A common variant is that in which some sort of alien power or god seeds Earth with mankind (Adam and Eve in the first instance), or transmutes the existing ape-people, as in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the alien/god takes the form of a black monolith. For one theory of the nature of gods and the human tendency to believe in them, see Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind ( 1976).Ī particularly common form of the "we are property" story tale is the retelling of the story of Adam and Eve (which see for examples) in terms of what Brian W Aldiss has termed Shaggy God Stories: recastings of biblical myth into an sf framework. The idea that we are property – a favourite notion of Charles Fort's – feeds strongly into sf tales of Paranoia, which are often stories of gods to whom we are subject one of the commonest forms of Metaphysics in sf is to ask whether the universe is wholly arbitrary, or whether its patterns of meaning are somehow planned (though not by us), which brings us full circle back to religion again.
But it is not only power fantasies that feed into sf stories about gods just as important are fantasies of impotence (sf's fascination with the uses of power extending as often to the manipulated as to the manipulators) in which we ourselves are the puppets of (or have even been created by) godlike beings. It is, then, natural that he or she should especially enjoy fantasies (some might say delusions of grandeur) about superbeings with the ability to create and manipulate whole worlds. The sf writer is a creator of imaginary worlds in that sense his activity is godlike. Although this frequency is partly fuelled by the interest in Religion that has characterized sf from its earliest days, we must seek further to explain the sheer scale of the phenomenon. The word "God" (or "Gods") is one of the commonest of all nouns in sf story and novel titles.
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