I doubt if there are any studies to prove or disprove the idea that speculative fiction is a first world pastime. To clarify, “first world” according to the Urban Dictionary refers to an informal classifications of countries:

The world classes (first, second, and third) have no official definition, but are often times used to describe the economic position of a state. The differences between the classes has less to do with the economic well being of the nation, and more to do with the geopolitical divides that emerged during and after the cold war.

First world is generally defined as a western style state that is usually capitalist and democratic, which has a high standard of living.

I’ve lived in a couple third world countries, one underdeveloped and largely agrarian, the other developing with a greater mix of urban and rural society. What do people from those nations think of speculative fiction—from gaming, comic books, movies or TV, and novels? Do they engage with science fiction? With fantasy? With horror? Or are those broad-brush genres only interesting to first world countries?

At the level of literature, speculative fiction depends on a literate society, so that must be in place for a country to have any awareness of the stories that are available. Second, a certain level of economic achievement seems necessary for people to spend money going to the movies, buying TVs, DVDs, computers and computer games. And finally, a significant amount of time seems necessary for people to spend reading or gaming.

But I have to wonder. Speculative fiction, at its core, involves the struggle of good against evil, so doesn’t that idea indicate that our stories are for everyone? Aren’t people in Sudan and Nigeria and Ukraine and Bolivia and Yemen concerned with despots and evil empires and heroes and struggle?

I think those elements and themes are universal, so I want to say speculative fiction is for everyone. But I wonder. Are the day-to-day conditions for people not living in a first world country perhaps too close to the pretend conditions of our speculative fiction. I mean, many don’t have to imagine a government depicted in dystopian, or war shown in epic fantasy or ostracism or alienation portrayed in a science fiction. They live with despotic governments, the dangers of war, unfair treatment based on ethnicity. Why read speculative fiction if you only have to look out your window to see the clash of good and evil.

Add in one more factor. Many of the third world nations have a greater awareness of the supernatural than do those of us in the first world. For instance, in his books Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, Nabeel Quereshi, of Pakistani descent, pointed out that many Muslims put great trust in dreams as a guide for their future.

Of course, Hinduism is predominant in India, and that belief system relies on any number of supernatural elements. Buddhism likewise starts with the the ultimate goal of spiritual enlightenment, achieved over many lifetimes of rebirth.

Other places in the world believe in animism, a kind of pantheism that sees all things as possessing a “spiritual essence.” Still others cling to a form of indigenous beliefs that have been labeled as “superstitions.”

While the latter can identify with the ultimate struggle between good and evil, some of the other religions see the world through a different lens. What does speculative fiction say to them?

And should we care? Is speculative fiction only for the first world, and are we to accept the idea that no one apart from first world individuals will benefit from science fiction and fantasy?

I suspect that some who love these genres will argue that “benefit” is not the goal. That speculative fiction is nothing more than entertainment, that we are to let every culture find their own entertainment and not concern ourselves with what they do or don’t do in their free time.

I have to wonder about that position. I mean, as many have pointed out before, Jesus told stories. The Bible is filled with stories. And at least on two occasions someone in Scripture told a story that would have to be identified as speculative. The Bible, remember, was not originally written to first world cultures. Jesus didn’t come and live during the internet era, or during the industrial revolution.

He spoke to third world Middle Easterners and He included stories that they understood but that we today also can understand.

I realize that no one who writes fiction is writing Scripture. Nor are we preaching sermons. But as we engage in the thematic base of speculative fiction—the struggle between good and evil—I wonder if our reading audience might not reach beyond our own borders. Is there any better way to bridge the gap between disparate worldviews than through story? And particularly through speculative stories?

When did this happen to me? This insatiable need to read?

Probably when I was in fourth grade. I was home sick one day and my mother bought a book for me.

I still remember my excitement and the desire to read that book again and again.

This week we feature C. S. Wachter and her novel The Sorcerer’s Bane in Lorehaven Book Clubs. Stop by the flagship book club on Facebook to learn more about this story.

Subscribe to Lorehaven Magazine for free to download our summer 2018 issue. And be the first to get our fall 2018 issue, releasing next month.

Why do people read? Gaining information, learning something new, or increasing knowledge about a favorite topic can draw seekers to read non-fiction.

But, what about fiction? Entertainment, leisure, escapism tend to top the list for reasons to read fiction.

But is that all there is to it? I wonder. If non-fiction can give us facts and true stories that touch us in certain ways, can fiction, especially fantasy, help us to flesh out our beliefs and expand our perspectives in ways non-fiction can’t?

The heart-power of story

I found this to be true nearly fifty years ago when I first read The Lord of the Rings. If nothing else, the returning king who came offering healing touched my young Christian heart and ignited my imagination, fleshing out truths I had read in the Bible. The story moved me on an emotional rather than intellectual level.

Stories have impact, leave impressions on people’s spirits. Emotions are messy and yet they have enormous control over our thoughts and decisions.

C.S. Lewis said:

At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting on life,’ can add to it.

Fantasy without God?

After reading C. S. Lewis in college, most of the fantasy I read seemed to be lacking something important. Then, a few years ago, I stumbled upon Karen Hancock’s Legends of the Guardian-King series, and like a bolt of lightning, it hit me. If I was seeking relevancy in an engaging story, I would not find it where the ultimate truth of a creator God is ignored.

In the realm of entertainment today, that concept of a divine designer is sadly lacking. For example, I began watching Supernatural, a series about two brothers who fight demons and other nasty supernatural beings. Like in other similar series and books, holy water, crosses, and assorted defenses are used, but their origin, the reason why they possess any power over demons or vampires, is lost in irrelevancy. If we need to battle a strong demon, we don’t turn to God. No, we turn to a nastier, stronger demon. And when angels enter the picture, they aren’t any better than the demons they fight.

It’s disheartening enough when God is ignored, but some series very specifically attack Christianity. Integrity, family, the covenant of marriage, honesty, and faith in God are all dragged out as anachronistic left-overs from a past we’re encouraged to leave behind. We, as human beings, are on our own. And, therefore, we must decide what is right for us individually in any given situation. Once we throw out absolutes, where is the bedrock for relevancy?

Exploring The Sorcerer’s Bane

“Write what you want to read.” I don’t remember when or where I saw that quote, but in July of 2015, I knew this is what I was being called to do. I hadn’t written anything before this except for college papers and some three-page pieces for a small writing group in my neighborhood (three people). But when I got home after meeting with my neighbors one afternoon, I sat at my laptop and began to write. Of course, me being me, it had to be fantasy. And, of course, God would not be banished to the background or ignored; instead, he would be a powerful presence throughout.

Though The Sorcerer’s Bane has been called dark, and I admit it is, there are shafts of light that pierce that relentless darkness. Could I have written a less dark tale? Possibly, but by the end of the roller-coaster ride that spans all four books of The Seven Words series, when the Son speaks in The Light Unbound, it is to a Light Bringer who has become part of us. We’ve been with him through abuse and pain, doubt and fear, and moments of radiant joy.

The voice of the Son permeated Rayne’s spirit and he knew the voice of the Son was also the voice of the Father One that he had heard so often. It swelled within him. ‘Beloved Light Bringer, chosen of the One. You have suffered much, and your faith has been tested by fire, refined like fine gold. Are you ready now to be our agent of judgement against the darkness consuming the worlds of Ochen?’

‘Yes, my Lord. What would you have me do?’

We cry out with Rayne, united in his answer that now carries the authority and relevancy of one who’s stood at the edge of the abyss and yet still trusts even when the trusting comes hard.

I’ve been told by a beta reader that The Seven Words books strengthened his faith. Fantasy stories that move us add dimension to life rather than just commenting on it. They transport us to other worlds and touch us on a deep level. It is only by his journey into the depths of darkness that Rayne’s words gain the authority to carry us forward into the light. Yes, it’s just a fantasy story. But for those of us Christians who are curious enough to read speculative fiction, the insatiable need leads us to seek out fantastical stories grounded on God’s truths because they not only entertain us, they impact our lives.

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“C. S. Wachter flings thematic windows open to sunlight and storms.”
— Lorehaven Magazine

Explore C. S. Wachter’s novel The Sorcerer’s Bane in the Lorehaven Library.

Read our full review exclusively from the summer 2018 issue of Lorehaven Magazine!

I saw the movie Alpha with my wife and her parents in Mexico last night (writing this on Wednesday–I love watching movies in Monterrey by the way–the seats are cheaper and the theater is cleaner and newer than watching the same film anywhere I know of in the USA). (Yes, obviously that means I’m in Mexico right now. 🙂 ) It’s not a movie I would have picked for myself–I generally find movies featuring dogs more than a bit corny. Note that Alpha is a piece of pre-historic fiction dramatizing the supposed first domestication of a wolf into a dog. Fantasy-esque is an awkward Frankenword (ahem), but I think it really describes the film. The movie is not in the fantasy genre, but a number of things about it feel like a fantasy, so I think quite a number of Speculative Faith readers would really enjoy this film–hence why I’m giving it my recommendation here. And explaining it a bit.

By the way, some general SPOILERS for the film follow. I won’t give away much pertinent to the plot, but I will mention some specific movie details. So if you had already planned to watch it and don’t want to hear anything about it, stop reading. If on the other hand, you are indifferent to the idea of the movie or even disinterested, keep reading–some things I share here might change your mind about Alpha.

Also by the way, Travis Chapman and I have actually figured out a process on how to proceed with posts. So next week we will launch into our joint series that will serve as a Speculative Fiction Writers’ Guide to Warfare. We’ll sum up our process and what we plan to cover next week, Dios mediante.

So why does Alpha feel like a fantasy? First there’s a terrible beast that stalks humans in the darkness. That the beast is a saber-tooth cat does not diminish the sense of horror and a feeling of “this beast is unlike anything from the world we know.”

And the movie has other strange beasts that attack, both day and night–stone age hyenas. And while hyenas don’t seem that surreal when set in Africa, I got a definite sense of the surreal as hyenas ran through snow–because of course, in our world, hyenas don’t live anywhere near snow. But during the Ice Age, the range of the Cave Hyena went across cold climate areas of Europe and Asia.

Howling at the starry night.

And for lack of a better word, the landscape is the movie is epic. Like the backdrop of an epic fantasy film in harshness and barrenness, the sites the film producers picked in British Columbia, Alberta, and Iceland, give a strong sense of being in another world. Add to that the way the night sky is shown to shine in majestic brightness and the way the film shows such “ordinary” things as the motion of the sun and the moon and I was left with a very strong sense that the film portrays the pre-historic world in a way that admirers of fantasy could fall in love with.

And the culture! There’s something of course familiar about cavemen scaring bison off a cliff, but the culture of these Cro-magnons shows them to be fully human in a very sophisticated way. They have tattoos, read the stars, know basics of medicine, wear sewn clothing and bone jewelry, braid their hair, cut their hair, shave, and work hard to master the skills of making fires and chipping razor-sharp stone tools. They leave piles of rocks to mark hunting grounds, build shelters, believe their ancestors bless them, leave stacks of rocks to help the dead find their way to the ancestors, have rites of initiation and ordinary emotional aspects of pride in relatives, love for one another, and fear during danger.

Sophisticated cavemen in mourning.

The human characters are like us but not like us, which is something the best of speculative fiction delivers. And note that the producers chose to do some things that I think Young Earth Creationists especially will appreciate–oh, the overtly stated setting of 20,000 years ago Creationists won’t like. But imagine the producers got the year wrong, and you’ll see very little sense that human beings have evolved in this movie. The culture and technology of the people of this film is radically different from us, but these are humans, fully human. And the cast, which is a mixture of Northern European actors, Latinos, and people of East Asian descent, shows people with dark hair, dark eyes, and high cheekbones, but in other ways with radically different appearances, as if belonging to a proto-race from which all other human races would eventually spring–which is a Young Earth Creationist idea of what early humans were like.

And lest someone complain that making cave men and women too sophisticated is just the movie makers importing modern culture into the past, please recall that Otzi the iceman found in the Alps some years back, though from a later time period than the setting of Alpha, surprised researchers with how sophisticated and well-crafted his personal items were. (And Otzi had tattoos.) Seeing cavemen and women as sophisticated actually follows along perfectly with what science knows about Stone Age people.

So I love this movie’s story world–I love its world building. It’s truly fantasy-eque, for lack of a better word. I also loved the cinematography, also fantasy-esque, which is what’s responsible for producing a truly unexpected and at times surreal sky and natural surroundings.

I didn’t love the plot as much. To sum up the plot in a way that minimizes spoilers (but still gives away a tiny bit), a boy who has just been accepted as a man goes out on his first hunt with the tribe led by his father. Something goes wrong and he is left for dead. He has to work to save himself and survive while a broken bone mends–and in the meantime, winds up saving the life of a wolf, who later becomes personally loyal to him in a way that obviously leads to the domestication of dogs.

From that set-up you should already realize up front that both the boy and the wolf survive, or else there were be no future implied about dogs. Them surviving is fine, but there were times the movie tried to make you wonder if they would make it, but I never wondered, based on the story set-up.

I’ve already mentioned that I think stories featuring dogs are often corny, but this one wasn’t very much. It did have some cute moments (or even “cutesy”) in which things happened that were not very likely. One example–the young man throws a stick at the wolf to get it to go away from him and the wolf snatches the stick from the ground and runs in back to him. That the dude has no idea what to do next, instead of deciding to play catch with the wolf, is what keeps that point of the story from getting too cutesy.

I did my own fair share of walking around in icy wilderness as a kid in Montana and I saw some things in the story that didn’t ring true to me. “Why isn’t he covering his face right now?” “Why is he always walking upwind–shouldn’t he at least tack back and forth a bit?” “Why did that guy freeze to death outside his tent (it’s much more like he’d freeze to death trying to stay warm inside it)?” “How come there’s always dry wood to light a fire (even during a snowstorm)?” “Why would you run out onto the surface of a frozen lake if you had no idea how thick the ice was (I wouldn’t)?”

And there’s some other moments I could mention that I won’t. I guess we could say that having a bit of surreal in the setting I like, but surreal plot elements I don’t.

But none of the plot things kept me from liking the movie–though they did make me see it as less than perfect. I would give this movie a B plus overall, or 4 out of 5 stars, or 8.5 out of ten. Oh, by the way, it’s also a clean movie, no swearing or nudity, limited violence, though some animals are portrayed getting killed (PETA has protested this aspect of the film, of course), and the story also contains some “peril” and relatively mild depictions of trauma.

But in spite of my caveats, I broadly recommend this movie, especially to fans of fantasy. Though supposedly a realistic story set in pre-history, it indeed is fantasy-esque. And worth the price of a movie ticket for the cinematography alone.

As technological development accelerates at a frightening pace, things that used to be purely in the realm of science fiction are now science fact, with new horizons being conquered on what feels like a weekly basis. One of the more recently explored frontiers is the merging of man and machine, spawning a new philosophical construct called “transhumanism.” This is more than just prosthetic limbs for amputees; transhumanism believes that the next phase of human progress and evolution is the synthesis of hardware and wetware, even at the synaptic level.

Image copyright Paramount Pictures

Many books, films, and TV programs have explored this intriguing technology, perhaps most famously with the “Borg” in the Star Trek universe. Only the most cold-hearted Communist would view the Borg as a worthy aspiration for the human race, and the medical advances we have made today are still far beneath the fictional technology the Borg employ. Most of our modern machinery compatible with the human body applies to the limbs and a few organs. We are nowhere near being able to replace a body wholesale while keeping the kernel of the human soul alive within the machine. Yet there are countless scientific minds and countless amounts of money being devoted to just that, hoping to one day be able to substitute this frail mortal shell for something harder, faster, and more durable.

I recently watched a film that deals with this subject called Upgrade. I can’t say I recommend the film, mostly due to its glorification of extreme violence, but the story was decent and there were some twists and turns in there. The basic premise is that in the near-future, a man is in an automobile accident, paralyzing him from the waist down. Without his knowledge, a computer chip known as STEM is implanted on his spinal cord, and he regains the ability to walk. Unbeknownst to him, at least initially, STEM is more than just a miracle drug; it is a fully-functional artificial intelligence system with the ability to talk and the capability of enhancing motor skills beyond what the human brain can achieve. At first, this sounds pretty cool (and a lot like the backstories of a thousand comic book characters). As expected, however, things take a sinister turn, and the moral of the story is that when someone (or something) has control, it doesn’t like to give it back.

Image copyright OTL Releasing

What made this film intellectually stimulating is the moral dilemma our hapless protagonist experiences. He can either surrender control of his body to STEM and walk and jump and kill and be invincible, or he can languish in bed as a paraplegic. I’ve never been in a paralyzed state but I imagine that if I were, I would do almost anything be able to walk again. Yet even our desperate hero balks at the idea of surrendering total control to a computer program, especially when its motives start to veer into dark territory. We instinctively know that the mind is more important than the body, yet it is our body which acts upon the world.

What might the Bible have to say about this issue? It is quite clear that as believers, we are expected to maintain control of our bodies. Eph. 5:18 exhorts us not to be drunk, which leads to debauchery; 1 Cor. 6:20 tells us to honor God with our bodies; Rom. 6:12-13 tells us to not let sin reign in our bodies, but to present our members as instruments of righteousness. When we were in sin, its lusts and passions ruled our bodies and we were powerless to resist. But now that we are dead to sin and alive in Christ, our sin nature no longer has a hold of us, and we now serve a new Master. By the power of the Holy Spirit through grace, we are commanded to use our bodies for righteousness. If we surrender control to a foreign host, that no longer becomes possible. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and He enables us to carry out God’s commands.

The Borg says, “Resistance is futile.” I say, “Tell that to Him who strengthens me.”

In The New Yorker, Booker Prize-winning author Ian McEwan wrote, “I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.”¹

Even if that’s an overstatement, McEwan’s article makes a great case that the novella is an important and beneficial form of literature.² So why are works of fiction with a length somewhere between short stories and novels almost never published, unless they’re by a famous author?

The main reason is that prior to modern publishing innovations like eBooks and on-demand production, thousands of copies of every book had to be printed, and novellas were too short and inexpensive for publishers to turn a profit on them (unless they were by a famous author and therefore guaranteed to sell enough copies). But those new publishing capabilities have made the printing cost a relatively moot issue, so the novella is now primed to become as prevalent and appreciated as its counterparts.

We may be at the dawn of a revolution in fiction publishing—the “Day of the Novella”—and Cruciform Press is hoping to be a pioneer in this new age like it has been with short, practical non-fiction books during the last decade. On July 30 we released the first three novellas in our new fiction line.³

Perhaps you’ve thought of some other reasons why there aren’t many novellas in print. For example, an avid reader I know once complained that a short novel is a mere “snack” to her, because she likes to read long epics. But what’s wrong with a good snack? Krispy Kreme donuts are a snack, and so are ice cream and Doritos (or whatever kind of chips you prefer)—even Starbucks. So that shouldn’t be a criticism or reason to abstain from novellas, and they’re not even bad for your health!

We might assume that novellas are somehow inferior to novels because they’re shorter, but McEwan addresses that issue very well in the larger section surrounding the quote above:

Composers, including those of the highest rank, have never had such problems of scale. Who doubts the greatness of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and string quartets or of Schubert’s songs? Some, like me, prefer them to the symphonies of either man. Who could harden his heart against the intimate drama of Mozart’s G minor trio, or not lose himself in the Goldberg variations or not stand in awe of the D minor Chaconne played on a lonesome violin?

Strangely, the short story never arouses suspicion of short-changing, probably because the form is so fundamentally different from the novel.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated, ill-shaven giant (but a giant who’s a genius on his best days). And this child is the means by which many first know our greatest writers. Readers come to Thomas Mann by way of “Death in Venice,” Henry James by “The Turn of the Screw,” Kafka by “Metamorphosis,” Joseph Conrad by “Heart of Darkness,” Albert Camus by “L’Etranger.” I could go on: Voltaire, Tolstoy, Joyce, Solzhenitsyn. And Orwell, Steinbeck, Pynchon. And Melville, Lawrence, Munro.

The tradition is long and glorious. I could go even further: the demands of economy push writers to polish their sentences to precision and clarity, to bring off their effects with unusual intensity, to remain focused on the point of their creation and drive it forward with functional single-mindedness, and to end it with a mind to its unity. They don’t ramble or preach, they spare us their quintuple subplots and swollen midsections.

Novellas not only promote economy and unity in writing, but they are a perfect medium for a generation of readers who have shorter attention spans and love movies (a screenplay is around the same length as a novella).

I wonder why Ian McEwan omitted A Christmas Carol from his list of examples (perhaps because it’s too “Christian” for him?). That short book by Charles Dickens, in my opinion, is the greatest example of a classic work of art that has changed the world for good in many ways. For one of Cruciform’s first three titles, I had the privilege of abridging and annotating Dickens’ novella Haunted Man, a forgotten speculative classic that I hope will also be used by the Lord to bring his grace and truth into many lives.

A reprise of an article that first appeared here three years ago, dealing with work—on Labor Day.

Today is Labor Day in the US, so I thought it appropriate to think a little bit about speculative novels and work. My first thought was, Does anybody work? I mean, in epic fantasy, the protagonist and his crew are questing—traveling, for the most part, from one place to another in an effort to find, win, capture, or fulfill whatever the quest requires. Space opera doesn’t seem very different, but the principles are wondering the galaxy instead of roaming the countryside.

So who works?

I know there are some stories that feature the prince or the warrior or the soothsayer. There are some centered around the dragon keeper (a nod in particular to Donita Paul and her DragonKeeper Chronicles); still others feature the assassin. These, of course, are professions, and there is a certain amount of work connected to what they do.

But who maintains the spaceship? Who cooks the dinner? Who shoes the horses? Who navigates the trail?

I think of the old westerns, which I’ve recently had the opportunity to view, and marvel that they are so well plotted, but also believably peopled with working characters. They have the scout and the cook and the wagon master.

Star Trek, the original, included the same elements, (though, of course, the worker red shirts are inevitably the ones who die in a crisis). The spin-off series maintained that same bit of worldbuilding. Miles was the transporter chief and his wife a botanist. Deanna Troi was the ship’s counselor and Beverly Crusher, the chief medical officer.

What about speculative fiction today? Are our stories including characters that tend to the mundane needs of the protagonist? Is there someone looking after the children, even teaching them? Who gets the meals? Who buys supplies? Who does the repair work? Are these characters significant or peripheral?

I wonder if our attitude toward work might not improve if we began to see it as honorable and necessary in our fiction.

But maybe it’s there, and I’m just not noticing.

What speculative novels have you read that showcase someone with an ordinary job?

Jill Williamson’s By Darkness Hid opens with the protagonist getting up early to feed the animals. It was his job as a slave. However, he quickly advances to become a squire, and off he goes on his quest.

Patrick Carr’s A Cast Of Stones opens with a drunk given a message to deliver—a job he accepts so he can get enough money to buy another day’s supply of booze. But he soon joins forces with a pair of clergymen and ends up on a quest.

Maybe “ordinary” doesn’t make for a good story. Still, I’d think within stories about the exciting and the exceptional, there need to be those who hold down the fort, who keep the supply lines coming through, who make sure the soldiers have shoes.

What books have you read (or written) that include the everyday in their worldbuilding? What books move those mundane jobs to the forefront and make them significant to the plot?

I want Christian characters in my books.

If you’re looking for an explanation of why I write stories the way I do, and why they contain the themes they do, there’s your answer. It’s that simple.

This week we feature Steve Rzasa and his novels The Bloodheart and The Lightningfall in Lorehaven Book Clubs. Stop by the flagship book club on Facebook to learn more about these stories.

Subscribe to Lorehaven Magazine for free to download our new summer 2018 issue.

Different readers have different tastes when it comes to religion in the books they read. Some are incensed if there’s even a mention of Christianity. Others are appalled if a character doesn’t “come to Christ” at the end. Then there’s a whole slew who are somewhere else on the spectrum, a rainbow of faithful with varied expectations.

But if you’re reading a space opera adventure, would you expect a character to be a believer? One who isn’t immediately portrayed as a villain?

They’re sorely lacking, because the stereotypes of the future don’t include religion. Humanity is supposed to evolve beyond it.

Fat chance of that.

Cosmic deity

“While The Bloodheart offers a fairly straightforward episodic quest, its sequel The Lightningfall breaks new narrative ground.”
— Lorehaven Magazine

I recently read a sarcastic comment online, through which one could sense the eye-roll, that you couldn’t have a Christian geek talk without a C. S. Lewis quote coming out. Kind of like mentioning Christians who are fantasy fans who hold up Tolkien as their patron saint.

In all fairness to the geeks and Lewis himself, where else are we to go to find philosophy that mixed faith and rocket ships? Few people indulge in serious thought on the matter.

In the sixties, Russian cosmonauts made what they thought was a clever communist-atheist statement: they’d been to space and hadn’t found God. Lewis, like many Christians, gave a big shrug, and he put his lack of concern this way:

“Space travel really has nothing to do with the matter. To some, God is discoverable everywhere; to others, nowhere. Those who do not find Him on earth are unlikely to find Him in space. (Hang it all, we’re in space already; every year we go a huge circular tour in space.) But send a saint up in a spaceship and he’ll find God in space as he found God on earth.”

It’s that last line that influences my writing. When you pick up a book of mine, no matter how far-future the space opera, you’re going to find Christians in it. Why? Because I have an agenda to push, or a message to preach? In a tiny way, yes, but really, name for me a book that doesn’t carry forward the author’s philosophy and I’ll show you something penned by a robot. The author’s beliefs bleed into a story, no matter how overt or covert he or she chooses to be.

Christian characters are needed, especially in science-fiction, but not to preach a message and not to show them being holier-than-thou. They need to be present to show how the faithful would live their lives in a far-off galaxy, and how their beliefs would be shaped by humanity’s expansion into deep space.

Christian trek

My characters in stories like The Face of the Deep series or the Vincent Chen novellas are Christians who are familiar with persecution. They interact every day with those who do not believe, so theological discussions take place. They read Scripture and go to church or, in the case of the Rescue Ops crew in Broken Sight, have chaplain’s services aboard their starship light-years from Earth.

Why should anyone care about that?

Because books, live movies, tend to strip modern-day religion from their stories as if no one in the future will attend a church or participate in the Lord’s Supper. These are not strange, rare occurrences. These are weekly and sometimes more often events that believers take part in. To leave them out of a story, while emphasizing other aspects of a culture, is, in a sense, lazy.

It’s one of the biggest beefs I have with Star Trek—the idea that within a few hundred years, all organized religion will simply disappear. The double-standard, of course, is that alien religions are treated with curiosity and respect. It’s part of the credo of the United Federation of Planets, this approval of diversity. And yet it’s humanity who comes across as monolithic, in the newer versions of Trek more than in the original. At least the 1960s crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise had some accents to distinguish them. Everyone on the U.S.S. Discovery sounds like they’re from generic America, even though they are a mix of races and cultural backgrounds.

An eye to the future

Christianity will not disappear from civilization, no matter how it may be declining in the United States in Europe—because, for one, it is on the rise in Africa and other nations. This ebb and flow of the religion happens throughout history, during times of persecution and endorsement.

I depict how things could be for Christians in the far-future, in a galaxy of new worlds and cultures. How will the faithful be treated? Where will they go? How will they communicate?

I think it’s important for people to read books in which Christians are depicted fairly and realistically, as true individuals who are as flawed as the next sinner, but who rely on the promises of Christ for the hope in a better life now and the best to come in eternity. To see believers as real, not as caricatures of either perfection or villainy.

Because you love books with characters who are true to life, then reading about people who pray when times get rough or who go to church to worship and commune with their brothers and sisters in the faith will give you a true taste of humanity.

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“While The Bloodheart offers a fairly straightforward episodic quest, its sequel The Lightningfall breaks new narrative ground.”
— Lorehaven Magazine

Explore Steve Rzasa’s novels The Bloodheart and The Lightningfall in the Lorehaven Library.

Read our full review exclusively from the summer 2018 issue of Lorehaven Magazine!

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In writing the kind of non-fiction that a Speculative Faith post is, good form comes from getting to the point right away. Tell them what you intend to tell them up front, tell them again in detail, and if necessary, summarize.

I’m not doing that with this post, but hope you will continue to read anyway to see what I’m talking about. I hope the images of young people having cut themselves that I’ve shared will catch your attention to the point you will want to know why I shared them. And you’ll keep reading to find out.

Note I’m still not continuing with the series I had planned, A Speculative Fiction Writer’s Guide to Warfare. I’m still working on collaboration with Travis Chapman, a situation which has not been worked out by any means…

To return to my indirect (“left-handed”) means to make a specific point, I once imagined writing a modernized version of Pilgrim’s Progress. If you aren’t familiar with that 1678 work by John Bunyan, it’s highly and obviously allegorical, with character names like Wordly Wiseman, Christian, Hopeful, Ignorance, and the Giant Despair, wherein the names of the characters sum up who the characters are.

In the version I pondered writing, the character names would be less obvious, but still sum up their nature. I thought of creating a knight named “Autotomy”–a word which comes from Greek roots meaning “self-cutting.” The knight, when first met and asked if his name is actually supposed to be “Autonomy” (since that’s a regular word in English and “autotomy” isn’t), he would answer, “Yes, you can call me that, too.” So “Autonomy” is what they’d call him most of the time.

The story would show the knight bleeding for unknown reasons over a good long while and eventually would reveal that he was cutting himself–the lesson in the name being that wandering from the Lord (via autonomy) is equivalent to doing harm to yourself directly, which I imagined as the knight slicing the inside of his arms and legs with his sword when he thought nobody was watching and then covering up what he was doing with his armor. By the way, this character idea was based on observations of my own life, believe it or not.

I think that idea for a character first crossed my mind around twenty years ago–even before my first short story was published circa 2002. I did not know of a single person cutting himself or herself in the late nineties–and it certainly was not the cultural phenomenon that it is now.

Let’s time travel (and who doesn’t like time travel?) to the present. I recently happened to meet a young person I originally planned to say more about, but I decided it’s better not to share too many details for the sake of her anonymity. This person had visible markings on the inside of her left arm where she has cut herself repeatedly in the past. I wound up talking to the girl on multiple occasions (in full view of other people, by the way).

I offered her an empathetic ear and found out that she believes she is actually male. She recently began living with family members who take her to church. She wasn’t that thrilled about church and wonders if she is an atheist. And she’s a science fiction and fantasy fan, an avid reader. She and I discussed the difference between reincarnation and resurrection and she actually didn’t even really understand what resurrection was, but understood reincarnation just fine. I wondered if stories she has read influenced her understanding. She also wondered why Christians hate “people like her.” I tried to explain that not all do.

You know something, when I was around 13, I didn’t cut myself, but I had a distant, alcoholic father, and a promiscuous mother who exposed me to things I should not have been exposed to (I could say what with more specificity, but don’t want to traumatize all the people reading this who had childhoods that did not feature abuse). I contemplated suicide. And I read science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction–it was my escape and comfort. And based on what I read in science fiction, I wondered if I really should be an atheist–like Isaac Asimov, science fiction writer extraordinaire, whom I admired.

I wondered who I was, I wondered what I was, and I certainly hated myself quite a lot. Intense loathing, in fact. I found a deliverance from all that in submitting myself to God and experienced God rescuing me, there’s no doubt in my mind on that point. Yet for many years, I would voluntarily wander away from God, in spite of what he had done for me, hurting myself again. Like Autonomy/Autotomy. (In fact, I still do this, but far less now.)

And with that background, there I was, talking to someone also rather like my character Autotomy, a character I hadn’t even put down in writing anywhere until crafting this post. This young person (quite young), who was born a female but now struggling with the idea she should be male–expressed interest when I told her about science fiction written from a Christian perspective. I gave her some books. She’s reading them. I don’t know now how that’s going to turn out. I hope what she reads helps reset her point of view, at least a little.

Let me be clear that I know that works of fiction are not primarily for the purpose of reaching a lost world for Christ. That’s what Christian believers are for, you and I. And let’s not forget the power of the words and images of the Bible.

Yet Bunyan’s work had a powerful influence in its day–and it was a work of fiction. A work of speculative (albeit allegorical) fiction.

Why would a young science fiction reader clearly know what reincarnation is but not resurrection? Why would the modern cultural trend of cutting and another cultural trend of a transgender self-concept be something fully understood, but basic concepts of Christianity seem foreign?

II Corinthians 10:5 and Proverbs 23:7a (“For as he thinks in his heart, so is he,” NKJV) are just two of many verses in the Bible that talk about the importance of what we think. And Proverbs 4:23 (NIV) says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”

Let me submit to you that the fiction we write becomes the backdrop of the thoughts of human beings, a substance that pours into human hearts. At least sometimes. Especially for people who are young and impressionable.

Sure, I understand when Christians choose to write for the general market–I in fact publish some short stories that would fit in fine in the general market. But note that I felt, when talking to a younger, female version of Autonomy (er, I mean, “Autotomy”) and handing her a small stack of books, a strong sense that this is why I write what I write. To put ideas in the minds of people, especially young people, other than what our culture revels in–ideas that have a different vision of the world than one that leads people to cut themselves.

And that is my point, friends. Writing speculative fiction as Christians can be a simple act of creation, without regard to spiritual influence on the audience. Yes, true–but it also can have the capacity to offer at least a little shift in perspective, a view of reality unlike what the rest of the world has.

If that’s what God has led you to do, to write with spiritual truths permeating your story(ies), don’t let anything discourage you: There’s a need for it. A genuine and desperate need.