This session considers how human religious figures in science fiction negotiate predicaments
and alterity in places beyond Earth. Lois McFarland explores how an evangelical pastor shares
the gospel to an alien civilization, forcing him to question his faith in Michael Farber's The Book of Strange New Things. With examples from the
novel The Sparrow and the Doctor Who, Firefly, and Star Trek television series, Kori Pacyniak
constructs a genealogy of clergy in space to ask how matters of ethics/morality, theodicy and
other difficult religious concerns are emblematic of the "priest" in science fiction. Scott Paeth
tracks how earth's religious traditions change in outer space by focusing on religious figures in
the popular visualizations Firefly and The Expanse.
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.
Why does Speculative Fiction seem obsessed with priests? In a genre that pushes the bounds of what is possible, it may seem unusual that priest/chaplain coded characters show up often. Contrary to the idea that religion and science are incompatible, speculative fiction often places a religious character at the forefront of space exploration or in the midst of a moral quandry. While many speculative fictional worlds create new religions, some draw upon Christianity, positioning it in a new context. This paper examines priest/chaplain characters in The Sparrow, Doctor Who, Firefly, and Star Trek, demonstrating how these characters allow characters (and the reader) to wrestle with questions of ethics/morality, spirituality, and theodicy and why sci-fi seems obsessed with priests in space.
This paper examines the role of religion in two science fiction settings: Firefly and the Expanse. These settings both offer rich resources for considering how contemporary religion may evolve in a future world. Each imagines a world in which religion remains a vital part of many people's lives, and yet, each imagines how religion may change in the face of a changing understanding of the universe.
In the final analysis, what these settings offer is an opportunity to think along with their creators about the role that religion plays in the maintenance and evolution of society. Far from seeing religion as an unnecessary cultural appendage, both Joss Whedon and James S. A. Corey view religion as an indelible, and often positive, force in human culture, and seek to recognize it as another way of being human that will remain far into our future.