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

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

In Jo Walton's Sulien books (The King's Peace and The King's Name) the Christianity-analog is not shown as better, but is at least shown as honorable and understandable and having virtuous followers. It also has annoying dogmatic followers, but then there are evil pagans also. And yes, that even-handedness is a deliberate reaction to other books.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of nifty things about those books. Like how a bunch of the Pagan gods convert to worship of the White God.

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.

[redbird]

Yes, I was going to point to that.