Episode Details

It’s darkest night and you’re lying under the sparkling dome of stars

And what you’re feeling is…awe? Wonder? Maybe even terror?

There are no words for this fleeting moment when we grasp the numinous, the transcendent

The sublime

So we try to capture the sublime in a story

As you gaze up into the black what story do you see?

Do you see the void of space, the atomic fire of infinite suns, the laws of gravity, energy and matter?

Or do you see the heavens above, a perfectly ordered cathedral, all to the glory of a divine creator?

This is the story of a fight for the transcendent. A struggle over the sublime. A battle between two mythic stories that both claim to show us the reality beyond the real.

One a story of science, the other of religion.

And it’s the story of 7 books…plus a few chucked in for good luck…that combine the stories of science and religion.

The 7 theological science fiction novels you

Must read?

Have to read before you die?

It just feels a bit absolutist, you don’t HAVE to read anything

How about the 7 theological science fiction novels you *might* like to read.

Watch the full video essay here

“The laws of the universe are never broken. Your mistake is to think that the little regularities we have observed on one planet for a few hundred years are the real unbreakable laws; whereas they are only the remote results which the true laws bring about more often than not; as a kind of accident.”

CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength

ONE – ANGLICAN ANTI-SCIENTISM

I’m a third generation science fiction reader. My grandfather read HG Wells and Jules Verne. My mother loved Arthur C Clarke and Kurt Vonnegut.

I was lucky to grow up in a home with a lot of books, and at the heart of my mum’s book collection were a pair of bookends that held our sacred books.

At one side of the bookends was the Holy Bible, which I have to be honest didn’t get read much.

At the other end was JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings which had been read so often it was falling apart. And between the two was

CS Lewis Space trilogy – Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.

Battered original paperbacks.

Which I didn’t like reading because I’d already been burned once by CS Lewis when I finally realised that Aslan was Jesus Smuggling.