Bittercon: Faith in Speculatve Fiction
Sep. 7th, 2012 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
attackfishFaith -- 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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-09-08 09:57 am (UTC)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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Date: 2012-09-08 01:12 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2012-09-08 01:27 pm (UTC)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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Date: 2012-09-08 01:28 pm (UTC)Poke me if I you haven't heard back by Monday.
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From:1/?
Date: 2012-09-08 05:13 pm (UTC)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...
Re: 1/?
From:2/3
Date: 2012-09-08 05:47 pm (UTC)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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Re: 2/3
From:3/3
Date: 2012-09-08 05:47 pm (UTC)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
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Date: 2012-09-08 08:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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