SOURCE: “Transformational SF Religions: Philip Jose Farmer's Night of Light and Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 35, No. 4, Winter, 1994, pp. 343-50.

In the following essay, Dudley analyzes the protagonists' quests for the divine in the respective universes of Night of Light and Downward to the Earth, highlighting the contemporary cultural significance of their search.

In a 1967 review article, Judith Merril noted that much of the era's science fiction dealt with what she termed “the religious functions of man” (44). These functions quite often found expression in the symbolism of the rocket, which (after losing its status as a phallic symbol with the emergence of the God-is-Dead movement) had come to symbolize to readers not only their own “expanding consciousness” and “the meaning of god, and of man's search for god” (43), but also “a recognition of the subjective ‘reality’ of religious experience to the individual human being...