RT Article
T1 “A Fourfold Vision: Nature Religion and the Wages of Scientism in Ursula K. Le Guin's ‘Newton's Sleep'”
JF Religions
VO 9
IS 9
SP 1
OP 14
A1 Newell, Catherine L.
LA English
PB MDPI
YR 2018
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1586876317
AB Ursula K. Le Guin's 1991 short story ‘Newton's Sleep' begins in a utopic society that escaped the environmental and social calamity of a near-future Earth and created an enlightened culture on a space station. The group, led by a scientific elite, pride themselves on eradicating the irrational prejudices and unempirical mentality that hamstringed Earth; but chaos blossoms as the society struggles with the reappearance of religious intolerance, and becomes confused by an outbreak of mass hallucinations of the Earth they left behind. This narrative trope of the necessity of nature for the survival of humanity—physically, mentally, and spiritually—represents a new and relatively common allegory in contemporary science fiction in an era distinguished by separation from the natural world.
K1 Enlightenment
K1 Gaia Hypothesis
K1 Romantic movement
K1 biophilia
K1 nature religion
K1 Scientism
K1 Sublime
K1 technological nature
DO 10.3390/rel9090279