So basically I'm on a kick of seeing if I can write a space opera/optimistic space adventure setting with zero supernaturalism of any kind that's 100% about sentients' agency. And it's wild how hard this is actually to do and how much theology and supernaturalism are in *most* modern sci fi.
Star Trek, often seen as one of the more atheist of sf franchises, interestingly has tons of this - possession, godlike aliens (regardless of whether people choose to worship them), ancient astronauts, and the premise that some species' religions refer to things that are objectively real rather than a matter of faith.
Nothing has made me realize most popular media sci fi has supernaturalism and theology in it (including and especially your favorite shows and movies written by professed atheists), like trying to worldbuild an s/f setting that *doesn't* have a lot of that and retains a fair amount of human responsibility for human consequences.
(One of the things in my setting bible is that I want problems to be solved by collective sentient effort and personal responsibility *most* of the time, and alien intervention in our history to play very little role. Humans collectively are the cause of most of our own failures and successes. This actually wipes tons of popular tropes off the board right away and is trickier to write than you can imagine!)
And almost all popular media sci fi has huge elements of supernaturalism and theology. (though hilariously, Star Wars *only* asks audiences to accept the existence of space wizards, which actually makes it one of the least supernaturalist of the various popular sf franchises.)
Past the 70s, tons of media sci fi goes the direction of "Gods are real but they're actually sufficiently advanced aliens that we only worship because we don't understand them." Which is an interesting stance but after a while it still boils down to "theological premises are objectively real rather than a matter of personal faith."
Also given I'm couching my own thing in the visual language and themes of retrofuture, it really makes me realize that somehow the supernatural themes as well as "can't show humans having too much collective or even realistic agency" in sci fi actually *stepped up* after the 70s. How and why did that happen? When did it stop being a thing to portray human agency let alone collective agency?
As of the 80s, harder stuff that doesn't go theological, has a tendency to be somewhat grimdark (cautionary tales offering no solutions; there is no way out of the exploitation and human-wrought horror being portrayed, except perhaps for - in the case of cyberpunk - doing crime. But the system of oppression must always be portrayed as intractable and oppression and inequality are always destiny. Sometimes 80s works got a little more hopeful, but I want to see more of life AFTER the revolution.)
Even Asimov (whose work was more grounded and human affirming up to this point) began tying up his narratives and explaining them away so that we're all pawns in the schemes of more powerful beings - by the time we get to his much later work, little of what his human characters achieved in his earlier works even really matters anymore in the same way that it did before I knew that super-robots moved pieces into place, and time-cops had already decided how things would go.
Why did this kind of theme take over sci fi after the 70s? When did that slippage actually happen?
What happened in the zeitgeist to make that happen? It's like theological arguments just unconsciously slipped in and became a big norm in media sci fi. And tons of atheist franchise writers seem to construct worlds in which godlike beings *do* exist.
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