religions in SF/F. discuss.

[kaigou]

I recall limyaael has had a number of good posts on religion & SF/F; here are a few I found after a few minutes of looking:

Religious Questionnaire I

Religious Questionnaire II

Rant on Gods

On beliefs and prejudices

Rant on Religion

Creating convincing religious characters
Recommend reading through if you're interested.

When it comes to SF/F, my experience has been that it's pretty much a paint-by-numbers, at least in terms of the major trends. (There are exceptions to this, of course; Majipoor Chronicles being possibly the biggest I can think of, but hey.) You picks yer characters, and you rolls yer die:

1. Good guy goes up against bad church, revealing good guy's (older) religion/god is stronger/purer. New upstart religion squished.
2. Good guy goes up against bad church, revealing good guy's (newer) religion/god is stronger/purer. Old stick-in-the-mud squished.
3. Good guy goes up against (controlling) god, reveals god is One Big Stinkin' Computer. SF anti-godism glorified, with heavy dose of anti-AI-ism.

In the worlds with religion, in fantasy, it's nine-times-out-of-ten a monolithic culture. (Kay's Last Light of the Sun may have frustrated me at times, but it was hardly monolithic, and I did appreciate that aspect.) Everyone in the story-world worships God A; if there's cross-God conflict, either A is bad and needs to be pushed aside to make way for the new, or A is an upstart and the One True God(s) need to slap A down. I've read this boring paradigm in plenty of "female goddess sweet and good" vs. "male god dark and bad" quasi-wiccan crap, but I have run across "old poly-god system is bad" vs. "one true god is bestest", though that seems to be rarer. But either way, most fantasy worlds seem to be pretty monolithic in terms of religion.

In SF, religion just doesn't even seem to be there, the majority of the time. (This also appears to be true in urban fantasy, unless vampires are involved, in which case the Judeo-Xtian god gets dragged into the picture because vampires, bad, devil, all that jazz.) I've read my share of SF (and watched a good dose) where there just doesn't seem to be any religion at all. The Star Wars series seemed to be a mild exception, in that the Jedi appear to be something of a quasi-Buddhist sort (including a pseudo-Shaolin 'fighting school' adjunct), but I never got the impression that your average Joe followed Jedi precepts. It seemed all rather esoteric compared to the little, everyday guys, for whom no religion was ever mentioned.

I'm curious what other people have come across, when reading SF/F.

Anyway, although I don't like the idea of writing a 'message' story (you must believe in the OTP OTG! you must give up your backwards notions of a god!), I do like the notion of raising the biggest damn questions possible for the two halves. For someone whose entire life has been predicated on the idea that a god exists, that this god is looking out for him/her, that god is In Charge, what does it mean to have it confirmed that this isn't true? And what does it mean to live one's life as an atheist and find out there is a god?

Dune and Majipoor Chronicles are the only ones I can think of in which the religions are not completely monolithic, in which there's inter- and extra-religious conflict, and in which characters range from highly devout to downright skeptical. Anyone know of any others?

Comments

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

And what does it mean to live one's life as an atheist and find out there is a god?

Means you're living in a Chick Tract. HAW HAW!

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

*shoots you*



Well, I'll do it only if I can get Askerian to do the illustrations... mmmm...

[christeos-pir.livejournal.com]

[koyote19.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Godstalk by PC Hodgell? And its sequels Dark of the Moon and Spiritmask (I'm not sure about the title of the third) There are a multitude of gods and religions...but the main characters belong to a race that has...less than good relations to their own god.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Less than good? Define less than good? I mean, if you were devout to a god who's an absentee landlord and your people get squished by, oh, say, HURRICANES, wouldn't that qualify as less than good?

[koyote19.livejournal.com]

well... and granted it's been a while since I read the series... this race has followed their god from world to world for 30,000 years (more or less) and there's a lot of history there. But they don't necessarily... like their god. Not quite to the point of outright hostility, except in Jame's case, but still... the god is not absentee by any means, and does directly interfere.

The gods in Hodgell's universe are very much active and corporeal in the world, and it's interesting to see how a race with a religion of a single god (with 3 aspects) interacts with a multitude of different gods and religions.

[branchandroot]

Oddly enough, Janny Wurts does a decent job of complicating things... if you can wade through the way her prose decends into slodge whenever she gets too excited.

She likes to stir technology and magic together and make them interfere and/or amplify each other, for one, and she's fond of charting the chaos that accompanies the rise of a popular religion. If she weren't so damn bent on making Arithon the Woobie To End All Woobies, complete with italics dripping off the page, I'd still be reading the Wars of Light and Shadow.

*thinks* Barbara Hambly does nice complex religion from a sociological perspective.

I can't think of any SF offhand, though. Maybe they all figure Herbert said it all already... not that this ever stopped anyone from recapping Tolkien's elves, so maybe that's not it.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

It sounded good until you got to the point about making a character a Woobie. Do, please tell, what is this highly esoteric writing terminology? It seems familiar--as if the concepts of dripping italics isn't enough to make me want to back away slowly...

SF has been playing with god-concepts for a long time, but often the SF god(s) turn out to be Big Machines In The Sky, and humans are just another experiment, complete with alien-anal probes. Boring! Heh.

(Although I keep thinking of the discussion during S5 of BtVS, when Glory showed up, and I mentioned "the big bad this year is a god!", and CP said, "just what is a god in that world, anyway? an undefeatable demon? and why is one person's god always everyone else's demon?")

[branchandroot]

*snickering* A woobie, as far as I can tell from the term's use in anime fandoms, is the Noble Punchingbag of Angst. Someone who's horribly trodden on by fate, but bears up under it with unspeakable nobility and, possibly, innocent purity.

*checks to see if you're gagging yet*

Anyway. Wurts has a bad habit of epic purple prose, but when she can control herself she does get into the issues of how and why people follow a religion, or deify someone/something. You might check out the trilogy that starts with Stormwarden. She keeps a decent grip on herself there, though the factions aren't nearly as complex as the Wars of Light and Shadow series. (Which shows no signs of stopping any time soon.)

The whole question of gods and religion in the Buffy-verse is an interesting one, though more for what Joss didn't deal with or answer than for what he did.

I have this sneaking feeling that Mary Gentle might have written some things that complicate the nature of gods or religion, but I can't name a specific example. Jo Clayton, too.

You know, the common thread in all the writers I'm coming up with are that they mix SF and F in their stories--they do world-mashing. And then they use the 'incongruities' as levers to open up the assumptions and world views of their characters. That tends to result in a complex treatment of politics, religion, culture... everything, really.

[elanivalae.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure some of the Star Wars novels involve different species' religious beliefs, but I can't think of specifics offhand. Maybe I'll go read some of them again and get back to you. xD

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Well, what about the tropes? Were the religions just like Star Trek's form of "how to identify culture" where it's monolithic to a culture--like the Star Trek episodes where you meet people from "a planet" and they're all basicallly in variations of the same jumpsuit, or the same skirt/shirt combination, or the same basic colors...y'know what I mean? Religion seems to fit that bill as well: everyone wears the same necklaces, uses the same greetings, etc.

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

Now, now. Occasionally there would be two cultures on a planet, and inevitably, they'd be fighting each other over something, and it would be the Enterprise's job to mediate and make them all buddy buddy again.

[flamesword.livejournal.com]

*amused* Hey, someone beat me to it. I was going to say, there is somewhat of a religion based around the force that goes beyond the Jedi themselves and force users. It's not very organized or ritualized, seems to vary from world to world and of course there are people like Han Solo that don't believe in it at all.

The force being a guiding and unifying life essence, it functions as something of a Higher Power in and of itself, shaping lives and events by giving them purpose and meaning and direction, 'destiny' or fate being seen as the will of the force. There are examples of this in the original trilogy, although they are pretty subtle. Han is the most obvious. He refuses to believe in anything having a hand in his actions other than himself, until he runs into Luke and is confronted with incontrovertible evidence. When he later says to Luke as he's leaving, 'May the Force be with you', he's at least acknowledging that whatever it is is there for Luke.

That phrase has been picked up and run with in several forms by other authors, and some of the short stories in particular do a great job of showing the galaxy from a non-Jedi point of view. It's more of a general blessing/farewell, something like the old English 'Godspeed'. It doesn't seem to indicate interaction or knowledge on a personal level for the majority of the galaxy, but merely an acknowledgement that a supernatural guiding force/presence exists and is generally beneficent, if not self-aware.

And um. There's a lot more I could say about that, but there are also culture specific religions in many places that may or may not be related to the force at all. Naturally, most authors preach tolerance and inclusion of any and all personal beliefs, coexistent. And. Hmm there's a lot more, but I dunno how much any of it would apply. Religion is something that definitely interests me in the SW universe, and it's surprising how often it's incorporated into plotlines and events, but there's a lot of subtle scattered things and especially with certain authors, they get liberally mixed into the SF/F aspect of the force as magical energy, which in my opinion it actually is not.

I have a lot more opinions about this, but this comment is long already, so. ;D If you want to know more, I'll probably be on AIM later.

[muffiewrites.livejournal.com]

Mercedes Lackey wrote a whole bunch of books in this universe where they had horses called Companions. I can't remember exactly which titles. Gods and goddesses figured prominently in it, but one that sticks to my mind is the Storm something, mmm, Storm Warning? Mage Storms trilogy. One of the main characters has to deal with his relationship with his religion since the priests perverted it over the years and the god stepped in to change it. That particularly universe had gods that didn't have any difficulties intruding on their worshippers. I find her stuff rather fluffy overall, I'm odd in how I interpret things, so I don't know if that's at all what you're looking for.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Well, uh, Mercedes Lackey, see, right there, that'll cover everything for me. *snicker*

Actually, I was more curious in the tropes & twists in religions in SF/F -- when religion plays a role, what kind of role--is it a plot-point, or a background filler, or just something mentioned in passing? Are there devout characters or just lip-service-payers?

[muffiewrites.livejournal.com]

I haven't read much fiction in a few years that isn't "fluffy". Shame on me. Now, CJ Cherryh has The Faded Sun trilogy, though politics is where she shines, the particular aliens the protagonist is trying to become a part of have a social order a lot like Islamic nations. The diety isn't separated and the religion is ingrained.

It's been a long time since I've read it, but Tad Williams wrote a story called Tailchaser's Song. It's the usual good~evil fantasy plot with religion being a lot of extrapersonal motivation.
Here's a link to an excerpt: (http://www.tadwilliams.com/excerpt_tailchasers.html)

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I think the link got eaten.

[muffiewrites.livejournal.com]

http://www.tadwilliams.com/excerpt_tailchasers.html

Okay, let's see if that works.

[sarolynne.livejournal.com]

If you ever want a sort of interesting series for gods, you might try looking up the Taltos series by Steven Brust. The origins of the gods one Draegara, and how they interact with the Draegarans and the humans there is pretty interestingly different, up to and including using humans to fight each other, to fight their enemies, and further their varied agendas; having demi-god children; very much not being omnipotent, and not filling cliche roles (the main character's patron is Verra the Demon-Goddess, who is called that because IIRC, she is both a demon, and a goddess).

They aren't the bestest best books ever, but the main character is very snarky and fun, and if the world is sometimes very "this would be cool!" it's still not normally painfully cliche.

It generally makes me happy after reading some snuggly feel good neo-Wiccan story that seems to forget that Nature (capitalized for deification) has no reason to be any more all-forgiving and merciful than nature.

[sarolynne.livejournal.com]

Also, Martha Wells occasionally has some interesting religion in her books. The Il-Rien ones less than some of the others; those get sort of Christian and Wiccan, but not preachily so. The main characters are never particularly religious. But Wheel of the Infinite is an interesting one with regards to religion. The main character is supposed to help with a ritual that keeps being disrupted--the priests and priestesses have to essentially remake a record of everything in their world out of colored sand. It's been awhile since I read it, but another one that manages not to get into total cliche.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Sort of like the Tibetan or Navajo or Hopi sand paintings?

What sort of tropes are in the stories? How does religion figure into the conflict and/or the resolution?

[sarolynne.livejournal.com]

The religion itself is sort of hodgepodge, with some clear South East Asian influences. The temples themselves definitely have that feel.

Actually, it did factor into the conflict pretty interestingly. It's not really the greatest book ever, and it's been awhile since I read it, but in the end, the conflict is the result of the ceremony being misused in the past.

[slobbit.livejournal.com]

Sherri Tepper generally has lots to say about religion, and it's usually pleasant in the ways you don't expect. _Six Moon Dance_ and _Raising the Stones_ are ones I think of particularly.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Asking you the same as the others: how does religion fit into the story? Are any characters particularly devout? Is the religion(s) just another cultural identifier, or does it form part of the characters' moral compasses? Does it impact the conflict or resolution in some way?

[bonniers.livejournal.com]

A Canticle for Leibowitz is very good. It's explicitly Catholic (Jesuit) but it doesn't fall into any of your main categories -- it's an examination of whether faith means anything after the apocalypse.

In fantasy, Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series depicts a very polytheistic culture, with the conflicts among religions old and new.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Hrm, Canticle isn't the one that's SF with the priest going off on a mission and then returning and trying to put his head together? Oi. I know there's one in which a Catholic priest must protect three aliens/angels...and now I can't remember anything else. Guh.

Curious about Martin's--I saw his religious conflicts in Last Light, of course, as those were a part of it, but to some degree the religious seemed to reside in the background (which fit the fact that none of the characters seemed outrageously devout), but there was a consistency in the characters' moral understandings, at least of the one god that got the most page-time. Y'know, things like what's cussing & what's blasphemy, etc.

[bonniers.livejournal.com]

No, Canticle is a postapocalyptic thing from the sixties. It covers, uh, if I recall correctly, around ten thousand years, from the apocalypse in the near future to the next apocalypse humans bring on themselves. I can't say what it's like because it's not like anything else I ever read.

I'm not familiar with Last Light, so I can't address that, or what Martin might have said in it. Song of Ice and Fire includes the old nature-based religion, the newer worship of the "Seven" which includes a lot of aspects of the trinity, only moreso, and some newer religions including a monotheistic fire-god one moving in. The followers co-exist and conflict. The characters display varying degrees of devotion and rely on their religions to different extents. Some of the religious characters are sleazy; some of the nonreligious ones are upright and honorable. The kids of the marriage between the follower of the old gods and the devotee of the Seven display believable conflicts about their own spiritual beliefs. Religion is frequently a plot point but not the center of the story.

Most of the characters display a sort of noble-warrior ethos that overrides the specific religious beliefs.

[mayakda.livejournal.com]

SF -- C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy (1st book is Black Sun Rising) has very interesting religious worldbuilding that's integral to the plot. One of my favorite trilogies.

Fantasy -- Victoria Strauss is really into examining religion as a social force. The Burning Land is really good, imo.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy -- I seem to recall someone else recommending that book a while back, but for some other reason than religion (though I can't now recall). Okay, I'll bite: how is the religion integral to the plot? I don't mind spoilers; I'm curious about current play in tropes & cliches.

[mayakda.livejournal.com]

Maybe it got rec'd for having the most memorable anti-hero characetr ever. :) Or for the horror type bits.
Anyway, when I read it I thought it's all about how people's beliefs and belief systems shape reality, and also has a nice conspiracy subplot in the dominant human religion.
I found it very intense to read -- the author knows how to be cruel to her characters.

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

Okay, I know this one. Religion is integral to the plot because the basic hook of the series, if you will, is that they landed on a planet where the human psyche shapes reality. So religion, being something that has a large impact on the human psyche, suddenly became a central question of much importance.

Ten thousand years later, there are basically two types of religion. There's the "pagans," which makes up most of the population, who worship one of a variety of hundreds of different little gods, the advantage to that being that the gods are effectively real and give real and immediate answers to prayer and worship. Then there's the "Church of the One God," and they're committed to the worship of a single god who never answers prayers, and in fact there's a sort of unspoken agreement that this single God doesn't actually exist at all, but it's still important to worship him for reasons which are really better explained in the plot.

The main character is actually a priest of the One God, and his religion is hugely important in defining his character, his sense of right and wrong -- even though he's aware that on some level his 'God' doesn't really exist. The Church of the One God is also hugely important to the second main character for extremely different reasons which it would be very spoilery to explain.

In the second book there Church of the One God plays another very key role when the heroes come to an isolated part of the world where there are no Pagan churches -- everyone's part of the Church. Awesome, right? Well... maybe.

Anyway, yeah, religion in a bunch of different forms is very important in that series, and I totally think you should read it anyway.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I just found the list I'd made a while back of books-to-find, and I'm almost positive you're the person who rec'd this book to me last summer. Guess I defintely need to get off my duff and track it down...

[l-clausewitz.livejournal.com]

One of the most interesting things in those limyaael rants is actually the series of responses written by a certain you-know-who whose sole mission in life seems to be defending all the values of Western, Judeo-Christian culture and all--needless to say, limyaael herself is smart enough to ignore him/her/whatever it is.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Uh, I think I missed that you-know-who. *goes off to read comments & pay better attention*

[tiercel]

I'd like to second Martha Wells' Wheel of the Infinite. I'm also very fond of Brust's Taltos series. Godstalk is an awesome, awesome book but it's hard to find a copy.

Kay tends to focus on the political aspects of various religions and their adherents - religion and faith may play a large role in the lives of some of his characters, but we as readers don't see miracles or gods or anything like that. Since a number of his works use places and times analogous to real history, religions do come into conflict - most notably in the Lions of Al-Rassan, which is essentially medieval Spain, and A Song for Arbonne, which is roughly medieval France vs. medieval Germany, only France is full of goddess-worshippers and Germany is out to burn the heretic witches.

What else? Tamora Pierce has a world with multiple gods, but it's more of a pantheon where people can choose who to worship than a world with conflicting religions.

I can't think of anything right offhand that's about people finding out God's not what they thought, although something's tickling the back of my mind.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

If you think of anything, let me know.

It seems (when I think back on the stories I've read) to maybe be roughly split between "stories in which people worship a god(s) who never shows up" versus "stories in which the god(s) play an active role" -- and of the latter, predominantly either to stomp on another god, or to right wrongs humans have created in the everyday world. Hrmmm.

[meritjubet.livejournal.com]

David Eddings wrote a series where there was conflict between a mono religion (with more than one sect) and another with a 1000 gods, as well as Troll gods (five I believe). He never really came out and said which one as right, which you could easily interpret into today's society. I think one series was called the Tamuli, and another the Elenium.

I always find it interesting when there is an absence of religion.

Speaker for the Dead / Homecoming Saga

[bexbean49.livejournal.com]

As an avid Orson Scott Card reader, I've got 2 examples. First of all Speaker for the Dead, from the Ender's Game series, and the 2 after it (Xenocide and Children of the Mind) deal with the forming of a new quasi-religion. Very important characters are also strictly Catholic and Buddhist (I think...? It's been a while.) Add to this the religion of a race of pig-like aliens, and you've got one hell of a party.

Also, the Homecoming Saga, while not necessarily the best series by OSC, has some really interesting looks at fictional separate men's and women's religions that go far beyond the usual stereotypes. Of course, this series does turn out that the god-like thing (the Oversoul) is a computer - but that's a good thing. And the Oversoul is replace by something else, which could be a god but is never fully explained.

Card is interesting because he takes a pretty analytical look at it all, especially since he himself is a Mormon.

[squirrel-monkey.livejournal.com]

Hi, I wandered over from Mr October's journal.

I like SF/F that deals with religion; write a fair bit of that myself. What I dislike is fiction where this question is resolved decisively. What is the point of faith if god(s) call a press conference to confirm their existence? part of the appeal of religious questions is that there are no answers, and the value is in the process, in what it does to people.

Hope it's not too muddled.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I suppose I'm a variant of that: I like the idea of a story where it may be decided one way or another...and yet the characters still pick an alternate way of dealing with it. As in, just because the god appears, they don't fall to their knees (or possibly, no god appears & they're not crushed).

[squirrel-monkey.livejournal.com]

I can get behind the second scenario -- if no god appears, it doesn't disprove their existence. (Tackiness alert) In my novel, there's a scene like that -- there's an expectation of divine intervention whcih never comes, and I like that, because it keeps the question alive. (Alert off)

I guess if a god does appear, it may work. But they have to be pagan type deities, Greek or Slavic or Norse. Those were fallible; but how can one write about an all-powerful monotheistic god? It porbably can be done, but I don't think I've ever seen it done convincingly. And if a deity like that manifests itself, how do you deny it? Must go think more. Thanks for this post! Good discussion and interesting topic to ponder.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I think it's entirely possible to deny a monotheistic, all-powerful god, but this hinges on the fact that the judeo-xtian system also contains that whole 'free will' clause, which allows one to deny such a god, even in the face of 'proof', if you will.

Of course, I'm also an atheist, so it's possible it'd take my POV to see it that way. I'm not entirely ignorant of the bias from my POV. ;D

[squirrel-monkey.livejournal.com]

I'm an agnostic, but if judeo-christian god showed up on my doorstep and bonked me on the head, I would be forced to admit his existence (buying into the moral and belief system is another issue however). Denying his existence at that point would be unreasonable, I think.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I didn't say deny his existence. I was a bit more ambiguous than that, I thought.

[squirrel-monkey.livejournal.com]

I didn't think you did, but I thought I'd make the distinction for my own benefit. Worship is a different animal, agreed.

[kraehe.livejournal.com]

coming in late...

There's always Terry Pratchett. Just because he tells lots of puns doesn't mean he isn't discussing some serious stuff.

Basically, in Discworld, there are lots of gods, and lots of religions. The power of each god depends on how many believers s/he/it has. If a god's last believer dies, they disappear. There are some monotheistic religions, but they're forced to coexist with the other religions. "Small Gods" discusses monotheism, I believe, and what happens when another deity comes along to upset the applecart in a monotheistic desert society (it's been a while since I read it). I always enjoy his books. Social commentary packaged in a very readable and entertaining way.