Science Fiction and Wonder and Humbug

John Hutchins asks:

Does the Left Behind book count as SciFi in your estimation?
Do things that are heavily influenced by religion like Dune, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and others count as being religious in nature?

Excellent question! Allow me to wax pedantic:

Let me start by saying I am not qualified to answer. I have not read the LEFT BEHIND series. My opinion is necessarily based on hearsay and ignorance. But I used to work for a newspaper, so ignorance of the topic is no excuse for not filling up the column space!

At a guess, from what I hear of it, I would not consider LEFT BEHIND to fit my definition of science fiction.

On firmer ground, I can say I do not consider the science fiction stories DUNE or BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, nor the space-opera fairy story STAR WARS to be religious fiction.

Science fiction stories are poetical or emotional accounts of man’s relationship to the scientific view of the natural universe and the Darwinian view of the origins of life. They are basically wonders stories about the wonders (or horrors) of science, of change and progress. Fantasy stories are the nostalgia of the scientific age for the magic of the medieval and pagan world view, or, at least, the view reflected in their epics, chansons, folk tales, and wonder stories. Religious stories are those primarily meant for edifying the faith, whether they contain elements of wonder or not.

Science fiction by this definition is the opposite of, for example, the Aeneid of Virgil, which showed the eternal laws of the divine gods and the eternal order of the universe as establishing the eternal city of Rome and her central place in it. Science fiction is about change and emphasizes the instability, the non-eternal nature, of those things we would otherwise take for granted, whether the change is, for example, the degeneration of Man into Eloi and Morlock by AD 802701, or the change is the rise of Big Brother in Airstrip One by AD 1984.

All stories, to some degree, are a humbug.

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