Review of “The Worshippers” (1953)
Damon Knight (writer).
Read in 2025.
An ordinary man takes a godlike position on an exoplanet.
The anticolonialist theme is not well done. It relies on a rug pull in the epilogue, where it is revealed that the alien “worshippers” were just pretending to be indoctrinated and enslaved, for their own sense of novelty. This twist did not apply to colonial societies in 1953, and is not funny. Everything else is surprisingly lazy, especially the long and irrelevant opening and the failure to consider the Fermi paradox in any way.