HUMA 1905
Dangerous Visions, Brave New Worlds:
The Science Fiction Culture and Our Scientific Age

For your interest, these are Paul Fayter's extensive lecture notes from years past.

I. Introduction to religious and environmental sf, biblical roots, worldbuilding, a review of the course syllabus, "the seven deadly sins of religion in science fiction," and a posthumous message from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

II. A small sampling of scholarly resources:

David C. Downing, Planets in Peril: a Critical Study of C.S.Lewis's Ransom Trilogy (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).
Jason T. Ebert, ed. Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
Frederick A. Kreuziger, Apocalypse and Science Fiction (Scholars Press, 1982).
---, The Religion of Science Fiction (Bowling Green State University Press, 1986).
Carl D. Malmgren, Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction (Indiana University Press, 1991).
Stephen May, Stardust and Ashes: Science Fiction in Christian Perspective (SPCK, 1998).
Gabriel McKee, Pink Beams of Light from the God in the Gutter: the Science-
Fictional Religion of Philip K. Dick (University Press of America, 2004).
Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall, eds., Cylons in America: Critical Studies of Battlestar Galactica (Continuum, 2007).
Josef Steiff, Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy (Open Court, 2008).

E. Rothstein, H. Muschamp, and M. Marty, Visions of Utopia (Oxford U.P., 2003).
Rose Secrest, Glorificemus: a Study of the Fiction of Walter M. Miller, Jr.
(University Press of America, 2002).

Internet bibliographies, articles, links, etc.: places to begin.

www.adherents.com/adh_sf.html
www.adherents.com/lit/sf_other.html
www.adherents.com/lit/index.html
www.adherents.com/lit/sf_rel.html
www.imdb.com [the go-to source for cinematic facts]

III. Notes on this week's film: Contact (1997).

IV. Religious SF: Mary Doria Russell and The Sparrow (1996); sequel: Children of God (1998) [both pb eds. have appended reader's guides]. Her 1998 lecture "Telescopes and Prayer" contests the common but historically erroneous warfare thesis: the simplistic claim that faith and science are polar opposites engaged in an inevitable, centuries-long conflict ("reason vs. superstition").

The problem of evil ("theodicy") and the crisis of faith in a good God.

An aside on a 2270 page masterpiece: Dan Simmons, Hyperion (1989), The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Endymion (1995), and The Rise of Endymion (1997).

Another aside: James Blish, A Case of Conscience (1958).

V. Environmental concerns, crises, and apocalypses in sf: a longish but very incomplete list of movies and novels, including alien and artificial worlds.

Apocalyptic is one category that links religious and environmental sf. Two key 20th century events affected this kind of sf: the beginning of the Atomic Age in 1945, and the birth of the environmental movement in the 1960s....Together, they popularized the idea of the extinction of our species--or, indeed, the End of the World as We Know It--through "natural disaster" (including extraterrestrial and humanly caused events).

An aside: The "Nature strikes Back" trope--a secular version of divine judgement--can be seen is such early sf novels as Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), Richard Jeffries's After London (1885), H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The War of the Worlds (1898), M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud (1901), Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1915), S. Fowler Wright's Deluge (1928) and Dawn (1929), and such movies as King Kong (1933; remake 2005 ); San Francisco (1936); The Hurricane (1937); Volcano (1953; remake 1997); The Birds (1963); Krakatoa, East of Java (1967)....
End of aside.

1940s: many short stories of atomic bombs, nuclear reactors, etc. Noteworthy eco-catastrophe novels include Ward Moore's satiric Greener Than You Think (1947), which imagines a species of grass so virulent that it drives out all other plant species, and George Stewart's Earth Abides (1949), a post-apocalyptic plague story.

1950s: Panic in the Streets won the Oscar for Best Picture for 1950; it was a story of a modern-day outbreak of the Black Death, in which apocalypse was averted. See also Destination Moon (1950; co-written by Robert Heinlein, this is the film that began the great 1950s "sci-fi" movie boom); Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950); When Worlds Collide (1951; based on 1933 novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie); Five (1951); John Wyndam's The Day of the Triffids (1951); War of the Worlds (1952); Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity (1953); Godzilla/Gojira (1954); Them! (1955); Wyndam's The Chrysalids (1955); It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955); John Christopher's The Death of Grass (1956); The Day the World Ended (1956); Forbidden Planet (1956; set on a planetary colony, this film introduced "Robby the Robot"); Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957; film, 1959); The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957); The Beginning of the End (1957).

1960s: The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961); The Damned (1961); J.G. Ballard's The Wind from Nowhere and The Drowned World (1962); Lord of the Flies (1963; the near-future sf film makes explicit the post-nuclear war devolution that is implicit in the 1954 novel by William Golding); Dr. Strangelove (1963); The Satan Bug (1965); Ballard's The Burning World (1965) and The Crystal World (1966); Frank Herbert's Dune (1965; a true classic, rejected by 16 publishers before seeing print; the sequels disappoint); Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (1966); John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968); 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, novel and film); Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968; pollution has rendered all non-human animal species extinct; source for 1982 classic Blade Runner); Planet of the Apes (1968; first film in the series, based on the initial premise of Pierre Boulle's satiric 1963 novel; the first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, from 1969, features an underground A Bomb worshipping cult in the post-apocalyptic world); Harlan Ellison's novella A Boy and His Dog (1969).

1970s: No Blade of Grass (1970, based on Christopher's 1956 novel [see above]); Theodore Thomas and Kate Wilhelm's The Year of the Cloud (1970); Larry Niven's Ringworld (1970); A Clockwork Orange (1971; based on Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel); Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain (1971 techno- thriller film based on his 1969 novel); Zero Population Growth (1971); Silent Running (1971, one of a number of stories set in artificial space environments, e.g., Solaris, Alien, Rama, etc.); Thomas M. Disch, ed., The Ruins of Earth (1971); Brunner's The Sheep Look Up (1972); Philip Wylie, The End of the Dream (1972); Solaris (Russian version dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972, based on Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel; avoid 2002 version); Soylent Green (1973); Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (1973); Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (1975); Niven's Tales of Known Space (1975); Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976); Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Time of the Fourth Horseman (1976); Empire of the Ants (1977, a throwback to 1950s "sci-fi" B movies); Star Wars (1977 + sequels; not really sf!); Meteor (1979); The China Syndrome (1979); Mad Max (1979; sequels in 1981,1985); Quintet (1979); Alien (1979); Sheri Tepper's Grass (1979).

1980s: Chain Reaction (1980); Edward Abbey's Good News (1980 post- environmental apocalypse); Niven's Ringworld Engineers (1980); Herbert's The White Plague (1982); Testament (1983); Silkwood (1983); William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984, the creation of "cyberspace"); Niven's The Integral Trees (1985; expanding the imagined world of his 1966 short story "Neutron Star"); Quiet Earth (1985); Walter M. Miller, Jr. (ed.) Beyond Armageddon: 21 Sermons to the Dead (1985); Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985); Kurt Vonnegut's Gal�pagos (1985); Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean (1986); Aliens (1986); Niven's The Smoke Ring (1987).

1990s: David Brin's Earth (1990); Stephen King's The Stand (1990; complete ed. of 1978 novel); Kim Stanley Robinson's terraforming Mars Trilogy: Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), Blue Mars (1996); Robinson's Three Californias Trilogy: The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge (Orb pb eds., 1995; describes possible post-nuclear apocalypse and environmental futures); Jurassic Park (1993, based on Crichton's 1991 novel; sequels in 1997, 2001); Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather (1994); Outbreak (1995); Waterworld (1995); Chain Reaction (1996); Sterling's Holy Fire (1996); Contact (1997; based on Carl Sagan's 1985 novel, ghost-written by Gregory Benford); Robinson's Antarctica (1998); Brian Stableford's Inherit the Earth (1998); Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia (1998) and Bios (1999); The Matrix (1999); Peter Watts's Starfish (1999).

2000s: On the Beach (2000; a worthy tv remake of the classic movie); AI (2001); Watts's Maelstrom (2001); Paul McAuley The Secret of Life (2001); Stephen Baxter's Evolution (2002); Dune (John Harrison's director's cut, 2002); Matrix: Reloaded, Matrix: Revolutions, and Animatrix (2003); The Core (2003; Hollywood science strikes again!); The Day after Tomorrow (2004); Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004; 21st c. retro-pulp fiction); THX 1138 (George Lucas's director's cut, 2004); Marcos Donnelly's Letters from the Flesh (2004); Blade Runner: Final Cut (Ridley Scott, 2007); I am Legend (2007 film version of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel); Alan Weisman's The World Without Us (non- fiction, 2007); James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand (2008); Victor Gischler's Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse (2008); John Joseph Adams, ed., Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, and a zombie anthology, The Living Dead (both volumes 2008); Terminator: Salvation (2009; after 1984, 1991, 2003 movies set in present)

VI. A concluding comment: antireligious sf, and the hunger for meaning, purpose, and transcendence in an age of science.

Despite significant atheistic sf assaults upon religious faith--classics include stories in Robert Heinlein's famous "Future History" series, Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man (1966 novella, exp. 1969), Arthur Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Terry Pratchett's Small Gods (1992), Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy, and Thomas Disch's unfortunate The Word of God (2008)--the sub-genre of religious sf persists in the 21st century. Perhaps this signals a deep yearning for a spirituality capable of reconciling, or at least encompassing, the insights and beliefs of both intersecting worlds of faith and science, and a recognition that there are questions that science alone is incapable of answering.

Note: This lecture may seem to consist mainly of long lists of titles of movies and novels. It is, apart from scenes from Empire of the Ants and Contact and The Matrix. But the lists, including websites, are far from complete. Further, I've omitted mentioning a huge number of short stories, worthy tv series such as Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica, video games, comic books, and so on. The short listing of important secondary scholarly sources is also quite incomplete, and does not include journal articles and chapter-length studies.

Return to syllabus