The Church of Science Fiction

or: y'all motherf***ers need science fiction jesus?

Back in early November when many, many folks were posing, and frantically attempting to answer, "what the hell?" and "what now?”, I felt myself on more stable footing after reading Henry Farrell’s essay, “Here’s where we are”—particularly its final sections, discussing the need for ... let's broadly say 'the left' but really we're talking about everyone who isn’t part of the axis of Those Guys… to experiment, and develop “the capacity to build a majority coalition.” When it came to the how, he linked two scholars, Margaret Levi and Hahrie Han. He quoted from Levi’s writing about the value of “communities of fate”, groups whose members’ deep commitment to one another leads to compassion and work directed beyond the community—and described Han’s research on community formation and megachurches. I love this paragraph of Henry’s:

“The Democratic party is a weak party, composed of factions who don’t particularly trust each other. It could stand to learn from megachurches, which are perhaps the most successful example in the United States today of organizations that can build community at scale. And as Hahrie says, the notion of grace is not just a powerful concept for religion, but for organizing community. We are all sinners, all equally undeserving, and embracing that truth creates a kind of solidarity.”

The ‘grace’ note (sorry) here is particularly fine; I’ve written elsewhere about karma and privilege (in the sense it’s often used online), and I’ve been ruminating for a while (though I don’t think I’ve written about it in any organized way) about similarities between the idea-structures of ‘privilege’ and original sin, social-justice protestantism, & the vital role of grace and the promise of grace in that structure. That’s not where I’m aiming this essay, though—notes for future work.

Now, I have a complicated history with megachurches and last-30-years American-model Evangelical protestantism. Maybe it’s not that complicated. I grew up in a high-church Episcopalian community, raised by a pair of divinity school students; I’ve never been to a ‘megachurch’ so can’t speak with direct experience there but my Campus Crusade and Vineyard exposure to white Evangelical protestantism in general was… not great. Some of this was a question of the raw aesthetics of the college communities in which I found myself, so read this in the voice of a younger and more catty Max: powerpoint instead of hymnals? Polo shirts instead of vestments? Awful cod-rock tracks instead of hymns? Instead of Mrs Howard on the organ you have a poorly practiced “worship team” power trio? Christian music used to be Bach! I have stood in a grand stone stained glass church at midnight listening to Compline chant and wrestled with intimations of immortality, now I am in a circle of folding chairs hearing a ‘praise song’ Brent wrote in his dorm room, what are we doing here. All of that’s a question of what you’re used to, I suppose, and I’ve since come to know some excellent musicians on the megachurch scene—though how one could prefer “God of Wonders Beyond our Galaxy” to “Let all mortal flesh keep silent, and with fear and trembling stand”… Ah, I’m being passed a card that says ‘get on with it,’ so I will.

Of course, these are for the most part aesthetic judgments; even at the time I tried to recognize that Brent of course has Buddha-nature, is a child of God seeking freedom and redemption for himself and others. If we were to judge spiritual quality by acoustic guitar output at age 19, who would escape whipping?¹ But I had other, more fundamental issues with the communities in which I found myself: with the high pressure sales-funnel approach to mission, the charismatic focus of the pastor, the emphasis on developing social pressure to separate people from their existing communities so as to become their new community, rather than offering community and fellowship, for a start, and the theological commitments these tactics implied. I look forward to catching up on Han’s writing, & seeing whether the issues I encountered are widespread or were particular to my experience. But these tendencies to isolate and boundary-draw, the in-or-out approaches to community, make me skeptical about the megachurch as a model for coalition-building in a fractured moment. Church as a model, though, that’s another plate of loaves and fishes.

A while back I read an article about a long-term Democratic GOTV organizer in, I believe, New Hampshire, who mentioned that Dems always started substantially behind in GOTV efforts because 'the Republicans have the churches' (loose quote), while his team started from scratch each cycle. And of course Black churches have been a mighty political force in the Democratic party for decades, with centuries-long traditions of organizing and action. If you're looking to form a community around vision and practice, to apply long-term social pressure under a wide range of conditions, to raise new generations to carry forward its values and reform / transform them to fit the moment, and to provide a community of support as its members attempt to live their lives in line with those commitments—in Western countries at least, you’re describing something recognizably ‘church-y.’

The emphasis on sustaining a long-term resilient community around shared values—an intergenerational one, because values-work is necessarily intergenerational—strikes me as particularly important. There was a brief moment before the current mess where “Christian values” folks were writing books like “The Benedict Option” (which I haven’t read but it’s hard to remember that sometimes)—anyway here’s a quote from the dust jacket, per Wikipedia:

“Today, a new post-Christian barbarism reigns. Many believers are blind to it, and their churches are too weak to resist. Politics offers little help in this spiritual crisis. What is needed is the Benedict Option, a strategy that draws on the authority of Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient church. The goal: to embrace exile from the mainstream culture and construct a resilient counterculture.”

The model proposed to folks worried about “a new post-Christian barbarism” is Saint Benedict, who (in the book’s mythology) built monastic communities to endure in Europe as the Western Roman Empire fell apart. The entire world is against us; what we need to do is be ready to get weird and disappear into the mountains for a thousand years. This didn’t stay in the realm of theory either: there were Benedict Option workbooks and how-to guides, titles like Build the Benedict Option: if you’re trying to build this kind of community, here’s how you organize weeknight gatherings, here’s how you make cookies for a crowd. While the political ends in question aren’t mine, to put it very fucking mildly, I wish more folks whose values are nearer my own, rather than posting ‘we’re so cooked’ on social media over and over again, had this kind of thousand-year gaze, and the practicality to realize that reaching a thousand-year destination involves hosting weeknight gatherings, making cookies for a crowd, arranging child care, having an urn of bad coffee on the go, making life livable on the way. You know, church stuff.

This is the line of thought that, eight years ago, might have started me thinking ‘I should start a church!' at which point a number of well-established personal guard mechanisms would have tackled me until the fit passed. Ah, the joy of one's early 30s... It would be dangerous, I think, to jump from ‘some of what’s missing is Church-shaped’ to 'the Left (or whoever) needs Churches,’ much as the early-oughts sentiment that 'what we need are Liberal AM Radio Guys' was a distraction. Strategies evolve in movements because those strategies are effective for the movement's goals and methods. I mean: people do things because those things work for them. Mirror-play only works if you're playing against a mirror. Short guys and tall guys can both fence well, but they have to fence differently. ‘Liberal AM Radio’ never really got off the ground, but the Daily Show had an impact.

It struck me early in my experience with organized science fiction fandom - the type that runs small and medium sized amateur and non-profit conventions, not the giant for-profit shows like NYCC - that I was dealing with something like a church. Certainly the “community of fate” language applies. Members gather for weekends of intense participation, celebration, and affirmation of group identity. The bar and ballrooms of a random Marriott are submerged into the ritual space that is Readercon. Panels are a sort of religious ceremony: discussions of shared doctrinal issues, beginning with ostensible experts and moving out to the general population. (Now I’m imagining a Quaker meeting: ‘This is more of a comment than a question…’) ‘The Bar' is another ritual space, with its various hierarchies and tables and practices. The Awards Season, with its ambitions, enthusiasms, litigations, and discontents, provides a sort of liturgical calendar that begins just before the winter solstice and builds to a midsummer-y festival in Worldcon. Cosplay and costume contests offer occasions for fancy dress. There's even a sort of monastic habit in the shape of blue jeans and a t-shirt with a witty reference on it.

Local shows will have a local practicing congregation (sorry), supplemented by a more moveable-feast cast of readers, writers, and publishing folks who attend many cons in a year. No two cons have quite the same focus or practice—which lends the enterprise as a whole a certain sort of resilience. Arisia has strong alternative-lifestyle and media programming, Boskone has more historical fandom and publishing, Capclave focuses on indie presses, Wiscon’s marker has been “the Feminist Science Fiction convention,” etc. (Second Church of Science Fiction, New Rite, Reformed, Eastern Division.) This leads to a lot of cultural mixing, a fecund combination of strong and weak social ties. And undergirding all this social foment we have the labor of a number of overworked volunteers, who give their time for many reasons—including a sense of deep loyalty to the community and practice.

The question of shared values and beliefs, of course, is… tricky. Fandom is such a notoriously fractious group that if you were writing a history of it, you'd need a keyboard macro for the phrase 'and all fandom was plunged into war.' But that contentiousness is the contention of loyalty. After all, folks can leave SF fandom whenever they want. Why stay to fight it out? There are grifters and cynics, of course—but fandom as a whole, on average, seems dedicated to working out the question of who it is, of what it means to be a fan. The great shared value, it seems to me, is a belief that this sort of thing is important: telling stories about things that haven’t happened yet or never could happen, about the future, about what are or what we might become, or might be if circumstances differed; sharing the shadow-plays inside our minds. Humans need fantasy, the man says, to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Which of course brings us to the sacred texts (and works of sacred drama). The authors may have clay feet, of course, and everyone has a lot of fun wrestling over the question of canonicity (or I hope they do! we certainly do it often enough); new artists in the field have their own anxieties of influence / rage against the machine. Many in SF fandom will eagerly go 13 rounds over the concept of whether ‘the’ canon does or should exist, let alone who belongs inside it (or should be fired out of it, preferably into the sun). But we all have our own personal canons, which won't match but often overlap, creating a sort of 'canon field.’ This occasions friction but also a great deal of flexibility. Because the field's too big now for anyone to have read everything, I still have the wonderful experience of being initiated into a friend’s favorite author or series—a con recommendation led to me finding CJ Cherryh’s Morgaine books, and another led to Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman. Textual loves can serve as cues to shared values and interests so long as you (1) don't take them too seriously, and (2) approach the process as a sort of triangulation: I'm likely to have a bit in common with someone who likes Roger Zelazny; if they like Roger Zelazny and Lois McMaster Bujold, that's a stronger indicator; if they like Roger Zelazny and Lois McMaster Bujold and Robin McKinley and Ted Chiang and Naomi Mitchison and Dorothy Dunnett and John Crowley and Chip Delaney and Ursula K Leguin… You get the idea. (This triangulation process reduces but does not eliminate the chance that, for example, what I like about Lord of the Rings is its vision of hope and work in dark times, its loyalty to the smallest folks in the grand sweep of history, the sensitivity and care of its construction etc etc and what that guy over there likes about Lord of the Rings is something something RETVRN/marble bust avatar/Palantir stockholding, et cetera. Doesn't mean we can't have a conversation, but it does change the nature of the conversation.)

The texts, though, are really a pretext. And I say this as a writer! They provide common language, and an occasion for gathering. But the gathering matters. Fandom communities have worked hard to maintain themselves, and, however imperfectly, to carry the community forward into new generations. Could new fans be welcomed more effectively? For sure. Does a countervailing wind rise against calls for change? Of course. But any effective community will seek homeostasis and yet change as circumstances require—never so fast as some members of the congregation would wish and too swiftly for others. Friendships and alliances provide cohesive force and, as the man said, the machinery for change (and rendering some online interactions incomprehensible if you aren’t privy to the backchannel). Traditions may seem like a burden, but they are also a resource—ballast against the storms of the world, and the rot of grift.

It's no surprise to me, given this, that old-school fandom showed itself, in the early chunk of the 21st century, somewhat resistant to the hijack protocols that proved so effective in, say, online discourse around video games or retail politics. During the Puppies incident, con-going fandom experienced a concerted attempt to take control of its rituals and spaces, called bullshit, changed the rules to nerf the tactics involved, and has remained, generally, vigilant. Many communities (and nations) have not managed half so well.

I don't know if this will last. COVID did a number on many fan shows, financially and in terms of attendance—I was on the board for one that righted itself, with a bit of wobble; some had substantially more trouble. Publishers seem to have pulled back, and so have authors (myself included)—even the most able-bodied and healthy authors being, as a rule, independent contractors (which means, in America, no employer-provided health insurance save through a spouse, no sick leave, etc) who work with their brains—long COVID brainfog has made work impossible for many of my friends for months at a time. The big for-profit cons reach more potential readers than the fandom cons—a single half-filled SDCC panel might hold the entire weekend gate of a regional con—so the dollars and cents (and risk) calculation often points in their direction; but the for-profit shows are businesses, without the interplay between volunteers and congoers and professionals, without the generations of observance. At a fan con, I’m part of a community. At a big show, I'm Talent while on stage; when off, I'm a Consumer. This isn’t all bad: if I'm in the right frame of mind it's fun to walk a giant dealer’s room as part of the crowd and see the joy and range of invention in costumes and fan art and goofy goods. But if I'm not in the right frame of mind I feel like I’m walking past ranks of money-changers in the temple. I suspect and hope fandom will find its footing and make its way in this new environment. At least, it has the tools and inclination to do so.

I’m not proposing fandom as some sort of base for political organizing. Attempts in that direction have not, I am told, historically worked out well. But “community of fate” does feel like the right term. Long-term political organizing could learn from megachurches—but it could also learn from science fiction fandom, which, after all, emerged without the threat of hellfire or eternal cookies forever amen, or the benefit of the pre-greased groove the concept of ‘church’ enjoys in (at least) American culture. People got together to talk about books and swap Kirk/Spock stories—and they’re still doing it almost a hundred years later. In a moment when it seems ‘all that is solid melts into air,’ or anyway much of the sand has washed away from the beach—when a few years and a change of ownership is all that it took to wipe out the freakin’ Washington Post—it’s nice to have that place to stand.

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A couple of sad notes:

• David Lynch passed away yesterday. I wrote “the world is less weird” at first but deleted it, because it was wrong. The world is no less weird, no less unsettling, no less awful, no less wonderful. But it has lost one of its great instruments for weaving all those many threads together, and making them manifest to eyes and minds dulled by care and work.

• Also, because days are not fair: the writer Howard Andrew Jones passed away after a battle with brain cancer. I met Howard once at GenCon. He was kind and wise and funny and generous over a few wonderful meals and long walks and conversations. I am sure his family would appreciate any support you could share.

And one happy one:

• Last night we celebrated the launch of New Year, New You, an anthology driven by the efforts of Viable Paradise class of 2023. It was a joy to see so many of the writers from that class again, and so many VP alumni (and a few readers of this newsletter!) in the audience—to be part of a moment where they claimed their place as writers and publishers. Congratulations all.

1. And—this is in a footnote because it really is an philosophical digression with little relevance to the main argument, feel free to go back and read the rest!—while it’s silly and immature (if extremely tempting) to scant someone’s human worth based on the poor quality of their acoustic guitar composition at age 19, it is dangerous to mistake the good quality of their acoustic guitar composition (say) for an indication that they’re a good person. Art and music are it seems to me disciplines like any other. It would be a kinder and simpler existence if the attention, passion and care required to achieve excellence in art (really, in any field) naturally gave rise to similar discipline, attention, passion, and care for the world and its people. I’d like to think that aesthetic and moral quality are not entirely at right angles, but… even if they aren’t, art is so often an exercise in concentration, using technique and practice to evoke or express what is most in the artist—most wise, most compassionate, most aware, most raw, most depraved, most loving, most rad, most generous. But the superlative is not necessarily typical. Or even customary.