UUs in science fiction: a reference page
Unitarian Universalists have a funny relationship with popular culture. How else can there be so much appreciation for needling slights and taunts from The Simpsons and Prairie Home Companion?
Well, if you’d like a little science fiction — and I know I’m not the only one waiting for the Doctor Who season finale next Friday — you might like this reference list from the underappreciated Adherents.com website.
5 June 2006 at 11:28 am
There is a brief reference to Universalists in a Lovecraftian story by Avram Davidson in The Other Nineteenth Century. I will provide a more detailed reference on my blog later, and probably try to update the Adherents people.
5 June 2006 at 6:52 pm
James, if you’re not aware of this already, you’ll probably be interested to learn that Lovecraft was a member of the Men’s Club of the First Universalist Church of Providence. This was before he’d written anything that could be explictly recognized as science fiction–like In the Walls of Eryx or Cool Air–however. As for authors, Ray Bardbury is a UU. I didn’t know until encountering this page–http://www.adherents.com/adh_sf.html–that Frederick Pohl is also and Olaf Stapledon was too. Kurt Vonnegut is often cited as a UU but I don’t think he officially affiliates.
5 June 2006 at 7:20 pm
Just as long as we don’t get a “Unitarian Universalists for Cthulhu” organization, I’m happy.
5 June 2006 at 11:30 pm
Jeff–I honestly had no clue! Thank you!
Scott–how could there not be a CthulhUU group?
6 June 2006 at 12:03 am
Universalists in science fiction–addendum
6 June 2006 at 6:40 am
Jeff: Is this Lovecraft an Universalist based on recent findings or just the poem? When I heard about the poem (on the UUHS list last year) I asked the Lovecraft folks (although I don’t know the big ones like Joshi) say that those years are mainly unknown years to Lovecraft experts. Has someone researched the church records then?
6 June 2006 at 3:13 pm
Someone eventually told me (not on UUHS, though I followed the conversation there) that Lovecraft joined the Men’s Club at the urging of his mother, who wanted the reclusive young man to be more social. He seems to have been an actual attendee of the Club, not simply a hired scribe/writer. This doesn’t necessarily make him a member of the church itself, however. I don’t say he was a Universalist (maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t at this time period), only that he was part of a Universalist organization.
22 June 2006 at 12:50 am
I would have to say that Vonnegut sounds like about half the Unitarian/Universalists I know….
Kurt Vonnegut was raised in the Indianapolis UU church (which his father apparently designed) and describes himself variously as a UU, a Humanist*, a “Christ-worshipping agnostic”, and has said that his family has been “”skeptical of organized religion” for at least four generations”. His son, Mark, planned to become a Unitarian Minister.
“I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot). [Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Fates Worse than Death: An Auotbiographical Collage of the 1980s]”.
He has served as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association.
** “What the freethinkers were are now called humanists. I am one. A humanist believes, because of Darwin, whose truths were so shocking, in making the most use of good science as possible. Humanists behave well without any expectation of either reward or punishment in an afterlife. We serve, as best we can, our community. When I was growing up, nobody ever said anything about Heaven, about an afterlife. They said that this life was enough.” http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/studsterkel/vonnegut.shtml
Yep…. sounds Unitarian!