I have met plenty of people who were not science fiction fans like us, but who talk with the assumption that manned exploration of the galaxy is destined to happen. I’ve even had young people ask me when is NASA going to build spacecraft like the ones in Star Trek and Star Wars.

I can’t help but feel that this is a belief system like the belief in life after death or heaven. Just because people haven’t made a formal religion out of it doesn’t mean it’s not a belief system. People believe in ghosts and angels and fairies, so why not galactic civilizations or intelligent robots?

respectfully, I think you are stretching things too far and are mistaking some science fiction tropes that have been adopted by the popular culture for a ‘belief system’.

Many of the works you refer to are, undoubtedly (especially so in the case of movies and television) fantasy rather than science fiction (Star Wars, for example); these feature rayguns, rocketships and robots and, although they ‘look’ like (and sometimes act like) their SF counterparts, they are, in actuality, mere stereotyping, icons for ‘the other’ or ‘travel to foreign lands’ – standins for what in an earlier era would have been pirate ships and fairies.

One of the main problems for SF as literature, at least in the realm of gaining new readers, is the introduction of a multitude of unfamiliar concepts – faster than light travel, time dilation, time paradoxes, aliens that are more than just ‘the other’. One spends a lifetime learning these concepts from context – but only if one is motivated to look beyond the icon and explore what it actually represents. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, for example, go beyond the mere concept of a mechanical, autonomous being. If one is treating the story as belief system, there is no need to look into the deeper, more important and meaningful aspects. There would be no need to create such a thing as the ‘Three Laws’. The ‘robot’ would be a mere cipher.

Anyone who is treating science fiction as a belief system is wading in the shallow end of the pond, playing with icons that are devoid of their actual reason for being and any real meaning.

What you are seeing is an increased awareness of SF tropes and their wider use in our culture because they have become so pervasive through mass media – but you are not seeing “science fiction” becoming pervasive, nor is it developing into a belief system. You’re looking at shades, being manipulated by people who have little knowlege or appreciation for the genre itself. By way of example – Vampires are ‘hot’ right now; Twilight and its soon to be made sequels are replacing Harry Potter – but this is an affectation of the money mavens. Popular fazes do not a belief system make.

Finally, if science fiction does engender some kind of belief system – wouldn’t it have to have its own comprehensive definition? Show me how and where numerous dystopian stories of the future jive with the utopian ones, or how tales of post-singularity humanity dove-tails with military space opera that’s based, in large part, on stories from the days of sail and imperialism. Does one just pick a single trope and build a life around it? How does one use this belief system in their daily lives – when most of science fiction has not yet been realized technologically?

For example, intelligent robots, aliens from other worlds, interstellar travel, time travel, homo sapiens 2.0, and so on. If you look at children’s books, movies, television shows, games, etc., you’ll find all kinds of science fiction concepts embedded with no explanation. They are taken for granted. Who are teaching 4 year olds about space ships and robots? Somehow they acquire those concepts with equal ease as dog and cats, gods and angels, cars and trucks.

Sure, science fiction is a form of entertainment that people seek out. But the concepts of science fiction have flowed out of the entertainment and into culture. Some people believe in those concepts.

Jim