he story of science fiction in the 20th century has been the story of an America facing outward. The heroes of this story, Competent Men (and, later, grudgingly, Women), pushed the envelope of the future, penetrated into new worlds: won. They won. They did not much need God.
James Blish may have suggested that the Word of God was pertinent where the writ of humanity ran, in A Case of Conscience (1958); and Walter M. Miller may have suggested a counter-myth of the future in which it is true heroism to preserve the shape of worship, in A Canticle for Liebowitz (1960). But these two novels, both of them justly famous, stood sideways to the parade.
It is a parade -- the parade of SF stories into a conquered future -- which has now pretty well ended. The underlying dream of SF -- that the 20th century could be made to work -- has turned into a nightmare in which we no longer have our hand on the tiller. Indeed, the more dismayed of our contemporary SF writers create tales in which it is irrelevant whose hand is on the tiller. Because the tiller has broken.
Into the shambles of Mahagonny, steps God.
God, or golems, or vampires, or AIs, or UFOs, or virtual reality wombs, or the Big Book of End Times. Any Daddy will do.
Instead of visiting ourselves upon the world, the world visits itself upon us.
Poor little supermen.
The end of the century
The end of the century is becoming God-friendly. Which is too bad for SF, really. Because SF is a genre whose stories, in the past, aspired to shatter the idols of the past, and to break through the barriers of prejudice and sloth, and to present us with lessons -- sometimes petty garish ones -- in Future Penetration.
Those who believe in God -- which means, in terms of story, in one of the million sects this one planet has seen, each sect so microscopically distinct from its hated neighbors that the whole array of human religious sects might best be described as a clade -- are not much interested in penetration. What they want is recovery.
So it is interesting to note that Arthur C. Clarke, who writes out of a half century of SF activity, excoriates the religions of the world in his new novel, 3001: The Final Odyssey, just now published in his 80th year. He does not expect to go to heaven. He is an adult.
And it is also interesting that Patricia Anthony, a writer of the 1990s whose first five novels have had considerable impact for their agility and for their sharp, savage, iconoclastic speed, has just now published a sixth novel more savage than any of its predecessors, darker and swifter and more pungent than anything she's done yet; and that the target of her magisterial ire in God's Fires (Ace Books, $22.95) is organized religion.
A believer in faithfulness
It is doubly interesting that -- like so many of the most engaged SF novels of the past half decade or so -- it is set in the past. The scene is Portugal, not long after the Roman Catholic Church had declared heretical the discovery of Galileo that the Earth moved around the sun. We are in the small village of Quintas. The priest who represents the Inquisition in this region is making a routine visit. He is a believer in faithfulness, but does not believe what his faith declares: a position probably typical of any religionist (dare we whisper the truth) in any land where career structures are dependent upon a Church or (can it be said?) any religionist who can count: who can count, that is, the number of nearly identical sects there are in the world, including his.
He is decent, complaisant, but constantly worried that his latitudinarianism will come to the attention of the Central Office. He also sleeps with the "witch" -- a local woman who cures folk of diseases -- who loves him. On his arrival in Quintas, it gradually becomes clear to him that there has been an infestation of female hysteria: young girls are claiming to have been made pregnant by angels, and so forth.
Simultaneously, it becomes clear to the reader that what has happened is that a spaceship has crashed. The first chapters of the tale play on this dramatic irony, rather in the way that John Fowles, in A Maggot (1985), plays on the profound conundrums of epistemology of First Contact, his tale being similarly set in our communal past, in 18th century England.
A God who longs to return to heaven
Unfortunately, the mentally retarded king of Portugal, Afonso (an historical figure), happens upon the crashed ship and aliens; and thinks he has found God, a God who longs to return to heaven, and who (incidentally) tells him that the Earth revolves around the sun.
Within days, the full horrors of the Inquisition descend (look to 1997 for its foul descendants); the outcome is complexly tragic, though told with sufficient distance that the reader is not literally nauseated by descriptions of Christian tortures. A few of Anthony's characters are a little too modern, perhaps; but none of them is immune to the rigors of her tale. There is no magical escape (except for one highly deserving victim). There is only the incandescent swiftness of the tale, which scores the mind; and the lesson: which is that, in 1997, after a century of SF escapes from this mortal coil, we are still here.
We are not free. We are bound to the stake.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, as well as one of the co-founders of the British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Omni, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list.
