Alan P. R. Gregory

Science Fiction Theology: Beauty and the Transformation of the Sublime Alan P. R. Gregory

Commendation Quotes: "Science Fiction Theology" situates science fiction, from its earliest literary expressions to its modern cinematic ones, within the broader context of an approach to nature that is itself a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. In the process, Alan Gregory reveals the profoundly theological underpinnings and implications of the unexplored depths of sci-fi s most characteristic components. He guides the reader through these subjects with an insightful eloquence that deserves to be widely read and widely quoted."Table of Contents: Introduction1. Sublime Fiction?2. Pulp Fiction, or the Sublime Subversion of the Boy-Engineer3. Wells and Stapledon: The Evolutionary Sublime4. Philip Dick versus the Sublime5. The Apocalyptic Sublime6. From the Sublime to the BeautifulConclusionMarc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Commendation Quotes: The spiritual dimension of science fiction has been ignored for too long, but here Alan Gregory gives us a pioneering account of how science fiction emerged from the tradition of the sublime. This suggestive new study combines historical insights into the context of the fiction with detailed analysis of particular works. Commendation Quotes: Alan Gregory's absorbing book is a significant investigation into the links between the aesthetic of the sublime, science fiction, and the Christian 'sense of wonder.' 'Science fiction has never steered clear of Christianity, ' Gregory asserts. His book is a stimulus for thinking through some of the consequences of acknowledging this claim. Biographical Note: Alan P. R. Gregory is Principal at the South East Institute for Theological Education. Commendation Quotes: Alan Gregory s absorbing book is a significant investigation into the links between the aesthetic of the sublime, science fiction, and the Christian sense of wonder. Science fiction has never steered clear of Christianity, Gregory asserts. His book is a stimulus for thinking through some of the consequences of acknowledging this claim."Publisher Marketing: Science fiction imagines a universe teeming with life and thrilling possibility, but also hidden and hideous dangers. Christian theology, often a polemical target for science fiction, reflects on the plenitude out of which and for which the universe exists. In "Science Fiction Theology," Alan Gregory investigates the troubled relationship between science fiction and Christianity and, in particular, how both have laid claim to the modern idea of sublimity. 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."