lutz

writing, criticism, podcasts

i'm a boy from indiana and this is very emotional for me


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aaaronbek
@aaaronbek asked:

Been enjoying SBG’s romp through Book of the New Sun, and it’s bittersweet to be approaching the end of the tetralogy. I can see how y’all don’t love how Wolfe increasingly foregrounds his idiosyncratic-Catholic interpretation of the story he’s been telling, but at the same time I’m very curious to know more about his notions about Christianity. Does he spell those out explicitly in anything worth reading, or is there maybe scholarship on his writing to infers the underlying theological commitments?

to my knowledge, no, there's no centralized place where he does this. most of my interpretations are based on reading his books in conjunction with broader knowledge of Christian theology and history and certain specific statements he's made here and there--for example, his opinions on Lamarckism and the real historicity of Jesus in Castle of the Otter. in this way you can start noticing, say, Wolfe's interest in paradox, and then put that into conversation with the history of paradox in Christian theology and seeing who he seems to be informed by. reading fiction is obviously not a way to draw a bead on an author's specific beliefs, but when you read them broadly you can begin to get a sense of where their interests lay. so that's a disclosure for me saying Wolfe is a "weird Catholic" is inflected by the fiction and his paratextual statements because i think in the day-to-day he was probably not very odd, but he probably semifrequently thought about what it might mean for an alien to take communion (which is not an unknown theme in Catholicism, or Catholic sf especially) and his writing often feels to me as if it's responding to notions like that.


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in reply to @lutz's post:

Thanks for this! I really appreciate it. I like these distinctions you’re making: between Wolfe’s sci-fi thought experiments and his quotidian beliefs, between what he believes and what he’s interested in (and what fiction can or can’t tell us about each). They’re every helpful. I’ve read ahead, and I think the last bits of CotA raise some further interesting questions on these fronts, but I’ll leave it there and look forward to those episodes.

Also, I truly has no idea that “Catholic sci-fi” is a thing