A comment on fantasy

[womzilla]

In a pair of recent posts, 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.

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

You're missing the final quote in the link to Nicoll's LiveJournal so the coding doesn't come through. Without having read the trilogy in question, Kara Dalkey is one of my favorite writers, and was a longtime mainstay of Shockwave Radio Theater.

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).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yeah: while we're being subjected to a vast horde of books in which the Wiccans are all Good and Honorable and the Christians are all Evil and Bad, over in the next subculture there's another horde of books in which the Christians are all Good and Honorable and the Wiccans are the Evil and Bad ones. I wrote about one of these in NYRSF once, just to point out that it was out there.

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.