Futures of an unknown world: utopian and dystopian visions of religion in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s and Monika Kaup’s work, this article analyzes some aspects of utopian and dystopian thinking about religion in contemporary science fiction, taking as an example Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series (2016–2021). In these novels set in the twenty-fifth century, religion is restricted to individual counseling with so-called ‘sensayers’, a future equivalent of scholars-of-religion\s-cum-spiritual-advisors. In exploring these visions of future religion, utopia and dystopia prove to be important concepts. Centering religion’s ambivalence as both a centripetal and centrifugal societal force, Palmer presents a continuum of utopian, dystopian, anti-utopian, and anti–anti-utopian religion(s). Nevertheless, in Terra Ignota religion remains conceptualized as an anthropological necessity, limiting the radical difference of her unknown world. In conclusion, drawing on Gayle Salamon and Richard M. Zaner, I argue that speculative fiction’s ‘acts of possibilizing’ can be generative of theoretical insight, providing occasion for fertilizing our ‘ability to fantasy’.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• imagination
• utopia
• dystopia
• speculative fiction
• science fiction
• possibilizing
• Terra Ignota

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I follow Engler and Stausberg (2011, 127) in using ‘study of religion\s' in order to ‘index a series of theoretical and meta-theoretical questions regarding the referents and framing of “religion” and “religions”’ at stake in this academic discipline.

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Adrian Hermann

Dr Adrian Hermann is Professor of Religion and Society at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft and Head of the Department for the Study of Religion at the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies of the University of Bonn, Germany. He specializes in the global history of religion since the nineteenth century and recently has begun to engage in the field of role-playing game studies, focusing on analog imaginative play. In Bonn, he teaches in various religious studies, cultural studies, and media studies BA and MA programs. Over the last 15 years, he has written on Christianity and Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the US.