*timidly enters the room and clears throat*
If I may…
I tend to lean on the same side of the fence as Daeus Lamb. While I don’t believe in aliens, incorporating them in an allegory (which I would argue all spec fic is) gives me the chance to explore how God would interact with them, which in turn forces me to examine how He interacts with people groups here.
While sci-fi tends to be futuristic, it doesn’t have to be far in the future. There are plenty of movies and shows that take place in the present, past, or a few decades from now (Stargate: SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis, Stargate, ET, Almost Human…). I would even argue that, depending on whether you’re pre- or post-trib, even a couple of centuries into the future wouldn’t be a terrible stretch to keep Christians on Earth.
That being said, I think that Christians tend to look at the way genres are typically presented and ignore the possibilities. I think it’s a disservice to the genre to say the way it’s been popularized is the only way it can be done. C.S. Lewis wrote deeply profound sci-fi that was unquestionably Christian and, in many ways, had little to do with Earth or humans. As a sci-fi writer, I struggled to figure out how to incorporate God into my stories without compromising my faith. Then I realized that sci-fi is inherently allegorical, just not typically in terms of the Bible. The shift from historical allegory to Biblical allegory, however, is a small one to make. The Bible is historical, is it not?
"In a world full of bookworms, be a book dragon."
- he who made the T-shirt
