Science Fiction, Fantasy, and the Dream of Moral Clarity

The original Star Trek bridge crew, sitting comfortably with their moral certainty

Before becoming a celebrated Christian fantasist, British writer C.S. Lewis was a celebrated literary critic and medievalist. In his monograph The Allegory of Love, he traces the origins of late-medieval verse romances, and their arc across European thought, culminating in decadent excess and collapse before the Renaissance. These myths of “Courtly Love” remain influential upon multiple popular literature genres, including especially Period Dramas and Fantasy.

Early in his monograph Lewis describes Chrétien de Troyes, whose French romances famously created Sir Lancelot, and introduced his adulterous love for Queen Guenevere. Despite being written in French, for French audiences, Chrétien set his stories in King Arthur’s court, hundreds of miles and hundreds of years away. “For him already ‘the age of chivalry is dead,’” Lewis writes. “It always was: let no one think the worse of it on that account.”

In my childhood, Star Trek, a commercial failure on network TV in the 1960s, had become a staple of syndication. Its images of a future characterized by intrepidity, valor, and moral confidence, often shone on TV during the hours after I’d finished homework, but before my family was ready to engage in other activities. So I watched it fairly passively and uncritically, as children do; I internalized its values without realizing they were values.

Meanwhile, thanks to the Scholastic Book Club (does that even exist anymore?), I discovered fantasy. Specifically, I discovered Lloyd Alexander, whose Chronicles of Prydain used the same mythic journey model favored by Gilgamesh and Luke Skywalker. Alexander presented a world loosely based on Wales, a mix of lush forests and cultivated farms, where a valiant youth could leave the homestead and discover himself among the wilds.

Children lack the context to critically analyze their media choices. A few years later, I’d have the capacity to understand that both Star Trek and Lloyd Alexander based their stories “out there,” whether that meant beyond the stars or across the sea, because that gave them clear, unsullied backgrounds for their stories. The Federation, and young Taran, are clearly good, while the Klingons and Arawn are evil. Only distance allows such clarity.

The revived Star Trek crew, with their usual expression of moral befuddlement

Homer and Virgil had similar standards. Though Homer didn’t particularly believe in Good and Evil, only winners and losers, he nevertheless situated his story centuries earlier, during the Late Bronze Age. Virgil did likewise, though he imposed Roman moral dualism on Homer’s Greek dick-swinging masculinity. In ancient times, when everyone assumed the future would resemble the present, these poets, like Chrétien, could only find moral clarity in the past.

With the Renaissance, naïve longing for the distant past fell on disfavor (even as early Humanists yearned for the greatness of lost Rome). Writers of moralistic literature abandoned yesteryear. Works like Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis were set across the ocean, in lands yet undiscovered, appropriate for the so-called Age of Exploration. But this only switched geographic distance for the mythic past.

With the Industrial Revolution, and its attendant social upheaval, audiences could see society evolving within their lifetimes. They realized the future didn’t necessarily resemble the present. Thus new utopian thinkers, from Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward to Karl Marx’s prescriptive economics, suddenly shifted into the future. But these authors shared Homer’s fundamental belief that the present was irretrievably murky and morally corrupt.

My father accused me, reading SF and fantasy, of fleeing the present and being merely escapist. “I like books,” I remember him saying, “that reflect this world, the one we live in, now.” But he read Tom Clancy, whose tales in technological wonders emerged from right-wing moral politics. He contended, basically, that better engines, better computers, or better satellites, would hasten the triumph of America, which was good, over evil Sovietism.

Goodness, therefore, always exists somewhere else. C.S. Lewis himself struggled with this. After his fumbling attempt at science fiction, the Space Trilogy, went essentially nowhere, he tried fantasy. As British critic Farah Mendlesohn writes, Lewis’ Narnia, reached through unique portals, strikingly resembles Christian allegories of getting to Heaven. He created a world, like Chrétien’s Britain, purged of today’s sloppy moral ambiguity and compromise.

Genre fiction is moving slightly away from that. While urban fantasy moves magic into the morally tangled present, J.J. Abrams’ recreated Star Trek largely abandons Gene Roddenberry’s belief in eventual human perfectibility. Creators use genre belief in absolute morality, while abandoning the illusion that good and evil were, or would be, clear. Time will tell whether these works remain as durable as the genre origins from which they first sprang.