A Gift from the Culture
"A Gift from the Culture", published in 1987, is a short work of space opera, by the Scottish science fiction author Iain M. Banks. The story is an early venture into the "complex and unusual and very distant" setting of the Culture, which Banks would further develop through various of full length novels, stories, and his essay "A Few Notes on the Culture".
New religious movements and cults in popular culture
L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, worked as a contributing author in the Golden Age of Science Fiction (1930s to 1950s) and in the horror and fantasy genres. In a bibliographical study of his works, Marco Frenschkowski agrees with Stephen King in regarding "Fear" (1940) as one of the major horror tales of the 20th century, and praises "its imaginative use of the prosaic and its demythologizing of traditional weird fiction themes". Other works which Frenschkowski cites as notable include "Typewriter in the Sky" (1940), "To the Stars" (1950), the best-selling "Battlefield Earth" (1982), and the ten-volume "Mission Earth" (1985–1987). Frenschkowski concludes that although Hubbard's fiction has received excessive praise from his followers, science-fiction critics leery of Scientology have underrated it. John Clute and Peter Nichols, however, manage to praise much of Hubbard's oeuvre while also raising questions about the thematic link to Scientology. Hubbard's "canny utilization of superman protagonists" in his early work, they argue, came to "tantalize" s-f writers and fans "with visions of transcendental power" and may explain why so many early followers of Hubbard's movement came from the s-f community.