isaac Asimov (1920-92):

  • I, Robot (1950). Linked short stories, introducing Asimov's unfallen artificial men. Do not go and see the film instead.
  • The Caves of Steel (1954). Introduces the Christlike robot, Daneel Olivaw.
  • ‘The Last Question’ (1956). Short story, collected in Robot Dreams (1986).
  • The Gods Themselves (1972). Nothing to do with my talks (despite the title), but included here because it's Asimov's single best work.
  • The Bicentennial Man (1976). Most of what I say about I, Robot applies. Particularly the bit about not seeing the film.
  • Foundation and Earth (1986). Contains a Group-Mind which may also be a God-Machine.

    Iain M. Banks (1954- ):

  • Consider Phlebas (1987). Introducing Banks's secular utopia, the Culture.
  • The State of the Art (1991). Short stories, including the novella ‘The State of the Art’, where representatives of the Culture visit 1980s Earth.
  • Excession (1996).
  • Look to Windward (2000). This and Excession interestingly call into question the Culture's moral basis: in Look to Windward the antagonists are a race of religious aliens who are in direct contact with their own transcended dead.


    SOME HETERODOX SF AUTHORS

    Philip K. Dick (1928-82):

  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964). A story of encounter with the alien and of humans becoming gods.
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Dick's most famous novel thanks to the film Blade Runner, which is a very loose adaptation of it. The novel defines humanity through contrasting it with its creations, the androids.
  • Ubik (1969). The most sophisticated of Dick's ‘artificial universe’ stories.
  • A Maze of Death (1970). An attempt to envisage an ‘abstract, logical system of religious thought’.
  • Valis (1981). Dick's most extensive attempt to interpret his religious visions.
  • The Divine Invasion (1981). Partial sequel to Valis.
    I find it difficult to know where to stop when recommending books by Dick. The man's a genius.

    Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950):

  • Last and First Men (1930). The entire future history of humanity in one hefty volume.
  • Star Maker (1937). Stapledon's visionary masterpiece, including a Group-Mind the size of a universe.
  • Sirius: a Fantasy of Love and Discord (1944). Stapledon's take on the Frankenstein myth, centring around an intellectually augmented dog.


    SF THEMES AND MYTHS

    Brian Aldiss (1925- ):

  • Frankenstein Unbound (1973). A careful metafictional examination of Mary Shelley's novel and of SF itself, as a time-traveller runs into both Mary and Percy Shelley and Victor Frankenstein.
  • Moreau's Other Island (1980). Similar metafictional exploration of Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau.

    Margaret Atwood (1939- ):

  • The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Famous feminist (or rather anti-feminist) dystopia.

    Arthur C. Clarke (1917- ):

  • Childhood's End (1953). A deeply ambivalent story of the evolution of a Group-Mind.
    The Odyssey Quartet:
  • 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968),
  • 2010: Odyssey Two (1982),
  • 2061: Odyssey Three (1987) and
  • 3001: the Final Odyssey (1997).
    Contains the archetypal God-Machine, the black Monolith, which creates humanity and must eventually be destroyed by its creations.

    William Gibson (1948- ):
    The so-called Sprawl Trilogy:

  • Neuromancer (1984),
  • Count Zero (1986) and
  • Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).
    Retelling of the Myth of the God-Machine for the cyberpunk era.

    Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

  • Brave New World (1932). Dystopian novel and political satire, invariably referred to alongside Frankenstein in tabloid discussions of biotechnology.

    David Lindsay (1878-1945)

  • A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). A bizzare Gnostic allegory and a deep-immersion experience of encountering the alien. A great inspiration to C.S. Lewis, who disagreed with it utterly.

    George Orwell (Eric Blair, 1903-50)

  • Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The archetypal dystopian novel. (Please note that the title is Nineteen Eighty-Four, not 1984!)

    Kim Stanley Robinson (1952- ):
    The Orange County Trilogy:

  • The Wild Shore (1984),
  • The Gold Coast (1988) and
  • Pacific Edge (1990).
    Thematic trilogy whose individual volumes (unconnected on a narrative level) are respectively a post-apocalyptic novel, a dystopia and a utopia, and form an excellent introduction to all three genres.

    Dan Simmons (1948- ):
    The Hyperion Cantos:

  • Hyperion (1989) and
  • The Fall of Hyperion (1990).
    God-Machines, Frankenstein creatures, dystopias, apocalypses, cyberpunk, Catholicism, classical myth and the Romantic poets – this two-volume novel really does have it all. The sequels, Endymion (1996) and The Rise of Endymion (1997) unfortunately suffer from diminishing returns.

    Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94):

  • Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Early retelling of the Frankenstein Myth.


    SF CRITICISM

  • Brian Aldiss: Billion Year Spree (1973), later revised as Trillion Year Spree (1986, with David Wingrove). Seminal critical history of SF, including the definition involving ‘mankind and his place in the universe’. Aldiss is, of course, a prolific and excellent SF author in his own right – see above.
  • Edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (second edition, 1993). It's getting a little out of date, but this is the definitive critical work on SF. It weighs in at somewhere in the region of a million words. Look out also for its equally compendious sister volume, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997).
  • C.S. Lewis: A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). Criticism of Milton's epic poem, many of whose ideas helped to shape Perelandra. See also Of This and Other Worlds (1982), a volume of critical essays on SF and other literature, including the essay ‘On Stories’.
  • Stephen May: Stardust and Ashes: Science Fiction in Christian Perspective (1998). Extremely interesting on SF and the Gnostic tradition, which is something I would have liked to cover in the talks but just didn't have the time. May's book is interesting, erudite and fun to read.

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