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attackfish) wrote2012-09-07 11:32 pm
attackfish) wrote2012-09-07 11:32 pm
Bittercon: Faith in Speculatve Fiction
Faith -- or even the considered rejection of faith -- is an area often overlooked in world-building for speculative fiction in spite of the impact it's had on our world (for good and bad). How does faith affect the world view and formation of a fictional world?
The first thing you find out about writing a novel is that you know the way you thought you had everything planned out? Not so much. the world that feels so detailed and vivid in your head is full of holes. As you start writing, a few thousand facets of your world get filled in and polished, and these things you didn’t think about before become important enough to ride around in the back of your mind all the time. For me, the consequence to this is that I keep finding potential![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
bittercon panel ideas and saying to myself, yes, I have to write this post, because I’m doing things with this in the Novel. Bear with me.
In my novel, the main character is deeply religious. Her religiosity is important, though never central, to the story both politically, because she belongs to a faith that is a somewhat oppressed minority in the country she’s just beginning to rule, but she comes from a nation of people who had only just recently conquered the country she rules, and in that nation, her religion is the dominant group, and also emotionally, to her as a character. Her beliefs also don’t line up perfectly with the standard doctrine of her faith. She’s no radical heretic, but like may of us, she’s a little heterodox. Other characters in the story have their own religious perspectives, either as fervent believers, or as people whose belief is a small part of their lives, or as people who just haven’t thought much about it (actual disbelief being much more difficult in a pre scientific revolution society). And as I’ve been writing, and comparing other books to mine, I’ve noticed that all of those things I just mentioned are rare in the genre.
Which isn’t to say that religion is thin on the ground in the genre, not at all. An author’s religious beliefs, or passionate lack of belief, and a wish to inspire others to share those beliefs has even been the foundation of some of Speculative Fiction’s most popular works. C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass series are allegories for Christianity, and against religion entirely, respectively.
Gods and Goddesses frequently populate fantasy worlds, real, substantial, and willing to grant their followers power. Fantasy reflects its connections to mythology in this way. Mythologies, by their very nature have divine forces acting on the world. The followers of these gods and goddesses have ample proof of their existence, which changes the importance of belief, and makes the gods, for the purposes of the story, another form of functional magic.
In Science Fiction settings, there is a tendency for religion to have fallen by the wayside as science has progressed further. A character in such a setting need never consider a rejection of faith, because society has already done that for him. A lack of a religious belief is as taken for granted as belief in the local gods was in early societies. Or religion doesn’t show up at all. It is just absent all consideration.
The most perplexing treatment religion in Speculative Fiction can receive, at least to me, is the one most often found in Urban Fantasy. The traditional remedies against vampires, and many other evil monsters are religious in origin, and in stories where religion is not otherwise even mentioned, those remedies show up, crosses and holy water for vampires, baptism for fairies, hallowed ground for the risen dead, can all be invoked against the supernatural without anyone seeing this as evidence for Christianity. Characters in on the hunting, even using these symbols may themselves belong to other religions, and no one seems to see a conflict. Even when other gods appear, no one notices a contradiction.
Religion in Speculative Fiction is dealt with in many, many ways, but strangely, enough, just as religion, as an expression of culture and unprovable belief. This is what I’m trying to do, in my novel, and the lack of it in the rest of the genre makes me wonder if I’m just the one odd duck who likes that kind of thing, and if I should scrap it. And this lack makes me wonder, and not just because of my perpetual case of authorial insecurity, why?
What do you think of religion in Speculative Fiction? Any specific examples you like? Dislike? Think it shouldn’t be in the genre at all? Think it should be in the genre more? Do tell.
Written forbittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic adapted from a panel at the 2012 Chicon, the text of which is quoted at the beginning of this post.
The first thing you find out about writing a novel is that you know the way you thought you had everything planned out? Not so much. the world that feels so detailed and vivid in your head is full of holes. As you start writing, a few thousand facets of your world get filled in and polished, and these things you didn’t think about before become important enough to ride around in the back of your mind all the time. For me, the consequence to this is that I keep finding potential
bittercon panel ideas and saying to myself, yes, I have to write this post, because I’m doing things with this in the Novel. Bear with me.In my novel, the main character is deeply religious. Her religiosity is important, though never central, to the story both politically, because she belongs to a faith that is a somewhat oppressed minority in the country she’s just beginning to rule, but she comes from a nation of people who had only just recently conquered the country she rules, and in that nation, her religion is the dominant group, and also emotionally, to her as a character. Her beliefs also don’t line up perfectly with the standard doctrine of her faith. She’s no radical heretic, but like may of us, she’s a little heterodox. Other characters in the story have their own religious perspectives, either as fervent believers, or as people whose belief is a small part of their lives, or as people who just haven’t thought much about it (actual disbelief being much more difficult in a pre scientific revolution society). And as I’ve been writing, and comparing other books to mine, I’ve noticed that all of those things I just mentioned are rare in the genre.
Which isn’t to say that religion is thin on the ground in the genre, not at all. An author’s religious beliefs, or passionate lack of belief, and a wish to inspire others to share those beliefs has even been the foundation of some of Speculative Fiction’s most popular works. C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass series are allegories for Christianity, and against religion entirely, respectively.
Gods and Goddesses frequently populate fantasy worlds, real, substantial, and willing to grant their followers power. Fantasy reflects its connections to mythology in this way. Mythologies, by their very nature have divine forces acting on the world. The followers of these gods and goddesses have ample proof of their existence, which changes the importance of belief, and makes the gods, for the purposes of the story, another form of functional magic.
In Science Fiction settings, there is a tendency for religion to have fallen by the wayside as science has progressed further. A character in such a setting need never consider a rejection of faith, because society has already done that for him. A lack of a religious belief is as taken for granted as belief in the local gods was in early societies. Or religion doesn’t show up at all. It is just absent all consideration.
The most perplexing treatment religion in Speculative Fiction can receive, at least to me, is the one most often found in Urban Fantasy. The traditional remedies against vampires, and many other evil monsters are religious in origin, and in stories where religion is not otherwise even mentioned, those remedies show up, crosses and holy water for vampires, baptism for fairies, hallowed ground for the risen dead, can all be invoked against the supernatural without anyone seeing this as evidence for Christianity. Characters in on the hunting, even using these symbols may themselves belong to other religions, and no one seems to see a conflict. Even when other gods appear, no one notices a contradiction.
Religion in Speculative Fiction is dealt with in many, many ways, but strangely, enough, just as religion, as an expression of culture and unprovable belief. This is what I’m trying to do, in my novel, and the lack of it in the rest of the genre makes me wonder if I’m just the one odd duck who likes that kind of thing, and if I should scrap it. And this lack makes me wonder, and not just because of my perpetual case of authorial insecurity, why?
What do you think of religion in Speculative Fiction? Any specific examples you like? Dislike? Think it shouldn’t be in the genre at all? Think it should be in the genre more? Do tell.
Written for
bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic adapted from a panel at the 2012 Chicon, the text of which is quoted at the beginning of this post.
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What it boiled down to was that even in the future, with mankind part of a near utopian galactic federation, people were still having crisis of faith and/or wrestling with temptation.
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I suspect we don't see much interesting fiction about this question because most are ignorant about the history of religions and religious thought. They think they know. "Catholics burned witches! They were superstitious and ignorant and anti-science!" But sound-bite worldbuilding shows its flimsy underpinnings--your example about Urban Fantasy is a good one. Of course, an equally ignorant reader is happy with the story.
James Blish did some interesting things. Lois McMaster Bujold approached the subject in her Chalion series. Most genre fiction, though, is disappointing in this regard, I find, though it can be great in all the other aspects that make it good reading.
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There's a vampire-like creature. It's not specific faith that matters, it's the intensity of belief that gives a physic barrier. So the Christian, ridden by doubt, is defeated, while the New Soviet Man comes through.
All over the web, of course.
BBC web page on the story (http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/curseoffenric/detail.shtml)
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Poke me if I you haven't heard back by Monday.
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Quoted For Truth.
And then there's the assumption that all religions are the same and share all the same flaws and advantages. I'm a little sick of seeing religions with different gods and goddesses, different core beliefs, etc. having rituals and clerical orders that are suspiciously Christian.
(And seeing as this somehow became Redwall week for me, can anyone explain the near total absence of religious ritual or prayer or discussion of belief in a set of novels that almost entirely takes place in an abbey full of monks and nuns?)
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1/?
That bugs me too. There's an occasional explanation I've seen pop up now and again -- the wielder might not have faith in God, but if the monster believes in God then the symbols hurt them. The Night's Dawn trilogy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night's_Dawn_Trilogy) did that at one point, where a far-future priest performs an exorcism on a child 'possessed' by the disembodied intelligence of a human who died millennia ago. As billions of people are being 'possessed' at that point, there's a lot of speculation in-story about if it could work on a mass scale, but it's finally determined that the disembodied intelligence only released the child because it had been an ardent Catholic when it had been alive.
Harry Turtledove had an interesting spin on the issue in "The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump (http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Toxic-Spell-Dump/dp/0671721968)." Briefly, it's set in a modern day (well, for 1993) analogue where magic takes the place of technology, and all religions are real. His protagonist, a Jewish police detective in LA, almost gets mugged by a starving vampire at one point. He talks about how a Christian would have been killed in his place, because the vampire had built up a resistance to Christian faith by living so long in a Christian-dominated area, and then manages to get the drop of the vamp mugger by pulling out... I forget what exactly, as it's been a decade or so since I read it... but it's some sort of Jewish icon. Unused to the potency of the Jewish faith, the vamp runs screaming.
This is getting long. New post...
2/3
Very complicated questions. But to sketch a response...
In general, I feel that to remove religion from either a fantasy or science fiction constructed setting seems too "early 20th Century leftism" -- the idea that religious belief is a delusional substitute for hard data and technocratic solutions. There's also the anti-religious folks mixing "belief in faith" with "belief in an organization." Sometimes those two are the same thing, but sometimes they're not. Although you can also take issue with "belief in faith" and "belief in an organization" for separate reasons. I'm only a Catholic is a loosely cultural sense nowadays, but my weak disbelief in God is a distinct issue from my distaste for the Catholic Church. Even then, I have fond memories of the monks and nuns who helped teach me as a kid, even if I take issue with the hierarchy they're a part of.
While there are and will always be flavors of atheism, I feel that the majority of humanity needs some sort of grand answer to the eternal questions we have. Even if it's not an organized religion, rare is the person who doesn't have a political ideal or a philosophical system to give bedrock to their lives. I may not believe in God or the divinity of Christ, but I still find the diverse and occasionally acrimonious various Christian philosophies interesting food for thought. So in a constructed world setting (an Avatar, a Star Wars) I find it weird and unrealistic when there isn't some sort of mention of what people believe or think in terms of spiritual affairs, more unrealistic than if all people believe in one faith.
That said, there's a definite resistance to religion in mainstream SF, both in terms of content and in fandom. Star Trek is explicitly atheistic humanism. Stargate is not much better. Star Wars has the Force, but it's a Members Only sort of thing that you need to be born into. nBSG featured religion at length, and I still see critiques over the inclusion of it. (Granted, the finale's bizarre swerve into Luddism aggravated that.) Babylon 5 allows for religion to exist in the future, but it's mostly background material. Although it has one particularly nice scene, even if it plays off the trope of aliens being culturally monolithic:
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3/3
That's easy. Warhammer 40K.
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Yes, a tabletop war game with endless tie-in novels, many of them shoddy pulp. Yet there are some really good novels that explore the setting, where the state religion plays a key role in everyone's lives. The Imperium worships the God-Emperor of Mankind, an immortal human psychic who himself was, before he became a living corpse on life-support, a militant atheist who did his best to annihilate religion and replace it with scientific humanism in the hope that it would allow humanity to peacefully unify. In that, he Epic Failed. Now the Imperium is a strident theocracy that punishes heresy of any sort with torture and execution. (How are these nutjobs the heroes, you ask? By comparison.)
So a couple of the novels really delve into the religious faith of certain characters -- Gaunt of the Gaunt's Ghosts series gets this in particular -- and the funny thing is, we know that not only is their religion fake, but that their deity hated the concept of religion, and had a special loathing for being worshipped as a god. They know none of that. Yet that faith still allows characters to accomplish amazing feats, and helps them resist the allure and corruption of the dark gods filling the setting. (There actually are gods, you see. They're just horrific monstrosities.)
The Last Church (http://1d4chan.org/wiki/The_Last_Church) by Graham McNeill is the single best exploration of religion in the 40K context. It's about the last priest in the last church on Earth, having a long conversation with the Emperor when he comes to burn down the church. And you can read it online for free! Although the formatting is a little wonky.
Re: 3/3
So the gods are real, they're just Eldritch Abominations? Joy.
Must... Not... Aquire... a new fandom...
Re: 1/?
In the first case, what do you do about an undead atheist? If beings were possessing people like that, I would start learning every exorcism in every religion humanity ever passed down and just go down the laundry list every time I came across one, hoping I hit on one that the possessor believed in. Sounds like it would be difficult.
I bet it was a chai, Hebrew word for life and used as a religious symbol. Or a Hamsa, pre-Abrahamic Middle Eastern protection symbol, used by both Jews and Muslims. That's an interesting idea, building up a tolerance to a specific faith.
Re: 2/3
Right now there's a pretty substantial movement, especially in Latin America of people creating culturally Catholic churches, unaffiliated with Rome, ever since the Catholic Church came down on liberation theology, and bizarrely, infertile people getting married, and with each new decision out of Rome, the membership in these churches grows.
Star Wars has the Force, but it's a Members Only sort of thing that you need to be born into.
Yes. In the expanded universe, a couple of other religions show up, but they're mostly portrayed as damaging cults.
nBSG featured religion at length, and I still see critiques over the inclusion of it.
This is doubly ironic, since according to my father, who is a former Mormon, the original BSG was pretty much Mormanism in space.
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Re: 3/3
* As much as it can be said to have any nice aspect, 40K is one of the few SF works that actually gets the staggering scale of a galactic empire right. Given that it's 40K, it uses that scale to add to the hopelessness of the setting.
If you do want to acquire it, I'd recommend either Eisenhorn (http://www.amazon.com/Eisenhorn-Warhammer-40-000-Omnibus/dp/1844161560) or Gaunt's Ghosts (http://www.amazon.com/Gaunts-Ghosts-Founding-Dan-Abnett/dp/1844163695/ref=pd_sim_b_2) as a starting point. They come in cheap, handy omnibuses. Three books each for ten bucks. If you want to do it for free, you can lose hours just in the massive TV Tropes entry (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/Warhammer40000?from=Main.Warhammer40000).
Re: 3/3
The nineties show, Brimstone, uses the consent of gods that only exist as long as people believe in them, and applies it to the Abrahamic god, and the main villain's goal is to end that faith globally. It's an unusual take on the Christian mythos, that's for sure. Shame it ended after three episode.
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An article that can explain the series better than me is:
http://affairsmagazine.com/wordpress2/2011/01/20/julian-may/
:)
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Re: 3/3
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My thoughts on faith in speculative fiction:
I am not a person of faith. I refer to myself as either a "practicing agnostic" or just a "heathen" (in that I come from the hills and lack any kind of religious book-learning). I enjoy the perspective of many spec-fic protagonists because they seem to share that sort of view, usually because the author doesn't bring up faith and so we assign our own views to the character. That works well -- for me, at least.
The problem starts -- for me -- in the world around the character. One of the things that draws me into a story is reading about a world with as much depth and detail as the world around us (us being the readers who live in the real world). For better or for worse, faith is a large part of the real world. Leaving aside militant atheists and reactionary cultists, a collection of "average" people will have people of faith in it from across a wide spectrum. These different beliefs give the real world color. Sometimes it's irritating, conflicting color, but definitely color.
The point I'm trying to make is that speculative fiction that ignores or deliberately doesn't include faith can fall flat. I find this especially in sci-fi, where all the protagonists are atheist and the only people of faith are backwater colonists -- that doesn't ring true to me, in my observations of the world around me. It also seems heavy-handed and preachy and even outdated, authors implying that science disproves religion and therefore in teh futar everyone will be either atheist or wrong.
I imagine there are also books and worlds out there on the opposite end of the spectrum -- Christian fiction where everyone in teh futar realizes they're wrong and embraces the love of blah blah blah. Same problem -- that world does not ring true to my own experience of a mix of color and faith.
The best speculative fiction worlds for me are ones where faith and religion are present, but not a central focus of the narrative. I'm also -- notoriously -- a sucker for reading about characters from different cultures meeting and interacting.
The stories that stick out for me as excellent examples of how to do faith in speculative fiction are anything written by Kate Elliott (omgomgomg the world building), and the books I've read by Barbara Hambly, especially Dragonsbane and The Ladies of Mandigryn. In these books, faith and religion is a part of the background culture; it's not really positive or negative, but it's there.
A different kind of example is the Hunger Games books, which I have not read. I'm sure I'll get around to reading them at some point, but I heard that the world in which they're set -- a dystopian post-collapse North America -- completely lacks religion. I don't know how this is handled (or even if it's true, I guess), but the idea of a dystopian post-collapse North America that lacks religion is just not interesting to me. Dystopian post-collapse worlds are an interesting premise to me, but ones that I rarely seen "done right" (for me), because what I find interesting about those premises is the conjecture of what the world would look like after a collapse. I see a dystopian post-collapse US as splintering into urban centers where religion is not a big part of life -- where maybe even atheism becomes a state religion -- but where pockets in the countryside keep their own traditions, or regress, or adapt new ones.
I would particularly love a story where the countryside fractures into enclaves that reflect the current makeup of the US. A story about the People's Free Democratic Republic of California, neighboring enclaves of Mormon farmers and non-denominational ranchers, with semi-nomadic groups of Hmong people doing what they've done for four thousand years (endure), would be very interesting to me, because I can so easily see it happening, given the current makeup of the world as I know it.
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where all the protagonists are atheist and the only people of faith are backwater colonists
Yes. And all the people of faith follow the exact same religious beliefs in the exact same way, because you know, all those religious backwater people are just sheep.
Christian fiction where everyone in teh futar realizes they're wrong and embraces the love of blah blah blah.
The scary thing, is that I'm pretty sure this does ring true to Fundamentalist Evangelicals. They really do believe that if you just heard the word of God, you would fall down on your knees and convert. When people don't, they see it as a challenge to their faith, or you being sinfully, willfully blind, or something like that. This is part of what I mean about religious culture. There are plenty of Atheists who feel that way too, mostly from culturally Christian backgrounds. Almost no Jewish kid, for example, grows up thinking they could, or even should try to convert people to their way of thinking. It's a sort of "I think you're wrong, but I don't need to convince you to be right, or even bring it up," kind of worldview that most people don't necessarily associate with religion.
I'm also a sucker for cultural meeting, and one of the fun things I'm doing in the novel I mentioned in the post is I've got two other main characters of the same faith as the protagonist, but a completely different cultural background, which changes the way they look at and interact with their faith. Nominally they're he same culture, most outsiders would see them as the same culture, but they really really aren't.
I haven't quite forgiven Kate Elliot for writing a Medieval Europe analog, with counterparts for nearly every single group, except the Jews.
If an author doesn't find religion all that interesting, it gets written out, but a dystopia without religion, unless there's a good in-story reason for it, is very jarring to me, because in times of stress and desperation, a lot of people cling more tightly to their faith. Scott Westerfeld's Uglies had a dystopia where religious faith had nearly disappeared, but that was because the kind of brain damage the government inflicted on its citizens made people stop looking for the transcendent. It was just about the only thing about those brain legions that made sense.