Anderson And Wells On Religion

It is Easter so the Archbishop of Canterbury proclaims "Christ is risen!" I acknowledge this proclamation as a powerful myth but not as a historical claim. I cannot join the Archbishop in his proclamation because it is generally understood in a literal sense whereas I am able to participate in Buddhist or Pagan rituals where belief is not an issue.

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, Dominic Flandry funds Fr. Axor's research. Axor studies Ancient relics, hoping to find evidence of an extraterrestrial Divine Incarnation. It is generally beneficial first that relics are studied and secondly that there is dialogue as to their significance.

In HG Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come, the One World-State, aiming to control all education, kills the Pope, martyrs an officiating priest, suppresses several religious observances in India and closes all kosher slaughter-houses as well as the chief holy places in Mecca.

No, Wells, that is not the way either to challenge traditional beliefs or to establish world peace and harmony! Attitudes to religion change as society changes. Change society, yes; force religious changes, no. Wells looks to:

"...an aggressive order of religiously devoted men and women who will try out and establish and impose a new pattern of living upon our race."

-HG Wells, The Shape Of Things To Come (London, 1974), p. 493.

- whereas I look to our race to find new ways to live and, as part of this, to resist any attempted impositions by aggressive minorities.

An sf writer imagines a technological innovation, then asks how it would affect society. Wells accurately predicted the ways that aircraft would change warfare. In "Kings Who Die," Anderson imagined governments agreeing not to end war but to move it off Earth. Larry Niven imagined that organ transplant technology would make prisons obsolete because electorates would vote to extend the death penalty in order to gain access to transplants from executed criminals. I think that this social change is completely implausible. Sure, some people would want to extend the death penalty but everyone?

Sf writers recognize that technological progress can coexist with social regression:

the Chaos, the Troubles and the Long Night in Anderson's Technic History;

the Second and Third Dark Ages in Anderson's Psychotechnic History;

the "Crazy Years" in Heinlein's Future History Timeline;

Asimov's Fall of the Galactic Empire;

Dark Ages in Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history;

the Age of Frustration in BOOK THE FIRST of The Shape Of Things To Come;

the Cold Peace, the Fall of the West and the Empty Years in James Blish's Chronology of Cities In Flight;

"Europe Murdered," "THE FALL OF THE FIRST MEN" and "The Second Dark Age" in Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men.