Conclusion
Humanism and science fiction: some further reflectionsNot everyone on the bridge agrees
Science fiction is not uniformly humanist, and no good would come of pretending otherwise. The genre has its mystics, its reactionaries, and its devout greats. For example, Christian apologist C. S. Lewis wrote his own space trilogy as an answer to the ideas contained in the novels of Olaf Stapledon and H. G. Wells, and the field is richer for the argument.
Shared DNA
But it is easy to argue, and fun to try, that science fiction and modern humanism have DNA in common. They are children of the same realisation, which arrived with the Enlightenment and became inescapable after Darwin: that humanity is on its own, unsupervised, unfinished, and responsible. The old religions had answered the questions of human origin, destiny, and how to live with stories of the past and promises of another world. Humanism and science fiction ask the same questions, but look to science and anthropology in place of myth, and to moral philosophy in place of theology.
Three questions, facing forward
Where do we come from? An unbroken evolutionary ascent, say Erasmus Darwin’s poetry, Stapledon’s Last and First Men, and the star-child of 2001. What are we? Whatever we choose to make of ourselves, say Shelley’s creature, Le Guin’s Gethenians, and every android who has ever petitioned Starfleet for personhood.
Where are we going? Nowhere we have not decided to go, say Wells, Atwood, and Roddenberry. In Star Trek at least, you get the sense of a humanist future that its creator so desperately wanted to be real: a federation of peoples, joined by democratic consent and not by conquest, in which nobody is hungry and nobody is property, where the young are educated rather than indoctrinated, where difference is a source of interest rather than fear, and where the highest calling anyone can think of is to go and find out what is true. Sixty years on from the series’ first airing, that future is nearer on the calendar than it was to Roddenberry. And yet some days it feels further away.
Imagining better futures — humanist thought and the radical power of science fiction
Everything in this exhibition, argued out loud. In episode ten of Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage podcast, Andrew Copson and Madeleine Goodall spend an hour on Frankenstein’s creature, Wells’ devolving future, Naomi Mitchison’s spacewoman, and Octavia Butler’s Earthseed — and put the question this exhibition circles: is science fiction a fundamentally humanist genre?
S. I. Martin — historian, author, and educator specialising in Black British history and literature, and a patron of Humanists UK.
Katie McGregor Stone — literary critic and researcher of science fiction and utopian literature, currently writing a book on Frankenstein.
We advance free thinking and promote humanism to create a tolerant society where rational thinking and kindness prevail.
That is the tradition this exhibition belongs to, and Humanists UK keeps it alive — researching it, publishing it, and defending it. Members make that work possible.