Canavan, Gerry

English

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Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteEnglish Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of11-1-2016Science Fiction and/as Theology: Review of ScienceFiction Theology: Beauty and the Transformation of theSublime by Alan P.R. GregoryGerry CanavanMarquette University, gerard.canavan@marquette.eduPublished version. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 43, No. 3 (November 2016): 582-584. DOI. © 2016DePauw University. Used with permission.582 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 43 (2016)fans in their demand for accuracy find hard to accept. The collection endswith “‘Did I Mention It Also Travels in Time?’: Time Travel as Formula andExperience in Doctor Who,” in which Michael G. Robinson explores theevolution of the best-known television series about time travel. Robinsonmakes the astute observation that “watching the Classic era [of Doctor Who]is also a trip back into older practices of making television. Cultural referencesand thematic allegories also reveal past cultural meanings” (242). In this way,time-travel television records our own cultural journey of understanding timeand our place in it—at least within the last fifty years or so. Future generationswill no doubt look at the television of our time in order to understand who wethought we were.While these essays offer many different viewpoints on time-traveltelevision from scholars with an impressive array of backgrounds, there is attimes a bit too much overlap among the essays. Some essays, in fact, say thesame things about the same episodes of well-known series. Furthermore, itbecomes tiresome to read repetitive, detailed explanations of phenomena suchas the “grandfather paradox,” especially when it is relatively safe to assumethat the audience for this volume would already be well-versed in such acornerstone concept. Despite these flaws, the book is a valuable contributionto time-travel studies and studies of sf television, one that fans and scholarsalike will find stimulating. Because of the show’s dominance throughout theseessays, this book also makes a valuable contribution to Doctor Who (1963-1989, 2005-) studies. The big picture that this volume presents, however, ismost aptly summarized by an assertion Kiernan Tranter makes in her essay,“Narrative and Paradoxes in Doctor Who ‘Time-Loop’ Stories”—that “thesestories matter because they show the complexity of what it is to be a being-in-time” (232). Time-Travel Television demonstrates that the human fascinationwith time travel is not just about scientific discovery or adventure, but that itis also about finding meaning and significance in our own lives.—JamesHamby, Middle Tennessee State UniversityScience Fiction and/as Theology. Alan P.R. Gregory. Science FictionTheology: Beauty and the Transformation of the Sublime. Waco, TX: BaylorUP, 2015. x + 318 pp. $59.95 hc. On the question of the existence or nonexistence of God, sf as a genre hasmostly agreed with the famous words attributed to the mathematician andscientist Pierre-Simon Laplace: “no need of that hypothesis.” The Holy Trinityof the Golden Age—Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke—were all atheists, as wereKurt Vonnegut, J.G. Ballard, Stanis³aw Lem, Iain M. Banks, Douglas Adams,John W. Campbell, Boris Strugatsky, and so on, and as are Harlan Ellison,Samuel R. Delany, William Gibson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Greg Egan, GregoryBenford, Joss Whedon, et al. As one expands the scope of “atheism” toinclude those loose agnostic, deistic, and/or pantheistic conceptions of Godthat, while nominally still “religious” in some sense, are fundamentally atodds with the sureties of organized religion, one pulls in all the foundationalauthors of nineteenth-century sf—Shelley, Poe, Verne, Wells, Twain—as wellThis content downloaded from 134.48.29.84 on Mon, 12 Jun 2017 18:07:09 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms583BOOKS IN REVIEWas nearly all the prominent writers of twentieth-century sf not already namedabove, such as Octavia E. Butler, Gene Roddenberry, H.P. Lovecraft, andOlaf Stapledon (to name only a few of my own personal favorites). While ofcourse important exceptions to any generally applicable rule exist, both theepistemological assumptions and the ethico-philosophical worldview espousedby sf—considered as a literary-cultural phenomenon and as a “way oflife”—have tended to see religion not only as a “problem” but almost as thegenre’s diabolical opposite, the bad historical force that technoscientificprogress (championed, naturally, by sf) has finally and blessedly renderedmoot.Alan P.R. Gregory’s Science Fiction Theology: Beauty and the Transform-ation of the Sublime provides some important counterpoint to this narrative.Gregory—a reverend, and principal of the South East Institute for TheologicalEducation in Canterbury—has written a book that links sf cultural productionsto the religious imagination not only through the theological fixations of majorwriters in the field (especially Stapledon, Lovecraft, and the VALIS-era PhilipK. Dick) but also through the genre’s constitutive aesthetic, that famous“sense of wonder” (what thinkers such as Kant and Burke once called “thesublime”). The constellation Gregory delineates among Christian theology andapologetics, the British and American traditions in sf, and the sublime is notan exhaustive exploration of any of the three, but rather serves as a usefulillumination of the many unexpected points of contact among these threemutually imbricated discourses. Different chapters in the book focus on eachof the three points of the triad, culminating in the final chapter’s presentationof a contemporary “theological critique of sublimity that has learned a gooddeal from science fiction” (1) and, therefore, the articulation of a science-fictional imagination that “calls thus to the Christian imagination, too” (236).This framework allows Gregory to name a sub-canon of religious and religion-infused sf that does not simply “stake its claim to sublimity, over the body ofa dead god” (40), but instead has interesting things to say about, and to learnfrom, religion.Gregory’s lucid and engaging readings of key texts in sf such as StarMaker (1937), Doctor Who (1963-1989, 2005-), the CTHULHU MYTHOS, and theVALIS trilogy (1978-1982) is primarily grounded in the discipline of theologyand does not engage much either with mainline sf studies in particular orliterary theory more generally; it will fall to other writers to link this materialto the sorts of utopian and countercultural critiques that have generallyanimated our discipline. Likewise, the book will likely fall short of many sfscholars’ expectations through its dedicated focus on the familiar, mid-twentieth-century white male sf “canon” that our field as a whole has largelymoved on from, while ignoring the post-1970s demographic expansion andinternationalization of the genre that has so vitalized contemporary sf and sfstudies.Still, from the perspective of an sf studies that has sometimes been guiltyof reiterating—or, less charitably, regurgitating—the same core preoccupationsover and over ad nauseam, the breath of fresh air can sometimes beThis content downloaded from 134.48.29.84 on Mon, 12 Jun 2017 18:07:09 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms584 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 43 (2016)exhilarating. I was particularly gratified by the detailed (and multiple) readingsof Dick’s VALIS books, which benefit from taking seriously Dick’s Gnosticmysticism in a way that literary scholars generally have not. The result bothelevates Dick by turning him into a theologically significant theorist ofsalvation (see especially 139-53), while also exposing the limits of hisapproach to mystical exegesis as his later novels produce a “tragic world …so sundered from the source of revelation that knowledge of the transcendentcomes in spite of the world and as always strange to it” (235). It is no’t easyto find new things to say about such a well-loved and well-studied author, butGregory’s complex reading of the late Dick through his career-long interestin the sublime somehow manages it, in the process finding PKD’s science-fictional and theological modes to be not really at odds at all, but eachfunctioning instead as the necessary completion of the other. This is not areading that many literary scholars would have produced—but it is a rich one.Gregory’s book—along with Steven Hrotic’s Religion in Science Fiction(2014), perhaps not incidentally the last book I reviewed for Science FictionStudies—points towards a growing interest in science-fictional explorations ofreligion that are not oppositional in nature, and that have not preemptively andpresumptively declared victory over a loathed enemy. They also point towardsthe rich and exciting project of rediscovering and re-contextualizing suchbeloved sf creators as Jonathan Swift, George Lucas, Orson Scott Card, JamesBlish, Margaret Atwood, and Clifford D. Simak—all of whom bedevil anyreductionistic equation between atheism and sf—as well as encouraging us tointerrogate more ambitiously the spiritualist bent of many contemporarywriters working in sf (especially in the Afrofuturist, techno-Orientalist, andindigenous-futurist traditions) and the barely sublimated spiritualism of thetranshumanist movement popularly known as Singularitarianism. But thesebooks also point towards the ongoing problem of siloization among thedifferent disciplines in the academy, and the continuing stasis in a popularconception of sf that seems entirely unable to move beyond the key names oftwo generations ago (even or especially among scholars becoming newlyinterested in the field). There are now myriad recent scholarly works makingimportant statements on the contemporary relevance of sf to a wide variety ofinterdisciplinary questions, which by and large have not taken any notice ofour community at all. The growing interest in sf on the part of academicsoutside our sub-discipline offers an exciting opportunity to expand the reachand impact of our work and of the work of the authors we champion—whileat the same time regrettably exposing how precious little progress we havemade towards that goal thus far.—Gerry Canavan, Marquette UniversitySTAR WARS and Its Fans. Peter W. Lee, ed. A Galaxy Here and Now:Historical and Cultural Readings of STAR WARS. Jefferson, NC: McFarland,2016. vii + 245 pp. $35 pbk. Lee is a productive and capable scholar who has edited a useful volume ofmixed quality. A Galaxy Here and Now explores themes largely familiar fromother STAR WARS (1977-) studies, and its contributions to the literature exist inThis content downloaded from 134.48.29.84 on Mon, 12 Jun 2017 18:07:09 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Science Fiction and/as Theology: Review of \u3cem\u3eScience Fiction Theology: Beauty and the Transformation of the Sublime\u3c/em\u3e by Alan P.R. Gregory

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Science Fiction and/as Theology: Review of \u3cem\u3eScience Fiction Theology: Beauty and the Transformation of the Sublime\u3c/em\u3e by Alan P.R. Gregory

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