Shaggy God story

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A shaggy God story is a story in a minor

A typical shaggy God story might feature a pair of astronauts landing on a lush and virgin world and in the last line their names are revealed as Adam and Eve. The television show The Twilight Zone used several versions of this, the most notable being "Probe 7, Over and Out". Another classic example is Isaac Asimov's 1956 short story "The Last Question," which ends with the protagonist supercomputer exclaiming: "Let there be light!"

The creation of the term is often misattributed to Michael Moorcock. Moorcock edited the issue of New Worlds in which Aldiss coined the term in a pseudonymous column. It has been suggested that many assumed Moorcock to be the author of the column. The issue was cleared up in an August 2004 David Langford column in SFX magazine.^[1]

The genre as a cliché

Shaggy God themes can be seen as an effort to harmonize religious accounts about the origin of human beings with science fiction tropes such as alien races, interstellar travel, genetic manipulation, the uplift of primitive races and man's place in the galactic life cycle.

David Brin's Uplift Universe is a series of science fiction works that deal with the idea of advanced intergalactic cultures who identify proto-sentient species and genetically manipulate them into star-faring cultures in their own right (often enslaving them for thousands of years as payment). In the novels, proponents of the view that humans were uplifted by a galactic culture (as opposed to evolving into sentience) are called "Dänikenites".