If Seventh-day Adventists have a sci-fi legacy, it’s the Great Controversy with lens flares—and even that’s being generous. They don’t write science fiction; they write prophecy cosplay. Swap the beast of Revelation for a red hologram, toss in a “Galactic Security Directive” instead of the “Mark of the Beast,” and call it futuristic. But real science fiction? That’s a bridge too far for a theology that already claims to have the script for the end of the universe.
Sci-fi thrives on uncertainty—on the dangerous act of asking, what if? Adventism thrives on certainty—on answering every “what if” with “Ellen G. White already told us.” In real speculative fiction, the future is a vast ocean of possibilities. In SDA theology, it’s a narrow canal with warning signs nailed to both shores: “Deviate and you’re toast.” Literally.
The Adventist literary ecosystem has been engineered to avoid risk. Pacific Press Publishing? No fantasy. No science fiction. No dystopia without a sermon stapled to the back. The closest you get is doctrinal PSAs in space suits—plots so predictable they might as well come with footnotes to The Great Controversy.
And it’s not just what they produce—it’s how they appear in broader sci-fi. Adventists show up in speculative worlds the way anchovies show up in pizza toppings: a strong taste in small, odd places, never the main course.
In Alas, Babylon (1959), an Adventist character’s main contribution is not drinking or trading in whisky—lifestyle cameo, nothing more.
In The Stand (1978), Stephen King lumps them in with other denominations to describe Boulder, Colorado, as some religious-political Disneyland—a punchline in a post-apocalyptic setting.
In Towing Jehovah (1994), a character recalls an Adventist warning him about Armageddon—an evangelical blip in a satirical galaxy.
In The Terminal Experiment (1995), Robert J. Sawyer name-drops them in a thought experiment about immortality.
Even in Tree of Smoke (2007), an Adventist character exists, but the role is cultural texture, not plot propulsion.
These aren’t bold explorations of Adventist eschatology in a speculative frame—they’re Easter eggs for people who happen to know the denomination exists.
The irony is, Adventism could produce stellar sci-fi. The Great Controversy is already a galaxy-spanning courtroom drama: God on trial, Satan as rebel general, Earth as the cosmic test case. Hand that premise to Frank Herbert or Ursula Le Guin and you’d get something rich, morally tangled, and dangerous. But in Adventist hands, the danger gets sanitized. Every alien would quote Isaiah. Every plotline would be a sermon. And the ending? Preordained, sealed, and utterly unshakable.
Until they loosen their death grip on certainty, SDA “sci-fi” will remain what it is now: a half-baked sermon in a space helmet, gasping for air in the vacuum of real imagination.
Further Reading:
The Great Controversy – Ellen G. White (Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1888): The original SDA cosmic drama—strictly a one-way trip, no detours.
The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin (Harper & Row, 1974): How to explore ideology in a speculative setting without strangling it.
Neuromancer – William Gibson (Ace Books, 1984): Cyberpunk at its purest—chaotic, unpredictable, and allergic to preordained endings.
Parable of the Sower – Octavia E. Butler (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993): Proof you can interrogate belief systems while telling a damn good story.
“Seventh-day Adventism in Popular Culture” – Wikipedia (Online): A rundown of Adventist cameos in literature, including the oddball sci-fi mentions.
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