Pope fiction: a writer who foresaw our dystopian era

Times

28-04-2025

'I advise you to read it,' Pope Francis said, and it's not often that the Pope recommends fiction, so I did. Lord of the World, a 1907 dystopian novel by the Catholic convert Robert Hugh Benson, is about the appearance of the Antichrist on Earth in the guise of a secular, humanist dictator, before whom a deracinated human race prostrates itself. The book seems to have had wide appeal among Catholics, liberal and conservative, clerical and synodal alike, and Francis was not the first pope to recommend it. Perhaps he won't be the last.
Benson's Antichrist clearly captures the modern forces that Catholics feel they're up against. This charismatic but bloodless Satan seduces humanity by preaching a creed of global unity under a perfect ideological schema: collective ownership, absolute equality, 'humane' euthanasia and so on. His disciples boast that he will bring about world peace and a rational reorganisation of all societies. He takes over by consent, but the impersonal, remote power structures acting in his name soon suppress dissent and enforce new, neopagan forms of worship.
Benson effectively predicts that the main ideological fault line of the modern world would be between atheistic, rationalist egalitarians and hierarchical, faith-inspired traditionalists. He saw that the stripping away of deep-rooted culture by global forces would leave societies ripe for all sorts of cults and shamans — bodybuilding, Jordan Peterson, jihad, gender ideology, Just Stop Oil.
Francis saw the creed of Benson's Antichrist, which he called 'ideological colonisation', all over the world. The desire to abolish binary sex categories was an attempt, as he put it, to make a world 'in which differences are disappearing and everything is the same'. One can see similar strands in projects of international law, globalisation, socialism, neoconservatism and EU 'harmonisation'. But there was also a time when the Vatican aspired to rule the world. Maybe it's only Satanic when it's the other guy doing it.
Musk-hailed space opera
Elon Musk, who seems to aspire to rule Mars after populating it with his offspring, has also proffered the odd book recommendation. I bought Consider Phlebas, the first in a 1980s ten-book 'space opera' by Iain M Banks, on Musk's public endorsement. It proved weirder and less readable than expected.
I won't summarise the whole plot; it would take too many words on names alone (one character is called Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda dam T'seif, and no, she isn't a Spanish infanta), but here's the gist.
An interplanetary, post-scarcity humanoid empire called The Culture, which is run by mega-advanced AI (Minds) and pursues hedonistic pleasure for all, is at war with an expansionist, religious empire of super-intelligent tripod-legged aliens called Idirans, who view AI as idolatrous. There are long action sequences and strange, melodramatic internal monologues.
There's a certain symmetry with the late Pope's reading material. Banks, like Benson, saw an irreconcilable conflict between a religious and utilitarian view of the world. You might assume Elon Musk would be on the side of the interplanetary, pleasure-seeking humans. But he's said he's worried that AI will take over and make humans obsolete. So maybe he isn't the Antichrist after all.
Dysmorphic dobbin
Where's the long face? No, really, where is it? Horses, one of the most beautiful creatures on this earth, are defined by their long, graceful noses and arching necks. But in the ubiquitous stickers and cartoons of unicorns flogged to little girls, they are drawn more like a dog, the horsey nose snubbed, presumably so the eyes can face forwards, anthropomorphically. All that remains of the horse is the flowing mane.