Can Christians Write SF?

It is said writers cannot write what they don’t know. This saying is true of unobservant writers only.

An observant writer, who happens to be a woman, for example, can write a male character very insightfully. I am also told that male writers who happen to be observant can write female characters insightfully, but that is rarer to see. An observant atheist can notice, for example, the joy the Faithful get from the mere act of singing hymns, even though he regards the behavior as odd and pointless: he can write a scene about a psalmist without having an ear for music, as long as he has an ear for humanity.

Now that I am a skeptical, God-fearing Christian (my degree of skepticism has not changed, thank you, merely the topics) I suppose one could ask how I can be a good Christian and agood science fiction writer, if I think the world views do not lend themselves easily to one another? I will merely reply that the question contains two assumptions flattering to me that may not be the case.  If the question were reworded to ask how could I be a writer of hackwork space-opera and a hypocritical, sinful Christian, that is easier to answer: if you write the story for the sake of the story, the question simply does not come up.

You do not have to give your opinion on the Council of Trent when penning an action story about a clean-limbed fighting man from Virginia rescuing a half-naked space-princess from the space-pirates of Lundmark’s Nebula. For that matter, you do not need to give your opinion of the scriptural warrant for Purgatory if you are penning a pirate story where Bootstrap Bill Turner comes back from the dead. For that matter, you do not need to give any argument for or against reincarnation to write a tale where Carter Hall or Mirdath the Beautiful or even Gilbert Gosseyn remembers a Past Life.

If you write the story for the sake of preaching your personal opinions, the reader can smell that from afar the way a dog smells fear. Some readers might enjoy a little preaching, if they agree with it, or tolerate it, if they are in a good mood, but the rest of the story has to be told for the sake of the story to put the reader in a good mood.

By the same token, neither should you make a fetish of hiding your opinions: they will come out in the way you tell the tale whether you want them to or not. Your philosophy, your sense of life, is what establishes not merely your sense of right and wrong, but your sense of realistic and unrealistic.

Let me use myself as an example, not because I am sterling example, but only because I have myself ready to hand.

My guess is that I will never write a story about a happy swinger like James Bond or Captain Kirk, because I do not think the character is realistic: I do not know any happy bachelors; I do not know any women who are happy to be abandoned thoughtlessly after a one-night-romance. Likewise I cannot write a tale about a happy drunk or a cheerful opium-smoker. This is not because I am preaching abstinence and temperance,  but only because my assumptions and observations and conclusions about the way life really works would not let paint a picture so much out of proportion with reality.

An author with my take on human nature could perhaps set a tale on the planet O of Ursula K. LeGuin, where all the humans are bisexual polygamists; or in the Lunar penal colony of Robert Heinlein, where all the humans are incestuous polygamists; or in a slave-pits of planet Gor by John Norman, where are the space-Hoplites are heterosexual bondage fetishists: but in each case that humble-yet-hardworking author would have to come up with some additional bit of science-fictional or pseudo-anthropological explanation to make the people of Planet Pervert seem imaginable.

Real people simply don’t act this way without real repercussions.

Polygamy is realistic, and suffragettes are realistic, and stable families are realistic: but a stable suffragette-run polygamy is not realistic. You at least have to say the Hainishmen or the giant insect overlords of the Sardar or the Lunar Authority put something in the water to quell the natural sexual, paternal, and selfish instincts of homo sapiens.

I am using sexual mores merely because thetopic is outrageous. To use a less controversial example, there was an Isaac Asimov short story (I forget the name) where teleportation technology made everyone is society phobic of going out of doors. In another story, the widespread use of robots made everyone phobic of meeting other flesh-and-blood persons face-to-face. Asimov felt no need to explain the bizarre unrealism of these social taboos, because his point was that all social taboos are bizarre. His readers are expected to accept this point for the sake of the tale, even though not one reader actually believes that the invention of the telephone made people phobic about talking face-to-face, or that the invention of the motorcar made everyone phobic about horses.

 (If Asimov had postulated a society where Political Correctness made everyone phobic about saying “he” and “him”, “mankind”, “manpower”, “fireman”, and “manhole-cover” that, on the other hand, would have been entirely realistic.)

Of course, authors who think that human beings are infinitely plastic, and can adapt to any social order without friction, or that there are neither natural nor economic incentives influencing which social institutions are stable, such authors need give no explanation in such cases because, in their world-view, none is needed. Their axiom is that moral codes are a social byproduct, not a natural reality.

And again, authors who are writing more lighthearted or more phantasmagorical epics need not stick to realistic humanity, because realism is not their point. Larger-than-life figures are not meant to be lifelike, any more than the grotesque figures in a low comedy are meant to be taken literally.