"Shall the Dust Praise Thee?" (1967)

Once again, with Damon Knight's contribution to the Dangerous Visions collection, we find a generally incompetent monotheistic God at the center of things, and once again I am put in mind of the 1966 Time magazine cover, "Is God Dead?" It may be too easy to speculate it made such an impression on editor Harlan Ellison and/or these writers. But a feeble and useless if not dead God does seem to be one certain epitome of a dangerous vision here, as it occurs more than once. Maybe it's even true enough, per existentialist thought and so on. Then there is the matter of Ellison's introduction to the story, which is weird. It gave me the impression Ellison didn't care much for Knight at the time, though he tries to pass it off as a joke. In turn, Knight's clipped afterword seems to confirm a strained relationship. The story itself is very short, about five pages. God and a posse of angels have returned to Earth for Judgment Day, but no one is home. Nuclear war seems the likely reason. Upon looking around for answers, God finds a sardonic message etched into a stone by those about to pass: "WE WERE HERE. WHERE WERE YOU?" So it goes in the worlds of faith and faithlessness, and I'm sure I don't know what it has to do with science fiction, dangerous or otherwise. You're better off contemplating that cover of Time as far as I'm concerned. Knight's afterword, though very short, sounds familiar themes of the aggrieved science fiction writer—well, maybe more generally all writers. When he first wrote the story and tried to publish it via his agent, Knight writes, "my then agent returned it with loathing, and told me I might possibly send it to the Atheist Journal in Moscow." Ba-da-boom—Cold War times, Cold War times. I don't like the story that much either, but more because it feels kind of lazy. I'm not averse to this preoccupation with religion in self-consciously controversial work (which is maybe all that "dangerous" means after all), just surprised that it was where so many science fiction writers would think to go in 1967. I want to think it's the influence of Ellison, but then his story was not focused on religion at all. I'm telling you, it's that Time cover.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison