I am a weekend writer. I’m neither published or all that good; I don’t write as a trade, though the possibility has some appeal to me. I write because I enjoy creating worlds, characters, and events for those characters to encounter. More than anything I like literary moments, the particular feel of a certain time, place, event, and emotion. I try to recreate these narrative moments I have in my head by spinning stories around them, and the exercise is both incredibly taxing and rewarding.
Writers by nature write what they enjoy. More often than not, a writer is an aficionado of whatever genre s/he is writing in. They write what they know and are accustomed to, allowing expertise and familiarity to enrich their capabilities as a writer. Since my youth I have dearly loved space science fiction. My love for the genre has grown steadily over the years, from my Star Wars obsession of the early 2000s to recent trysts with Firefly (arguably one of the best science fiction TV series ever canceled) and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. I love the thrill of a new world, discovering an alien race, voyaging across space, and fighting whatever inter-planetary evil that might arise along the way. If I lived in the Star Wars or Star Trek universe, where aliens are usually humanoid and relatively relatable, I would be a xenobiologist, no question. The idea of studying an entirely different sentient race is fascinating to me.
But I just can’t write it. I can rarely bring myself to actually pen a space story, much less one with other beings from other planets. Because I believe the Bible, which says God created the world for the express purpose of showing created beings how good he the Creator is, I have an incredibly hard time writing a story that lies outside of that worldview. I don’t readily abandon what I know to be true to create a work of fiction that disagrees with the truth of scripture. And yet I love reading about these worlds.
It’s this interesting dualism that I came to while trying to begin my latest idea. Why do I enjoy fictional realms that don’t agree with the gospel? I think there is one redeemable aspect to the whole business, namely the constant struggle of good and evil and the need for good in the universe, however undefined that term may be. However, the other side of the coin is more sinister.
In every space science fiction story, we or some other race are voyaging outward, making contact, and discovering new things. It’s adventurous and interesting, far more so than this dull earth we know. We enjoy space fiction for the same reason people have always enjoyed fiction: it’s limitless escapism. We can get out of the life we are oh so familiar with and, voyaging out, find a more agreeable reality to live in, if only briefly.
I’m not claiming any inherent wrongness to enjoying fiction. But I wonder, from my experience, where the line must be drawn between enjoying a world devoid of Christ and professing a world in which Jesus is King. I think, when it comes to fiction, we have to watch our hearts carefully, and ask ourselves which world we would rather live in, and why. If it’s a fictional realm, it’s because we want the story to cater to our liking, maybe even revolve around us. And that’s the story we’ve preferred since the Garden.
– Eric
Doxometry 