Number ten is up and you can find it here. The question this week:
Does the very nature of science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) automatically preclude fair treatment of religion? Must religion always be seen as an outdated and outmoded way of thinking, or are there authors who can and have included religion (whether real or imagined) in its pages without forcing an either/or proposition between religion and science?
Any thoughts?
(Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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3 Responses
Great question! Let me give my two cents’ worth…
I don’t think there should necessarily be a conflict between science and religion.
I remember Madelein L’engle’s book, A Wrinkle in Time – it is a children’s book about space travel (but don’t be fooled, it is a marvelous book, even for adults). Its main theme is how hope and love triumphs over darkness and evil. It sounds simplistic, yes. But isn’t that the essence of religion: goodness over evil?
Conflicts between religion and science exist primarily due to ignorance, which is probably a rude thing to say, but it is true. How do you explain to someone who is unwilling to see facts for what they are that something is the way it is because science has proven it to be? How do you argue with a person who believes the Earth is 4,000 years old and believes that scientists are part of a grand conspiracy to get rid of religion?
The two CAN coexist so long as both groups are willing to give a little leeway. Scientists should be ready to acknowledge that some things are simply unexplainable at this point (and there will always be unexplainable things) just as religious people need to acknowledge that the Bible is not a basis of fact for scientific inquiry and that scientists aren’t out to nail religion as a fundamentally flawed and idiotic position. Scientists want the truth. That’s all. Why religious people fight the truth is beyond me, because throughout time we’ve seen this battle rage, and religion keeps losing. Science isn’t evil. Embrace it. It can teach you things 😛
But that’s my opinion…
River of Gods by Ian MacDonald was Hinduism on steroids in the future, and the religion was completely inseperable from the technology. (Although, it’s possible that the two conflict in that example that I don’t know about–I couldn’t finish the book for reasons unconnected to the concepts within.) I haven’t run into published sf that marries Buddhism and science yet, even though my reading and understanding of the two would make it seem that the two are very compatible when it comes to understanding physical reality–but I have been in a delightful position to have read “monk punk,” which a Clarion workshop classmate came up with (a bit like Zen monks in spaaaace), and it was simply delightful, and very inspiring.