Wednesday 27 September 2017

Future Religions

The Atlanteans expected "Father" to strike people down so that was a fragment of Christian belief! (See here.) The White American Church warns:

"'Rouse not the anger o' the Lord...'"
-The Snows Of Ganymede, Chapter 4, p. 29.

Heinlein's Future History has the puritanical Angels of the Lord. In Blish's Cities In Flight, Volume I, They Shall Have Stars, has "Believers," called "Witnesses" in some editions and clearly identical with Jehovah's Witnesses, whereas Volume IV, The Triumph Of Time, has the fundamentalist Warriors of God. Ironically, the Believers proclaim that millions now living will never die just as the antiagathics are being developed. Later, the Warriors oppose any human intervention in the coming cosmic collision on the ground that this will jeopardize their salvation.

In these future histories, such religious beliefs are seen as obstacles to human progress whereas CS Lewis' anti-Wellsian sf shows literal divine intervention in the Solar System.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And, by and large, we see Poul Anderson taking religion more seriously and sympathetically than Heinlein. And I think Blish took belief in God or gods more seriously in his "After Such Knowledge" books than in the CITIES IN FLIGHT books.

Sean