Sf's great schism

Here's a fascinating thought: is there a religious divide within American sf? It's not religious versus secular, as one might think:

The main SF line is ‘Protestant’ in its imaginings, with Catholic impulses providing important counterpoint. Roughly, Protestantism is all about the ‘disenchantment of the world’ and Catholicism is about magic and sacralization. So SF is Protestant and fantasy is Catholic, and the fact that SF is often hard to distinguish from fantasy just goes to show that Protestant and Catholic imaginative impulses can intertwine and do complicated stuff.

“If I am asked to condense into a single sentence, my thesis is that science fiction is determined precisely by the dialectic between ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ (or, if one prefers less sectarian terms, between ‘deism’ and ‘magical pantheism’) that emerges out of the seventeenth century” (p. xi-ii).

I wonder (among other things!) about non-western Christian sf, namely coming from the Eastern Orthodox tradition.

Comments

[Patrick]

If you haven't seen Nightwatch & Daywatch, two great Russian Sci-Fi movies, you should. They've got such a different feel than Western Sci-Fi. I think the obvious conflict (besides Light v Dark) could be one of Religion v Magic (paganism).

[Bryan Alexander]

Those are good examples, Patrick, of post-Soviet Russian fantasy. Have you read any Soviet sf, like the Strugatskys' work? Or seen Tarkovsky's films, deeply informed by religion?