An Odd God Who Opposes Weird Science?
I would like to thank Wipf and Stock Publishers for my review copy of James McGrath’s latest book, Religion and Science Fiction.
Alison Bright MacWilliams’ “Science Playing God” goes, at first, over the traditional interpretations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus and H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau. Having read Frankenstein as well as seeing the early 20th century motion picture on it, I was familiar with the story, and the discrepancies between the novel and film. The movie, like the color of its screen, and its morality, is black and white: Victor Frankenstein played God and therefore he must suffer the consequences. MacWilliams counters with a few lesser known stories, Children of the Lens by Edward Smith and David Brin’s UPLIFT series, where science is seen as the solution to science’s problems.
I enjoyed this article very much, and I was exposed to some new material I may have to check out in the future. I would push MacWilliams further; why the Pandora Box polemic is still found in science fiction, written by persons from the West, against scientific research? I would say, to some extent, it has to do with the embedded civil religions, that stand as challenges against nationalism and “realism.” Don’t go too far, mankind! This is the best of all possible worlds, right?
Well, modern psychology turned Michael Landon into a werewolf ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3r2Nt6SCW4 ), so it can’t be all good. Actual last line of that film, after the werewolf has been killed: “After [the media has] had their field day, one thing will be clear. It’s not for man to interfere in the ways of God.”
Of course, my favorite “science is a Pandora’s box” line comes from HP Lovecraft: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” -The Call of Cthulhu
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