Science, Religion and the Science Fiction Idea, Or, Where Would We Be Without Hitler? by Barrington J. Bayley (published in 1979). Bayley discusses how Science Fiction is a kind of new religion, with its sense-of-wonder as literal religious awe, and the way you either “get it” or don’t. He talks about how the space programs (of Nazi Germany, the USA and the Soviet Union) were driven by the SF faithful the Russkies, poor buggers, cut off from the pulp magazines all these years, have to make their spaceships look like something out of Jules Verne
, and he closes with a lamentation about how the images and thoughts we have for so long prized have become common property.
, and how Science Fiction is in transition perhaps from being a living and vital religion to becoming an ossified “old” or “common” religion, focused on ritual rather than revelation:
A film was released recently in which the first manned Mars expedition goes wrong and can’t take off, so for political reasons the whole thing is faked for the benefit of the world television audience, and the pictures of astronauts purportedly on Mars are really being enacted in an American desert. The film is quite good symbol of what happens when a living cult, bound by a common secret, turns into an established social religion: the Great Science Cosmos vulgarised. Every genuine religious idea is a product of the creative mind, and has an inspirational quality while it remains secret. When it is thrown open, when it is spoken on every tongue, a reverse alchemy takes place and pure gold turns to common brass. The gates have fallen, the holy of holies has been violated, and the rude barbarian, sword in hand, stares gape-mouthed at what he cannot understand.