WATCH ME GET SUED OR SOMETHING: The Rallying Point links to this list of Celebrity Critics of Scientology and I can't help but notice that like half of them are science fiction authors. There has to be some professional jealousy here of L. Ron Hubbard, right? They're thinking to themselves, "I coulda come up with a WAY better religion than THAT." For whatever reasons, science fiction is a kind of culty genre and it's practitioners have to walk a fine line sometimes between being artists and prophets speaking to converts and would-be converts and old L. Ron definitely embraced the prophet deal whole-hog. There are others who went half-way there into guruhood, like Kurt Vonnegut, and others who wanted to but pulled back at the last minute, like Philip K. Dick, as I think Thomas Disch mentioned in The Dreams Our Stuff Are Made Of.

By the way, here's a geek heirarchy I found via the null device (a completely great name for a blog, by the way). Science fiction authors are at the top; people who write erotic Star Trek fan fiction featuring themselves as funny animals are at the bottom.