Religion and Science Fiction

Religion and Science Fiction began today. I said something like the following which is something like something William Gibson once said which I wrote down but which doesn’t appear to be available on the Internet hardly anywhere anymore:

Science fiction functions as the oven mitts with which we can begin to handle the burning hot casserole of what’s actually happening to ourselves and others in the situation we call the world.

As ever, I’m really excited to be attempting a class within these bookends which contain almost everything I want to talk about it. There are short readings I’ll share, but here are our required texts:

Parable of the Sower. Octavia Butler. New York: Grand Central, 2000.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Philip K. Dick. New York: Mariner, 2011.

The Left Hand of Darkness. Ursula K. Le Guin. New York: Ace Books, 1987.

Severance: A Novel . Ling Ma. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018.

More than Human. Theodore Sturgeon. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Here’s one of the short readings.

I welcome anything anyone wants to say about any of this.