io9 
May 7, 2008 12:10 PM
1,351
The Islam And Science Fiction website is addictive reading, mostly because it shows how many different ways non-Muslim writers have portrayed Islam in SF works. I already knew that Dune borrows tons of ideas from Islam, but I'd forgotten that Philip K. Dick's Eye In The Sky used a fundamentalist Islamic world to reflect paranoia about McCarthyism and Communist hysteria. (In a few works, Islam seems to be the "safe" other to project an author's fears of oppression onto.) But since 9/11, portrayals of Islam have actually become more sympathetic in novels such as Charles Stross' Accelerando and Brian Aldiss' Harm. [Islam In Science Fiction]
Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at charliejane@io9.com.
