Bittercon: Faith in Speculatve Fiction

[attackfish]

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 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.

Comments

[sharkflip.livejournal.com]

This is a placeholder comment because this a really interesting topic that I think about a lot, and I want to discuss but not going into my eleven-hour workday.

Poke me if I you haven't heard back by Monday.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

You told me to poke you if I hadn't heard from you by Monday. Poke.

[sharkflip.livejournal.com]

OMG. I have survived the busy season at work. *die*

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.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I am a person of faith, and furthermore of a minority faith and culture in the States, so for me, the religious makeup of the world has always stood out for me. A lot of Athiests and Agnostics tend to forget or ignore that they were raised in a Christian religious culture, and that they still share in that, whether or not they left the faith, or are even second or third generation non-Christian. That's not only not my religion, it isn't my culture either, but that doesn't even occur to most non-Jews, because Christian culture is so firmly the default. Books where religion doesn't exist almost always push everybody into the default, which leaves a sour taste in my mouth (and is boring). For this reason, because I am outside the default, and usually reminded of it at every turn, I can't project my on cultural/religious views onto characters as easily, which in turn makes me notice it.

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.