Why are there so many monks in space?
The Jedi are the obvious root example. Robed and reclusive, prone to politics when by all rights they should steer clear, any given Jedi Knight is a tonsure and a penguin outfit away from the Order of St Benedict. Dune’s Bene Gesserit have a distinctly monastic (or convent-ional) quality, in their withdraw from the world and their focus on the Long Now via their messiah breeding scheme. Hyperion has its Templars, robed dudes who hang out in spaceship trees—along with its xenoarchaeological Jesuits (priests, sure, but relevant to this conversation) and Jewish academics. A Canticle for Leibowitz follows monks through the postapocalypse, and Stephenson’s Anathem culminates in a double handful of monks being launched into space for a hundred-fifty page EVA. (Surely the spoiler limit on this one has passed by now?) Sevarian’s Torturers’ Guild is a monastic order of St Catharine, and the berobed, contemplative Utopians in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series have more than a whiff of the monastic about them.
Monks fill the galaxy, singing compline on Mars, illuminating manuscripts on Andromeda. Babylon 5 features at least three monastic orders and that’s only counting the human variety. LeGuin’s Ekumen also has a tinge of the monastic.
When I sit down to write books set in space, I find monks popping up like mushrooms. “The Scholast in the Low Waters Kingdom” was written in part to pacify the Space Mohists who kept appearing in my other projects, asking me to do something with them. When I dove into Empress of Forever, I didn’t last beyond chapter three before the monks arrived.
So: why monks? And why space?
Dedication
Astronauts don’t have many days off.
It makes sense if you think about it. Lifting a human from Earth’s gravity well is insanely dangerous and expensive, without even mentioning the added cost of supporting life up there in space for any length of time. So Mission Control tries to make the most of it. Astronauts’ days are heavily scheduled: conduct this experiment, that experiment. Fifteen minutes for lunch. Experiment, experiment, EVA, conference call, experiment, check in, we’re already ten minutes behind, straight through from morning to night to morning to night to morning to… Well, to be fair, it’s morning every thirty minutes on the space station, but eventually you do go back to sleep. Whether or not the Skylab slowdown in 1976 really was a strike as it’s sometimes characterized, it speaks to the overwhelming work conditions in orbit that 93 minutes of radio silence could constitute a remarkable disruption.
Many astronauts come from military and scientific backgrounds—in some cases both. Military and academic careers do involve a certain level of routine—but they also value independent thought and agency. A year of endless repetition of basic tasks in an unchanging environment—even an environment of weightlessness and awe-inspiring glory—can chafe. There’s a whole field of Mars mission prep focused not on radiation shielding or delta-V but on the human factor. What kind of person can live in the tight, constrained conditions of a Mars voyage (let alone a Mars colony) without going mad?
But that’s life in the monastery. Different orders (and, of course, different religions!) have different rules, and customs shift from monastery to monastery, but let’s take Christian Benedictine monks for an example: their day begins with Matins at around two in the morning, and proceeds through eight services until Compline around sunset. Between church services and daily communal meals, monks work to maintain the monastery—gardening, farming, brewing beer, giving out alms, cooking and feeding the monks themselves, copying books. Many orders require that monasteries be self-supporting, which in the modern day means the monks’ activities often have a commercial component, whether that’s making jams and furniture or (in the case of at least one Franciscan monastery in the ‘90s) web design. The schedule is rigid, communal, and mutual—you attend services, do your work, and live with your fellow monks, not out of a desire for fame or adventure, but out of a desire to serve the always-unfinished cause of salvation, and to help your community survive.
The monastic existence doesn’t have a lot of draw for people who want to be heroes, or win a Nobel Prize, or cure cancer, or turn people into dinosaurs. Becoming a monk means acknowledging that you’re one small piece of an effort that began long before your birth and will continue long after your death. Which brings us too…
The Long Now
Monasteries last. The Order of Saint Benedict was conceived during the long fall of the Roman Empire as (massive oversimplification warning) a kind of ark and alternative to a failing society. Rather than continue to work and live in the shadow of decaying Rome, Saint Benedict thought, instead retreat with your like-minded fellows. Tend gardens, live by simple rules, and take care of one another. Those structures, close to the ground, dedicated, and united (more or less) in their mission, survive today. Sure, the role of Benedictine monasteries in European life has changed over the centuries, but they’ve lasted through all those centuries to change. Few other institutions—corporations, dynasties, governments, even governmental systems—can say the same. (Universities come close, but then, universities drew heavily on the monastic and clerical model.)
Space, meanwhile, is big. Even when we’re talking about fictional universes that feature such dramatic conveniences as faster-than-light travel, few authors represent that travel as instantaneous. Most include some hat-tip to the idea that space takes time to cross—weeks in hyperspace if not generations of sub-light acceleration. Even in settings that allow for real instant travel between settled systems (like Hamilton’s Commonwealth, Cherryh’s Gates, Simmons’ Hegemony of farcasters, or the Stargates of SG-1), going someplace totally new—and carting around those instantaneous FTL gates—takes days, weeks, months, years. More common is the imperial travel time suggested by Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire: months to pass from the periphery to the core.
Space Rome isn’t built in a space day. Any prospective interstellar civilization will have to bridge vast gulfs of time with raw intent. Few groups have that kind of staying power. Representative democracies are notoriously bad at maintaining consistent motivation (on things like infrastructure maintenance, say) over a scale of years, let alone millennia. Dynasties can can cobble together a century or two of executive intent, enough to build a cathedral, but that’s small potatoes next to the time you’d need to settle even a tiny fraction of space. Monks, though: you get them started and they just keep going.
Insignificant Compared to the Power of the Force
We’re all insignificant in space. No matter how planet-smashing the setting, no matter how vast and all-consuming the star wars, they’re dwarfed by the stars themselves. All the stellar empires and spaceports and Big Dumb Objects you care to name amount to so much pocket change in the reaches of eternity. We can cleverly suggest that our deep-space action fills the cosmos by shooting our spaceships from underneath and positioning the camera so the Imperial Star Crushers fill the screen, but we all know that’s movie magic. Space is just too big for us to matter in it.
The other social structures we humans might bring to bear on the challenge of surviving and thriving in Space—universities, militaries, governments, corporations—aren’t known for their ability to confront their own utter irrelevance. They’re limited spheres of endeavor that confuse their own limited concerns with the Ultimate.
Buy the Book
Empress of Forever
Monks, on the other hand, live in conversation with the ultimate. Different faiths and traditions construct that conversation differently—not every faith has a Book of Job to rub humanity’s face in its own tininess—but to be a monk is to acknowledge that there are things bigger than you, bigger than your family, bigger than any terrestrial desire or ambition. The concerns of the monastic life—death, time, liberation—are beyond any individual monk’s ability to see through to their end. Even if one individual monk becomes a saint or bodhisattva or even (heaven forfend) famous, achieving some deeper understanding or personal revelation or miraculous power, the work of monks in general remains. The road is straight, and goes on forever.
That’s not to say individual monks (or whole orders) don’t find themselves concerned with short term goals, fighting for their lives, making the best beer, getting more funding or protecting their land, whatever. Just that when a monk returns to the heart of their calling, when they ask themselves “why am I here,” the answer isn’t going anywhere.
And neither is space.
And in the end…
There are so many sorts of monks in space, and so many facets to the monastic life that seem well suited to life in space, that I could go on listing correspondences for another few pages without doing more than scratching the surface, and spin the examples out into a master’s thesis. Which raises another question: is there a reason monks and space (or, to be more specific, the imaginary of space, the picture we have in our heads of what life in space might be, and the kind of stories we tell about it) go together like chocolate and cappuccinos? Is this fitness just a coincidence, or… what?
In physical life we might easily say, it’s a coincidence, monks just happen to be the best space-tool for the space-job. But this is a conversation about stories, too, and coincidence does not sit easily in a story’s stomach.
Space is the “final frontier.” It’s the unmapped territory, the uncomprehended edge, the giant question mark. Space contains mystery on mystery. Ask yourself where we came from, where we’re going, what happened in the immense gulf of before-time to bring us to this moment, and how our atoms will, over millions of years, decay—whether our culture will survive the next century or the next millennium—what life is and whether it has any destiny to speak of—the answer is out there in space. Or maybe what’s out there are only more questions—an endless sequence of questions curled up and hiding inside other questions, like the coiled-up higher spatial dimensions.
Rudolph Bultmann, in The New Testament and Mythology, points out that the picture of the world encoded in Christian teaching—the world view in which there’s a heaven up there with gods, a hell down there with demons, a living earth realm caught between them, and spirits that move from realm to realm according to some set of rules—is not by any means exclusive to Christianity. It’s a common way that a resident of Judea in 0 CE would have described the universe. It wasn’t until modern times, Bultmann says, that we started to peer down into the bowels of the earth and see, yes, fire, but no demons—and peer up into the stars and see no Heaven, but… Space.
For Bultmann, that creates a crisis in Christian teaching. Modern Christians find themselves forced into doublethink: Hell does exist, it is “down there”, but not down there down there, just sort of ‘down’ in a different ontological direction. Heaven, similarly, is up, but not up-up. To live in the modern world and use modern technology is to accept on some level the picture of the world that underlies that technology, even if you claim to disagree with it. You have two visions of reality in your mind at once. For Bultmann, this is a maddening proposition—and that leads him to investigate the inner content of the Christian teaching, what human truths early Christians were trying to communicate using the language of the world as it was commonly understood in their time.
But that sword cuts in the other direction, too. Spiritual truths, great unanswerable questions, are posed in the common language of every century and every people. And when a person who accepts the general scientific picture of the material universe—whether or not that person thinks of themselves as particularly secular—wants to ask questions about (or tell silly stories about, which amounts to the same thing in the end) deep time, human destiny, death and fate, where we’re going and where we come from and what we do on the way—that person looks up into the Ultimate, where we see the beginning and end of all things, our insignificance and our wonder, and uses the language of that world to express their convictions.
Space, in short, is a spiritual realm. So of course it’s full of monks. They go where the work is.
Max Gladstone is a fencer, a fiddler, and a two-time finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. He is fluent in Mandarin and has taught English in China. He is the author of the Hugo Award-nominated Craft Sequence of novels, a game developer, and the showrunner for the fiction serial, Bookburners. A graduate of Yale, Max lives and writes in Somerville, Massachusetts. His novel Empress of Forever is available from Tor Books.
monks, perfect for space stories, cool robes, mystery and used to being alone, perfect astronauts![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
I may be wildly off-base here, but don’t monks need a larger population of people to recruit from to keep going? Monastic orders can remain so consistent only because not everyone is a member. They only take the small percentage that is drawn to that way of life. And as they don’t wield power over others (most of the time), they don’t attract the elements of humanity that would fake a preference for their ideals to wield that power.
In short, I’m struggling to come up with a way that their staying power makes multi-generational space travel more plausible.
And let us not forget:
Interesting points indeed
Monks seem to be seductive to authors because they can write adults who have few personal ties. It is not confined to SF. Chesterton’s Father Brown, Brother Cadfael are two of many robed sleuths. Probably for the same reason young protagonists are often orphans in much higher proportion to the real population.
In science fiction, however, it seems we need the robes to be shorthand for mental discipline. Spock was shovelled into some unfashionable robes to indicate dedication to logic.
On the fun side, Monks can be a inherently funny by appearance and manner. Terry Pratchet’s temporal order and the Monks of Cool.
There’s also Alien 3 (both the final theatrical version and Vincent Ward’s earlier draft).
While there are certainly monkish orders in Science Fiction and even more in Fantasy Fiction, I think there is a similar type of group that is far more prevalent.
In most Science Fiction books you will find groups that are, effectively, guilds. Some are more explicit than others but unlike monks membership is based on skill, not belief. Even your example of the Jedi seems, to me, more like a conflict between a light force guild and a dark force guild. To put it in fantasy terms it is the wizard’s guild versus the necromancer’s guild.
Even in your own Three Parts Dead, while the inner circle of Kos could be considered monks, it is the craftsman’s guild that drives the action.
Let us not forget the Order of Saint Leibowitz.
This seemed somehow appropriate in this context:
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams.
Monasteries are seen as being outside traditional power structures (hah!) but still having a position of authority over the ordinary people. There is an attraction there for authors (and readers) because you can both be the outsider/underdog in opposition to traditional authorities (police, military, stuff shirt civil servant, etc) and still have people do what they are told in furtherance of the plot and still have the moral high ground.
Thanks for this article. For several of the reasons the article discusses, especially the first two, I have long felt that monastic orders could provide good working models for the social organization of space settlements. (Real settlements, not science-fictional ones.)
The most thought provoking thing you have is that section on “Dedication”. I hadn’t thought about it ’til now, but yes, Astronauts really do live a high tech monastic life.
#9 Sort of the entire point of monastic communities to begin with. Someone has to “pray without ceasing” while the rest of us grow food, govern, reproduce, etc.
I just want to point out that nuns also do everything monks do. None of what is discussed above is gender specific.
Somehow, I read “any given Jedi Knight is a tonsure and a penguin outfit away from the Bene Gesserit” instead of “the Order of St Benedict,” and was rushing to the comment section to snark: “And a gender reassignment surgery, apparently.”
It pays to read without skimming.
One thing absent from the above is that monks often seek out extreme locations and a degree of isolation. From the Desert Fathers in Egypt to the Stylites in Asia Minor to the mountain-dwelling monastics of Athos, asceticism and isolation are naturally congruous. When a planet is increasingly interconnected, when wilderness areas and remote locales are fewer and harder to find (or to keep that way once found), then the next step is to leave that world behind and find a new one. It only makes sense that accessible interplanetary travel would attract the monk, since it would provide the only means of achieving the isolation that so many monastics and monastic communities require.
#7 Good point. The earliest I recall was Heinlein having young heroes trying to get into the Navigators Guild in a universe of protectionist workers unions. But there seem to be attractions of guild liked structures. Perhaps a link with the number of futures where space navies seem to be stuck in 17th century England.
#9. Yes of course non gender specific. The Dumarest Saga certainly has the eponymous heroes aided by interstellar nuns.
I think one of the more interesting takes on the “monks in space” trope is C.M. Kornbluth’s story, “That Share of Glory,” which first appeared in Astounding in 1952. The protagonist is a novice in the “College of Heralds,” who are set up as a quasi-monastic order and are dedicated to learning the languages and cultures of interstellar civilizations and who hire out as translators for traders.
Monks innnn SPAAACE!!!
Sorry, somebody had to say it.
Cistercians, an order dedicated to hard physical labor would make terrific first wave colonists in space, just as they did in the unsettled parts of medieval Europe. It was kind of inconvenient in fact. The Brothers would go someplace remote and work like beavers creating a strong agricultural base and some necessary manufactures and people start pouring in to expand the new community which was so what the Monks didn’t want.
BTW, on a purely pedantic note Franciscans are Friars not Monks. Yes there is a difference.
Although Severian undertook at least one space flight after the events of Book of the New Sun (and some excursions in time during them) , I don’t think the Torturer’s Guild was anything more than Earth-based, and local to the Commonwealth.
I think monks (and brothers and friars, who are not the same thing) confuse many people, especially those who come from religious traditions that don’t have the concept and those who are areligious.
First a couple of definitions:
Monks live in cloistered monasteries which are, ideally, largely self-supporting. The goal of the community in a monastery is prayer and contemplation; they are involved in commerce so they can support their contemplative life style (historically, many monastic orders have also been, communally, quite wealthy, owning vast quantities of productive land. Like any human institution, perfection is unobtainable). http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10487b.htm
Brothers interact more directly with the community, including teaching (there are teaching brothers at all three of the all-male Catholic high schools in Connecticut, Xavier, Notre Dame, and Fairfield Prep). Unlike monks and friars, brothers are lay people, not ordained.
Friars are members of mendicant orders. Unlike monks, friars are expected to minister to the public. See http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06280b.htm
Obviously, the definitions of monks, friars, and brothers differ among different religions.
I think one attraction of monks in sf/f is that they have many of the accoutrements of military order: obedience to authority, discipline, a distinct hierarchy, and a uniform. The other is that monks are supposed to be celibate, all-male organizations. This means that authors don’t have to worry about writing a) female characters and b) sex scenes.
Brother Parvus, from Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade, is one of my favorites.
Also James Blish: “A Case of Conscience“ and Mary Doria Russell’s “The Sparrow”.
Interesting article, and it made me laugh more than once. Thank you for that!
However, as a Christian I have to disagree with the view of Heaven and Hell that is described here. Some early uneducated believers might have had such superstitious ideas/beliefs, but the truth would be that such places are in a different plane of existence, and Earth is the battleground where both sides fight for the hearts and minds of the people.
I mean, it’s pretty darn clear to me that if there have been humans like Hitler and Mother Teresa on the same planet, it’s entirely possible (and indeed an indication) of the existence of God and Satan.
I know, I’ll probably get roasted and ridiculed for holding this point, but when you’ve seen spirits come out of your walls and start choking you in the middle of the night, then yeah, you start to believe in the reality of these things.)
I’d like to laud and mention this guy, who left his monastery to ‘walk the world for a spell’.
Okay, he has a really interesting backstory (which was revealed a few years ago, but still….
@@@@@ 25 philippa: When I saw Serenity, I had the feeling that Shepherd Book and the Operative had a lot in common. Meaning that Book was coming from a life much like the Operative’s, and that I felt the Operative was leaving all behind and becoming… a hermit, a monk, or a preacher like Shepherd Book.
Now I’m going to check that backstory…
@25, 26.
There’s a long tradition in fiction of men of violence relinquishing that life for that of a monk. Partly redemption, partly expiation, partly the group bonding that a self selecting brotherhood supplies. Not to mention the Sanctuary aspect of holy ground. That even shows up in Highlander.
@@@@@ 27 Mayhem: Very true. I should add that it is true in real life as well.
Not precisely a monk, but, according to tradition, Indian emperor Ashoka was transformed from a bloodthirsty conqueror into a peace-loving ruler and a convert to Buddhism by the aftermath of his own slaughter of the Kalingas (around 300 BCE or so).
I think @swampyankee has it right: monk’s are the peaceful military. Discipline, organized, set apart (and thus perhaps objective in some fashion), and, as a number of other commenters have pointed out, terribly convenient. So, like FLT then. There is also the rich history of monk’s as preservers of various hermeneutic traditions, and thus they act like living treasure chests (of information) which is highly appealing to those among us who are readers and/or lovers of things read. What use is gold when you have a fascinating puzzle to solve a la The Name of the Rose? As preserve[r]s of tradition, think atomic priesthood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interference_Task_Force
Monks work, but celibacy makes is bad news for space princesses, or space princes for that matter. I prefer the military model. It’s basically socialism, except no one has to admit it. My favorite will always be the American suburban family in space, a staple of the 1950s and 1960s, but destroyed by the gas crisis of the 1970s.
Kind of surprised no one brought up the monks Christopher Stasheff put into the Warlock series. Their patron saint is St Vidicon of Cathode. I thought for sure someone would have — particularly with all the geeks on Tor.com. I cannot recall the order’s name, however…
As a teen, I read Chris’s books, over and over (and over).
Saint Vidicon of Cathode, pray for us!
Anyway, it’s a fun variation. :D
Best,
Anne*—
Postscript: I did refresh the page, so if I missed someone else mentioning St Vidicon over this past week, my apologies.