What can science fiction tell us about God?
Speaking as a reader of SF who also happens to be a churchgoing believer – not much, really.
Part of the reason for this is cultural. In theory, speculative fiction's power to re-invent the world is unlimited: every category can be reconfigured, every familiarity subverted, any conceivable strangeness brought within the household of story. In practice – though enough of that power gleams and lingers to keep us reading, and hoping, and periodically being gorgeously surprised – the genre is as shaped by a particular history as any other school of writing, and it's got, if not walls round the edges, then very definite centres of imaginative gravity. Its roots in Britain are in the "scientific romance" as HG Wells invented it.
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