Faith & Spirit Quote by John Sladek

Sladek’s line snaps like a trap on the ankle of respectable storytelling. “In most conventional novels” is the giveaway: he’s not diagnosing God, he’s diagnosing taste. Mainstream fiction tends to treat divinity as a stabilizing premise - a moral north, a metaphysical landlord who may be absent but must remain sane. The minute God becomes “nuts,” the whole realist bargain collapses. You can’t keep your tidy psychological arcs if the cosmos is run by a manic prankster.

The second sentence is the nastier twist. It’s not just that literature censors a crazy deity; it also polices who gets to speak with godlike authority. “Nor are nuts allowed to be God” points to a cultural gatekeeping reflex: if a character is labeled irrational, their revelations are automatically disqualified. That’s a critique of how we flatten mental instability into plot-device noise, instead of grappling with it as a mode of perception that might be terrifyingly accurate.

As a satirist working in science fiction’s shadowland of conspiracy, paranoia, and false realities, Sladek is needling the boundary between the sacred and the pathological. His subtext is that our “conventional” narratives aren’t neutral; they’re comfort machines. They keep God respectable and madness containable, because the alternative forces a much darker question: what if the universe is incoherent, and the people we dismiss as unstable are the only ones taking that possibility seriously?