Science Fiction’s Gifts to Paganism: talk video and footnotes

I am pleased to be able to post the video of my 12 February 2015 Treadwells talk on ‘Science Fiction’s Gifts to Paganism’. My huge thanks to the Treadwells staff as always, especially to Marco Visconti for filming and editing the talk.

The YouTube video went live on 27 February – tragically, this was the day Leonard Nimoy died. Out of the huge respect I had for the man, and how he embodied the concepts of IDIC which I explored in the talk, I waited to post this until now.

(And, not long after, Terry Pratchett also died. I’m glad to have given both these gentlemen some small tribute here.)

As some of the audience requested, I have a few footnotes on the talk below.

The genre classification of Fantastika (the literature of the fantastic, including SF, fantasy and horror)

Neil Gaiman’s full introduction to Fahrenheit 451 as a slideshow

A brief history of Bovril and how it got its name from the work of Bulwer-Litton

HG Wells and his hatred of the work of Charles Fort

Short biography of Hugo Gernsback, who gave Science Fiction its name and a home in the pulps

Biography of paperback books inventor Ian Ballentine

Robert A Heinlein, Jack Parsons, L Ron Hubbard and the Mañana Literary Society, and a review of the excellent fictional version, House of Rumour by Jake Arnott.

A very detailed look at Heinlein’s influence on The Church of All Worlds can be read here...

…and the section of Margot Adler’s Drawing Down The Moon at Google Books in the CoAW can be found here

Biography of Discordianism co-founder Kerry Thornley, who coined the term ‘Paganism’

My article on Star Trek and IDIC, first published at Modern Mythology

My Darklore piece on Hyperreal Religion – long, detailed look at this important concept (.pdf) (This covers parts of the talk, such as the rise of Jedi as a belief system, in much more detail)

Chris Knowles’s excellent blog The Secret Sun; full of synchromystical crossovers – start with his look at the work of Jack Kirby

Frank Collins on the SF&F TV of the 1970s

Warren Ellis’s talk ‘How To See The Future’; on, among other things, The Science Fiction Condition of the modern world

My colleague & brother-from-another-mother Damian Williams on what the Western Esoteric Tradition, pop culture and magic can do for academia and vice versa

And, for the Hyperreal aspects: Baudrillard’s original paper ‘Simulation and Simulacra’

4 thoughts on “Science Fiction’s Gifts to Paganism: talk video and footnotes”

  1. Can we put to rest the notion that Kerry Thornley coined the term paganism? Or is the propagation of that tidbit just another aspect of Operation Mindfuck?

    1. If you have some evidence to the contrary, I’d be happy to see it! (OM is one thing, but I like to get the facts straight: if the Drawing Down The Moon account is inaccurate, that would be worth knowing.)

Leave a Reply to Charles Faris Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *