[Today's post is by special guest, Chris Walley, whose blog I highlighted last Thursday.]

Last week, I got asked two excellent questions by E. Stephen Burnett. Let me try and answer them in turn.

1) Why is it that British authors seem more prone to writing more excellent Christ-honoring sci-fi and fantasy – or anything within those genres altogether? Lewis and Tolkien are oft cited, of course, but now I believe we can include both Stephen Lawhead and you. Is there some socio-cultural reason? educational? or a different form of faith tradition?

When I worked in the oil industry I used to give careful, reasoned answers based soundly on documented facts. It was terribly dull and so here I want to be a little bit more adventurous. Yes, there are major differences between Britain and the US that are masked by the fact that (most of the time) we speak the same language. In terms of a sci-fi fantasy I think there are three areas of difference.

1) Historically, Britain ceased to be an outward looking country from 1900 onwards. While we still had an empire we were pretty much just holding the fort and had lost any sense of facing frontiers. Cautiously, I think this channeled imaginative writing away from the real world into fantasy. Americans, in contrast, over the last hundred years have been (for better or worse), growing into a sense of being a global power. Americans still face the frontiers, either at home or globally. But that may be ending.

2) Culturally, the prevailing British view of life is extraordinarily cynical. I am some way through watching West Wing and whatever your views of it, it would be absolutely impossible for there to be a British equivalent. To have a Prime Minister who was not corrupt, incompetent or downright evil? I can hear the laughter now! In such a caustic environment it is very hard to express good and evil in a real-world setting. Fantasy allows the Christian to describe battles of good and evil, which every Brit knows never occur in the reality.

3) Theologically, the church situation in the UK is very different. Two areas are critical in terms of writing. The first is that, for over a hundred years, evangelicals (and to some extent Christians generally) have been pretty much been a beleaguered minority in the UK. British Christianity has become more personal and introvert and as a result, one of the best areas to deal with matters of faith has been in fantasy. Linked with this is, I think, the fact that we have never had the rather curious phenomenon of fundamentalism which I think has rather constrained American orthodox evangelical writing.

Finally, I do wonder whether the British interest in SF and fantasy fiction occupies the same niche as the western in the US.  If you think that is unreasonable, consider how so many SF films ransack the traditional westerns for plots. We never had a Wild West; we had to invent Middle Earth!

2) If I remember the back-cover summaries correctly, both novels deal with civilizations thousands of years in this world's future, on "created-worlds." On your blog you've written about your views on including "magic" in fiction, based on Scripture. What is your viewpoint about how far we can go with imagining stories in this world — without going beyond Scriptural parameters (e.g. eschatology) and being forced to generate a parallel dimension or a galaxy far, far away?

In the early days of the Reformation, the theologians, trying to unite what was becoming a rapidly fragmented reformed Church, created two categories:  things that were vital and ‘things indifferent’ (adiaphora). I think this is still a useful division. I would not even contemplate a story in which Christ was not God, sin was seen as harmless or in which the devil ultimately won. Those are the non-negotiables, it seems to me, for the Christian writer. But beyond that, we are in the adiaphora and have a lot of freedom. I personally consider the timing of the Second Coming to be a thing indifferent. Yes it will happen, but good and godly people disagree over the details.  Thus we have some degree of freedom to posit an alternative to the currently popular model. Incidentally I’ve gone back to the Puritans for mine, and just boosted the timescale. They would probably have found the eschatology proposed by certain popular American authors as very dubious. Fashions change!

I find writing anything Christian to do with really non-human cultures profoundly difficult. That may just be me but I think there are issues when you step away too far from human being. This may be the problem strange cultures and strange things creates too much strangeness. I suspect the best sort of fantasy where you manage to portray reality but as in a mirror so we see ourselves as we are for the first time.