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Science Fiction Theology: Beauty and the Transformation of the Sublime
By Alan P. R. Gregory (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2015) pp. 318+x
[Recent conversations on Medium about theology and science made me decide to retrieve my review of this important book. Science fiction is inevitably theological… more negation than otherwise… A version appeared as “The Vast Expanse of Interstellar Space”: Alan Gregory’s Science Fiction Theology; Anglican Theological Review; Vol. 99, N° 1, (Winter 2017): 89–99.]
Alan Gregory’s title initially gives one pause: putting science fiction and theology together seems almost oxymoronic. First of all, the genre still has a certain disrepute: “pulp fiction.” And much of science fiction literature is either contemptuous of religion, especially Christianity, or else passes over religion altogether, as if in the future we will not need religion at all. However, such judgments are themselves theological, if only to claim that the practices and objects of religion are jejune. Not all the literature is so negative, of course — C. S. Lewis’ trilogy comes to mind, among others. Even more popular, and just as theological, are science fiction movies, with literally billions of devoted viewers.
