Michel Faber’s 2014 novel The Book of Strange New Things is a work described variously as dystopian, literary, speculative and science fiction. I tend towards "speculative fiction" as an umbrella term encompassing “works presenting modes of being that contrast with their audiences’ understanding of ordinary reality” (Gill, 73). Brian Aldiss describes these genres as inheriting from the gothic tradition the anxieties of “spiritual isolation [and] alienation” residing in-text “like serpents in a basket” (11). The novel’s protagonist, Peter, zealous convert-turned-evangelical pastor, undoubtedly encounters such spiritual isolation and alienation on his mission to the newly colonised planet Oasis, in which a small community of native "Jesus Lovers" is flourishing thanks to the work of a prior missionary who has, unnervingly, disappeared.
Through flashbacks, correspondence and indirect exposition, Faber invites the reader into Peter’s own faltering faith and identity as a popular evangelical pastor in the UK. The aptly named Peter frequently compares himself not only to his biblical namesake but also to Jesus and Paul figures as he imagines the impact he has on the unsettlingly faceless (in any human sense) aliens. When discussing with a colleague how to describe the Oasans who are entirely "other," Peter wonders, “we could use creature instead, but there are problems with that, don’t you think? I mean, personally, I’d love to use ‘creature’, if we could just take it back to its Latin origins: creatura: ‘created thing’. Because we're all created things, aren't we? But […] creature, to most people, means monster, or at least ‘animal’” (Faber, 104). Faber himself observes, “One of the concerns that runs through all my work is the gulf which separates each human from all others and how valiantly we strive to cross it” (“Foreword” 2). As evangelist to such nonhumans, Peter must contend with the difficulty of communicating the Bible to the Oasans, both in terms of language and metaphor: Oasans cannot pronounce fricatives, nor can they imagine a shepherd seeking out a lost sheep on a planet containing only predatory animals. As a result, he must rewrite much of it, and as Wilkinson argues, “Peter's new version of the Bible for the Oasans raises further questions about interpretation and textual resistance” (Wilkinson 91). The paper will engage deeply with some of the questions raised within Jennifer Koosed’s edited collection The Bible and Posthumanism, to address the surprises and challenges Peter faces when trying to practice his urban and trendy ministry in a completely alien context.
Peter’s excitement at the opportunity to evangelise to the eager Oasans is also tempered by the anxiety of leaving his pregnant wife Bea in an increasingly dangerous contemporary world. Receiving infrequent and gradually more desperate messages from Bea, Peter’s myopic focus on the Oasans’ salvation places him in an increasingly negative (though very human) light for the reader. The paper considers Faber’s framing of Peter’s predicament: should he continue evangelising to the eager Oasans while an urgent global crisis rages at home? As for the missionary’s own faith, the novel (spoiler alert) reaches its climax at Peter’s realisation that the Oasans have so eagerly absorbed his biblical teaching because they cannot recover bodily from even the slightest harm. A cut or a graze will lead to certain death, hence their readiness to accept – as literally true and presently available – all the promises of Jesus’ miraculous healing that Peter cannot deliver.
This paper focuses not only on the religious and ethical quandaries presented to Peter upon entering the Oasans’ settlement, but also the legacy of missionary work as a function of imperial exploitation with which he has become naively entangled. The novel explores Fredrick Jameson’s claim that it is easier to imagine the end of capitalism by imagining the end of the world (76), as readers realise along with Peter that the colonists have brought capitalism with them to Oasis. The engineers and scientists at the research base seem oddly devoid of affective attachment to Earth or to Oasis, and Peter realises, as the missionary before him must have done, that his role is to keep the Oasans on side so that this exploitation may continue. Through cognitive estrangement, science/speculative fiction is useful in the classroom for providing a degree of separation with which to interrogate pertinent real-life issues. Besides the postcolonial critique offered above, the humans’ encounter with the "other" can open up explorations into critical posthumanism within feminist, womanist, queer, crip, and animal studies. So too can Bea’s emails offer feminist challenges to the single-mindedness of Peter’s missionary perspective. The epistolary form of the novel and Peter’s new Bible can provide students with material for discussing biblical genres and histories of translation. Lastly, the colonists’ detachment from the crisis back on Earth invites an ecotheological response to, as Ahlberg states, “the present catastrophic plight of the world’s most exposed citizens as war, climate change and political breakdown displace millions, while the rest of the world still living in relative comfort looks on” (79).
Works Cited
Ahlberg, Sofia. “Goodbye Crude World: The Aesthetics of Environmental Catastrophe in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things and Edward Burtynsky’s Oil Photographs.” The Comparatist, vol. 41, 2017, pp. 78–92.
Aldiss, Brian. “A Monster for All Seasons.” Science Fiction Dialogues, edited by Gary K. Wolfe, Academy Chicago, 1982, pp. 9-25.
Gill, R. B. “The Uses of Genre and the Classification of Speculative Fiction.” Mosaic, vol. 46, no. 2, 2013, pp. 71-85.
Faber, Michel. The Book of Strange New Things. Canongate, 2014.
---. “Foreword.” Michel Faber: Critical Essays, edited by Rebecca Langworthy, Kristin Lindfield-Ott, and Jim MacPherson. Gylphi Limited, 2020.
Jameson, Fredric. “Future City.” New Left Review, no. 21, 2003, pp. 65-79.
Koosed, Jennifer L., ed. The Bible and Posthumanism. SBL Press, 2014.
Wilkinson, Kate. “The Book of Strange New Things: Letters, Delay and Experiences of Time.” Michel Faber: Critical Essays, edited by Rebecca Langworthy, Kristin Lindfield-Ott, and Jim MacPherson. Gylphi Limited, 2020.
Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (2014) is a work of science/speculative fiction in which the protagonist, an evangelical pastor named Peter, embarks upon a mission to a newly colonised planet, Oasis, while Earth becomes increasingly mired in political and climate disaster. The alien “Jesus Lovers” are shockingly “other” to humans, and though they are eager to hear of Jesus’ healing, Peter struggles to communicate the Bible’s language and message across the human-nonhuman divide. This paper focuses not only on Peter’s own faltering faith upon entering the Oasans’ settlement, but also the legacy of missionary work as a function of imperial exploitation in which he has become naively entangled. Noting some important posthuman, feminist and ecological issues at work in the novel, this paper demonstrates some of the many ways SF uses cognitive estrangement to critique real-world issues, and how these can be used in the TRS classroom.