Science Fiction Church

I grew up around Air Force personnel, on Air Force bases, and I spent a lot of time in the library. Air Force libraries have pretty decent science fiction sections, because so may of the airmen are in such high tech jobs, that science fiction is not far off from their day to day. Radar technicians, jet fuel labs, weapons/payload masters, jet engine mechanics, you name it. Occasionally I would meet them in the library and they would point me to the classics. I spent a lot of time reading Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Poul Anderson. In a lot of ways science fiction did not seem far off to me, either. Part of sci-fi is a kind of mind-numbing and exciting diversity of cultures. On some days I woke up, went to my neighbor Urban’s house, had good German bread with hot chocolate made from fresh sheep’s milk, then I’d go to the base where it was little America, but still a little tweaked. We moved a lot, made friends with all kinds of people.

Some days I would wonder, “will it be like Stranger in A Strange Land? What will it be like to interact with completely different people and mindsets?” And then I came to The Rock. It’s hard to tell what drives things. Have we accreted the groups we have—White and Hispanic to begin with, then African, then seeing class as culture in the white population, then African American, now possibly an outreach to refugees from Nepal—have we become this and it looks like Ensign Flandry’s world, or the court of Shaddam IV? Or is it something in our imagination, something embedded-- a kind of speculative anthropology—pulsating, in the Gospel?