Surely one of the most powerful novelettes ever written is Lester del Rey's For I am a Jealous People, in which the earth is invaded by a reptilian species with an advanced technology. The central character is a small-town minister, who sees his flock decimated and scattered by the invader, which loots and kills and drives him out of his little church. He takes a secret way back in and sees a worship service going on, and on his altar, no less than the Ark of the Covenant. He understands then that God has broken His ancient covenant with humanity and has given it to the aliens; and after some wracking soul-searching, he calls his congregation together and, in a new, potent, Moses-like fury, declares himself against God. "You have in us a worthy opponent."
In the late '40s a new bright light appeared on the horizon with the founding of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, co-edited by J. Francis McComas and Anthony Boucher. Boucher—who was author William A. P. White, who was H. H. Holmes (who reviewed as many as three hundred detective novels a year for the New York Tribune), and who conducted, from one of the finest record collections in the world, a weekly radio program on fine opera, was science fiction/fantasy critic for the New York Times, and one of the best, sharpest, gentlest and most creative editors who ever lived —was also a devout Roman Catholic. (He was also one of the most relaxed human beings one could meet, and his death in 1968 is a terrible loss.) His was a devotion of wide tolerance and ecumenicism; he would have had a joyful time with Pope John, and if there is high art in heaven he will at this moment be conducting a delightful battle royal with the late Colonel (Mistakes of Moses) Robert Ingersoll, and in the Jamaican phraseology, I wud Ghod I were a fly on de wall fe see dat.
A fine writer himself, he wrote a number of stories dealing with religion, probably the most notable being "The Quest for St. Aquin," in which a priest, heavily disguised in an America which had become totally intolerant of all religion, mounts a robot donkey—a "robass"—and follows myths and rumors to a cave in which, it is said, resides a saint. I won't spoil the story for you by telling you what he found; I will say that the dialogue between him and the robass is priceless. In addition, Tony gave a very special kind of house—room to writers with ideas about religion and worship, whether it was whimsical matter, like the endless series of short stories about deals with the devil, or stories of real moment and of towering quality—one thinks especially of Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s, "A Canticle for Leibowitz," which provoked two more novelettes on the same theme—a monastery in a postatomic era which had given itself the duty of preserving knowledge—the three becoming a novel which had even the mainstream critics taking real notice.
Philip Jose Farmer is one of the most original, one of the most talented, and certainly one of the most fearless writers around. He is deeply preoccupied with (among a good many other things) the profound pressure-to-worship mentioned earlier. "The Alley Man" is a powerful and most unsettling story about a garbage man who is very possibly an immortal Neanderthal and quite possibly a god as well. He is ugly, brutal, sensual, and more than a little divine. Farmer's novel Flesh is a marvelous orchestration of commentary on religion, morals, and power politics, in a fast-paced, hard-core science fiction setting. The crew of a starship returns to Earth to find it vastly changed, consisting of a quasi-tribal confederation of states completely under the domination of a savage (in two senses) theology. The captain is taken and processed to be this year's god-in-the-flesh. Part of the processing is to equip him with antlers, which have the effect of turning him daily into a condition of totipotent rut; he is carried naked from town to town and turned loose on the willing female population. He learns that this will continue for some weeks until he dies of it. This wild situation is complicated by his falling in love with a girl he doesn't want to hurt, and of course by her considerably mixed feelings about being in love with him, for all she is a native and understands the ritual. It is this kind of cold-logic-in-the-far-out that is Farmer's hallmark. An underpopulated culture, living a precarious existence in a ruined world in which, however, certain high technologies remain, has several urgencies: to breed as fast as possible; to secure the very best possible for the gene pool; and to give the people a predictable saturnalia during which they can lose their terrors in wild celebration. To accomplish this the government taps every resource of psychology—including that urge to worship, which it adds to the sexual drive, instead of separating them as is done by the Judaeo-Christian and Eastern ascetic philosophies. (Either way serves efficiently to fence a flock during those times when it is not under the direct view of the shepherd.) In Flesh, the incarnate dies of his ritual; and even this is used, for the biochemical preparation is ritualized into a surrogate birth process, with the unconscious preparee squeezed out through a narrow opening into public view. The pattern of the deity reborn is a familiar one, and in this context it digs right through the veneer. It can clearly be seen, then, that this narrative is no mere exercise in sensationalism, blasphemy, and porn, but is, underneath, a most astute examination, by comparison, of our own beliefs and convictions, and of the very nature of religion and morality, things which, in the ordinary course, we tend to take for granted, accept as axiomatic. I hold that it is right and necessary to examine these things, for they are vital to humanity. Gregariousness is not a privilege or a play toy. It is essential to our species; and the moral structure, and especially worship—because of its extension from the individual to the group, whereas the thrust of morality is in the other direction—are the peaks of our underlying gregariousness. To celebrate commencement, a faith must pass its finals.
I cannot leave the subject of religion in science fiction without mentioning three writers, who by their reputations within the field are little, middle, and big.
Sam Mines is little only in the sense that his bibliography is so short. He was at one time the editor of Thrilling Wonder and Startling Stories, and was most notable at the time for the studied gentleness and perception of the magazines' "Letters" columns. He is the author of a story—I call it a "lost" story because I have never seen it in an anthology, and I cannot recall the issue in which it appeared, except that it seems to have been in the early '50s. I am not even certain about the title, but I think it was called "Find the Sculptor."[11 It dealt with a lunar exploration team, a thoughtful and rather ludicrous crewman who happened to be devotedly religious, and another who was agnostic, brash, and the kind of guy who, when he was a boy scout, delighted in pushing the fat kid so he would sit in a puddle. Told too simply, the plot was that the brash one had a joke to play. He had a stone cross with him, and he dropped it on the lunar surface and manipulated matters so that the devout one would find it and pick it up—an artifact!—a cross!— on the moon! There would, of course, follow much raucous laughter and 240,000 miles' worth of ribbing. Well, the devout one indeed found the cross, and reentered the ship. and he was radiant, he was illuminated. And it came to the meathead to understand that whatever the episode that had lit this flame, regardless of its false and trivial sources, what had happened to his crew mate was real, and should not be tampered with. And that was his own illumination. A nice story, and one which reached me personally very deeply.
The levels of this little fable are many, and not the least of them is its recognition of what I have come to call the "infrarational"—that source of belief, faith, and motive which exists beside and above reason. So conditioned have we been by Aristotle, Kant, and Freud that we tend to believe that any force, object, or problem will yield to rational processes; when they don't, we blame the process and call up yet more logic. The infrarational, however, is a very large component in us, and while reason calls it ignorance and stupidity (viz, trying to talk someone out of a fear of the dark or of snakes), it is neither. It is the infrarational, source of many of our motivations and the tint reservoir of much of our thinking. We will never succeed in reaching our optimum as a species until we learn the nature of the infrarational. We may fail as a species unless we do. The urge to worship—as ubiquitous
and commanding as sex—has its origins there.
A "middle" writer is Marion Zimmer Bradley—competent, entertaining, insightful, always worth a reader's time and money. In her new novel Darkover Landfall, about a starship, carrying colonists, which strays far off course and crashes on an unknown planet, there is a frightening sequence in which the pollen of a certain flower acts in strange ways on warm-blooded life, indigenous and alien both. Among the people most taken by its madness is a priest (of the Order of Saint Christopher of Centaurus) who, under the influence of the pollen, commits sins which he thought were impossible to him, then murders to eliminate the witnesses, and then begins to suicide—and only at that point recognizes immolation as yet another mortal sin and stops in time. (The details of his sins are in the book. I'm not about to spoil so careful and powerful a piece of writing.) Because human life is so precious in this situation, and because the defense of temporary insanity is so obvious (for everyone was affected during the pollen-drift), Father Valentine is not executed, but is put to burying the dead and setting up a cemetery, working and living alone except for the momentary contact of someone's bringing food. A woman with a problem asks to take him food one day, and this interesting exchange takes place:
“Father, I need your help. I don’t suppose you’d hear my confession?”
He shook his head slowly. “I’m not a priest any more... How in the name of anything holy can I have the insolence to pass judgment in the name of God on someone else’s sins?. How can I honestly teach or preach the Gospel of Christ on a world where He never set foot? If God wants to save this world he’ll have to send someone to save it. whatever that means.”
“Then you’re just leaving us without pastoral help of any sort, Father?”
“I don’t think I ever did much in that line,” Father Valentine said. “I wonder if any priest ever did? It goes without saying that anything I can do for anyone as a friend, I’ll do-it’s the least I can do; if I spent my life at it, it wouldn’t begin to balance out what I did, but it’s better than sitting around in sackcloth and ashes mouthing penitential prayers.”
The woman said, “I can understand that, I suppose. But do you really mean there’s no room for faith, or religion, Father?”
He made a dismissing gesture. “I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘Father.’ Brother, if you want to. We’ve all got to be brothers and sisters in misfortune here. No, I didn’t say that. Every human being needs belief in the goodness of some power that created him, no matter what he calls it, and some religious or ethical structure. But I don’t think we need sacraments or priesthoods from a world that’s only a memory, and won’t even be that to our children and our children’s children. Ethics, yes. Art, yes.
Music, crafts, knowledge, humanity—yes. But not rituals which will quickly dwindle down into superstitions. And certainly not a social code or a set of purely arbitrary behavioral attitudes which have nothing to do with the society we’re in now.”
“Yet you would have worked in the church structure at the Coronis colony?” [Their original destination.]
“I suppose so. I belong to the Order of St. Christopher of Centaurus, which was organized to carry the Reformed Catholic Church to the stars, and I simply accepted it as a worthy cause. I never really thought about it. Not serious, hard, deep thought. But out here on the rock pile. Judith, forgive me. You came to me to ask my help, you asked me to hear your confession, and you’ve ended up listening to mine.”
She said very gently, “If you’re right, we’ll all have to be priests to each other, at least as far as listening to each other and giving what help we can.”
Of the many aspects of that multifaceted monolith Robert Heinlein, one of the most fascinating is the development in his work, through the years, of the religious element. One of the boldest thinkers around, he often seems harnessed to conventionality. But has his thinking in this area evolved—or has he been revealing more of what was always there? It's difficult to say.
In one of his earliest stories, "The Year of the Jackpot," which describes the result when all life-affecting cycles—lunar, solar, geological, psychological, meteorological, etc.—happen to peak at the same time: everybody goes crazy. The hero, like so many Heinlein heroes, is a fast-thinking, strong, engineering type, who rescues a girl out of the madness and brings her to a hiding place back in the hills, where they wait it out. They fall very much in love, and what to do? They're not married! This is a difficult issue for them; but what seemed even at the time (1952) merely quaint, suddenly became poignant when he and she knelt while he devoutly called upon God as his witness that these two were well and truly married. (In the same story, incidentally, is a most touching passage, in which the girl asks this slide-rule, chrome-plated character if he believes in life after death. "There must be," he says without hesitation. "If there weren't—it would be. bad art." I cannot express to you how much I like
that.) In Sixth Column the United States has been so thoroughly conquered that there are only six patriots left free to fight; they win back the country with a dazzling series of super-, pseudo-, and just plain scientific gadgetry, encasing the whole in a spectacular God-is-on-our-side false front which heartened the natives and demoralized the invader. And to this day I have not been able to decide whether this was cynical commentary on the force of religion or a kind of naivete. For a long period Heinlein, like a great many of his contemporaries, ignored this aspect—at least, to the best of my recollection; there are, certainly, a great many other things to write about.
Then along came the extraordinary Stranger in a Strange Land, a book which infuriates almost everyone who reads it— and with each reader, for a different reason! Aside from the fury, however, most people who read it love it. Heinlein's fusion of the optimum-human concept with religion becomes clear in this book, together with an opening up, not of love (there is always much more of love in Heinlein's works than the casual skimmer can find) but of ways of love. The parallel in Stranger between the careers of Michael Valentine Smith and Jesus of Nazareth is purposeful and clear, and, it seems to me, a lot more life-oriented in the former. The gaity in that transubstantiation scene at the end is something that has infuriated some of the infuriated readers; yet it is much closer to the agape, the love-feast, of apostolic Christianity than the rather more austere ceremony into which it evolved.
To sum up, then: religion and science fiction are no strangers to one another, and the willingness of science fiction writers to delve into it, to invent and extrapolate and regroup ideas and concepts in this as in all other areas of human growth and change, delights me and is the source of my true love for the mad breed.
As to morality, there is little more I can say about this than I have said above: morals are rules by which the individual survives within the group. More often than not they are outdated ethical concepts; more often than not they are tools for the established order to keep the order established. They have little contact with necessity; they tend to immobilize rather than to emancipate; they yield readily to straight hard questions, like:
Why must three-year-old girls wear bikini tops?
Why must little boys wear bathing suits at all?
Are the garments worn to worship services by today's females more or less modest than those worn on the beaches in the memory of the oldest parishioners?
Clothing, especially beach wear, is an easy target, a simple test for viability and usefulness in a moral idea. Some are more ponderous and worth pondering:
If all children were slapped every time they used the four-letter word "frog," frogs would achieve more size and more voltage than any frog has ever dreamed of.
Well, you take it from there. Live, and grow, and in the name of a real God, don't let morals stop you.
Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon was born on Staten Island, New York, in 1918. He started writing during the three years he spent at sea after attending Penn State Nautical School; he sold his first sf story, "The Ether Breather
s," to John W. Campbell's Astounding in 1939, and by that time he had already published forty or more stories in different fields as well as some poetry. Once launched in sf, he produced a long string of memorable short stories, and is celebrated (with Heinlein, del Rey, Asimov, and others) as one of the creators of science fiction as it is today. His stories appeared in all the leading sf magazines, and in 1947 one of them, "Bianca's Hands" won a $1,000 prize from the English Argosy (Graham Greene taking the second prize).
Sturgeon's first collection, Without Sorcery, appeared in 1948. Then, when Galaxy was founded, he began writing for it the psychologically oriented stories which culminated in his novel More Than Human, winner of the International Fantasy Award. Since then, he has been accorded innumerable other honors, including both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for "Slow Sculpture," a Galaxy story. He has written TV scripts for Star Trek and other shows, is preparing a new sf television series, and is married to TV personality Wina Sturgeon. He continues to produce his incomparable novels and short stories.
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