SCIENCE fiction

1. 22 TV themes in 7 minutes - including two of my favorites: Firefly and The Office.

2. LOST writers need your help ... finishing the show. It's a pretty funny video.

3. From First Things: "Science Friction." An interesting article on the relationship between science fiction and religion, especially Christianity. It' mentions one of my favorite sci-fi short stories, “The Quest for Saint Aquin.”

In this context, it is at least intriguing to consider the question as presented in Anthony Boucher’s 1950s story, “The Quest for Saint Aquin.” In that story, a Catholic Church driven underground by a repressive technarchy sends a priest in search of a rumored St. Aquin. The priest rides a robotic ass who, being an atheist, thinks the quest idiotic. The robot feels vindicated when they find that St. Aquin is, in fact, a defunct robot.

The priest, however, takes a different lesson from the situation: “This is your dream. This is your perfection. And what came of this perfection? This perfect logical brain . . . knew that it was made by man, and its reason forced it to believe that man was made by God. And it saw that its duty lay to man its maker and beyond him to his Maker, God. Its duty was to convert man, to augment the glory of God. And it converted by the pure force of its perfect brain.”

Science fiction can present two contradictory views of ultimate reality. One is that of, say, Steven Weinberg, the physicist who writes that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” The bleakness of this view is only partially mitigated by the wonders revealed by research and the possibility that man eventually will be able to raise himself to divine status.

The other is that reason reveals an underlying order so profound that even a robot can see that it is the handiwork of God.