Time, the Mormon Consciousness, and SF&F

Among the aspects of existence that sf&f plays with is our experience and perception of time. Most obviously, this is the case with time travel, a trope that belongs more or less exclusively to science fiction and that can be used in such a variety of interesting ways that it is always a disappointment when it becomes nothing more than an authorial restart button.

But there are many other takes on time as well. Consider, for example, the trope of progress, which science fiction both celebrates and critiques. Similarly fundamental to much of modern fantasy is presentation of the past as key to the present and future, so that the hero’s quest becomes in part a kind of detective story for finding out the secrets of the past, whether the history of the One Ring or the story of the Deathly Hallows or Severus Snape’s personal history with Lily Evans. (So enmeshed are Harry and the others in dealing with the shadow of the past that effective action in the present often seems to escape them.)

For that matter, the heroic quest itself is a way of organizing time, both with respect to the protagonist’s own story and on a meta-level: there is something fundamentally homogeneous and stable, or at least recurring, in a universe where archetypal patterns manifest. The same is arguably true of historical cycles, which might be considered as the equivalent of archetypcal patterns for civilizations. Thus, Isaac Asimov’s evocation of the history of Roman empire (as explicated by Gibbon) as a template for his Foundation series suggests something universal in the evolution of societies.

Such cycles often feature an apocalyptic phase, though the extent to which this is emphasized varies based on the predilections of the writer. Thus, for exampe, in the writings of authors such as Michael Moorcock and Glen Cook you find persistent tales of societal collapse, while in The Lord of the Rings victory is tempered by the cost associated with the ending of the Third Age. Even Asimov’s new future is built on the ruins of the old Galactic Empire, though no one seems to mourn it much.

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So what does all this have to do with Mormonism?

Mormonism, I submit, offers a bewildering variety of conceptions of time. Let us count some of them:

• Culturally grounded in the nineteenth century as it is, it would be remarkable if Mormonism did not incorporate narratives of progress. Certainly progress — eternal progress — is a key feature of the Mormon narrative about individuals. You also get a sense of social progress in Mormon enthusiasm for new technologies, the notion of continuing revelation, and the designation of the latter days as the “fulness of times,” following which there will be (by some interpretations at least) an end of history as we know it.
• At the same time, Mormonism buys deeply into a view of time as cyclical, both on a personal/archetypal level (hence the importance of rituals and ordinances) and on a societal level. Time on earth, in the Mormon view, is divided into dispensations, each beginning with a revelation of knowledge from God and continuing through phases of prosperity and obedience, forgetting God, disobedience, and eventual destruction. Such cycles are recapitulated on multiple levels, from the personal to civilization-wide. Sometimes they are cut short by repentance; sometimes not. Once, with the City of Enoch, the cycle ended in righteousness literally too good for this world (for a minority at least). Thus, this is a cycle of many different flavors and varieties.
• Anyone who thinks Mormonism lacks an apocalyptic strain has not been paying attention. Seriously. Whether in the repeated hammer-blows of the final Book of Mormon authors, the Millennial preaching of the early Latter-day Saints, or the ritual denunciation of the corruption of our time in General Conference and sacrament meeting talks, Mormons often seem to buy into a discourse of downward spiral — sometimes with what seems like a disquieting sense of relish. Indeed, it’s quite common to hear back-to-back talks about the marvels of the modern world and ways that same world is going to hell, with little apparent awareness of the cognitive and metaphorical dissonance.
• And then there is what I would call the baseline human assumption to which Mormons are certainly not immune that yesterday was much like today, and tomorrow will be more of the same. Perhaps uniquely in the Christian world, we as Mormons explicitly embrace doctrinal evolution as a core belief (see Articles of Faith 1:9), but until it happens, we tend not to believe that it ever will. (And then we forget that it ever did.) Perhaps this tendency to assume that things stay pretty much the same serves as a corrective to our bias to see ourselves and our time as unique, although the more skeptical part of myself thinks it’s more likely that we simply hang onto all our competing irrationalities: viewing the past and future as different when we should assume they are the same, and as the same when we should question whether they might be different.

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This is the point where ideally, I would start talking about Mormon sf&f writers and how they (we) play in these various temporal sandboxes. Unfortunately, I don’t think I know enough to do more than gesture in a couple of directions.

Two trends in Mormon-themed sf&f that I wish to briefly note, though I do not plan to address them in depth here, are (a) the interest in post-apocalyptic fiction in which Mormons struggle to survive after the fall of civilization, starting at least as early as Gerald Lund’s The Alliance (originally published in 1983), and (b) alternate history stories that play with the givens of Mormon history in changed contexts. Both categories play with notions of time in ways that deserve fuller treatment. Perhaps I’ll write that essay someday…

A strong thread running through much of the sf&f I’ve read by Mormon writers is a perhaps ahistorical baseline assumption that human nature is much the same regardless of time and social circumstance. Thus, for example, the Babylonian goldsmith in Steve Peck’s “The King’s Jeweler” is if anything a little too much like a modern LDS convert, while families in Orson Scott Card’s fiction bicker and love and hate each other similarly whether in 19th century frontier America or a colonized star system of the future.

While this assumption of fundamental similarity is far from unique to Mormon writers, for those of us who are Mormon I tentatively associate it with our deeply engrained sense than when we live our mortal lives is in some ways incidental to the common elements of our shared premortal childhood, the fundamentally congruent challenges of our mortal adolescence, and a postmortal collective destiny where a few centuries one way or the other in when we were shipped off to terrestrial boarding school won’t really matter. Modern revelation assigns contemporary Mormons the task of binding up the whole family of humanity, in apparent defiance of history; I choose to see a reflection of this in the egalitarian way Mormon sf&f writers treat their characters across multiple time periods and cultures.

Conversely, I am surprised by the extent to which I do not see the history of civilizations and societies presented cyclically among Mormon sf&f authors. Rather, what I see is a very modernly conceived type of historical evolution — not necessarily progress, but a sequence of carefully explicated changes caused by factors as diverse as advances in science and technology (as in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series), the socially fossilizing effect of life extension (Orson Scott Card’s Abner Doon universe), and increased population pressures (Dave Wolverton’s Serpent Catch books).

Here, I propose, thoughtful Mormon writers are testing rationales for societal evolution, cautiously integrated with Mormon ideas about good, evil, the necessity of opposition, and life as an arena for individual chocie. Perhaps this reflects the tension among Mormons between our sense that God is in control of history, on the one hand, and on the other that we as humans can and should act in ways that improve existence for ourselves and others. History as a constrained yet contested space.

Or so I posit. Thoughts?