Science fiction grand master John C. Wright poses a long overdue question in his recent post on hard science fiction.
Heinlein never penned a sequel where the bastard children of Mike the Martian, six-fingered giants educated in Martian psionic arts by the ghost of their dead patriarch, overthrow and trample all other religions, shatter the corrupt federation with kinetic bombardments from the moon, to erect a worldwide theocratic state under the Church of Nine Worlds devoted to the worship of The Beast. But that would have been more theologically accurate than his “Thou art God” houey.
A book where humans evolve into angels is not just not Hard SF, it is not Hard Theology. As in science fiction, we can divide the genre of angels stories into “hard” and “soft.” Where angels follow heretic ideas or popular misconceptions (such as Clarance in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE) is “soft”. Where they are portrayed accurately as Thomas Aquinas described (the Eldil in CS Lewis’ Planetary Trilogy), is “hard.”
Now, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE is one of my favorite films. I would not change it for the world. I mean no disrespect by calling it “soft” any more than I would offer disrespect to A. Merritt or HP Lovecraft or Robert E Howard or Jack Vance by calling them writers of weird fiction.
This leaves a question unanswered: are there any books that treat with angels and other divine things in a theologically well-researched fashion? Did anyone write “Hard Theo” aside from Charles Williams and CS Lewis? Does Dante count?
The chief occupation of fiction authors, much like stage magicians, is to deceive the audience enough to enable suspension of disbelief. The boy at the birthday party must believe, if only for a moment, that he had a coin hidden behind his ear. The science fiction reader must not question the possibility of warp drive while the story lasts.
Like a good carnival huckster, a science fiction author must be a jack of all trades. He must know just enough about his story’s technological trappings to make the illusion hold up at a respectable distance.
This literary sleight of hand, mainly intended to satisfy the layman, often runs afoul of the STEM set. The astronomer shakes his head at faster-than-light travel. The biologist winces at atomic energy growing a spider to gargantuan size. Even your company’s IT guy reacts to Computers are Magic! movies like Hackers and Swordfish with facepalms.
Recently I was brainstorming a custom mech with a cherished reader who backed the sequel to my mecha Mil-SF novel Combat Frame XSeed.
My reader’s friend, who happens to be a physicist, overheard our boyish gushing over giant robots. She graciously took the time to explain why certain conceits of our secondary world tech violated the current understanding of basic physical laws. She was quite professional, but I could hear the eye rolling over the phone.
That’s to be expected. Combat Frame XSeed falls within the Real Robot genre, a cultural product of the inscrutable East. While the genre label hints at an affinity with hard SF, Real Robot also features tropes such as space psychics capable of stopping asteroid drops with magic sparkles as they fade into the Force. It defies easy mapping to any Western genre.
Nonetheless, I can sympathize with the rocket scientists, engineers, and network admins who groan at authorial violations of physical laws. That’s because I contend that the single most hamhandedly misrepresented and abused science in all of fiction is mine, the queen and mistress of all sciences, theology.
Now, hard SF usually provides a respite from the relentless drumbeat of theological illiteracy pervading the rest of pop culture, if only because hard SF tends to studiously ignore theological questions. The worst you get is a Big Men with Screwdrivers Meet Scooby-Doo story like Star Trek V.
When any other genre deals with theology or a related discipline like ecclesiology, soteriology, pneumatology, etc., it subjects your local theologian to a trial of Christian patience.
The worst offenders are fantasy games and films wherein the goal is to, “kill the gods!” A close second is stories in which the deities are said to be reliant on mortals in some way. I’m looking at you, Clash of the Titans remake and American Gods.
To give a physics analogy, that’s not producing a clever bit of handwavium to break the light speed limit. That’s proposing a universe where the acceleration formula has been changed from a=dv/dt to a=purple/leaf blower.
Gross theological error is a perennial fixture of what I like to call Death Metal Narration Tales. They tend to be Smrt stories, though it’s often due to laziness rather than malice. Named for the spoken word segments between tracks on certain metal albums, such stories can be from any genre. What they have in common is severe theological indifference.
They authors of DMN stories can’t really be blamed. Clown World gives them good cause to claim invincible ignorance. Like Clown World itself, the problem goes back to the Enlightenment, when theology was maliciously dethroned from its chief place at the Western universities which owe their existence to it. The Queen of Sciences has languished in the liberal arts department ever since.
What a rank injustice. Unlike so-called “hard sciences” whose body of knowledge undergoes constant and often drastic revisions, only theology brings men knowledge of absolute, immutable truth with certainty. It’s more technically correct to say that theology is the ONLY science.
But, we can’t entertain serious scholarly claims that one religion is true while the others are false or that there’s an objective moral reality. That might hurt someone’s feelings.
To address Mr. Wright’s excellent question, do any modern authors write “hard theology”? Other than Lewis, I can’t name any who even tried. And no, Dante doesn’t count. He’s a superlative poet, but his scholarly rigor leaves something to be desired.
Let’s put it this way. I’m a trained theologian, and even I didn’t shoot for high theological accuracy in my Dante-inspired Soul Cycle. On the contrary, I purposefully imagined a secondary world with radically divergent cosmological and theological principles so I could meet readers awash in DMN stories halfway.
Is writing hard theology stories even possible today? I’m skeptical. Lewis could do it in the 30s, back when the zeitgeist still retained a strong vestige of Christian culture. My vampire yarn “Izcacus” is my best stab at a theologically correct story. Give it a read, and see if you can spot the departures from how a DMN author would’ve handled the material.
The main obstacle to authors doing hard theology is that precious few theologians do hard theology these days.