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Science-fiction writers have long enjoyed developing similar themes. Nelson Bond, in a short story called The Cunning of the Beast, published in 1942 told about a weak-bodied, high-minded scientist named the Yawa Eloem who tried to create intelligent animals to serve his fellow academicians on the distant planet that was their home. But the servants rebelled, got into the Yawa Eloem's private laboratory, and learned how to do evil. His colleagues decided to punish Dr. Eloem by sending him off in a spaceship to a far corner of the universe, accompanied by his creations—Adam and Eve. The late author and Anglican theologian C. S. Lewis used space to expound traditional Christian theology in his trilogy Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. His Perelandrans, for instance, were creatures who had not fallen from primordial grace.
Blue Fire. Other stories examine what might happen when it is man's turn to explore other worlds, possibly to encounter life forms both inferior and superior to his own. One chilling short novel published in 1954, Lester del Rey's For I Am a Jealous People, told of a future in which mankind comes up against an ambitious race of conquerors with whom God has made a new Covenant—against earth men. Ray Bradbury's story of "The Fire Balloons" in The Illustrated Man tells of a gentler encounter, when two Episcopal missionaries on Mars discover spheres of blue fire that are intelligent beings—free spirits, as it turns out, long liberated from the pains, and the sins, of the body. And in a recent, surprisingly touching Star Trek TV script, the crew of the spaceship Enterprise stumble upon the Greek God Apollo on a distant planet, only to tell him that they can no longer worship him, as they did when he and his race of supermen lived on earth.
Encounters with more primitive civilizations might produce unintended results not unlike those that Erich von Däniken says once occurred on earth.
In a 1961 story called Prometheus by Philip José Farmer, the hero, an intergalactic missionary named Father John Carmody, visits a planet where the inhabitants are only dimly aware that they have souls at all. He then prcceeds to instruct them, in one breathtaking passage, in the basic principles of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, and the ritual of the Last Supper. As Carmody's spaceship moves away from the planet, the agnostic ship commander chides him. What the priest has done in his effort to instruct, says the captain, is to lay the foundations for a mythology in which the missionary himself may well become a god—or the son of one.