| Title: | Elements of Religious Meaning in Science-Fiction Literature. |
| Authors: | Mörth, Ingo1 |
| Source: | Social Compass; 1987, Vol. 34 Issue 1, p87-108, 22p |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Subject Terms: | *MEANING
(Philosophy) *SCIENCE fiction *UTOPIAS RELIGION & science TRANSCENDENCE (Philosophy) |
| Abstract: | This article contends that religion and science fiction (SF) are not only comparable by means of the formal aspects of utopia and transcendence, but also by the transgression of boundaries of knowledge, experience, and behavior. SF establishes a fantasy world which literally transgresses the boundaries of everyday existence in the true sense of the word, constructing a world of different structures of meaning, based on the future or an alternative environment, into which the reader enters. This delimitation of the spatial, temporal, and social structures of the life world which are empirically valid and the exploration of the possible and the imaginable automatically bring SF closer to religious spheres of meaning, which likewise thematize and define another world. This formal parallelism is at first glance, trivial and seems to cease upon closer examination: a religious system of meaning creates a particular reality excluding other structures, which has a quality of absolute certainty for those believers who enter into it. Certainty is, however, principally not envisageable within the literary sphere of SF, whose foundation is the open horizon of the possible. It is this which appears to separate fundamentally SF and religion. |
| Author Affiliations: | 1Assistant professor of sociology, University of Linz |
| ISSN: | 0037-7686 |
| Accession Number: | 14899813 |
| Persistent link to this record: | http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=snh&an=14899813 |
| Database: | SocINDEX |