I have long avoided writing “Christian Fiction” due to the distaste of trying to preach my own beliefs that way. Yet, I can’t avoid my own upbringing and the beliefs I live with. In a story as large as the Project Saga, there are a couple of things that came out.
In the U’tanse Branch, when Abe came to the conclusion that he would never return to Earth and that his descendants might never rediscover their native world either, he began to write a book. He wrote his own autobiography and anything he could remember about life on Earth. He spelled out all the sciences he remembered, the limited history he knew, and having been raised at a Christian orphans home in Medina, he was familiar with the Bible. He tried to recall all the Bible stories he could remember and wrote them down. Knowing his recall was limited and imperfect, he left warnings to never treat what he wrote as infallible. His version of the Bible was much smaller and left out many of the details, but he wrote what he remembered. The Book of Abe the Father was a formative influence in the culture of the U’tanse and in some ways defined their existence.
I often wonder how well I would do if I wrote my own summary of the Bible, with no preparation and no references to rely on.
In the Lunar Alpine Trilogy, there was a preacher, Harriman Moore, who drove his covered wagon throughout the settled communities of terraformed Luna. When civilization collapsed during the time of the Plague, the survivors had been far too dependent on computer storage and print-on-demand books. When computer storage was gone and the limited books lost or burned in the chaos, widespread literacy was lost.
On Luna, Harriman Moore had the last known copy of the Bible and it was destroyed in an accident. The preacher, relying on memory and scraps of scripture he’d collected during his travels spent his life trying to rebuild the Bible.
When Charles, the main character of the trilogy, seeks to fund his own purpose in life after recovering the last beamship on Luna, he offers to take Harriman to the space station Alexandria in Lagrangian orbit around Earth where the largest library of physical books remained after the collapse. Harriman could find a Bible and Charles could collect books to help restart widespread literacy on Luna.
The preacher finds his Bibles and documentation on how to make a printing press. Charles is caught up in the political battles and has to leverage the power of his beamship at the same time he struggles to preserve his own resolve not to become a killing machine.
When Harriman Moore is martyred defending his printing operation by the organization of scribes that have their monopoly threatened, Charles reaches his own religious conversion inspired by his friend.
While the Lunar Alpine Trilogy is a foremost a science fiction adventure tale, I was also inspired by an ancestor of mine who was an itinerant preacher, the development of printing in the 1400s and the preacher himself was modeled after several people I’ve known in my life.