Vehige: The Catholic Writer and Speculative Fiction

First, let me say that this post should be seen as a compliment to Keith Strohm's "Why I Hate Christian SF." I don't agree with everything he says: for example, I don't think there should be art directed toward the Christian community. The only legitimate kind of religious art is liturgical art — that which is created as an aid for worship. All other art is art, pure and simple; and if a work of art contains Christian themes, it is because the artist is a Christian. If this is not true, if Christian art is a genre that's defined by its target audience, or by its plot, or any other external criteria, then anyone can make Christian art — believer or infidel. Michelangelo did not give us the Pieta because he was trying to create Christian art; he gave us the Pieta because he was a great artist who allowed his Christianity to penetrate and inform his art.

But that's a minor quibble. Overall, I agree with Keith . . . and from a certain point of view, he yanked the rug out from under me, for I was thinking about writing a similar post. Yet I mentioned that Keith didn't say everything that needs to be said, and so I'm left to take that burden upon myself.

Here, I want to sketch what it means to be a Catholic writer, why Catholic writers should be engaged in writing serious Speculative Fiction — that is, science fiction, fantasy fiction, and horror fiction — and, finally, I'm going to outline a program Catholics who want to write SF should follow.

What is a Catholic Writer?

As I've already implied, a Catholic writer (or artist of any kind) is a person who allows his Catholic faith to penetrate his fiction. This does not mean that the Catholic writer must write about saints, or Marian apparitions, or a band of rosary-praying friends, or the end of the world according to a Catholic interpretation of Revelation. Let me be blunt: neither the novels of Bud MacFarlane nor Michael O'Brien are the paragons of good Catholic fiction. They're not even the paragons of mediocre Catholic fiction.

In short, a Catholic writer doesn't have to write about anything Catholic. J. R. R. Tolkien didn't, and as far as I know, Flannery O'Connor, the matriarch of Catholic writers, included Catholics in only one of her stories — "The Temple of the Holy Ghost."

If a Catholic writer doesn't write about Catholics, what makes his fiction Catholic?

The way he understands his material does. One of the first lessons a Catholic writer must learn is the lesson that distinguishes the apparent immorality within a work of fiction and what makes a story truly immoral. Both Anna Karenina and The Bridges of Madison County have as their major plot engine adultery; but Leo Tolstoy and Robert James Waller have very different understandings of adultery. Whereas one novel is moral, the other is immoral. It's on this deeper level that the Catholic writer must allow his Catholic conscious to bear witness. So let the Catholic SF writer write about cloning and in-vetro fertilization, because if he does it right his fiction, regardless of the apparent immorality, will be both moral and Catholic.

How does the Catholic writer do this? First, by being devoted to the Church, and second by being devoted to his craft. Since the writer is a person first, he is unified within himself; there should be no distinction between his faith life and his artistic life. If he is devoted to the Church, if he is devoted to his craft, and if he does not intentionally separate these devotions, he cannot help but write Catholic fiction — even if his fiction doesn't include one overt reference to the Church.

The Catholic Writer and "Speculative" Fiction

For non-Speculative Fiction fans — or for those readers who may not know the term (which was proffered as a substitute to "science fiction" by Robert Heinlein) — Speculative Fiction, includes what is commonly called science fiction, fantasy fiction, and horror fiction. I prefer the all-encompassing term "Speculative Fiction" because despite the way they're marketed, the hearts of these three genres beat in unison — they all thrive on a what-if-reality-were-like-this speculation. What if we could colonize Mars? What if dragons really existed? What if vampires did?

From one point of view, Speculative Fiction (=SF) will never attain the literary value of a Homer, Tolstoy, Melville, Dostoevsky, or Faulkner. The reason for this is that SF thrives on a "what if" question which often overwhelms the story to the detriment of character development. Faulkner is correct: the essence of fiction is the human heart in conflict with itself. When a writer begins to have fun with reality, as all SF writers do, there's little time to explore the human heart in conflict with itself.

But from another point of view, this is precisely the power of SF. Faulkner's definition of fiction is twofold — it does indeed examine the conflict of the human heart within itself . . . and it also deals with the eternal verities. It's my contention that SF has a unique power to explore these truths because the speculative reality offered by the SF writer usually has metaphorical value. If it doesn't, then at least the speculative reality allows the writer to speak of moral issues in a disarming way. One of the greatest examples of this is Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The world of Middle Earth allows Tolkien to write about friendship and nobility, sacrifice and honor, good and evil, in a way that doesn't sound like moralizing or preaching.

Back to SF and the eternal verities.

One of the top SF writers today — Robert J. Sawyer — had recently announced that science fiction should be renamed "philosophical fiction" because it's the only genre that's able to handle the Big Questions in philosophical ways. And when asked if there are "any social issues of the day that you think speculative fiction writers should be willing to take on?" he said:

You've got it exactly backwards! There are no social issues of the day that speculative fiction writers should not be willing to take on. In my own books, I've dealt with abortion issue, capital punishment, racism, sexism, affirmative action, gay rights, recovered memories of childhood abuse, corruption within the church, the politics of war, 9/11, creation vs. evolution, government funding for culture, and many others. Science fiction is a way of looking at our society through a distorting lens that lets us see truths that otherwise might remain hidden. Despite what people think they know about science fiction from watching Star Wars -- which is really fantasy, not SF, and unambitious fantasy at that -- good science fiction, starting right with H.G. Wells, has always been about social comment.

Granted, not all of these social concerns would constitute the "eternal verities" of human life, but each one can be a springboard for asking the major philosophical questions. Why are we here? Does God exist? What does it mean to live in society? Is truth relative? And so forth.

I'm not going to suggest that SF is uniquely qualified to handle these social concerns or to tackle these issues. But it does, and it's been doing so its entire history. There is no reason, then, for a Catholic writer who wants to write SF from a Catholic viewpoint to limit himself to missionaries evangelizing alien societies, Marian apparitions on Mars, priests trying to prove God existence, or what the Second Coming might look like if humanity had colonized other planets.

How to Become A Catholic SF Writer

If a Catholic writer wants to write SF, then he must focus on being a good Catholic, on understanding the Church's social teaching and philosophical tradition, and, of course, on learning to write solid SF. That's easy to say. But for those who want a more definite plan, here's some recommendations.

1. Cut your aesthetical teeth on Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism to understand not only what art is, but what it means in the abstract to be a Catholic artist. I'd also recommend John Gardner's trilogy (On Becoming a Novelist, The Art of Fiction, and On Moral Fiction) to understand both the craft fiction and its aesthetical aspects.

2. Read Flannery O'Connor's The Habit of Being to see Maritain's Art and Scholasticism in action.

3. Read all the great Catholic writers of the past and present: Leon Bloy, Georges Bernanos, Francois Mauriac, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, J. F. Powers, Edwin O'Connor, Walker Percy, Jon Hassler, Tobias Wolff, Ron Hansen, Andre Dubus, and others.

4. Since you want to write from a Catholic perspective, you'll need to immerse yourself Catholic thought, so read all the major encyclicals written by every Pope since Leo XIII — especially the social encyclicals. Read Vatican II. Immerse yourself in Thomistic philosophy by reading as much Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and Josef Pieper as you can handle. It wouldn't be a bad idea, either, to read a lot of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

5. Read as much modern philosophy as you can, particularly Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, Foucault, etc., to know what the other side is thinking.

6. Read as much SF as you can to understand the breadth of the genre. The quickest way to understand the field, I think, is to take Orson Scott Card's recommendation in How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy seriously and read every story in the following anthologies: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame 1 edited by Robert Silverberg, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame 2 volumes edited by Ben Bova, The Best of the Nebulas which is also edited by Ben Bova, Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, as well as every story in Gardner Dozois' The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction (which is not in Card's plan).

7. When you've finished that, read every novel that won the Hugo Award and/or Nebula Award and/or the World Fantasy Award.

Why so much? It's obvious, isn't it?

If you want to write good fiction, you need to understand the art and craft of fiction on a sophisticated level. Thus, Number 1.

If you want to write good Catholic fiction, you need to know how the great Catholic writers of past and present — all of whom have been esteemed by the literary community as great writers — successfully merged their faith with their art. Thus, Numbers 2 and 3.

Since you want to imbue your art with a Catholic worldview, you need to have that worldview yourself. You don't get that through reading popular theology. You must immerse yourself in serious Catholic thought. The teachers of the popular theologians must become your teachers. Thus, Number 4.

But you have to know what the other half is thinking. Every character can't be a Catholic philosopher. Our culture is saturated with contemporary nihilistic thought. How so? Because it's been disseminated though pop artists. More people learned their Nietzsche through Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors, than from any Introduction to Philosophy class. To see how this works, get a hold of the Firefly DVD set and listen to Joss Whedon's commentary for Episode 14. If that doesn't convince you of the need to read serious philosophy, both Catholic and secular, nothing will. Thus, Number 5.

Finally, if you want to write SF fiction, you need to understand the genre because the fans do. Thus, Numbers 6-7.

But this will take years! you cry.

Yes, it will. That was a mistake I made when I was trying to write — thinking that writing fiction should come quickly, with ease. But stories do not spring forth complete and perfect from the mind of the artist the way Athena sprung forth from the mind of Zeus. The writer does not put a story on paper in order to relieve himself of a headache. On the contrary, once you decide to put your stories on paper, that's precisely when the headache begins.