
Religion and Science Fiction
Timothy Jenkins(Author)
Peter Lang Verlag
Published on 29. November 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
158 pages
978-1-80374-170-3 (ISBN)
Description
«Flying saucers come from outer space - except, as Timothy Jenkins observes in this persuasive and enjoyable volume, they also come from the pages of nineteenth-century occult texts. Jenkins ably traces the connections between Madame Blavatsky's messages from spirit masters to Richard Shaver's pulp fiction classic "I Remember Lemuria".»
(Matt Tomlinson, Associate Professor, School of Culture, History and Language, Australian National University)
Flying saucers display characteristic features, transmitted by an important strand of early science fiction, which express religious concerns entangled with new technologies and scientific discoveries. The extraordinary universe discovered by late nineteenth-century advances in the sciences, with its expansion in both space and time, was populated in spiritualist and other thought by intelligent beings attentive to and bound up with the progress of humankind. This book traces the appearance of these interplanetary guardians, active at every level from the atom to the Cosmos, and uses a pulp science fiction story from 1945 to describe how this theosophical worldview was expanded to explain important aspects of contemporary American wartime society, in this fashion preparing the landscape for the coming of the flying saucers.
More details
Series
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 210 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
197 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80374-170-3 (9781803741703)
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Timothy Jenkins
Religion and Science Fiction
E-Book
12/2024
1st Edition
Peter Lang Verlag
€30.49
Available for download

Timothy Jenkins
Religion and Science Fiction
E-Book
12/2024
1st Edition
Peter Lang Verlag
€30.49
Available for download
Person
Timothy Jenkins retired from Cambridge University in 2019. He trained at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology, with fieldwork in France and Britain. His research interests include moral uses of scientific discoveries and the multiple dimensions of time. He has also published Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists (2013).
Content
Contents: An exemplary story in its setting - Theosophy, the source of this complex world picture - The <<Shaver Mystery>> - sources and commentary - Appendix: A study of Alfred Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism (1883).