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News from Nowhere

Page history last edited by Yvonne 11 years, 2 months ago

 

News from Nowhere: the connections between SF and Pagan thought by Yvonne Aburrow

 

     

  • Utopias
  •  

  • Back to the land
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  • Gothic and Romantic stirrings
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  • Technofear and dystopia
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  • Ecological concerns
  •  

  • Visions of alternative societies
  •  

  • Feminist fables
  •  

  • Slipstream, fantasy and magic realism
  •  

  • Pagan SF
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  • Other religions and SF
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  • Conclusion
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    There are many spiritual and religious ideas in science fiction, but there are several connections between science and speculative fiction and Pagan thought; it is also noticeable that many Pagans read science fiction and fantasy, and are influenced by its ideas. From the earliest stirrings of science fiction and fantasy in the Romantic movement, when writers looked to ancient myths and despaired of the Industrial Revolution, we see reflected the ecological and social concerns of Pagan thinking. Writers became more optimistic about technology with the arrival of science fiction as a genre, but it was then that visions of alternative societies came to the fore.

     

    Paganisms offer an alternative way of looking at the world, a different set of ideals to strive for, and a critique of our own society; so does speculative and science fiction. Further, modern science fiction deals positively with sex, and so does Pagan thinking. The sexual themes explored in SF include polyamory, bisexuality, homosexuality, and other forms of sexual freedom, which are also advocated by many Pagan writers. Ideas about nudity are also explored (an issue dear to the heart of Gerald Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca, and Ross Nicholls, the founder of OBOD). In this area there is a fruitful crossover between feminisms, Paganisms, and SF. There is also quite a lot of gay and lesbian SF.

     

     

    Utopias

     

    The earliest utopian novel was also the one that gave this sub-genre its name: Utopia by Thomas More. The word utopia means "nowhere", so what is implied is that the vision of society in the utopian novel is impossible. Thomas More may have written his book to emphasise the impossibility of social reform - but at the end he says, "I cannot perfectly agree to everything he has related. However, there are many things in the commonwealth of Utopia that I rather wish, than hope, to see followed in our governments". However, the work describes a number of interesting features - increased autonomy for women, tolerance of other faiths (there are moon-worshippers, sun-worshippers, planet-worshippers, ancestor-worshippers and monotheists on the island, but each is tolerant of the others). Some of the early books possibly influenced by Utopia include The City of the Sun by Tommaso Campanella, Description of the Republic of Christianopolis by Johannes Valentinus Andreae, New Atlantis by Francis Bacon and Candide by Voltaire. Johannes Valentinus Andreae was of course a famous Rosicrucian, and the Rosicrucian tradition was a major stream in the Western Mystery Tradition, one of the wellsprings of modern Paganisms.

     

    Utopian novels are often set on an island or in a valley, a self-contained world. The original Utopia had a canal around the island as well, and apparently this symbolises the womb (a very Pagan symbol!)

     

    Another significant utopian novel is by William Morris, one of the Pre-Raphaelite painters: News from Nowhere, in which a man falls asleep and dreams of a future society where towns are small, everyone is equal, and lives self-sufficiently on a small plot of land; the houses are surrounded by pleasant woods and gardens, and all the artefacts are hand-made and therefore created with love (the ideal of the Arts and Crafts movement, of which Morris was a founder). Morris' book, The Wood Beyond the World, is considered to have heavily influenced C. S. Lewis' Narnia series, while J. R. R. Tolkien was inspired by Morris' reconstructions of early Germanic life in 'The House of the Wolfings' and 'The Roots of the Mountains'. The ideas in all these works are closely related to the yearnings for a connection with nature and a balanced and fair society that form one of the strands of Pagan thinking.

     

    Two contrasting novels by Aldous Huxley also deserve consideration: Brave New World (a dystopia) and Island (which he conceived as the antidote to Brave new World). The title Brave New World refers to Miranda's speech in The Tempest:

    O brave new world, that has such people in't.

    Island is about a journalist who travels to a Pacific island where an ideal society has been set up, based on Shiva-worship and Buddhist ideals, but is threatened by the depredations of oil magnates and repressive regimes. The book describes the cynical journalist's gradual discovery of how the island utopia functions. There are many ideas here which are broadly Pagan: the celebration of being alive; self-development through spiritual exercises; the balance of light and dark, life and death. Aldous Huxley was an adherent of the Perennial Philosophy (and wrote a book of that name), the idea that a universal set of truths common to all people and cultures exists.

     

    Ursula Le Guin is broadly influenced by Taoism, but has also written an utopian novel based on anarchist ideas, The Dispossessed. Several other novels set in the Hainish universe contain ideas dear to the hearts of Pagans (The Word for World is Forest, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Telling). Another very interesting and beautiful book by Ursula Le Guin is Always Coming Home, set in the Napa Valley in the far future. It describes a people who live in harmony with the Earth and who have a sophisticated philosophy and a set of seasonal festivals which are perfectly attuned to the landscape in which they live.

     

    Many of the ideas in Ursula Le Guin's books are similar to Pagan thinking, and it is possible that her work has influenced a novel by Starhawk (a well-known Pagan writer, better-known for her non-fiction) called The Fifth Sacred Thing, a novel set in a future San Francisco, where different religions (Pagan, Christian, Jewish, etc.) live in harmony together in an ecofeminist utopia. There are some interesting parallels between this book and Always Coming Home - both societies are located in a future California, and both are threatened by a fundamentalist monotheistic society. (There, however, the similarity ends, so both are well worth reading.)

     

     

    Back to the land

     

    Many SF novels, particularly in England, have a "back to the land" theme: modern technological society has collapsed, and been replaced by something simpler and more pastoral (which may be utopian or dystopian). Many of John Wyndham's novels take this form. One of the founders of this sub-genre was John Richard Jefferies:

     

    After London (1885) is of the type that could be best described as "post-holocaust science fiction"; after some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life. The first chapters consist solely of a loving description of nature reclaiming England: fields becoming overrun by forest, domesticated animals running wild, roads and towns becoming overgrown, the hated London reverting to lake and poisonous swampland. The rest of the story is a straightforward adventure/quest set many years later in the wild landscape and society; but the opening chapters set an example for many later science fiction stories. (Wikipedia)

     

     

    Gothic and Romantic stirrings

     

    A founding novel of science fiction is of course Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which a mad scientist creates a monster. This novel is part of the Gothic tradition, but it is also the beginning of modern science fiction. Its subtitle was The Modern Prometheus, which links it to the classical legend of the hero who steals fire for humanity but is punished for it by the gods; he was also the creator of humans.

     

    Both the Romantic movement, and its literary sibling, the Gothic, reflected a profound distrust of the Industrial Revolution. This distrust, and the Romantic yearning for a return to Nature, gave rise to Pagan impulses, and much early neo-Pagan writing such as Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Graeme, Edward Carpenter, etc.

     

    Another connection between the Gothic and Paganism is of course the modern Goth subculture (which is heavily influenced by the Gothic literary genre), many of whose adherents are also Pagans.

     

    Liz Williams' book, The Poison Master, also explores the connections between the Gothic, the occult, and SF. The heroine, Alivet Dee, is a descendant of John Dee, who was invited to colonise a distant planet by the Lords of Night, who then turned out not to be that friendly after all. Alivet Dee explores various worlds which are planetary versions of the spheres on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life in search of freedom from the oppressive regime of the Lords of Night. This is an ingenious and atmospheric work, which could be characterised as both Gothic and SF. One of her more recent novels, Darkland, also explores the realm of the Gothic imagination.

     

     

    Technofear and dystopia

     

    Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 are some of the most famous examples of the dystopian genre, which often includes fear of political control by means of technology, or sometimes a simple Luddite fear of the machines taking over. There are elements of this in the film Minority Report, an adaptation of a short story by Philip K Dick.

     

     

    Ecological concerns

     

    Ecotopia, Dune, and The Fifth Sacred Thing all express ecological concerns.

     

     

    Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston is the title of a seminal book by Ernest Callenbach, published in 1975. The society described in the book is one of the first ecological utopias and was influential on the counterculture, and the green movement in the 1970s and after.

     

    The impressive, environmentally benign energy, homebuilding, and transportation technology Callenbach described in Ecotopia was based on research findings published in such journals as Scientific American. The author's story was woven using the fiber of technologies, lifestyles, folkways, and attitudes that were being reflected (from real-life experience) in the pages of, say, the Whole Earth Catalog and its successor CoEvolution Quarterly, as well as being depicted in newspaper stories, novels and films.

     

    One of the themes of Dune, a novel by Frank Herbert, is the ecology of a desert planet, Arrakis. Its native people, the Fremen, live in harmony with the planet and their entire socio-economic structure reflects the importance of water. They contrast sharply with the planet's imperial rulers, who can only survive on the planet with the aid of technology. The various aspects of the ecology of Arrakis are closely linked in with the plot, as there is a mysterious connection between the Spice of Life and the worms.

     

    Ecological ideas are also central to Starhawk's novel The Fifth Sacred Thing. The four elements, especially water, are held sacred in the future San Francisco in which the book is set, and no-one may own them. The fundamentalist theocracy ruling Los Angeles, on the other hand, strictly controls access to water.

     

    Terraforming is a theme that appears in many SF novels, a recent notable example being Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. The idea is to modify other planets (using biochemical processes) to resemble Earth. This raises questions like 'Do we have the right to exhaust the environment on our home planet and then go and turn other planets into new Earths?' 'What about any life that might exist (or might have existed if it hadn't been terraformed) on the other planet?'

     

    Liz Williams' novel The Ghost Sister offers a critique of terraforming. The ruling elite of Irie St Syre, the Gaian priestesses, believe that humanity has a right to adapt the climate and biosphere of planets to its own needs. They send out emissaries to a lost colony, Monde d'Isle, who have adapted humanity to their planet, not the other way around.

     

     

    Visions of alternative societies

     

    Pagans envision alternative societies and so do SF novels. These alternatives can range from alternate histories to future utopias and even dystopias, but all of them offer a critique upon the status quo. Pagans also criticise the status quo, with its materialism, consumerism, patriarchal tendencies, and destruction of the environment. Many of these themes are found in both Pagan writing and SF.

     

     

    Feminist fables

     

    Feminist SF is a huge sub-genre (which includes lesbian SF). A feminist SF novel that I particularly enjoyed was A Door into Ocean by Joan Sloncewski, where a society of women (who can reproduce without the assistance of men) has colonised an ocean world and formed a symbiotic relationship with an organism which allows them to breathe underwater. Their idyllic existence is disturbed when some explorers from Earth arrive.

     

    Much of Ursula Le Guin's work explores gender and sexuality issues from an anthropological perspective (though it never loses sight of the story and the characters). In the 1960s and 1970s there was a wave of feminist science fiction, by such writers as Joanna Russ and Sheri S. Tepper. In books like The Female Man and The Gate to Women's Country these writers used science fiction to explore feminist, gender and sexual issues, building on the work done in the 1960s by Ursula Le Guin and others.

     

     

    Slipstream, fantasy and magic realism

     

    Slipstream is by definition something which cannot quite be categorised. It may contain elements of science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, horror, and so on. Much of the work of Neil Gaiman could be categorised as slipstream. Slipstream also includes "mainstream" writers who write SF works (Christopher Priest, Margaret Atwood, Karen Joy Fowler, Douglas Coupland, Angela Carter, Steve Erickson, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami, J. G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, William S. Burroughs, Kazuo Ishiguro). Many of these authors also cover themes relating to myth, especially Angela Carter.

     

    Fantasy can be distinguished from science fiction in that the main technology in fantasy is magically-based, whereas in SF it is science-based. SF in the sense of speculative fiction can also be characterised by the question "What if...?"

     

    Fantasy before Tolkien was quite a different genre than it is now. Sadly many modern fantasy novels are a disappointing and badly-constructed rip-off of The Lord of the Rings - itself a work of genius, distilling many Pagan literatures (in particular Norse and Finnish) into a modern work of considerable power.

     

    Luckily many fantasy writers are beginning to break free of the medieval and Tolkienesque worlds in which much modern fantasy is set. Neil Gaiman could be argued to have broken the mould entirely; indeed much of his work is similar in tone and style to pre-Tolkien fantasy, being much darker and more sinister. Pre-Tolkien fantasy recognised that the world of Faery was not always nice. Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist is an excellent example of this; Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies treats the same theme humourously.

     

    The Inklings (Tolkien, CS Lewis, WH Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield and their circle) produced a lot of mythopoeic literature (indeed it was Tolkien who coined the term). Some of it was fantasy, some science fiction (CS Lewis's series Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength being a notable example of this), and whilst their work was ostensibly Christian, it contained many ideas which are related to or drawn from Pagan themes: the use of magic, a reverence for nature, and a slightly fatalistic view of destiny. Ronald Hutton explores these connections in "The Inklings and the Gods", a chapter in Witches, Druids, and King Arthur (2003).

     

    Ursula le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea series has always been popular with Pagans, perhaps because of the way that magic is portrayed as an integral part of life in these books, also the emphasis on maintaining a balance. Another influential fantasy novel is of course Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, a reworking of the Arthurian myth seen from the Pagan perspective of Morgan le Fay.

     

    Another excellent fantasy series which is very magical is Mythago Wood and its sequels, by Robert Holdstock. Shapeshifting, the use of masks, the relationship of the collective psyche with the land, how myths arise and are modified, it's all here. The brooding atmosphere of these books cannot be too highly recommended.

     

    Magic realism can be distinguished from fantasy in that it is set in the real world, but contains fantastical or surreal elements. Notable authors whose work can be characterised as magic realism include Hermann Hesse, Neil Gaiman, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino and Mikhail Bulgakov.

     

    Hermann Hesse's work is very magical, and contains ideas from Jung, Buddhism, Nietzsche, and magic. The Glass Bead Game would be of particular interest to readers of science fiction, as it is set in a future world where the Glass Bead Game has developed a mystical significance, and what appears to be a utopia surrounding it, though ultimately the hero, Josef Knecht, turns his back on it. The theme of the book is really whether it is possible to be an intellectual and still participate in the world (or rather the bourgeois world). This is also a prominent theme in Steppenwolf, though that book is also about the individuation of the hero, nd his encounter with his anima in the form of Hermine.

     

     

    Pagan SF

     

    Liz Williams is a practising Druid, and many of her books reflect upon Pagan themes. Nine Layers of Sky explores Russian mythology and its relationship with the land. The Ghost Sister is about a society of natural dowsers, who also have a tendency to lycanthropy (the downside of their adaptation to their planet). Her work is very rewarding to read; not only are the characterisations and the knowledge of myth excellent, but the ideas are well-thought-out.

     

    Starhawk has written two novels, Walking to Mercury and The Fifth Sacred Thing, but is well known as a non-fiction writer on Paganism and eco-feminism. The Fifth Sacred Thing is a good read - maybe not great literature, but it contains some interesting ideas and heartwarming characters, plus reasonably convincing depictions of polyamory.

     

    Karen Traviss is not a Pagan as far as I know, but the main character in her excellent trilogy City of Pearl, Crossing the Line, and The World Before is a Pagan (well, a lapsed one, anyway) and the books contain many interesting ideas about ecology, whether or not it is acceptable to eat other species, what constitutes a boundary between species, and how much you can change your environment.

     

     

    Other religions and SF

    Of course the links between SF and paganisms are not unique - SF, by being concerned with alternative visions of the world, could hardly avoid being spiritual in some sense. There are many examples of fantasy and SF from other spiritual traditions. But I do feel that there are links between the science-fictional and Pagan worldviews (as outlined above).

     

     

    Conclusion

    It can certainly be said that speculative fiction in all its forms is concerned with alternative visions, either spiritual or political; and many of these have influenced modern Pagans and the rebirth of pagan sprituality. Many of the most beloved authors of modern Pagans are writers of SF or fantasy.

     

     

    Yvonne Aburrow

     

     

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