This is a personal list. It is not intended to be definitive or complete. It is based on my own reading and omits many examples discussed elsewhere, e.g. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien.
Furthermore, Dorothy L. Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker, said that the first requirement of the artist is to produce good art, not to be theologically correct. This applies to SF and Fantasy. For me it is far more important that a story be good fiction than that it follow a Christian world view. By definition we talking about imaginary worlds, which need not follow the laws of our theology any more than they need follow the laws of our science. I can enjoy an SF story with FTL, extraterrestrials, or telepathy, even though I think all three are scientifically unlikely. Similarly I can enjoy a story set in a non-Christian universe without feeling that my faith is compromised.
Poul Anderson has addressed religious themes in much of his fantasy and science fiction. Some years ago I wrote a letter about that to the now (alas!) defunct SF fanzine Radio Free Thulcandra, a 'zine that looked at the relationship between Christianity and SF. It is a little bit dated, but most of Anderson's important work stays in print.
Another author that comes to mind is James Blish. See A Case of Conscience and (very different) Black Easter. A nice note in Black Easter is how Blish wrote his fellow authors Anthony Boucher, Robert Heinlein, and Roger Zelazny into the story.
"The Star"
The Deryni novels. Prior to becoming an author Ms. Kurtz had studied medieval history.
Ms. Kurtz was drawing a lot on the history of the early Celtic Church. The older Deryni Kingdom corresponds to Celtic Britain, with its distinctive form of Christianity. The Deryni were overthrown by a pure human dynasty, the Church of which was hostile to the older Deryni ways. This corresponds to the Anglo-Saxon invasions, bringing after them the Roman Church, which suppressed the distinctive elements of the Celtic Church and imposed its own rules and hierarchy.
The parallels go further. In the Ms. Kurtz's stories there was a Church council at which Deryni practises were condemned. This might correspond (in a more extreme form) to the Synod of Whitby, at which some Celtic customs, such as the computation of the date of Easter, were replaced by Roman. Similarly, there is a period in the Deryni "history" when the Deryni were forbidden to hold Church office. Historically the Celtic Bishops in Britain were replaced by Anglo-Saxons (and later Normans), and after the English invasion of Ireland there came a time when the native Irish were excluded from the Episcopate there. In the novels monasticism was very important in the Deryni Church, as it was in the Celtic Church of history.....
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Turning to the practical issues of Christian devotion in space, in The Mote in God's Eye there was a Russian Admiral in command of the expedition. He kept a candle burning in front of an icon on his flagship. Of course, left to itself a candle would burn itself out in zero-G because there would be no convection currents to carry away the smoke and carbon dioxide (hot air will not rise when there is no up!). The authors are very careful about their science and had anticipated that problem: The candle had a fan that would turn on whenever the ship went into zero-G, providing an air current that would keep it burning!
The "Agent of Byzantium" alternate history series. In this world Mohammed, instead of founding Islam, becomes a Christian--the greatest missionary since St. Paul. As a consequence the Byzantine Empire does not lose Syria and Egypt in the 7th century and is far more powerful in the late middle ages than in our history. However, the old Christological controversies are still around, and still tied up with Imperial politics. Thus they come into the plots of several of Turtledove's stories.
Before turning to SF Turtledove earned a Ph.D. in Byzantine History, thereby becoming, as he put it, one of the least employable people on the planet.
Doomsday Book, an outstanding novel which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Another web page you may want to look at is the Christian Fandom Recommended Reading List. The original list was from the web site of Ross Pavlac Ross, who died of cancer in 1997, was a strict evangelical, and we disagreed about many things. However, his opinions were always interesting, and he had an enormous amount of good information about all sorts of things.
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Copyright 1998 by Glenn T. McDavid
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