Catholic and Enjoying It!
More often wrong than right. Yeah, ocassionally some technological development is (sort of) foreseen by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells or Arthur C. Clarke. Even a blind pig can find truffles. But what’s really stunning is how extremely and incredibly wrong these guys are about so many things while (ahem) guys like Chesterton are amazingly prescient about everything from eugenics to the destruction of the family, to the certainty of WWII (which Chesterton predicted in 1934).
The reason is not far to seek: a great many sci-fi writers are engaged in the project of proposing a narrative about human nature that is radically at odds with what the gospel reveals about human anthropology. And so they invent creation myths, anthropologies and eschatologies that point to remote pasts and (what matters here) remote futures that have no room for the truth about Christ or the human person and are, very often, at war with these truths. So we get Roddenberryesque utopias or dystopian nightmares. Wells winds up writing “Mind at the End of its Tether” when WWII demonstrates that man is made of the same stuff as ever. Of course, sci fi is a very mixed bag and there is also great good and fascinating speculation to be had there. But not a little of it is written in the service of a secular messianic vision that is deeply hostile to the gospel and to the truth about who we actually are as human beings. And a creature of the 19th Century Philosophies of Pride, it shares in their tendency to want to imagine that it is the prophetic work of the Vanguard of History, full of certitude about Things to Come. Very often, the Things to Come either did not come, or else they did come and helped to create a world very much nastier than the utopia promised by the secular messianic visionary who trust that Science with a capital S would save us all.
By the way, the people *I’d* like to hear weigh in on this are my friends John C. Wright, who probably has forgotten more about sci-fi fantasy lore than I will ever know, and Sandra Meisel. That would be a fun roundtable, especially if you could wedge in John Farrell and John’s friend the estimable Michael Flynn who gave the world the great novel Eifelheim, one of the best sci-fi stories ever written.
Update: John C. Wright kindly obliges me! By the way, if you’ve not read his fiction, you can get it here.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In