Epistemological Expansion through Christian Allegory in Apocalyptic Science Fiction: Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children

Abstract

In Greg Bear’s Darwin series, which portrays the eschatological crisis caused by a virus named SHEVA, Christian allegory works as a mythical source that provides natural thematic coherence on one side and as a counter-narrative against which a new worldview makes sense on the other. Using the fragmentariness and incoherency of allegory, Bear juxtaposes dialectical images of the divine/the secular, the human/the non-human, and good/evil, thus blurring essentialist conceptions and promoting readers’ epistemological transformation. Appropriating the framework of Christian apocalypticism, wherein salvation and eschatology are embodied and vision and reality intermingle, conflicts become synthesized in terms of the interaction of Shevites and humans. Evoking the possibility of the redemption of the human world, creating a counter-discourse to human conflict and disgust, the posthuman existence of Shevites, a new species of humanity, represents the blurred distinction between nature and culture in addition to that of human and nonhuman; this post-humanity breaks with Cartesian dualism and thereby demands a new epistemology which presupposes a network of human and nonhuman and their interrelatedness, negating anthropocentrism. At the ambivalent intersection, the Christian allegory in the Darwin series does not work to convey Christian messages as a Grand Narrative but instead serves as an axis with which to produce an anti-discourse and ultimately to go beyond binarism and essentialism, inviting readers to a new skepticism regarding the conventions they have held. In this way, the pandemic crisis leads to the emergence of new myths supplanting biblical ideologies as well as anthropocentrism and supporting interconnectedness of everything.