"On Planet God": Evangelicals in Space in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (2014)

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.