The Truth Is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction

I am neither a science-fiction enthusiast nor a Christian. However, I am a long-time devotee of The Twilight Zone, and found myself intrigued by the concept of this book. As an impressionable youth at the time of the Twilight Zone's initial run, I always felt that the Twilight Zone was not "just a TV show," but rather presented a fairly coherent, if covert, value system that underlay and unified the various episodes, while offering a subtly didactic message. The authors of this book have analyzed the show from this standpoint and come up with a remarkable way of understanding this value system, expressed in a highly readable way. The style of the book is neither pompously academic nor heavy-handedly sectarian. But it is engaging and thought-provoking. I recommend it to all fans of TV science fiction, and not just Christians.

In an exploration of the contemporary vernacular of television, Kim Paffenroth and Thomas Bertonneau have articulated the ways that modern scientific investigation can enhance one's Christian faith. For too many years, too many preachers and theologians have kept either an uneasy distance between science and religion, or have felt compelled to elevate one, while denigrating the other. These authors have used six television shows, Doctor Who, Star Trek, The Prisoner, The Twilight Zone, The X-Files and Babylon 5, to examine the ways such television shows acknowledge a God who is intimately engaged with humans. Each of these television shows offered its viewers iconic archetypal heroes and villains, ones who are not that different from the great figures of the biblical text. Over time these productions grappled with human choices when presented with ethical dilemmas. They looked into the multidimensional faces of evil in the human realm. Viewers were thrust into the midst of such grand storytelling, right along with the characters in the television production. These authors have looked at the power of one aspect of the popular culture, linked it to theology in informed ways, and offered conclusions that are hopeful. Rather than reject television as "trash," Bertonneau and Paffenroth offer readers a fascinating analytical consideration of an inextricable part of our everyday lives. [Rev. Sandra M. Rushing: Author of the upcoming book The Judas Legacy]

This is very much a book that I wish I had written. I have been a fan of science fiction for as long as I can remember (I can't quite remember the original Star Trek in first run, but it was in recent re-run when I first acquired sentience and memory...). One of the hallmarks of successful science fiction (as opposed to the significant volume of bad science fiction that comes out each year) is that it doesn't rely exclusively on futuristic ideas of where science and technology will go, but rather delves deeply into the meaning of life and other significant issues of existence, relationship and cosmological understanding that people find important regardless of the time and technological period in which they live. A case in point is Star Trek - issues arise in most episodes of most of the series that deal not just with life and death, but what is important in life? By playing off against in-human or un-human characters like the Vulcans or the Klingons (or even more exotic, albeit often poorly constructed, creatures), the important aspects of human nature can be brought forward in ingenious ways. Authors Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth begin the text by discussing the relationships of science, religion and storytelling. There is a long history of this triad, which have rarely all been pulling together in the same direction, but not always opposed to each other, either. Bertonneau and Paffenroth trace the origins of science fiction back to ancient Greece, whose writings at the time combined elements of philosophy, religion and science in ways that often did not recognise a distinction between the fields the way modern academia and popular imagination does. Of course, these all contain ideas that lead into each other and the human condition. 'In giving us a cosmic perspective on ourselves, science and science fiction restore us to a proper humility - a meekness before the awe of creation appropriate to our station.' One might wonder at the absence of films here - after all, the Joseph Campbell/Star Wars mythology would seem a natural tie-in for the subject. However, the authors liken the television shows to epic poetry - the serial aspect shows (generally speaking) the same sets of characters in recurring dilemmas, much the way epic poetry did. Most films do not have that aspect (although the Star Wars series approaches epic proportions). Also, television gives a kind of accessibility that films (until recently) did not have - an 'in-home' quality that is analogous in ways to Jesus' parables, which are much more home-spun in nature when compared to philosophical treatises of Greek and Roman writers of his same time. Bertonneau and Paffenroth highlight six particular series: Dr. Who (the original British version), Star Trek (the original generation), The Prisoner, The Twilight Zone (Rod Serling's time), The X Files, and Babylon 5. The authors do not expect readers to be familiar with each of the shows (although the more obsessiv

I found my read of "The Truth is Out There" by Bertonneau and Paffenroth enjoyable and satisfying. I'm not a scholar but I had no trouble moving through the chapters and I gained not only a new perspective on some of my favorite entertainment but I discovered a few fascinating facts that has me looking at it again. The historical review of the classic "science vs religion" argument in the opening chapter was revelatory for me. I think anyone who isn't already familiar with the work of Rene Girard (whose theory of literary analysis is integral to the authors' thesis) will find the words, "Well I'll be darned!" escaping from their lips, paragraph by paragraph. There is much more surprise to this book than just the unexpected subtitle, "Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction". (I think the publishers should have dropped "Christian" as this rich insight into things religious is a mutli-faith one.) I learned something about myself as well from Bertonneau and Paffenroth... there is good reason why so many simple but haunting images from the Twilight Zone and The Prisoner have lingered in my imagination for decades. Read this book.

I have to disagree with the Publisher's Weekly review at the top of the page. Overall, the book isn't "stuffy" at all; it's easy to engage with and, yes, entertaining. You simply need to think it's cool that the more you know the Book of Revelation, the more you understand the X-Files. In this genre (academics writing about TV shows) you can find some very good books and some very bad ones. The bad ones are all the same: academics who are bored with what they do -- theories of the self deconstructed blah blah -- try to juice it up by discovering it in the midst of a sitcom. The result is unpersuasive, condescending, and boring. *The Truth is Out There* is one of the good ones. I'd rank it among the few (for example, Paul Cantor's *Gilligan Unbound*) that see how the best entertainment always has something serious at stake. You can try to make entertainment that takes *nothing* seriously, but that's a really serious development too. (See Thomas Hibbs, *Shows About Nothing*, another great example of what can be done with the genre.) As anyone who is really into these science fiction shows will tell you, they are most fun when you take them most seriously. That's what *TTIOT* does. Just how Christian these shows are is a hard question, and the Christian readings advanced in the book will be controversial. All the better. I'd love to see the authors engage in phaser warfare with Cantor, who also deals with Star Trek and the X-Files but reads them very differently.