Nice coincidence: I’m 80% of the way through John Scalzi’s delightful romp “The Android’s Dream”, which includes a religion invented by a hack sci-fi writer. The parallels are obvious, aren’t they? Well, why don’t I let Scalzi explain it himself, as he does in his blog today:

[I]n that book I create The Church of The Evolved Lamb, a religion founded by hacktastic science fiction writer as a scam to separate the credulous from their money, which is a description I know many would apply to Scientology. But in the course of the book, the folks in the Church are shown to be the good guys, with a solid grip on reality (such as it is in the course of the book). So if I’m satirizing Scientology… I’m doing a pretty bad job of it…. I definitely take advantage of the (presumed) reader familiarity of L.Ron Hubbard and Scientology to set up the ELC, but after that it’s pretty much its own thing.

And what about Scientology itself?

[W]ell, I’m not down with Xenu using DC-8s to transport billions of people to volcanoes for the purpose of nuking them into malevolent ghosthood, but then I’m not down with Yahweh blinking the universe into existence in six days and then kicking Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden because they decided to make a fruit plate, either. They’re both just different flavors of nonsense. I’m not sure why anyone wants to believe either, but if people want to believe either, it’s fine with me, as long as they keep it to themselves and don’t bug me about it.

Works for me. Or it would do. Unfortunately members of both groups have this annoying tendency to believe their own propaganda, and stick it where it isn’t wanted. (Science teaching in the US, and drug education in the UK, for instance.)
As for the book, it’s a lot of fun. There are nice touches of Douglas Adams ((The alien Takk would have got on well with Marvin.)) , although Douglas himself would never have described the blow-by-blow of a fight in quite the obsessive way that John does. But that’s OK. I know that John is identified with the “milSF” sub-genre, but I hope he doesn’t limit himself; he’s a much better writer than that. Plus he writes about my favourite area of software futurology, intelligent agents – but with a twist.