Description
To the extent that science fiction has appropriated - and reveled - in the sublime, it has persisted in a sometimes explicit, sometimes subterranean, relationship with Christian theology. From its seventeenth-century beginnings, the sublime, with its representations of immensity, has informed the imagining of God. When science fiction critiques or reinvents religion, its writers have engaged in a literary guerrilla war with Christianity over what is truly sublime and divine.
Gregory examines the sublime and its implicit theologies as they appear in early American pulp science fiction, the horror writing of H. P. Lovecraft, science fiction narratives of evolution and apocalypse, and the work of Philip K. Dick. Ironically, science fiction's tussle with Christianity hides the extent to which the sublime, especially in popular culture, serves to distort the classical Christian understanding of God, secularizing that God and rendering God's transcendence finite. But by turning from the sublime to a consideration of the beautiful, Gregory shows that both Christian and science-fictional imaginations may discover a new and surprising conversation.
Reviews
An argument that deserves to have a wide readership. -- Pierre W. Whalon -- Anglican Theological Review
...deploying the sublime as a prism through which to compare and contrast science fiction and theology is a master stroke. -- John Saxbee -- Church Times
Awards
Winner of Book Award in Culture and the Arts 2016 (United States).
Book Information
ISBN 9781602584600
Author Alan P. R. Gregory
Format Hardback
Page Count 328
Imprint Baylor University Press
Publisher Baylor University Press