SOURCE: "Man and Apollo: A Look at Religion in the Science Fantasies of Ray Bradbury," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 5, No. 4, Spring, 1972, pp. 970-78.

In the essay below, Dimeo uncovers moralism in Bradbury's short fiction.

Although religious thinking in the space age has been largely dominated by Nietzschean apostasy, science fiction itself seems to be giving more and more attention to man's relationship with the divine. Religious themes have long been treated in the genre but the first to give it serious and even literary consideration was C. S. Lewis in his trilogy Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1944), and That Hideous Strength (1945) which lofted the Christian mythology complete with angels and devils into tangible planetary realms. Since then the more notable examples of science fiction with more innovative religious implications have included Gore Vidal's Messiah (1954), James Blish's A Case of Conscience (1958), Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s...