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A comment on fantasy
In a pair of recent posts, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
james_nicoll has been discussing breaking American fantasy writers out of the pseudo-Celtic mode. (This was probably inspired by reading a particularly bad pseudo-Celtic book, but he's discreet enough not to say which one.)
He implies in the later post that he thought that Kara Dalkey's Blood of the Goddess trilogy would have inspired others to venture into Indian settings. I said this in response:
And that tied in to something in his earlier post:
Which combined to remind me that I've wanted for years to see a genre fantasy novel in which the new, vast, invader Monotheism which is trying to stamp out the old, local, virtuous, home-grown paganism is shown to be the better religion, with stronger magic that actually works better for most people and a nicer god who refuses to demand, say, human sacrifice. Just for a change. Note that even if I were the person to write genre fantasy novels, I would not be the person to write this book.
james_nicoll has been discussing breaking American fantasy writers out of the pseudo-Celtic mode. (This was probably inspired by reading a particularly bad pseudo-Celtic book, but he's discreet enough not to say which one.)He implies in the later post that he thought that Kara Dalkey's Blood of the Goddess trilogy would have inspired others to venture into Indian settings. I said this in response:
I thought that Dalkey's Indian trilogy would have been a lot better at 500 pages than it was at 1000; I can't actually recommend it as published, though I would have loved to be able to. (It also would have been significantly better if even one of the Christian characters who was not the simpleton was actually a believing Christian rather than a garden-variety hypocrite and power-grubbing colonialist.)
And that tied in to something in his earlier post:
Boy, there's nothing quite like a modern fantasy with . . . the surprising revelation that while Wicca is true, Xtianity isn't.
Which combined to remind me that I've wanted for years to see a genre fantasy novel in which the new, vast, invader Monotheism which is trying to stamp out the old, local, virtuous, home-grown paganism is shown to be the better religion, with stronger magic that actually works better for most people and a nicer god who refuses to demand, say, human sacrifice. Just for a change. Note that even if I were the person to write genre fantasy novels, I would not be the person to write this book.
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Try Elizabeth Hand's _Waking the Moon_.
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As to the "surprising revelation" in modern fantasy, I'd say that if it were the other way around it wouldn't be fantasy. It would probably be the Left Behind books (they count as fantasy, though not to some Xtians).
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On a related subject, I nominate Asimov's "The Dead Past" as an sf story in which the government's nefarious attempts to squash scientific research turn out to have a damn good reason that had never occurred to the oh-so-noble protagonists.
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I am amused and delighted by that: the decent prosleytizing Christian-analogues aren't trying to destroy the Pagan gods -- they're trying to convert them. I love the notion of one god worshipping another one.
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I like the idea of people as people.
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