Writes member "humphrey" over at WhyWeProtest:

If Scientology were pretty much exactly the same but centered around Philip K Dick, my god — I'd want in, for his secret scriptures! The lectures on cosmogony! The resonant gnostic insights that made PKD's work so mythic!

The discussion devolves into some weird irrelevant stories about strange experiences with science-fiction authors and their cult followings. But there's also a nice thread where people ask which other SF authors would have been good choices to start a religion. The main recommendations: Isaac Asimov (his religion would have had a more thought-out cosmology) and Frederik Pohl.

But I bet we can come up with some other good ones — which classic (or recent) SF authors would you prefer to see as religious founders, rather than Hubbard? [Why We Protest]

You shouldn't even bother trying to predict the future of technological progress, argues The Space Merchants author Frederick Pohl:

No sensible science-fiction writer tries to predict anything. Neither do the smartest futurologists. What those people do is try to imagine every important thing that may happen (so as to do in the present things which may encourage the good ones and forestall the bad) and that's what SF writers do in their daily toil.

Chiming in Nancy Kress (Dogs) says it's foolish to try to predict the course of technology more than about 15-20 years out.

Ringworld author Larry Niven is more sanguine, laying down a couple of iron-clad rules for writers seeking to predict a future technology:
1) Think about basic human goals that will never go away, like immortality or instant travel. Then think about how someone could make them happen.
2) You can't invent the car without also inventing traffic jams and gas shortages.

The whole article is worth checking out, if only to see Halting State author Charles Stross say, "Donald Rumsfeld was right." [CIO]

Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1993): A continuation of Prelude to Foundation, it continues the life of psychohistorian Hari Seldon as he develops his theory to create a society to replace the crumbling Galactic Empire. Like the original Foundation, it consists of a series of interconnected stories.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? The first three stories in Forward the Foundation were published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine prior to his death in 1992. By the time Asimov succumbed to kidney and heart failure, he had a complete, albeit unedited, draft of the book. Asimov’s third memoir, I, Asimov was also published after his death, as was a final collection of short stories and It’s Been a Good Life, a compilation of Asimov’s diaries and personal correspondences collected by his wife Janet, which for the first time revealed that he had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion a decade before his death.

Radio Free Albemuth by Philip K. Dick (1976): Nixon stand-in Ferris F. Fremont occupies the White House and has turned the United States into a police state, by inventing a fictitious group of home-grown terrorists. Science fiction writer Phil Dick finds himself the target of this new paranoia while his friend, record executive Nick Brady, starts hearing voices from an alien entity that may be God. And the entity, Valis, is prodding Brady to overthrow the corrupt commander-in-chief.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? Dick submitted the manuscript (under the title Valisystem A) to his editor, Mark Hurst, who sent the novel back for minor revisions. But rather than make the changes, Dick reworked the concepts into an entirely new novel, VALIS. Dick gave the Valisystem A manuscript to fellow science fiction writer Tim Powers, and eventually Arbor House acquired the rights to publish it, but retitled it to avoid confusion with VALIS. Dick’s early rejected non-science fiction works, Gather Yourselves Together and Voice from the Street also enjoyed posthumous life.

For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs (1939) by Robert Heinlein: Heinlein’s first novel outlines a roadmap from America’s Great Depression to a futuristic utopia. Engineer Perry Nelson experiences a bad car accident in 1939, and wakes up in the year 2086. He meets and falls in love with a beautiful woman, is reprogrammed to remove his outdated sexual mores and jealousy, and learns about the technological and social advances that have passed him by.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? The book was rejected by several publishers, possibly due to its depictions of nudity and sexual liberalism. Although the ideas in For Us, The Living fed some of Heinlein’s later works, he was not eager to see this early effort come to life. He attempted to destroy every copy of the book. But Heinlein did give the manuscript to at least one friend, and Robert James, a Heinlein scholar, eventually found it stashed away in a garage. And so, despite the author’s best efforts, it found its way into print.

The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (2002): The unfinished novel, collected with other Adams works in a volume of the same name, promised to be the third volume of the Dirk Gently series, but Adams was considering remaking it as another volume of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? While Adams was still deciding what to do about Salmon, he suffered a fatal heart attack, and now we’re left with Eoin Colfer to give us a new Hitchhiker’s Guide.

The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl (2008): In Clarke’s final novel, 15 year-old Ranjit Subramanian achieves fame when he publishes the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Meanwhile, an alien empire realizes that humans have developed nuclear weapons and decides the planet must be wiped out.
Why wasn’t it published while Clarke was alive? As Clarke was working on The Last Theorem, his health began to deteriorate. So he tapped his longtime friend, Frederik Pohl, as his collaborator. Clarke sent Pohl 100 pages of notes, only 40 to 50 pages of which contained fully written text. Even Clarke had difficulty deciphering the notes, but Pohl wrote out the manuscript, the final version of which Clarke reviewed just days before his death this past March. But Clarke offered a more direct farewell to fans in the form of his 90th birthday video:

Harry Mudd from Star Trek is exhibit A for unconvincing future con men. Who exactly is supposed to be fooled by this guy? He practically winks at the camera every time he tells a lie, and with that mustache he's either a villain or a Burning Man hippie — and you really wouldn't want to get mixed up with him either way. He talks like a circus ringmaster, and almost manages to out-ham William Shatner, especially in the episode where he's the slave of a hundred android supermodels. And his scams are way, way too complicated: like he's got a stash of pills that make women irresistibly beautiful, for a while... but he doesn't just sell the pills. Instead, he gives them to not-quite-beautiful women and then sells them as wives. Or he's got a love pill so strong, it even gives Kirk and Spock a tender moment, but he doesn't just sell the formula to it to someone who can mass-produce it.

Ardra tries to con a whole planet into becoming her vassals in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, but Picard totally pwns her. She's basically the classic con artist, using bells and whistles like forcefields and holograms to try and convince the inhabitants of a planet that she's a mythic god/devil figure, who gave the planet a thousand years of peace and prosperity in exchange for total slavery afterwards. But at least she has the best hair of any of these con artists. Love is a battlefield, man.

Quark from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, who's such a weak flim-flam artist that Odo the mopey shapeshifter can see through him. (Odo described Quark in a report as "a self-important con artist who's nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is.") In almost every episode of DS9, Quark has some wacky scam involving fake Betazoid viagra that stops making you empathically sexy after ten minutes. The only person he ever manages to fool is Harry Kim from Voyager — and Harry's got "rube" stamped on his forehead.

Mitch Courtenay in The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. It's a future dystopia where corporations run everything, and the government represents them instead of the citizens. Our hero, Mitch Courtenay, is the highest form of life — an ad executive, whose job it is to hoodwink the citizens into buying vat-grown meat laced with addictive chemicals. Or a one-way trip to the horrendous colony on Venus. Unfortunately, Mitch is sort of a bad con artist because he suffers a crisis of conscience after he gets a taste of how the other half live and falls in with the Consies, aka Conservationists.

Captain Jack Harkness starts out on Doctor Who as a conman, which lasts all of an hour before he starts getting soft and remorseful. He has some way-too-complicated plan to send a space ambulance back in time to World War II, and pretend it's a war ship. And then sell it to the Doctor, but explode it before he realizes it's actually just an ambulance. Between the incredibly overcomplicated plan and getting side-tracked by trying to seduce his marks, Jack dances himself all the way out of his hustle. He should probably just stay out of sales altogether: I can picture him trying to sell you a time share, but sending it back in time to the middle ages and pretending it's actually a hot-air balloon. And then staring at your pants for an hour.

Sabalom Glitz showed up a few times on Doctor Who, and started out as a psychopathic mass-murderer who was willing to wipe out an entire human settlement just to get his hands on some secret treasure that he only dimly understood. And then over his next couple of appearances on the show, he went through the kind of wimpification that usually takes years, even on television. The last time we see him, he's just sort of a cuddly teddy bear who'll try to con you out of your last dime, but means well, really. The Doctor is willing to let his companion, Mel, go off with Glitz without so much as a backward glance. (Although that could be a reflection on Mel, rather than Glitz.) Also, according to the original scripts for some Doctor Who episodes, and some of the novels, the Doctor's other companion Ace lost her virginity to Glitz. So actually maybe he's a pretty good con artist after all.

The Stainless Steel Rat starred in a whole series of novels by Harry Harrison, which I totally ate up when I was a kid. He's a weak con man for a different reason — he's always getting out-conned, mostly by the government's Special Corps, which is always tricking him into doing its dirty work. But apart from that, he's actually quite a slick con-artist, and even manages to connive his way into becoming president of a planetary banana republic in The Stainless Steel Rat For President.

Vala Mal Doran from Stargate SG-1, was originally conceived as a "a former Goa'uld host who now is a scheming, unscrupulous, thieving con artist." When we first meet Vala, she tries to seduce Daniel Jackson and steal the Earth ship Prometheus. The second time we meet her, she slaps alien security bracelets on Daniel and herself, so that they can't get more than about 100 feet apart without dying — maybe not the most elegant hustle you've ever seen. Plus she succumbs to the ultimate con-artist cliche: she falls in love with her mark. Also, it turns out her dad is also a con artist, of whom one reviewer wrote: "Every time the camera hits his face, his expression reveals the snake-oil salesman at the heart of the character. That makes it impossible to accept that anyone would be fooled by him."

Saffron aka Bridget aka Yolanda from Firefly. She's actually one of the better con artists in this round-up, but her schemes are usually way too complicated. She wants to sell Serenity to some bad guys, so she goes to all the trouble of getting herself stuck in a village in the boonies and pretending to be a simple peasant girl, who then gets married off to Mal. And the second time we see her, a crucial flaw of her modus operandi becomes apparent: she marries too many guys, and they're bound to run into each other eventually.

Con-artists from science fiction who aren't actually from the future: Funky Flashman from Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" comics for DC, Sawyer from Lost, and probably a few others I've forgotten. Also, Star Wars takes place in the distant past, not the distant future, so I'll leave out Lando (who I don't remember actually conning anybody, except when he sells out Han and Leia to the Imperials under duress) and Vilmarh Grahrk

Compiling this list has made me realize a couple things about con artists in science fiction: they have totally insane pimp outfits. You usually can't see their feet, which is probably because they're wearing platforms with aquariums in them. And also, if they last more than a little while, they always get afflicted with "heart of gold" syndrome and start getting rolled over by everybody. I blame antidepressants in the future-water.

It's not a bad list for when you need a literary escape from the looming holiday season, but we'd love to see separate lists for science fiction and fantasy. Don't mix your Pohls and Kays! Although Alcatraz Versus The Evil Librarians sounds like it might be worth looking into. Check out what she's been reading, and let us know what's on your list.