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

[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.