This panel examines speculative fiction reimaginings of religion, ethics, and social life in future worlds. Through readings of works by Ishiguro, Le Guin, Wolfe, and Bazterrica, the papers explore how religious ideas persist, mutate, and generate new meanings within technologically and ecologically transformed societies. Together, the papers ask: how do speculative narratives interrogate structures of power—including labor hierarchies, gender norms, and social orders—while asking what forms of ecological responsibility, technological mediation and moral agency remain possible? Here religion is not merely inherited tradition but dynamic of practices and imaginaries that shape how communities respond to crisis and envision alternative futures. By bringing theology, philosophy, and literary analysis into conversation, the panel highlights speculative fiction as a critical space for reflecting on the ethical and social implications of emerging technological and ecological conditions, while reconsidering the categories of religion and the secular in an uncertain, even frightening future.
Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985) is a speculative ethnography of the Kesh, a place-bound, multispecies community whose ceremonial life, ecology, and non-linear temporality enact what this paper calls "earthbound wisdom." Drawing on Le Guin's lifelong engagement with the Tao Te Ching (Le Guin's preferred transliteration), the book performs what Donna Haraway calls an autremondialisation, a bringing of other liveable worlds into existence. This paper uses Haraway’s string figuring method to pass threads between several key thinkers (Deborah Bird Rose, Bruno Latour, James Clifford, and Kim Stanley Robinson), asking what wisdom the Kesh might offer to those Latour calls the Earthbound, those gathered in response to an Earth that is acting now. Rather than advocating for a new religion, the paper concludes by wrestling with the inherited categories of religion and the secular themselves, asking how they might be refigured in the Chthulucene.
Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) remains one of speculative fiction's most theologically sophisticated—and critically under-discussed—voices. His magnum opus, the "Solar Cycle," draws upon Jewish angelology, Christianity, Greco-Roman polytheism, Western hermeticism, and Neoplatonism to project what future faiths might look like in a far-future dying earth. Whether in the Book of the New Sun's figures of the Increate and Conciliator, which refract Christian theology through a temporally complex loop, or in the computerized pantheon of the Book of the Long Sun, Wolfe uses science fiction's imaginative power to explore how religions emerge, mutate, and persist across vast stretches of time. These future faiths, this paper contends, are central to Wolfe's sustained meditation on time, technology, and transcendence—one that invites meaningful conversation with two fellow mid-century Catholic visionaries: the poet-artist David Jones and the priest-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
This paper analyzes themes of disposability, sacrifice, and moral agency in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2019 novel Klara and the Sun. What are the ethical implications of programming AI agents behave in servile, self-effacing ways? To what extent does this AI programming reinforce existing forms of social programming that relegate certain groups of people to lives of undervalued service work and disposability, and what forms of moral agency are available within this social order? I argue that critical reevaluations of Christian ethical frameworks—which, in my reading, play a subtle but significant role in shaping the novel’s moral imagination—provide conceptual resources to analyze issues of structural harm and moral agency that have arisen in the secondary literature. In my analysis, the novel resists straightforwardly optimistic or pessimistic prophecies while offering resources for hope and resilience in the face of our potentially bleak future.
The paper reads Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale alongside Agustina Bazterrica’s Las indignas (The Unworthy). In each book, religion has a complicated relationship with gender and specifically womanhood. The first two novels are often discussed side by side in the context of the future of gender, particularly in dystopian settings. In Atwood’s Gilead, gender norms are dogmatically enforced by religious leaders. In Butler’s Earthseed, Lauren establishes a religious community where change is divine, allowing for societal roles assigned not by gender but by capacity. Newcomer to the discussion, Bazterrica’s Sacred Sisterhood offers a deeper critique of a religion’s strict gender roles, exposes a monstrous future for gender, and reinforces—more than Atwood and Butler—gender’s performative nature. The paper then reads these three works of speculative fiction to highlight how practice, theology, and ecology factor into the future of gender.