Part 2 of Catholics & Science Fiction | An Interview with Sandra Miesel | Read Part 1

That said, some people are going to have problems with premises, such as evolution as an explanation in SF and the reality of magic in fantasy. There’s lot of cultural/moral relativism and protagonists don’t necessarily keep the Ten Commandments.

To limit oneself to 100% Catholic materials would wall off much of the great literature of the human race, from Homer to the Norse sagas to The Tale of the Genji–pagan creations all–much less nearly all of what’s been written in English since the Reformation. And on a less exalted level, it’s not a bad idea to keep tabs on factors influencing modern society–cultural engagement, anyone? C.S. Lewis’s little book, An Experiment in Criticism, might be helpful here.

IgnatiusInsight.com: Are there fantasy and science fiction writers who aren't believers but who nevertheless deal with themes that should interest believers?

Miesel: Philip K. Dick, who was drawn to Oriental mysticism, shows "small folk" resisting evil and creating beauty in The Man in the High Castle, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, and Ubik.. (I don’t recommend what he wrote post-1971!)

Poul Anderson’s explorations of the imperfectability of man in a universe doomed by entropy made him the master of the SF & F novelette. He celebrates freedom, courage, and responsibility in dozens of story collections, any of which will have some good stories. His fantasy classics Three Hearts and Three Lions and A Midsummer's Tempest have a Christian framework but The Broken Sword's is Norse paganism.

Gordon R. Dickson thought that man was perfectible but Pilgrim and Soldier, Ask Not are powerful tributes to faith, courage, and sacrificial love.

You didn’t ask about Christian writers but I’ll list some fine ones from former times anyway. R.A. Lafferty wore his conservative Catholicism on his sleeve in Past Master, Fourth Mansions, and The Flame Is Green. His quirky short stories are like tall tales. Russell Kirk’s excellent ghost stories are collected in Ancestral Shadows.

Manly Wade Wellman’s fantasy stories about Appalachia collected in John the Balladeer and Valley So Low presuppose Southern Protestantism. The SF collections The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith, an Anglican, is overtly Christian and Ingathering by Zenna Henderson, a Methodist, is implicitly so.

At the Young Adult level, try Elizabeth Goudge‘s Little White Horse and Linnets and Valerians which are exquisite fantasies suffused with Anglican sensibility. The Satanic Mill by Otfried Preusler is a vivid historical fantasy with a Protestant background.

IgnatiusInsight.com: Describe your SF&F novel and some of your short stories. How did you go about writing them?

Miesel: My science fiction novel Dreamrider (1984) redone and expanded as Shaman (1989) is based on the idea that what shamans see in their trances are alternate timelines. My heroine is a librarian at a near future University of Illinois living under global "soft tyranny." She is coached into developing shamanic powers that allow her to skip across alternate histories gathering information that will save her own world. Her gifts are psychic, with a pseudoscientific explanation, not magical.

What I do there and in the rest of my fiction, is use absolutely real settings and props for fantastic events. I like to research better than I like to write. I did meticulous research for each project: if I say this is how people in the past cooked custard, penned pigs, or cast metalwork, you can be confident that’s how it really was. I make detailed outlines, slowly prepare a first draft, then one more pass for polishing. I use a version of the "consciously thematic" technique taught me by Gordy Dickson: the point the story is trying to make is symbolically embedded in every figure of speech and word choice, rather than in any overt statement.

The short stories came after the novel and are all fantasies. The first (and best) is "The Shadow Hart," set in Denmark in the 1370s. It’s based on medieval hunting symbolism and on the legend that Danish king Valdemar is cursed to hunt each night until Doomsday.

That gave me the idea of a cycle of fantasy stories set in the fourteenth century, one per decade, imbedded in real history. So I did "The Goldsmith’s Maid" about an arrogant Bohemian goldsmith learning hard lessons after a plague and "The Sword That Wept" about a deal with the Devil in the Hundred Years’ War that leaves paralyzing guilt. (These were the only pieces of fiction that I sold "over the transom.") Then the fourth installment didn’t sell so I gave up the plan.

I wrote "The Book-Healer in a pseudo-medieval "shared universe" (where the background is provided). It’s the world’s only fantasy about art conservation. "The Salt Garden" was set on Andre Norton’s Witch World and was inspired by Chinese flower arrangements made from colored stone. The mythic framework comes from Tibetan Buddhism. My last sale "Miss Lotte" answers the question "What if cats molted rather than shed?" and is set in New Orleans of 1955.

IgnatiusInsight.com: How has your Catholic faith informed your SF&F work?

Miesel: As a critic, I specialized in analyzing myth and religion in SF & F. I wrote on both Christian (Tolkien, Lafferty, Saberhagen, Wolfe, Henderson, Smith) and non-Christian (Anderson, Dickson, Dick) writers that I mentioned above. For the latter, I always tried to draw out elements of universal Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

My novel owes more to Mircea Eliade than to Scripture, but I was dramatizing the fundamental religious experiences of call and initiation. I invented a simple monotheistic religion for my non-human characters, nothing in it inimical to ours. The medieval stories have scraps of pagan beliefs and folklore underlying everyone’s Catholicism–which was the situation in the fourteenth century. In "Miss Lotte," a conventionally catechized schoolgirl collides with Creole superstitions, again drawn from life. A recurring (and very Catholic) theme is redemptive sacrifice and transformation through suffering.

IgnatiusInsight.com: How can SF&F uniquely convey Truth? What do you think is the proper approach toward SF&F?

Miesel: SF & F asks: What if? By taking us "beyond the fields we know," it can pose important questions with special vividness:

What is the meaning of Life?

What does it mean to be human?

How can we relate to intelligent non-humans? To Nature?

What aspects of the human condition are permanent and which changeable?

What makes a good society? A bad one?

What if history can turned out differently?

How would the human race react to an unprecedented catastrophe? To a marvelous invention? To an alien environment?

And SF & F can do this over larger stretches of space and time than mundane fiction does. See Of Other Worlds by C.S. Lewis for discussions by a Christian critic. The validity of SF & F answers is, of course, to be measured in the light of Faith, as everything else should be.

Some final pointers: traditionally, SF & F is more driven by ideas, setting, and plot than by the sensitive delineation of character or literary style (although the latter have improved over time). When judging a book, it helps to understand what sort of a work is under inspection, what it’s trying to do. (Early reviewers of The Lord of the Rings seldom managed to do this.)

A brisk tribute to the glories of engineering expects a different response from the reader than a moody supernatural fantasy. A serious work demands more than a light piece of commercial entertainment. SF & F has its own body of critical literature and has attracted academic study. Although they have axes to grind on certain authors, much useful information about the field can be found in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant, both available in most libraries. The trade publication of the field is Locus, with news at www.locusmag.com.

IgnatiusInsight.com: In your opinion, who are the most interesting SF&F writers today?

Miesel: I haven’t had time to follow developments in the field for the last few years, so I’ll rephrase that to "What current writers might IgnatiusInsight.com readers enjoy?"

Tim Powers’ Declare is a superb Catholic fantasy, a cross between a spy thriller and The Arabian Nights. Powers likes to use real settings and historical periods, with large dollops of mythology. Christian spirituality is implicit in Elizabeth Moon’s Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy, which is a fantasy about a female warrior in an imaginary world.

The humane military SF of Lois Bujold has won many awards. Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom trilogy is a Young Adult fantasy remarkable for both its imagination and its prose. Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Gathering Blue are thought-provoking Young Adult SF by a Christian writer.

Related Links:

• Interview with Sandra Miesel about The Da Vinci Code.
• The Powers of Fantastic Fiction | An interview with Tim Powers