It isn’t often that a book series written by a conservative Catholic goes viral on BookTok and BookTube.
One of the series’ boldest thematic choices… has to do with what the protagonist believes God has sent him to do: To wipe out an alien race.
But after nearly getting canceled due to low sales, Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series has become a surprise hit, garnering tens of thousands of raving reviews, and even boasting a “Best of BookTok” badge on Amazon. Nor can this be chalked up to the author hiding his faith. The longer the series goes on, the more theological it becomes, as the protagonist fights demons (described like Ezekiel’s infamous vision of wheels filled with eyes), confronts God himself in a Job-like sequence, and comes to view himself as God’s chosen representative.
Perhaps one of the series’ boldest thematic choices, however, has to do with what the protagonist believes God has sent him to do: To wipe out an alien race.
From the first page, Hadrian Marlowe tells readers directly how the seven-book series will end. “The light of that murdered sun still burns me,” he reflects. “It is like something holy, as if it were the light of God’s own heaven that burned the world and billions of lives with it […] You want to know what it was like to stand aboard that impossible ship and rip the heart out of a star.” (Empire of Silence, 1). We learn shortly after that Hadrian destroyed the star to exterminate an alien race. It isn’t for nothing that he’s called genocidal.
A series about an alien race being exterminated at God’s directive may stir up memories of a key biblical event. “Genocide” is also the term many skeptics use today for the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan. And over the course of the recently-completed series, the alien Cielcin are depicted with several eerie similarities to the Old Testament Canaanites.
It leads one to wonder whether Ruocchio’s series may help us better understand one of the most controversial parts of the Old Testament.
Many Christians likewise wrestle with the moral implications of God’s commands… How can such an act be morally justified?
“Is God a moral monster?” This question forms the title of one of the more famous book-length treatments of the various moral questions raised by the Old Testament (including the destruction of the Canaanites). It’s not just a question for unbelievers; many Christians likewise wrestle with the moral implications of God’s commands, especially the destruction of women and children. How can such an act be morally justified?
This question also pervades the moral landscape of the Sun Eater series. Early on, Marlowe is given a vision of blowing up a sun to destroy virtually all of the Cielcin, women and children included. As the story unfolds from there, Marlowe wrestles with the moral implications of such an act. Would destroying their entire race really be a heroic deed—or does that make him another in the long parade of history’s horrific villains?
It’s hardly a spoiler to say that Marlowe does decide it is morally justified (he tells us on the first page of the first book that he did indeed blow up the sun). What’s fascinating is how readers are slowly drawn over the course of the series to agree with his decision.
The primary point in favor of Marlowe’s choice has to do with the Cielcin’s sheer barbarity. The Cielcin feed off human flesh, raiding planets to devour humans like cattle. And that only touches the surface of their grotesque wickedness. They gleefully rape and mutilate human bodies for their pleasure. And it becomes clear over the course of the series that they have little sense of morality, viewing the world merely in terms of the right of the strong to dominate the weak.
One can readily draw comparisons with the depravity of the ancient Canaanites. The Scriptures paint a bleak picture of their propensity to practice child sacrifice (Lev. 18:21), bestiality (Lev. 18:23), and gang rape (Gen. 18). “Do not defile yourselves with any of these things,” God commands, “for the nations which I am about to drive out before you have been defiled with all these things. Therefore the land has become unclean and I have brought the punishment for its iniquity upon it, so that the land has vomited out its inhabitants” (Lev. 18:24-25). The Cielcin and the Canaanites alike display great wickedness.
What has driven the Cielcin to such grotesque displays? Illuminatingly enough, it is their allegiance to demons (“The Watchers”). As the series unfolds, we learn that they have sworn themselves to the Watchers, and their ruler eventually becomes possessed by one. Nor are these just any demonic forces. One particular demon, Ushara, is depicted in the following fashion:
It was as if the sky opened, as if that light from nowhere made straight the coiled paths from other time and revealed that higher plane—if only for a moment. The space beyond teemed with eyes lidless and pitiless, eyes that might have been carved of marble and set with gems. They slide across the heavens, fixed to great bands of glittering black, rotating rings within rings like the characters of her celestial speech—eyes seeing all (Disquiet Gods, 249).
It’s hard not to see such a depiction as directly pulling from Ezekiel 1. And in a later scene, Marlowe learns of Ushara’s creation: “She had been made to shepherd the stars. Her task had been their maintenance and command, and she had forsaken it so she might rule the Vaiartu as a queen. As a god. In doing so, she had rebelled against her master, her maker, against the Quiet himself” (Disquiet Gods, 374).
It sounds eerily similar to the way that theologians like Michael Heiser (The Unseen Realm) understand and describe the pagan gods of the Old Testament.
In The Unseen Realm, Heiser argues that God appointed a divine council to rule over the world, with “the rest of the nations placed under the authority of members of Yahweh’s divine council” (114). When those members rebelled, they represented themselves as gods: Baal, Ashtoreth, and so on. And this in turn explains why the Israelites were commanded to wipe out the Canaanites: They had allied themselves with (and in some cases chosen to be possessed by) literal demons. And the only way to wipe these demons and the human-demon offspring from the earth was complete annihilation. As Heiser posits, “The rationale for annihilation was the specific elimination of the descendants of the Nephilim” (210).
Under such a reading, the core of both narratives is the same: a race mixes with demonic forces so deeply that they become vilely depraved. And as a result, their destruction becomes justified.
One may question whether Ruocchio’s Cielcin should be interpreted as analogous to a human race. In a Reddit exchange, his wife mentioned that “the Cielcin aren’t meant as a Muslim caricature or stand-in. It would be pretty gross to intentionally depict any real world people groups as (possibly irredeemably) pure evil. Happy to report I am not married to someone who feels that way.” Such a statement suggests that Ruocchio is not intending to write a direct allegory of the Canaanites.
But the intensity of the parallels may lead us to explore whether we may learn something about our own faith through this poignant fictional picture.
The Sun Eater is not a retelling or an allegory of the destruction of the Canaanites.
One final piece of the puzzle is notable when analyzing the Cielcin’s destruction. As Marlowe struggles to accept God’s command, he attempts other methods of ending the war that don’t lead to their annihilation. But (mild spoiler) what ends up convincing him of the morality of his decision is not only the wickedness of the Cielcin, but the fact that the Absolute (his word for God) has commanded it.
This explicit command from God becomes a pivotal factor that uniquely justifies his decision to destroy the sun. At a separate point in the book, Marlowe is given an opportunity to wipe out a world that is arguably just as evil as the Cielcin. Yet despite every pragmatic reason seeming to justify such an act, Marlowe refuses. “Legitimacy must lie not in power for power’s sake, but in something else. Was not power a consequence of something higher? Its visible sign?” (Shadows Upon Time, 836)
The resulting picture then becomes clear. Within the world of Sun Eater, the extermination of the Cielcin is justified because their subordination to demons has turned them into a grotesquely wicked race powerful enough to destroy all human life if unchecked. In light of such depravity, the Absolute in his protection gave humans special permission to wipe them out entirely to save themselves.
The Sun Eater is not a retelling or an allegory of the destruction of the Canaanites. The plot of Sun Eater is entirely unique, the Cielcin share several key differences from the Canaanites (including their lack of human nature), and the protagonists are far from an allegory of Joshua or Israel. While the number of parallels may lead readers to wonder if some of these connections were intentional, this article does not mean to argue for Ruocchio’s intentions.
[Fiction] primarily moves us not through logical arguments meant to persuade the mind, but through examples and pictures meant to reach our hearts.
That being said, given the parallels, the way that Marlowe comes to peace with his own decision to exterminate the Cielcin may help Christian readers with their own unease when it comes to the conquest of Canaan. Fiction presents moral arguments in a way distinct from nonfiction. It primarily moves us not through logical arguments meant to persuade the mind, but through examples and pictures meant to reach our hearts. We shouldn’t form our theological opinions on the basis of fictional works like Sun Eater or go to it as a justification for our beliefs. Nonfiction presents clearer arguments on this front.
Yet the value of a work like Sun Eater is in helping our hearts accept truths where it can be difficult to align head and heart. C.S. Lewis alluded to this potential in fiction in his famous article on fairy stories, where he described how stories can slip past our automatic defenses (the “watchful dragons”) and resonate more powerfully with us. With regard to these particular themes, our minds can more readily grasp that God has the right to judge and exterminate a civilization for their sins; yet our hearts can struggle at the seeming-harshness of such a move.
When presented with a picture of an ensouled alien civilization which, through an alliance with demons, devotes itself to brutal conquest and revels in terrible depravity, the vividness of the image helps us see mercy and protection in the decree of the Absolute to eradicate them for their sins. That in turn assists us when we read theological justifications for God’s decisions in the Old Testament to more easily see the goodness of his decrees.
Sun Eater has helped me personally better settle my unease with the end of the Canaanites. Which is not a thematic conclusion I expected when I first picked up this viral mainstream sci-fi series. But perhaps the medium of fiction allows certain ideas to slip under the gaze of watchful dragons.
