Religion in Science Fiction: The Evolution of an Idea and the Extinction of a Genre. By Steven Hrotic.

Abstract

As a genre, ‘science fiction’ (SF) is usually associated with imaginative notions such as space/time travel, futuristic technology, extra-terrestrial life, and parallel universes. It may seem surprising, then, to encounter a work dedicated to exploring the role of religious narratives within SF. The label science fiction would appear to exclude anything relating to the transcendent, metaphysical, or mystical—notwithstanding Brian Aldiss’ thesis in Billion Year Spree that SF is the religious literature of the modern age. Yet an analysis of the relationship between these two domains is precisely the aim of Steven Hrotic’s new monograph. For Hrotic, one of the intriguing paradoxes of the SF genre is that religion and science appear to have evolved a ‘symbiotic relationship’ since the 1920s, in contrast to much of the ‘outside world’, which continues to perceive them as mutually exclusive (p. 9). He believes that SF thus has much to contribute to the resolution of this religion/science tension, for, as a body of literature strongly identified with science, it can ‘attempt to reconcile two different ways of understanding the world’. At the very least, SF might prompt us to ‘… discover that perhaps religion and science are not as inevitably opposed as we once supposed’ (p. 2).