So far I've just tossed some stuff into this page without commentary.  Many of my colleagues consider any interest in speculative fiction as, well, lightweight.  As it happens, I'm married to a science fiction writer (Sherwood Smith) and am a past president of the oldest scholarly association met for the consideration of science fiction and fantasy (The Science Fiction Research Association), so my web site is going to include the stuff, whatever my sometimes stuffy colleagues might think!  My own approach to this popular genre is from the perspective of the religious sociology of literature and film.  It is important to poke around in odd and often neglected corners of our culture -- the resulting increase in cultural parallax yields an equal increase in cultural insight.

There is no particular order yet to what follows.

The War of the Worlds Panic of 1938 and the Angst of Secularization

SF fandom as audience cult

Early Secularization Theory

Religion and Literature

What is religion

Religion and the Five Story Types

SF as psychological compensation

Narrative Sources of the Fantastic

The Nature of Myth

Tolkien

Psi in SF
 

Here are some additional websites you might check out:

The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) is a large and vital scholarly association for the study of speculative fiction.

The Science Fiction Writers' Association (SFWA) is the association of professional sf writers.

The Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase is especially useful.