Science fiction: the other god that failed

01/01/2008 . Source: Jeet Heer

Science fiction, it is often plausibly argued, is a literature about technology and what
it does to humans. But what if this view of the genre is wrong? What if science
fiction (SF) is not really about technology at all but something else. What if SF is at
its core a religious genre, a literature about the search for transcendent meaning in
a post-Christian world?
The story of L. Ron Hubbard is well known: he started off as a successful pulp writer of
science fiction (and other popular genres) in the 1930s and 1940s. By the tail-end of the
1940s, he claimed to have discovered a new science of the mind, Dianetics. This
purported discovery eventually morphed into the religious movement called Scientology,
which now has many thousands of adherents world-wide, including celebrities like Tom
Cruise and John Travolta.
Hubbards roots in science fiction were hardly an accident. The birth of Dianetics was
completely and organically tied with the evolution of American science fiction. In the
1930s and 1940s, SF was very much a messianic, utopian genre. Many writers were
Marxists or quasi-Marxists (including Isaac Asimov, Frederick Pohl, Judith Merrill) or
adhered to other plans to radically remake society (Robert Heinlein seems to have been
some sort of Social Credit acolyte, a fact later suppressed).

These utopian hopes were often invested in the genre itself. Both fans and professional
writers argued that SF had a real-world mission: by grappling with the new ideas, SF
could help humanity come to terms with technology and solve the problems of economic
distress and warfare that plagued the 20th century. Science fiction could, it was earnestly

argued, save the world.

By the late 1940s, these social hopes for amelioration increasingly moved away from
communal projects towards the dream of personal development and self-improvement.
Perhaps through evolution or mutation or the cultivation of untapped mental powers, a
new type of humanity could emerge to save the world: the superman as messiah. Socially
marginal and even alienated, working for tawdry magazines that paid them a penny a
word at best, totally despised by the intellectual and cultural elite, SF writers of the 1940s
maintained grandiose visions of what they could accomplish through their writings.
When L. Ron Hubbard came up with Dianetics, he found a ready and expectant audience
in the science fiction world. The first announcement of this new science was in
Astounding Science Fiction in 1950, where it appeared as a special fact article. Under
the stewardship of John W. Campbell, Astounding was the leading magazine of the
genre, renowned for publishing Isaac Asimovs Foundation series and Robert Heinlein
future history stories.
Astounding prided itself on being the home of hard science fiction, SF that adhered as
closely as possible to the real laws of physics and extrapolated with rigor future
developments in technology. Yet for all his pretences of being a hard-headed just-thefacts engineer, Campbell had a mystical streak to him which Hubbard cunningly tapped.
For at least a while Campbell became one of Dianetics loudest advocates. Even after he
gave up on Dianetics, Campbell became a perpetual sucker for all sorts of pseudosciences. His magazine became a haven for those who believed in extra-sensory
perception (or psionics) and the Dean Drive (an anti-gravity device that required an
unfortunate suspension of Newtons third law).
Aside from Campbell, many members of the SF community got caught up in the
Dianetics craze: Katherine MacLean, James Blish, A.E. van Vogt, and Forrest J.
Ackerman. More importantly, the underlying promise of Dianetics, the hope for a new
science of mind that would unleash hidden mental powers, became a central theme in the
genre. Telepathy and psionics became staple concerns in SF magazines, as common as
guns in detective novels. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, writer after writer dealt
with this messianic hope of unleashing the hidden potential of the human mind.
This theme shows up in the most famous and widely read books in the genre, running
form Alfred Besters The Demolished Man (1953), to Theodore Sturgeons More Than
Human (1953) to Robert Heinleins Stranger in a Strange Land (1963). All these books
are charged with a strong transcendentalist yearning, and the Heinlein novel is very
explicitly about the birth of a new religion, created by a messianic Martian. By the late
1960s, some hippies had taken the Heinlein book as a new gospel and started to enact
communal ritual ceremonies based on Heinleins fictional religion.
Its hard not to find religion in almost all science fiction, a current that is always running
a few feet underground. Think of the major movies in the genre: 2001: A Space Odyssey
ends on an appropriately mystical note. What is the force in Star Wars but a pop

version of Zen? In Blade Runner the replicants search for their creator hoping he can
offer them immortality.
The true history of science fiction has yet to be written. In most accounts of the genre,
Hubbard is treated as an embarrassing digression. He was much more than that: through
chicanery he uncovered the true meaning of science fiction. Science fiction is the only
literary genre that has led to the creation of a new religion. Why? Because science fiction
at its core is a religious genre.
In early 1970s Philip K. Dick, the greatest science fiction writer since H.G. Wells, had a
series of bizarre visions and auditions. He heard and saw things that werent there. If he
had wanted to, Dick could have become the second L. Ron Hubbard. Science fiction fans
who heard him speak about his visions were prepared to make him a guru and follow his
prophetic teachings.
It is part of Dick heroism, the real bravery of a flawed but honest man, that he chose not
to become a God, preferring instead to work his visions into writing and remain a writer
of science fiction. Science fiction may be a religious genre but there is no need to make a
religion out of every science fiction vision. As Dick proved, the demarcation between
literature and religion can be maintained even in the face of the temptation to be
worshipped.
Jeet Heer
Further reading:
http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2007/10/11/barry-malzberg-is-alive-and-well/
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/scientology/start.a.religion.html
http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/print/0105/cover.html
(c) Jeet Heer 2007
Jeet Heer is writing a doctoral thesis on the cultural politics of Little Orphan Annie at
York University (Toronto). He is co-editor, with Kent Worcester, of Arguing Comics:
Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (University Press of Mississippi, 2004). With
Chris Ware and Chris Oliveros, he is editing a series of volumes reprinting Frank Kings
Gasoline Alley, three volumes of which have been published by Drawn and Quarterly
under the umbrella title Walt and Skeezix. He is also the editor of Clare Briggs Oh Skinnay and is writing the introductions to a multi-volume series reprinting George
Herrimans Krazy Kat. His essays have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, the
Literary Review of Canada, the Boston Globe, The (London) Guardian, Slate.com, and
many other publications.