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

[fjm.livejournal.com]

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.

Try Elizabeth Hand's _Waking the Moon_.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

ps. Mind you, it seems to be arguing that patriarchal wars which kill thousands are better than matriarchal human sacrifice which kills one.

[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.

[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.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

naomikritzer's Fires of the Faithful and its sequel don't have exactly what you describe, but it's got enough similarities that it might be worth your time.

[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.

[celestialabyss.livejournal.com]

I'm enjoying the comments on this thread. As a Pagan myself it is good to get resources of fiction and such that don't paint the Christian in a black and white bad guy mode... and obviously ones that don't paint non-Christians ditto. Individuals in each camp, perhaps, yes. But not as a broad statement.

I like the idea of people as people.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Some of the Arthurian material out there is definitely pro-Christian. (We shall ignore the movie where the druids work with the Saracens in Arthur's Britain to sacrifice our brunette heroine at Stonehenge, where the gods demand a blond. The ever practical pagans plop a blond wig on her.)