Genre Meta: The Beginnings of a Book

Late last night, after finishing my Early Edition review, I was suddenly seized with an overwhelming desire to start writing a book entitled God Between the Lines: Engaging Science Fiction and Fantasy as a Catholic Christian. What follows is a draft of my introduction.

A Faithful Fan:

Two Journeys

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My love for science fiction and fantasy developed in much the same way as did my respect for the military and my love of early American history: through my upbringing. As a midshipman, my father was an avid Dungeons and Dragons player and a fan of such mid-century greats as Robert Heinlein, Cliffard Simak, and the rest. Indeed, by the time he graduated from the Naval Academy, my father had not only met the woman who would become his wife, but he had also amassed quite a collection of award winning genre lit. These books he took with him into his new household.

Years down the line, when I was in middle school, Dad started handing his books to me. I was certainly ripe for it; at the time, I attended a school that sat adjacent to the local public library, and I was already wiling away many hours after school in that library devouring everything from The Babysitter’s Club to nonfiction tomes on medicine and biology. My appetite for reading was – and still is – voracious, so I took to Dad’s funny looking books with the colorful covers like a duck to water. To this day, I still vividly remember the very first science fiction novels I ever read. (They were Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer and John Christopher’s Tripods Trilogy, in case you’re curious.)

A short time later, I discovered Star Trek, and my life as a “fangirl” officially began. I started wearing a Bajoran earring to school (Deep Space Nine had just begun at the time, and I idolized Major Kira), and by the time I was fourteen, I had already managed to get myself onto a couple fan panels at a local convention. I even started writing a little “fanfiction,” though looking back on it now, I’m pretty sure those stories would be classified as “Mary Sues.”

Both my brother and I grew up to be science fiction fans. It was inevitable; love of the fantastic and the futuristic was ingrained in my family’s culture. Catholicism, however, was not.

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            My mother was raised first as a Presbyterian, then as an Episcopalian, but throughout my childhood, she did not practice as a Christian; my father was raised Roman Catholic – in fact, he was even an altar boy – but in young adulthood, he too fell away from his faith. Thus, while my brother and I were both baptized as Roman Catholics, attending church on a regular basis was simply not something my family did. My only exposure to the Catholic Church came through my father’s side of my extended family. I have a dim memory of praying the Lord’s Prayer before bed at Grandmom Souders’ instruction, and I was obligated to attend Mass with Grandmom and Pop-Pop whenever I came to visit. Beyond that, I received little catechesis in early childhood.

                When I entered the first grade, I started to exhibit a genuine interest in God. At the time, Dad was stationed in Bangor, Maine, and we lived in a very large house that was a mere walk away from the beach. (When Hurricane Gloria hit New England, our family actually headed down to that beach to watch the surge come in.)  The bus I took to and from school passed by the local Catholic church on its route, and every Wednesday afternoon, the bus would stop to unload the kids who were enrolled in CCD.

            I had no idea what “CCD” was, but my six-year-old brain felt certain I was missing something great. Thus, one Wednesday afternoon, I did not get off the bus at my usual stop; instead, I followed the others to CCD. Oh, what a confusion and panic that touched off! The catechists at the church couldn’t find me on their lists, and my parents had no idea where I was. When the metaphorical smoke cleared, however, I was allowed to stay in CCD. I even got to be an angel in the local church’s Christmas pageant - and my parents still have the little pink “Jesus Loves Me” cup my teacher gave me.

            Years later - around the time that I discovered Star Trek - I decided that I wanted to start going to church every Sunday. Fortunately, my parents were quite open-minded and allowed me to go to church on my own. Dad, still somewhat leery of his own inherited faith, suggested that I go to a “middle-of-the-road” mainline Protestant church, so I scanned that section of the phone book and selected a Methodist congregation that was based very close to where I lived. At this church, I sang in the Christmas services, served as lector, and attended some of the youth functions, though at the last, I didn’t really feel I fit in, so I soon shifted to attending the adult women’s groups, where they were engaging in serious scriptural study. I recall one lady in particular with whom I studied St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans on a one-on-one basis.

            In college, I drifted away from Christianity entirely. From the start, my approach to faith has always been very bookish. As far as I was concerned, there was no contradiction between my reason and my faith, and I enjoyed reading not only the Bible itself, but also Christian philosophy and apologetics. The Christians I met in college, however, left a bitter taste in my mouth because they, like the atheists whose ideologies I also disliked, denied that faith and reason were two wings of the same bird. It was at this stage that I started to explore Judaism. The Jewish intellectual tradition appealed to me greatly, as did the ritual. I even started to keep semi-kosher because I liked that physical reminder of my duty to God.

            I eventually came back to Christianity because of C.S. Lewis. During the summer of 2008, in preparation for a panel at Atlanta’s Dragon Con, I read virtually every book C.S. Lewis had ever written, including his apologetics. In the process of getting to know C.S. Lewis’ personality and modes of thought, I came to be fully convinced that the Christian faith is true. Meanwhile, over the years since my graduation from the College of William and Mary, I had also come to see the Catholic Church as profoundly attractive. Catholicism had all the things I was seeking, including the rich intellectual heritage and the sensual signs of God’s work in the world. Once I finally believed that Christ Jesus had to be both God and man, my next step was obvious. In the fall of 2008, I started attending my neighborhood’s Catholic church. In May of 2009, I was confirmed in the Catholic Faith.

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            Once I became a fully initiated Catholic Christian, my vision fundamentally changed. I had always been something of a conservative in my philosophy and my politics (another product of both my education and my upbringing), and that already colored my interpretations of the books I read and the television shows I watched. As a Catholic, however, I became more conscious of the Biblical motifs that float through even our largely secular popular culture. Even our most openly atheistic writers find it hard not to be drawn to the Passion narrative, or to the Fall, or to the idea that there is a Heaven and a Hell. Some may be scrambling these days to deny that the Anglosphere belongs to that larger entity known as Christendom, but it seems Christianity is an indelible part of our collective literary personality; one could almost say it is a genetic memory bequeathed to us by our forefathers.

Science fiction and fantasy writers are no less influenced by this cultural heritage. Many of the writers I will tackle in the following pages have not claimed an explicitly Christian identity for themselves; indeed, some have declared that they are atheists, while others have approached their inherited faith with an attitude of profound ambivalence. Yet, as I will demonstrate in the first section of this book, many of their works are shot through with Christian concepts, themes and symbols.

               Still, it is absolutely undeniable that a significant number of speculative fiction writers have risen up in a decades-long rebellion against the legacy of our Christian ancestors. Nowhere is this more apparent than in these authors’ assaults upon the Church’s moral and ethical teaching. Thus, in the second section of this book, I will provide a Catholic response to works that challenge traditional morality.

            At the same time, many in the Christian community – partially in response, no doubt, to the hostility some science fiction and fantasy writers have lobbed in their direction – have declared speculative fiction the tool of Satan. In the third section of this book, I will attempt to prove that rather than being the work of the Devil, science fiction and fantasy can be a powerful means by which we can transmit the basics of the Christian faith. In fact, Christian authors both past and present have already harnessed the genre to, in C.S. Lewis’s conception, prime the public’s imagination. Instead of cutting ourselves off from such a rich resource, I will argue, we Christians should embrace science fiction and fantasy as a potential tool of evangelization.

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            I don’t believe it’s an accident that God made me a science fiction fan before He made me a Catholic Christian. I believe I am meant, in some small way, to shine the light of Truth upon this odd and wonderful product of our culture. I ask Jesus now to guide me in this labor of love.