Ted Chiang's alien language in Arrival, James S.A. Corey's deep space opera The Expanse, and Jeff VanderMeer's strange ecologies provoke scholars of religion into revisiting definitions of mysticism. How do we contend with the science fictional sublime/grotesque and confront transcendence? What can the "mystical" mean in locations and situations that defy sensorial comfort and familiarity. What can we learn about "religion" when confronted by the truly alien?
Mysticism is difficult to define, but, following Bernard McGinn, a robust definition is a unique consciousness of the ultimate reality one perceives. Understanding how the mystic’s consciousness is unique when compared to their community can be difficult, but the 2016 science fiction film _Arrival_ provides an analogous situation that helps illustrate this concept. Through intense preparation and engagement with a newly encountered alien language, the protagonist Louise develops a unique consciousness of time that enables her to save the world. I argue that this correlates to the mystic’s unique consciousness of ultimate reality, also often attained via preparation, that enables them to provide fruitful reflection to their own community. The use of _Arrival_ to help clarify this concept for mysticism points to the potential fruitful dialogue between speculative fiction and religious studies.
In this paper, I examine the mystical aspects of the space opera novel series The Expanse, which describes humanity encountering an alien presence in outer space drawing upon Christian and Buddhist mystical metaphors. Despite the success of The Expanse and space opera novels more broadly, scholarly attention to its religious elements remains scarce. The paper aims to fill this gap by examining how mystical experiences in the series often manifest as erotic or violent, challenging some mainstream notions of space-born spirituality (such as the “overview effect”). It first surveys scholarship on mysticism in popular literature and on religion in science fiction. Then, it close-reads selected passages from the novel series. It concludes by comparing The Expanse to other recent space opera novels that do not imagine mystical unity in a violent or even erotic manner, but as a new default mode of consciousness for a space-borne humankind.
The novelist Jeff VanderMeer has a penchant for plunging his characters into overwhelming piles of decaying stuff. This paper contends that passage through these piles can be read as a form of mystical absorption apposite to the experience of being overwhelmed by climate crisis. Climate crisis is often presented as a problem of scale, yet scale alone cannot account for its maddening, and at times deeply stupefying, particulars. Nor should scale be the sole connection point between climate crisis and the scholarly study of mystical techniques and experiences. I argue that VanderMeer’s recurring motif of piles depicts mystical experiences of excess born not of inexhaustibility but of exhaustion, and thus offers resources to resist transcendentalizing climate crisis in a way that distracts from its politics.