A Science-Fiction Sampler

A Science-Fiction Sampler Matthew Menning The Fox network's popular television drama, "The X-Files," is concerned with the quest of two FBI agents for the truth in the face of the apparently unexplainable. In a recent episode, Agent Scully, the team's skeptic, struggled with terminal cancer. Lying on her hospital bed, she spoke with her partner about her illness. As an adult, she said, she put her faith in science and her desire for truth. When science and logic failed to explain a mystery, she was willing to entertain the possibility of anything from alien contact to government conspiracy. Not until cancer brought her close to death did she reconsider faith in a God who is present in this world and who offers strength to those in need. For Agent Scully, accepting the presence of a God she could not explain and did not understand required more courage than battles with terrorists or alien abduction. Scully risked her objectivity and discovered a peace and potency that enabled her to endure her cancer until she was healed. Agent Scully's dilemma is not unfamiliar. Since the Renaissance, scientists have astounded us with their discoveries. That which was unexplainable has become increasingly mundane. Humans have walked on the moon, come to understand the workings of subatomic particles and discovered the secrets of heating food using microwaves. Most of us do not understand the science behind these marvels, but accept the fact that scientists do, and could explain them to us if we wished to learn. For many of us, it has become increasingly difficult to believe that there is anything science cannot explain, given time and resources . The inexplicable is anathema to our society, and it seems that we are forced to choose between our faith in science and our faith in a God whose existence scientific method cannot prove. From the publication of HG. Wells' The Time Machine, authors of science fiction have been struggling with these issues. Writers who deal with the consequences of scientific discovery for contemporary humankind and for the future must inevitably grapple with issues of faith . For some writers, it is the future of the Christian church in a universe dramatically changed in the 2,000 years since Christ's incarnation on earth that is the salient issue. Other writers address the effects of science, real and fictional, on the human spirit. From traditional Christian authors to advocates of non-traditional 111 faiths, writers of science fiction offer us ways to interpret the increasingly complex relationship between science and faith. C.S. Lewis, in his science-fiction trilogy, was one of the earliest authors of the genre to deal with the impact of science on the Christian faith. Out of the Silent Planet, the first of the trilogy, imagines a terrestrial traveler who discovers alien races on the planet Mars. For Ransom, the protagonist of Lewis' stories, reconciling the scientific theory of Earth with the reality of unfamiliar alien life is a struggle from the onset. Lacking knowledge of the society he encounters, he assumes the Martians possess a cold and intellectual science ruled, at heart, by a superstition and emotion it has attempted, but failed, to remove. 1 Marooned on Mars, Ransom grows to understand its inhabitants, realizing that his conception of the science of Mars is, in fact, a description of what he fears terrestrial science has become. Ransom's encounters with the ethereal inhabitants of Mars, known as eldila, convince him that when science seeks not only to dismiss God, but to portray God and religious sentiment as ignorance and superstition, only evil can result. 2 In Perelandra, the second book of his science-fiction trilogy (and the last to be discussed here), Lewis speaks further of the necessity of science guided by faith. Twentieth-century science, he suggests, encourages us to separate the natural from the supernatural; that which is "real" from that which is "imagined." This way of thinking eases the "intolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us by dividing it into two halves and encouraging the mind never to think of both in the same context. "3 The security this dichotomy imparts is misleading, and Ransom soon discovers he must risk the comfort of conventional conceptions of true and false if he is to succeed on the planet Perelandra. Guided by the eldila, Ransom finds himself in a paradise inhabited only by the "King" and "Queen" of that world and another traveler from Earth, Ransom's evil counterpart Weston. It becomes apparent that the four characters are to reenact the story of the Fall on Perelandra. Weston plays the part of Satan, the Queen Eve, and Ransom intercedes for the good. Eventually, good defeats evil. The Queen resists temptation, and a society free of sin is born on Perelandra. Ransom, though delighted by the triumph of good, once more falls prey to his fear of the unknown. In our world, he says, the coming of Christ is the central event of all time. How is it possible that Christ's incarnation is not central to the universe, but only to one small world among billions? The eldila answer, emphasizing the fact that } wherever God is, that is the center. The only way to move away from the center is to move into evil. 4 Ransom must accept the fact that God's pattern ~ is larger than Earth, and that all things, Christianity included, do not remain static, but grow and change. 112 Orson Scott Card, like C.S. Lewis, writes about human encounters with alien intelligences and the ways in which our science and our faith shape those encounters. Unlike Lewis, Card (as well as the other authors we shall discuss) wrote in the years following World War II. Lewis' work is concerned not only with the strict separation of science and faith he saw as detrimental, but with a clear delineation between good and evil necessitated by his generation's struggle with Hitler and the Nazi regime. For Card, good and evil are ambiguous terms, and it is this ambiguity around which the first book of his trilogy revolves. Card's Ender series begins with Ender's Game, and is concerned with humankind's war against an alien life form perceived to be hostile and invasive. Earth's leaders, lacking any knowledge of the aliens apart from their bug-like appearance, seek to obliterate them. This "get them before they get us" philosophy serves to unite humankind, but upon eradication of the alien threat Andrew Wiggins, the book's protagonist, discovers the true nature of the aliens. They were not, in fact, invading monsters, but peaceful creatures whose physiology and thought processes differ so extremely from those of humans as to be almost incomprehensible. Wiggins chronicles the story of the aliens in a document he calls "The Hive Queen and the Hegemon," and out of that story a new faith is conceived. This faith does not replace the religions of the world, but stands beside them. When people die, a Speaker for the Dead arrives at their graveside to tell the story of their life, both good and bad, faults and virtues, that those who remain may know the unadorned truth of their corporeal existence.5 In Ender's Game, Card offers humanity the Speaker for the Dead, someone who makes known the story of both the good and evil. The Speaker for the Dead's tale is not the sheltering, ultimately stunting objectivity Lewis fears, but objectivity tempered with compassion. Thus, the tale is a vehicle for expanded knowledge and understanding rather than isolation and fear. In Speaker for the Dead, the second book of his series, Card puts that vehicle to the test. It deals with a planet called Lusitania on which a colony of human Catholics coexist with an aboriginal race they call "piggies." The human inhabitants of Lusitania live in uneasy peace with the piggies, separated by a wall through which only a few "xenobiologers," scientists dedicated to the study of alien races, may pass. When cultural misunderstandings lead the piggies to kill one of the scientists, the governing body of human colonized worlds acts, once more, to annihilate what they perceive to be a threat to humanity. It is up to the colonists, led by Andrew Wiggins and their bishop, to apply the lessons learned from the destruction of the first alien race encountered by humans. Again the colonists must choose between fear of the unknown and faith in the infallibility of God's plan. In the end, the colonists choose faith. Risking their own lives, they decide to 113 stand up for the piggies, not simply because they perceive the destruction of an unfamiliar race as morally wrong, but because they come to understand the unique opportunity they have to share the faith that is central to their community with those who have not experienced it. 6 The third book of Card's Ender series, Xenocide,1 continues to tell the story of humans and piggies as they struggle to understand each other. This time, however, inhabitants of a third planet are involved, and it is on them that we shall focus . On the planet Path dwells a group of humans whose gods call them to love each other, but demand obedience manifesting itself in rituals associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Han Fei-tzu and his daughter Qing-jao are leaders of their society. Though humiliated by their irresistible compulsions, their faith in the gods of Path is such that they accept what they perceive to be their responsibility.

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