E. Stephen Burnett wonders if authors are on safe ground when they remake God in fiction. (He says that The Shack did that, for example.) He asks, but does not answer, three good questions, which he extrapolates from the writing of C. S. Lewis.
The questions (paraphrased) are:
1) Can a Christian writer write a story about a God who is different? (Different commands or personality.)
2) Can a Christian writer write a story with a character who defies God?
3) What purpose is served by doing either 1) or 2)?
Burnett is a good writer, but he does not make clear, at least to me, exactly what he is asking. I think he is asking if a Christian writer can do these things and remain in God's will.
Let me muse about these matters.
Question 1 - Can a Christian writer write a story about a God who is different?
As I see it, there is possible danger in such writing. I believe that it would be possible to write a story about a God who was so different from the Christian God that the story would be blasphemous. It would also be possible for a reader, or the writer, to become too interested in a false god -- a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments.
However, in a sense, the Old and New Testaments present seriously different views of God. The Old Testament God required sacrifices, and adherence to Jewish dietary laws. The New Testament God was a sacrifice, and Christians are no longer required to keep the dietary laws. But, of course, this was not fiction.
J. R. R. Tolkien, an influential writer, usually considered to have been a Christian, presented a false god, or several of them, in his writing. Sauron, although he was, in Tolkien's phrase, "but a servant,"of a more powerful being, was worshiped, and demanded such worship. He was clearly thoroughly evil. Melkor/Morgoth, the great enemy, Sauron's master, was even more powerful, and more evil, and also was a god, to some. In fact, Tolkien had a whole pantheon of lesser beings, some good, some not so. Was he blasphemous? Most would say that he was not. He was merely telling a story. These evil beings were the equivalent of Satan, the real enemy of God, and of God's people, and lesser demons. The good ones were something like angels. Some of them, possibly, were like saints, in the Roman Catholic sense of the term. (Tolkien was a Roman Catholic).
Even though Tolkien had some evil gods, they were not supreme. As in the real world, there was a supreme, good God.
It seems to me that it could be legitimate to present God in a different way, as Tolkien did, if maintaining his goodness, love and supremacy. Some readers might become too obsessed with such fictional deities, but that would be their doing, not the author's. It would be possible to fantasize lustfully about Salome, or Bathsheba, or to covet Solomon's wealth or wisdom, but that would not be the fault of Matthew and Mark, or of the author of 2 Samuel or of 1 Kings.
It seems to me that The Shack also presents God in a legitimate way, although apparently I disagree with Burnett about this.
Elizabeth Moon, an important writer of fantasy and science fiction, has written several novels in an imaginary setting. I have previously posted on the question of whether these works should be taken as Christian novels, or not. I am not sure if Moon meant to portray a polytheistic religion, with a supreme God, and lesser gods, or one that is like Roman Catholicism, with a supreme God, and saints, especially Gird, who was once a living man. As a Protestant, I don't believe in the efficacy of prayer to any but the Triune Supreme God, and believe that prayer to saints comes close to, perhaps is, a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments.* To expand on that, there are some Christian elements. (See my post.) Moon, who is an Episcopalian, and active in her church, has posted a summary of the religion in these books.
Lois McMaster Bujold is also an important writer of both fantasy and science fiction. Like Moon, she has incorporated religious ideas into the fabric of one of her imaginary worlds. (There is a fantasy series by Bujold that I have yet to read, and I would guess that she has done that for this sub-creation, also.) I have also written previously about whether one of her novels can be classified as Christian, and, again, concluded that, although there are Christian elements, it can not. Bujold has done some experimenting -- she has constructed a theology based on five more or less co-equal gods. These gods can reveal themselves to people, and are otherwise real to some of her characters. I do not know whether Bujold is a Christian. There are a few Christian ideas, and apparently a Christian character, in her science fiction series.
C. S. Lewis, perhaps the most important Christian writer of the twentieth century, wrote fantastic fiction, for children, and for adults, as well as about Christianity. In fact, Barnett uses Perelandra, a fantastic novel by Lewis, as a focal point in his essay. By emphasizing Lewis, I think Barnett has answered his own question, with a firm "yes." Why? Because Lewis also wrote a sequel, That Hideous Strength, wherein Merlin is possessed by angelic beings, a non-Biblical concept. And, especially, Lewis wrote Till We Have Faces, a book set in a pre-Christian time, with a pagan goddess, Ungit, who was represented by an idol, and with the god of the mountain, apparently the Greek Cupid.
Question 2 - Can a Christian writer write a story with a character who defies God?
Again, I turn to the Bible. Job and Paul defied God, at least at first. Pharaoh, and several Israelite and non-Israelite kings also did so, for their entire lives, or began by following God, but ended up defying Him, as apparently Saul and Solomon did. And let us not forget Satan.
Enough said. The answer is "yes."
Question 3 - What purpose is served by doing either 1) or 2)?
As to writing about a character who defies God, the purpose should be to set forth an example that we must not follow, or of the error of such defiance. (Kings David and especially Manasseh defied God, but repented, and so can and must we.)
What about writing about a different God, or god?
Till We Have Faces made a point that Christians must take to heart. That point is that God is not required to answer our questions. He is, Himself, the answer. Could this point have been made in a book written of a time and society where there were Christians? I suppose so, but it would have been a drastically different book, and perhaps Orual's defiance, had it been of the one true God, would have turned Christian readers off, whereas defying pagan gods is not so likely to. Defiance, and its answer, was necessary to make Lewis's point.
Bujold's gods of Chalion seem to me to be a different matter. She seems to have done what writers of fantastic literature should do, namely present us with a universe like ours, but with some substantial difference, then describe what that would be like. Ursula K. Le Guin did this about gender in her The Left Hand of Darkness, for example. What would it be like if gender was not fixed? But is it legitimate to tinker with a universe by imagining different gods? I'm not sure. Not to have done so would have made the story quite different, but there could still have been goodness, service, and sacrifice in it, as Bujold's Cazaril showed so well. And creating a theology with no single supreme being strikes me as dangerous.
Let me answer the question for Elizabeth Moon (I have used Bujold and Moon because I am familiar with their work, and because of their prominence.) What about Moon's whole zoo-full of gods (or maybe saints) and spirits? Is that wrong, for a Christian writer? Well, let's put it this way. I submit that Tolkien did the same thing. There are all sorts of evil spirits, and good ones, and a pantheon of gods, in his sub-creation. There is little or no worship of a supreme being, private or public. There is no clear Christ-figure. Yet what he did is accepted as having been good, even Christian fiction, by many Christian writers, probably including Burnett.
I would say that if there is a story that an author must tell, and the author herself is not in defiance of God, there may be legitimate reason to write such a story, even though it presents different gods. I think that's what happened to Tolkien. There are certainly dangers. Pride and idol worship, being attracted by the occult, or having gods before the one true God, come to mind. Prayerful care must be taken. I also think it is possible to write a story with a god who differs from God, or including defiance of God, if the author's intent is to present a lesson that is best presented in that way.
Thanks for reading. Read Burnett's essay.
*On October 2, 2011, I changed a key sentence about Elizabeth Moon's Paksenarrion novels, which was "In a word, they are polytheistic, hence not Christian," to the two sentences before the asterisk in the work above. The reason is that I have re-read the books, and it seems clear that they describe one Supreme God, who is to be worshiped. I didn't come away with that impression in my first reading, several years ago, but I should have. I also changed what I said about Tolkien, adding the idea that some of the good beings, who are no longer mortal, may have been saints, rather than minor gods, and made a few minor editorial changes, related to the ones just described, or to improve the clarity of the post.
This is a re-post, with some revisions, of a post from April 13, 2009. I have removed (unintentionally) the previous post.
Musings on science, the Bible, and fantastic literature (and sometimes basketball and other stuff).
God speaks to us through the Bible and the findings of science, and we should listen to both types of revelation.
The title is from Psalm 84:11.
The Wikipedia is usually a pretty good reference. I mostly use the World English Bible (WEB), because it is public domain. I am grateful.
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The posts in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can copy and use this material, as long as you aren't making money from it. If you give me credit, thanks. If not, OK.
Showing posts with label Lois McMaster Bujold. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lois McMaster Bujold. Show all posts
Monday, October 03, 2011
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
The Spirit Ring, by Lois McMaster Bujold: A Christian Novel?
The Spirit Ring is a fantasy novel, by Lois McMaster Bujold, set in Italy during the Middle Ages. The book was a Locus Fantasy Award nominee. (See previous post for a plot summary.)
Before I discuss this book, let me mention two other important works of fantastic literature, both also partly set in the Middle Ages. Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn, was a nominee for the Hugo Award in 2007. It supposed that aliens came to earth in Germany, and considered, among other things, the possibility of aliens becoming converts to Christianity. It was possible. The other book is the Doomsday Book, which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. In this book, a time traveler goes from England's near future to study the Middle Ages. She finds, among other things, a true believer, a good man, an unlettered, but devout and unselfish priest. Both books also consider the important question of where God is when things hurt us badly. I don't seem to have ever posted on Doomsday Book, a serious omission, considering the stated subject matter of this blog. Sometime, maybe.
One of my most important posts is "What must be Christian about a Christian novel?" In that post, I set forth six important criteria, which help me to answer that question, not always to my own satisfaction. That post has links to other posts, related to books by Elizabeth Moon, J. K. Rowling, and others, considering whether some of their works should be considered to be Christian novels. I have also considered that question twice, in relation to books by Bujold, here and here. I couldn't convince myself that either of the works in question were fully Christian, by my criteria. I believe that The Spirit Ring is, in fact, such a novel, and it is by a major author of fantastic literature, who has won Hugo, Nebula, and Mythopoeic awards -- so far, no other author has done so -- and has written both science fiction and fantasy.
Why do I say that The Spirit Ring is, in some sense, a Christian novel? (Lest there be any doubt, it is not "faith fiction," a form of literature which is Christian in world-view, but one aimed at a niche market, Christians. Bujold writes, and her publishers market, to those interested in fantastic literature.) Here's why I believe it to be a Christian novel:
1) Is there a Christ-figure? That is, does someone offer his or her own life for someone else, and, in some sense, to redeem that person? I would have to say no to this question. There are people who sacrifice themselves for the good of others, especially Thur Ochs, a miner turned metal worker who agrees to enter the castle controlled by Ferrante, an evil man, as a spy, for the sake of his brother, Uri, who, Thur believes, may be a prisoner there.
2) Is there belief in orthodox Christian doctrine? Definitely. Abbot (and also Bishop) Monreale is clearly a character who believes in the ability of God to redeem others. In spite of obstacles, he offers the spirit of Jacopo Sprenger, an evil wizard, a chance to repent while that spirit still has the power to choose:
"Jacopo Sprenger. Though your spirit is parted from your body, you still partially exist in the world of will. While your will is free, you may yet effectively repent, confess your sins and profess your faith; I swear to you God is greater than any evil you can encompass. Stop. Stop now, and turn your face around!" Monreale's voice was anguished in its sincerity.
He had ridden through the night not to destroy Vitelli, but to save him, Fiametta realized. (Lois McMaster Bujold, The Spirit Ring. Riverdale, New York: Baen, 1992, p. 341)
Monreale also offers the spirit of Uri Ochs absolution, and Uri confesses his sins, and his confession is accepted by Monreale, just before his spirit ceases to manifest itself in this world.
3) Is there monotheistic prayer to a Divine being? Fiametta, a young woman, is the heroine of the book. She is able to do some magic herself (so is Monreale). Both she and Monreale believe in the power of prayer, another orthodox Christian doctrine. With Fiametta, it seems to be prayer in emergencies. Monreale also prays in emergencies, but Bujold gives the impression that he is not only a cleric with some ecclesiastical power, but a devout man, and one who habitually prays. He is described as being on his knees more than once, and on at least one occasion, he believes that he has received guidance from God, in answer to prayer. It wasn't the answer that he wanted.
4) Does an important character express a relationship with the God of Christianity as Lord? Monreale doesn't say that, but he is portrayed as living in that way.
5) Is there consciousness of supernatural guidance? See item 3, above.
Fiametta and Thur attempt to temporarily place the spirit of Uri, Thur's dead brother, in a statue made using Uri as a model. Fiametta prays more than once during the process. Bujold doesn't explicitly say that their work is divinely guided, but there are several developments that are close to miracles, if not actual miracles, and Thur makes some wise decisions, in carrying out this task. They succeed, and their success leads directly to the defeat of Ferrante and Vitelli. Neither Fiametta or Thur have ever done anything like this before -- they needed wisdom beyond themselves.
6) Is there explicit rejection of evil, or turning away from evil acts by a character? Clearly, Monreale, Fiametta, Thur, and others, have rejected the evil of Ferrante and Vitelli, and Monreale seems to have a lifelong history of seeking good.
As indicated under point 2, an evil character is offered a chance to reject evil, which he does not take.
I wouldn't say that this is an overwhelming case for The Spirit Ring as a Christian novel, but it's close enough for me. I have never read anything by or about Bujold that gives a clear indication that she is, or is not, a Christian.
Lest there be any doubt, I do not believe that Christians should practice magic, even if they pray devoutly before they do so. Nor do I believe that the soul, or spirit, stays around for a while after death. Neither of these is orthodox Christian doctrine. And, as far as that goes, as a Protestant, I don't believe that it is necessary to gain absolution from a priest to have one's sins forgiven. That is orthodox Roman Catholic doctrine, but not mine, and the Bible seems to agree with Protestants on this, according to 1 Timothy 2:5. All of these are features of Bujold's sub-creation. The third item, absolution by a priest, was orthodox in the time in which the book takes place, and it would have been strange to have left out that part of medieval Christianity.
So why don't the other two features mentioned in the previous paragraph make this a non-Christian novel? Because, in my mind, they do not negate the basic world-view of The Spirit Ring. In The Shack, widely (although not universally) accepted as a Christian novel, the three persons of the Trinity appear as three separate and distinct human beings, or at least as three persons who seem to be human -- they eat, for one thing. That is not orthodox Christian doctrine, but it doesn't mean that the book is not fundamentally Christian. Both The Shack and The Spirit Ring have fantastic elements, and are fictional, and anyone trying to use any such book as their foundation for doctrine is making a serious error.
My criterion is not that there is no unorthodox doctrine, Christian, or not, in a book, but that there is some orthodox Christian doctrine held by one or more important characters.
Thanks for reading.
On August 19th, 2009, I did a small amount of editorial work on this post.
Before I discuss this book, let me mention two other important works of fantastic literature, both also partly set in the Middle Ages. Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn, was a nominee for the Hugo Award in 2007. It supposed that aliens came to earth in Germany, and considered, among other things, the possibility of aliens becoming converts to Christianity. It was possible. The other book is the Doomsday Book, which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. In this book, a time traveler goes from England's near future to study the Middle Ages. She finds, among other things, a true believer, a good man, an unlettered, but devout and unselfish priest. Both books also consider the important question of where God is when things hurt us badly. I don't seem to have ever posted on Doomsday Book, a serious omission, considering the stated subject matter of this blog. Sometime, maybe.
One of my most important posts is "What must be Christian about a Christian novel?" In that post, I set forth six important criteria, which help me to answer that question, not always to my own satisfaction. That post has links to other posts, related to books by Elizabeth Moon, J. K. Rowling, and others, considering whether some of their works should be considered to be Christian novels. I have also considered that question twice, in relation to books by Bujold, here and here. I couldn't convince myself that either of the works in question were fully Christian, by my criteria. I believe that The Spirit Ring is, in fact, such a novel, and it is by a major author of fantastic literature, who has won Hugo, Nebula, and Mythopoeic awards -- so far, no other author has done so -- and has written both science fiction and fantasy.
Why do I say that The Spirit Ring is, in some sense, a Christian novel? (Lest there be any doubt, it is not "faith fiction," a form of literature which is Christian in world-view, but one aimed at a niche market, Christians. Bujold writes, and her publishers market, to those interested in fantastic literature.) Here's why I believe it to be a Christian novel:
1) Is there a Christ-figure? That is, does someone offer his or her own life for someone else, and, in some sense, to redeem that person? I would have to say no to this question. There are people who sacrifice themselves for the good of others, especially Thur Ochs, a miner turned metal worker who agrees to enter the castle controlled by Ferrante, an evil man, as a spy, for the sake of his brother, Uri, who, Thur believes, may be a prisoner there.
2) Is there belief in orthodox Christian doctrine? Definitely. Abbot (and also Bishop) Monreale is clearly a character who believes in the ability of God to redeem others. In spite of obstacles, he offers the spirit of Jacopo Sprenger, an evil wizard, a chance to repent while that spirit still has the power to choose:
"Jacopo Sprenger. Though your spirit is parted from your body, you still partially exist in the world of will. While your will is free, you may yet effectively repent, confess your sins and profess your faith; I swear to you God is greater than any evil you can encompass. Stop. Stop now, and turn your face around!" Monreale's voice was anguished in its sincerity.
He had ridden through the night not to destroy Vitelli, but to save him, Fiametta realized. (Lois McMaster Bujold, The Spirit Ring. Riverdale, New York: Baen, 1992, p. 341)
Monreale also offers the spirit of Uri Ochs absolution, and Uri confesses his sins, and his confession is accepted by Monreale, just before his spirit ceases to manifest itself in this world.
3) Is there monotheistic prayer to a Divine being? Fiametta, a young woman, is the heroine of the book. She is able to do some magic herself (so is Monreale). Both she and Monreale believe in the power of prayer, another orthodox Christian doctrine. With Fiametta, it seems to be prayer in emergencies. Monreale also prays in emergencies, but Bujold gives the impression that he is not only a cleric with some ecclesiastical power, but a devout man, and one who habitually prays. He is described as being on his knees more than once, and on at least one occasion, he believes that he has received guidance from God, in answer to prayer. It wasn't the answer that he wanted.
4) Does an important character express a relationship with the God of Christianity as Lord? Monreale doesn't say that, but he is portrayed as living in that way.
5) Is there consciousness of supernatural guidance? See item 3, above.
Fiametta and Thur attempt to temporarily place the spirit of Uri, Thur's dead brother, in a statue made using Uri as a model. Fiametta prays more than once during the process. Bujold doesn't explicitly say that their work is divinely guided, but there are several developments that are close to miracles, if not actual miracles, and Thur makes some wise decisions, in carrying out this task. They succeed, and their success leads directly to the defeat of Ferrante and Vitelli. Neither Fiametta or Thur have ever done anything like this before -- they needed wisdom beyond themselves.
6) Is there explicit rejection of evil, or turning away from evil acts by a character? Clearly, Monreale, Fiametta, Thur, and others, have rejected the evil of Ferrante and Vitelli, and Monreale seems to have a lifelong history of seeking good.
As indicated under point 2, an evil character is offered a chance to reject evil, which he does not take.
I wouldn't say that this is an overwhelming case for The Spirit Ring as a Christian novel, but it's close enough for me. I have never read anything by or about Bujold that gives a clear indication that she is, or is not, a Christian.
Lest there be any doubt, I do not believe that Christians should practice magic, even if they pray devoutly before they do so. Nor do I believe that the soul, or spirit, stays around for a while after death. Neither of these is orthodox Christian doctrine. And, as far as that goes, as a Protestant, I don't believe that it is necessary to gain absolution from a priest to have one's sins forgiven. That is orthodox Roman Catholic doctrine, but not mine, and the Bible seems to agree with Protestants on this, according to 1 Timothy 2:5. All of these are features of Bujold's sub-creation. The third item, absolution by a priest, was orthodox in the time in which the book takes place, and it would have been strange to have left out that part of medieval Christianity.
So why don't the other two features mentioned in the previous paragraph make this a non-Christian novel? Because, in my mind, they do not negate the basic world-view of The Spirit Ring. In The Shack, widely (although not universally) accepted as a Christian novel, the three persons of the Trinity appear as three separate and distinct human beings, or at least as three persons who seem to be human -- they eat, for one thing. That is not orthodox Christian doctrine, but it doesn't mean that the book is not fundamentally Christian. Both The Shack and The Spirit Ring have fantastic elements, and are fictional, and anyone trying to use any such book as their foundation for doctrine is making a serious error.
My criterion is not that there is no unorthodox doctrine, Christian, or not, in a book, but that there is some orthodox Christian doctrine held by one or more important characters.
Thanks for reading.
On August 19th, 2009, I did a small amount of editorial work on this post.
Monday, August 17, 2009
The Spirit Ring, by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Spirit Ring is a fantasy novel, by Lois McMaster Bujold, set in Italy during the Middle Ages. The book was a Locus Fantasy Award nominee.
In this post, I intend to summarize the plot of this novel. For another summary, see the first link in this post.
The book is fantasy literature, in that some people have abilities that go beyond the normal senses, and the normal ability to manipulate objects. These people, in this book, are portrayed as magicians.
There are three main characters, and many characters which appear less often. Fiametta is a young woman. In addition to wishing for a good and loving husband, and some security in her life, she also wishes to be respected for her ability to practice magic. Her father, Prospero Beneforte, is such a magician. He is also a metalworker. With some help from Fiametta, he has created some amazing works of art on commission for Duke Sandrino, ruler of their city-state, Montefoglia. (Montefoglia is fictional. There are references to other, real, cities.) He could use some help in his metal work. One of the objects he is working on is a large statue, to be made of bronze. Uri Ochs, captain of Sandrino's guard, was the model for a clay statue, that is being used to make a mold for pouring the bronze for a metal statue.
Thur Ochs, Uri's brother, is a young man, a miner, living a few days' journey from the city. He is mostly ordinary, but does have the ability to find things. He knows, because of this special sense, where there are seams of metal ore in the mines. Thur is more tolerant of kobolds, small, nearly human-shaped creatures that live in the substance of the rocks, than most people. He advocates leaving milk for them to drink -- they can come out of rocks, and go into them -- and believes that they should be let alone. His brother, Uri, has been asking Thur to come to the city. The collapse of part of a mine, which nearly kills some of Thur's fellow miners, combined with the state of the mine -- it is almost mined out (although, if those in charge would listen to Thur, he could have found more ore) -- lead Thur to follow his brother's advice.
One aspect of Bujold's sub-creation is that the spirits of the dead can remain active, and interacting with normal, living people, for some time after death, if they have not received last rites, and their bodies are preserved. Such spirits can be useful to magicians, although doing so is dangerous, and a form of black magic, forbidden by the church. Beneforte has been working on the theory of such magic.
Beneforte and Fiametta are invited to a banquet at the palace. The occasion is the visit of Ferrante, a nearby ruler, who wants to marry Sandrino's daughter. But the occasion is disastrous. Ferrante kills Sandrino, and makes known that he plans to rule his own duchy, and also Montefoglia. Uri is also killed. Fiametta sees that Ferrante has a dead baby, kept in salt, with him in a box, undoubtedly used in black magic. She and her father escape to the countryside, but her father dies of a heart attack. Some of Ferrante's men take her father's body from her possession. She meets Thur, who is coming to the city with a pack train.
Fiametta has a magic ring -- not the spirit ring of the title -- that indicates that Thur Ochs is the man she should marry. At first, she rejects that idea, because of Thur's station in life -- a poor miner. As the book progresses, and she sees his bravery and intelligence, she changes her mind.
Fiametta, Thur, and others, go back to the city. They decide to enter the monastery, directed by Bishop and Abbot Monreale, and besieged by Ferrante's soldiers. (Monreale is the third main character.) The Abbot, a devout man, but with some knowledge of magic, and ability to perform some, is praying about whether to accept a truce with Ferrante. When Fiametta tells him about that man's use of a dead baby, in magic, Monreale sees that Ferrante cannot be trusted, and takes that knowledge as an answer to his prayer. He sends Thur into the city, and the castle, as a spy, with certain magic items to help him communicate what is happening back to Monreale. Thur goes, principally because he wants to find out what has happened to his brother.
In the castle, Thur is put to work as a metal worker. He learns that Ferrante has an aide, Vitelli, an evil man, expert in black magic. Vitelli wants to use the spirit of Fiametta's father in his evil work. He hopes to capture that spirit in a ring. He also wants to discover any notes that Beneforte had on the subject. Thur finds that his brother was killed, and that his body, like Beneforte's, is being preserved.
Thur is discovered. When he is, Monreale and Fiamette know of this, because of the magic communication devices Thur took to the castle. Vitelli destroys all of them, so Monreale can't find out any more about what is going on there. Fiametta feels that she must go to the city to help Thur. She ends up going into the city, but stays at her own house.
Thur, with some assistance from kobolds, is able to escape, and to bring his brother's body with him. He, guided by his ability to find, goes to Fiametta's house, with the body. Fiametta decides to undertake, with Thur's help, a difficult task, namely to invest the bronze statue with Uri's spirit. They hope that such a statue, which, if she is successful, should be animated for a short time, will be able to defeat Ferrante. Defeating Ferrante is crucial, because Vitelli is trying to use Fiametta's father's spirit to gain the power of a spirit ring, and, if he were to succeed, this would give Ferrante great evil power. Fiametta has never done anything like this, and Thur has never cast a statue. He is not sure that there are enough supplies available to do what needs to be done. Fiametta prays, asking God's help, and they proceed. Kobolds bring Thur metal from the castle, and help with the casting.
They are successful, and Uri inhabits the statue long enough that he leads an army of citizens to defeat and kill Ferrante. Vitelli, too, is killed. Monreale appears, having come from the abbey. He is there principally to offer the spirit of Vitelli an opportunity to repent, which opportunity is refused. Uri's spirit does repent.
Bujold's books are usually love stories, and this one is no exception. Fiametta realizes that she loves Thur, and they are married. Monreale not only marries them, but obtains a license for Fiametta to perform magic -- not evil magic, but magic for good.
I often don't summarize the plot of novels I post on, so as not to spoil the reading of them. The exception in this case is because, God willing, my next post will be on the question of whether or not The Spirit Ring is a Christian novel, and I need to set forth the proper background.
Thanks for reading.
In this post, I intend to summarize the plot of this novel. For another summary, see the first link in this post.
The book is fantasy literature, in that some people have abilities that go beyond the normal senses, and the normal ability to manipulate objects. These people, in this book, are portrayed as magicians.
There are three main characters, and many characters which appear less often. Fiametta is a young woman. In addition to wishing for a good and loving husband, and some security in her life, she also wishes to be respected for her ability to practice magic. Her father, Prospero Beneforte, is such a magician. He is also a metalworker. With some help from Fiametta, he has created some amazing works of art on commission for Duke Sandrino, ruler of their city-state, Montefoglia. (Montefoglia is fictional. There are references to other, real, cities.) He could use some help in his metal work. One of the objects he is working on is a large statue, to be made of bronze. Uri Ochs, captain of Sandrino's guard, was the model for a clay statue, that is being used to make a mold for pouring the bronze for a metal statue.
Thur Ochs, Uri's brother, is a young man, a miner, living a few days' journey from the city. He is mostly ordinary, but does have the ability to find things. He knows, because of this special sense, where there are seams of metal ore in the mines. Thur is more tolerant of kobolds, small, nearly human-shaped creatures that live in the substance of the rocks, than most people. He advocates leaving milk for them to drink -- they can come out of rocks, and go into them -- and believes that they should be let alone. His brother, Uri, has been asking Thur to come to the city. The collapse of part of a mine, which nearly kills some of Thur's fellow miners, combined with the state of the mine -- it is almost mined out (although, if those in charge would listen to Thur, he could have found more ore) -- lead Thur to follow his brother's advice.
One aspect of Bujold's sub-creation is that the spirits of the dead can remain active, and interacting with normal, living people, for some time after death, if they have not received last rites, and their bodies are preserved. Such spirits can be useful to magicians, although doing so is dangerous, and a form of black magic, forbidden by the church. Beneforte has been working on the theory of such magic.
Beneforte and Fiametta are invited to a banquet at the palace. The occasion is the visit of Ferrante, a nearby ruler, who wants to marry Sandrino's daughter. But the occasion is disastrous. Ferrante kills Sandrino, and makes known that he plans to rule his own duchy, and also Montefoglia. Uri is also killed. Fiametta sees that Ferrante has a dead baby, kept in salt, with him in a box, undoubtedly used in black magic. She and her father escape to the countryside, but her father dies of a heart attack. Some of Ferrante's men take her father's body from her possession. She meets Thur, who is coming to the city with a pack train.
Fiametta has a magic ring -- not the spirit ring of the title -- that indicates that Thur Ochs is the man she should marry. At first, she rejects that idea, because of Thur's station in life -- a poor miner. As the book progresses, and she sees his bravery and intelligence, she changes her mind.
Fiametta, Thur, and others, go back to the city. They decide to enter the monastery, directed by Bishop and Abbot Monreale, and besieged by Ferrante's soldiers. (Monreale is the third main character.) The Abbot, a devout man, but with some knowledge of magic, and ability to perform some, is praying about whether to accept a truce with Ferrante. When Fiametta tells him about that man's use of a dead baby, in magic, Monreale sees that Ferrante cannot be trusted, and takes that knowledge as an answer to his prayer. He sends Thur into the city, and the castle, as a spy, with certain magic items to help him communicate what is happening back to Monreale. Thur goes, principally because he wants to find out what has happened to his brother.
In the castle, Thur is put to work as a metal worker. He learns that Ferrante has an aide, Vitelli, an evil man, expert in black magic. Vitelli wants to use the spirit of Fiametta's father in his evil work. He hopes to capture that spirit in a ring. He also wants to discover any notes that Beneforte had on the subject. Thur finds that his brother was killed, and that his body, like Beneforte's, is being preserved.
Thur is discovered. When he is, Monreale and Fiamette know of this, because of the magic communication devices Thur took to the castle. Vitelli destroys all of them, so Monreale can't find out any more about what is going on there. Fiametta feels that she must go to the city to help Thur. She ends up going into the city, but stays at her own house.
Thur, with some assistance from kobolds, is able to escape, and to bring his brother's body with him. He, guided by his ability to find, goes to Fiametta's house, with the body. Fiametta decides to undertake, with Thur's help, a difficult task, namely to invest the bronze statue with Uri's spirit. They hope that such a statue, which, if she is successful, should be animated for a short time, will be able to defeat Ferrante. Defeating Ferrante is crucial, because Vitelli is trying to use Fiametta's father's spirit to gain the power of a spirit ring, and, if he were to succeed, this would give Ferrante great evil power. Fiametta has never done anything like this, and Thur has never cast a statue. He is not sure that there are enough supplies available to do what needs to be done. Fiametta prays, asking God's help, and they proceed. Kobolds bring Thur metal from the castle, and help with the casting.
They are successful, and Uri inhabits the statue long enough that he leads an army of citizens to defeat and kill Ferrante. Vitelli, too, is killed. Monreale appears, having come from the abbey. He is there principally to offer the spirit of Vitelli an opportunity to repent, which opportunity is refused. Uri's spirit does repent.
Bujold's books are usually love stories, and this one is no exception. Fiametta realizes that she loves Thur, and they are married. Monreale not only marries them, but obtains a license for Fiametta to perform magic -- not evil magic, but magic for good.
I often don't summarize the plot of novels I post on, so as not to spoil the reading of them. The exception in this case is because, God willing, my next post will be on the question of whether or not The Spirit Ring is a Christian novel, and I need to set forth the proper background.
Thanks for reading.
Saturday, August 08, 2009
The Sharing Knife books: finding lessons there
My apologies to Lois McMaster Bujold, but I spent quite a bit of time reading her four Sharing Knife novels, which aren't short, and I'd like to muse some more about them.
The theme of the books is reconciliation. Here's Paul on that subject:
1 Corinthians 12:13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. (All scripture quotations from the ESV.)
There is reconciliation even more important than two groups of people becoming reconciled to each other, though:
2 Corinthians 5:20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
Getting your priorities right is illustrated.
In the fourth book, a wagon train is about to be attacked by a powerful malice, with its slaves. The Lakewalkers tell the farmers with them to run for cover. But some of them don't want to go.
"The wagons are all we have!" cried Grouse.
"You can't stop to defend things." (The Sharing Knife, Volume Four: Horizon. (New York: Eos, HarperCollins, 2009, p. 209. Grouse is a minor character. Dag is the one who answers him.)
Another man, a smith, is asked if he would rather save his wife or his anvil.
Mark 8:37 For what can a man give in return for his soul?
Luke 12:20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’
There is love and fidelity in marriage.
There are a number of happy married couples in the book, including the main characters, Dag and Fawn, but many others, some who have been married for a long time, like Fawn's parents, or Mari and Cattagus, are examples of long-term commitment, and unselfish love for another. (Mari is Dag's aunt, and, until he stopped patrolling, his most recent patrol captain.)
At one point, Dag is approached by a woman, who asks him to be unfaithful to Fawn. He doesn't even consider this, but refuses immediately. Cattagus is disabled, and unable to go on patrol when his wife does, but he and Mari are obviously in a mature spousal love relationship. Dag and Fawn have a number of conversations, throughout the four books. Except when Dag doesn't tell Fawn that he knows she is pregnant right away, there is no hint of dishonesty between them.
The Bible is full of admonitions and examples about this.
There are several examples of moral choices. Some characters make the right choice, some do not.
There is love for the natural world, without worshiping it. Dag shows Fawn his favorite place, a spot on the lake where there are lots of waterlilies. Fawn tells him that she loves milkweed flowers. These plants become part of their wedding cords, objects worn for the duration of a marriage by Lakewalkers.
I believe that stewardship of the natural world is part of God's plan for humans.
There is unselfish service to others. The Lakewalkers, who patrol their own lands, and those of the farmers, for malices, are usually considered to be some sort of freaks, cannibals, and the like by the farmers. The farmers are seldom grateful for this service, and many of them don't even believe it is necessary.
Dag, and other Lakewalkers with healing ability, often give of their time and energy, even putting their lives at immediate risk of being groundlocked, to fix injuries and diseases. Dag and Arkady do this not only for Lakewalkers, but for farmers.
There is a conflict between good and evil.
The evil beings, malices, attack at unexpected times and places, and in unexpected ways. They are able to subvert farmers, even Lakewalkers, to be their slaves, aiding their evil purpose, which is to destroy all that is alive and good. They use their slaves, without regard for their safety, or even their lives. This is much the way that the devil operates, according to the Bible.
As Paul put it:
Ephesians 6:10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.
And, of course, the most important lesson: Freedom from evil comes only at the cost of a life.
There is no analogy worthy of comparison to the death and resurrection of Christ, the perfect sacrifice for sin, certainly not anything in these books that is so worthy. And there is no hint of a resurrection in them. However, the books do put forth a system wherein the only way to kill a malice is for part of a dying human's ground to be placed into a sharing knife, and that knife be used on the malice.
Thanks for reading. Read the Bible!
The post introducing these books is here. This post is on the theme of the books. This post is on ground, a unique aspect of Bujold's subcreation. A post, on religion in the books, is here.
The theme of the books is reconciliation. Here's Paul on that subject:
1 Corinthians 12:13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. (All scripture quotations from the ESV.)
There is reconciliation even more important than two groups of people becoming reconciled to each other, though:
2 Corinthians 5:20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
Getting your priorities right is illustrated.
In the fourth book, a wagon train is about to be attacked by a powerful malice, with its slaves. The Lakewalkers tell the farmers with them to run for cover. But some of them don't want to go.
"The wagons are all we have!" cried Grouse.
"You can't stop to defend things." (The Sharing Knife, Volume Four: Horizon. (New York: Eos, HarperCollins, 2009, p. 209. Grouse is a minor character. Dag is the one who answers him.)
Another man, a smith, is asked if he would rather save his wife or his anvil.
Mark 8:37 For what can a man give in return for his soul?
Luke 12:20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’
There is love and fidelity in marriage.
There are a number of happy married couples in the book, including the main characters, Dag and Fawn, but many others, some who have been married for a long time, like Fawn's parents, or Mari and Cattagus, are examples of long-term commitment, and unselfish love for another. (Mari is Dag's aunt, and, until he stopped patrolling, his most recent patrol captain.)
At one point, Dag is approached by a woman, who asks him to be unfaithful to Fawn. He doesn't even consider this, but refuses immediately. Cattagus is disabled, and unable to go on patrol when his wife does, but he and Mari are obviously in a mature spousal love relationship. Dag and Fawn have a number of conversations, throughout the four books. Except when Dag doesn't tell Fawn that he knows she is pregnant right away, there is no hint of dishonesty between them.
The Bible is full of admonitions and examples about this.
There are several examples of moral choices. Some characters make the right choice, some do not.
There is love for the natural world, without worshiping it. Dag shows Fawn his favorite place, a spot on the lake where there are lots of waterlilies. Fawn tells him that she loves milkweed flowers. These plants become part of their wedding cords, objects worn for the duration of a marriage by Lakewalkers.
I believe that stewardship of the natural world is part of God's plan for humans.
There is unselfish service to others. The Lakewalkers, who patrol their own lands, and those of the farmers, for malices, are usually considered to be some sort of freaks, cannibals, and the like by the farmers. The farmers are seldom grateful for this service, and many of them don't even believe it is necessary.
Dag, and other Lakewalkers with healing ability, often give of their time and energy, even putting their lives at immediate risk of being groundlocked, to fix injuries and diseases. Dag and Arkady do this not only for Lakewalkers, but for farmers.
There is a conflict between good and evil.
The evil beings, malices, attack at unexpected times and places, and in unexpected ways. They are able to subvert farmers, even Lakewalkers, to be their slaves, aiding their evil purpose, which is to destroy all that is alive and good. They use their slaves, without regard for their safety, or even their lives. This is much the way that the devil operates, according to the Bible.
As Paul put it:
Ephesians 6:10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.
And, of course, the most important lesson: Freedom from evil comes only at the cost of a life.
There is no analogy worthy of comparison to the death and resurrection of Christ, the perfect sacrifice for sin, certainly not anything in these books that is so worthy. And there is no hint of a resurrection in them. However, the books do put forth a system wherein the only way to kill a malice is for part of a dying human's ground to be placed into a sharing knife, and that knife be used on the malice.
Thanks for reading. Read the Bible!
The post introducing these books is here. This post is on the theme of the books. This post is on ground, a unique aspect of Bujold's subcreation. A post, on religion in the books, is here.
Friday, August 07, 2009
The Sharing Knife, Religious Aspects
I do not know what Lois McMaster Bujold's religious beliefs might be. In an earlier post, I pointed out that one of her characters, in the Vorkosigan saga, seems to have been a Christian, and in another post, I have argued that Cazaril, in her The Curse of Chalion, is in some respects a Christ-figure. But I do not know for sure what Bujold thinks. My guess is that she is at least sympathetic to orthodox Christianity. In an interview, she said, in response to a question suggesting that fantasy and science fiction might be inherently antithetical to Christianity, ". . . religion or its absence is a matter of the writer’s world view, and will vary with the writer, not with the genre." She went on to say that she was opposed to fundamentalism, and, from the context, she probably meant fundamentalism associated with Young-earth Creationist beliefs.
In Bujold's Sharing Knife novels, there are some important religious aspects. I would like to discuss these works under a rubric established previously. In that post, I discussed some traits that might be used to determine whether or not a novel is a Christian novel.
1) Is there a Christ-figure? The Sharing Knife books have a number of Lakewalkers who might be considered Christ-figures, in that they allow their lives to be taken, so that sharing knives, to kill their greatest enemy, the malices, might be prepared. I have difficulty accepting this aspect of the book as showing a genuine Christ-figure, for two reasons. One, this is quite common among Lakewalkers. Bujold doesn't explicitly say so, but the books seem to indicate that this is the normal mode of death for Lakewalkers. Secondly, sometimes, a Lakewalker kills herself to prime a sharing knife. I have difficulty accepting that a sacrifice, even unto death, carried about by the person who dies, is like what Christ did. He did die so that others might live, as Lakewalkers do, but not by his own hand, and only one sacrifice, not many, was necessary.
2) Belief in orthodox Christian doctrine, such as belief in the Trinity. I didn't find this in the books. In fact, most or all of the Lakewalkers seem not to believe in any gods at all, except in "absent gods," a frequent expression of Dag, and others. Fawn does find that some Lakewalker music is hymn-like, but what that means to her is not explained. There is little or no explanation of farmer religious beliefs.
3) Prayer to a monotheistic god. There is a little mention of Lakewalkers praying, or wishing that they could pray, but no real prayer in any of the four books. If there was, presumably it would have been to the "absent gods," not to a single supreme god. It is as if Bujold has constructed a world in which the inhabitants wish that they could believe in a supernatural God, or gods, but don't really do so.
4) No one in the novels under consideration expresses a relationship with the God of Christianity, or with any other deity.
5) There is no acknowledgment of supernatural guidance in the books. However, the mission of Dag and Fawn, to begin to bridge the gap between Lakewalkers and farmers, sometimes goes so well (by no means always) and by such unexpected means, that it seems like it might well have been explained by providential guidance and assistance.
6) There is deliberate rejection of evil. Better put, there are some clear moral choices to be made by the characters. Some of both Fawn's and Dag's families cannot put aside their prejudices. Fawn's brothers participated in a scheme which, had it gone the way it was planned, might well have killed Dag on the night before his wedding to Fawn.
Crane, the renegade Lakewalker turned river bandit captain, has clearly made some very wrong choices. Dag and the farmer and Lakewalker group that ends the robberies and murders of Crane and his followers believe that the farmers who have chosen to follow Crane did not have to do so. Alder, who had been betrothed to Berry, but wound up as one of Crane's bandits, is told exactly that. Some farmers tried to escape Crane, but were killed in doing so. Alder didn't try.
Dag, while training with Arkady to be a healer, agrees that he will not treat farmers, because doing so might overwhelm the Lakewalkers with requests for their services as healers. But a farmer asks that he come treat a young relative, and he agrees to do so, knowing that he is breaking his word, but considering that it would be wrong to let a boy die a horrible death.
Neeta, a young Lakewalker woman, becomes infatuated with Dag, and tells him that he would be welcome in her bed, and that Fawn would never know. Dag refuses, and doesn't really consider the offer. Later, Neeta makes a very bad choice. Fawn is lying in a coma-like state, in the group of farmers who are attacked by a very dangerous malice (all the Lakewalkers in the group are trying to kill the malice) and Neeta directs that Fawn be buried, knowing that she is alive.
Barr, a young male Lakewalker, appears in the third volume, a self-centered, careless person. By the time the last book is ending, Barr has seen that he should take responsibility for his actions, in particular his brief affair with a farmer woman, which, he discovers, has resulted in a daughter.
These characters have clear moral choices to face. Some choose good, some choose evil. Barr, for one, changes from a person who doesn't care about the rights and wrongs of what he does, but about how it makes him feel, to a moral individual.
I wouldn't say that the Sharing Knife books are Christian novels. I would say that they do present clear moral choices, and characters who are both evil and good.
Thanks for reading. The post introducing these books is here. This post is on the theme of the books. This post is on ground, a unique aspect of Bujold's subcreation. The final post in the series, on how I found illustrations of important Christian ideas in the books, whether Bujold intended them or not, is here.
In Bujold's Sharing Knife novels, there are some important religious aspects. I would like to discuss these works under a rubric established previously. In that post, I discussed some traits that might be used to determine whether or not a novel is a Christian novel.
1) Is there a Christ-figure? The Sharing Knife books have a number of Lakewalkers who might be considered Christ-figures, in that they allow their lives to be taken, so that sharing knives, to kill their greatest enemy, the malices, might be prepared. I have difficulty accepting this aspect of the book as showing a genuine Christ-figure, for two reasons. One, this is quite common among Lakewalkers. Bujold doesn't explicitly say so, but the books seem to indicate that this is the normal mode of death for Lakewalkers. Secondly, sometimes, a Lakewalker kills herself to prime a sharing knife. I have difficulty accepting that a sacrifice, even unto death, carried about by the person who dies, is like what Christ did. He did die so that others might live, as Lakewalkers do, but not by his own hand, and only one sacrifice, not many, was necessary.
2) Belief in orthodox Christian doctrine, such as belief in the Trinity. I didn't find this in the books. In fact, most or all of the Lakewalkers seem not to believe in any gods at all, except in "absent gods," a frequent expression of Dag, and others. Fawn does find that some Lakewalker music is hymn-like, but what that means to her is not explained. There is little or no explanation of farmer religious beliefs.
3) Prayer to a monotheistic god. There is a little mention of Lakewalkers praying, or wishing that they could pray, but no real prayer in any of the four books. If there was, presumably it would have been to the "absent gods," not to a single supreme god. It is as if Bujold has constructed a world in which the inhabitants wish that they could believe in a supernatural God, or gods, but don't really do so.
4) No one in the novels under consideration expresses a relationship with the God of Christianity, or with any other deity.
5) There is no acknowledgment of supernatural guidance in the books. However, the mission of Dag and Fawn, to begin to bridge the gap between Lakewalkers and farmers, sometimes goes so well (by no means always) and by such unexpected means, that it seems like it might well have been explained by providential guidance and assistance.
6) There is deliberate rejection of evil. Better put, there are some clear moral choices to be made by the characters. Some of both Fawn's and Dag's families cannot put aside their prejudices. Fawn's brothers participated in a scheme which, had it gone the way it was planned, might well have killed Dag on the night before his wedding to Fawn.
Crane, the renegade Lakewalker turned river bandit captain, has clearly made some very wrong choices. Dag and the farmer and Lakewalker group that ends the robberies and murders of Crane and his followers believe that the farmers who have chosen to follow Crane did not have to do so. Alder, who had been betrothed to Berry, but wound up as one of Crane's bandits, is told exactly that. Some farmers tried to escape Crane, but were killed in doing so. Alder didn't try.
Dag, while training with Arkady to be a healer, agrees that he will not treat farmers, because doing so might overwhelm the Lakewalkers with requests for their services as healers. But a farmer asks that he come treat a young relative, and he agrees to do so, knowing that he is breaking his word, but considering that it would be wrong to let a boy die a horrible death.
Neeta, a young Lakewalker woman, becomes infatuated with Dag, and tells him that he would be welcome in her bed, and that Fawn would never know. Dag refuses, and doesn't really consider the offer. Later, Neeta makes a very bad choice. Fawn is lying in a coma-like state, in the group of farmers who are attacked by a very dangerous malice (all the Lakewalkers in the group are trying to kill the malice) and Neeta directs that Fawn be buried, knowing that she is alive.
Barr, a young male Lakewalker, appears in the third volume, a self-centered, careless person. By the time the last book is ending, Barr has seen that he should take responsibility for his actions, in particular his brief affair with a farmer woman, which, he discovers, has resulted in a daughter.
These characters have clear moral choices to face. Some choose good, some choose evil. Barr, for one, changes from a person who doesn't care about the rights and wrongs of what he does, but about how it makes him feel, to a moral individual.
I wouldn't say that the Sharing Knife books are Christian novels. I would say that they do present clear moral choices, and characters who are both evil and good.
Thanks for reading. The post introducing these books is here. This post is on the theme of the books. This post is on ground, a unique aspect of Bujold's subcreation. The final post in the series, on how I found illustrations of important Christian ideas in the books, whether Bujold intended them or not, is here.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
The Sharing Knife Books: Ground
In previous posts, I described the setting and the theme of the four Sharing Knife novels, by Lois McMaster Bujold. A later post, on religion in the books, is here.The final post in the series, on how I found illustrations of important Christian ideas in the books, whether Bujold intended them or not, is here.
I now expand on the setting, by describing one special aspect of Bujold's sub-creation, namely, ground. A Wikipedia author, in the article on Passage, the third book in the series, compared ground to the traditional Chinese concept of ch'i, or qi. The comparison seems to have some merit. I would like to describe Bujold's ground, as well as I am able. I do not think in those terms, myself.
All material objects possess ground. Living things have more of it than non-living objects, and humans have more of it than any other living things. Embryos and fetuses have especially active ground. Some adults have more active, or intense, ground than others. A person with groundsense can distinguish between people, using only this sense, which tells us that there must be some property, or properties, of ground that make it so distinguishable.
Lakewalkers all develop groundsense during adolescence. The amount of groundsense varies. Groundsense has a range. For Dag, this is about a mile, normally, although during some times when he has been stressed, it is much less. Most Lakewalkers do not have a range as great as Dag's. Some Lakewalkers are especially talented. They are healers, or makers of sharing knives. I described sharing knives in my first post in this series.
Some farmers have a little groundsense. Fawn's Aunt Nattie has some. Fawn, herself, has none.
Not only can Lakewalkers detect individual humans, other living things, and inanimate objects (such as hidden sandbars in rivers) but they can manipulate other objects with groundsense. They can, for example, make mosquitoes stay away from them. Dag, at least, can attract fireflies to himself. He can also fish and hunt using his groundsense, attracting game animals and fish to him, using his ground.
Dag puts a broken glass bowl together, using his groundsense. Healers, and even ordinary Lakewalker patrollers, can do some medical work with their groundsense. When doing so, they lose contact with the ordinary world, and sense details of the body to be healed that would not be perceptible to a person lacking groundsense. They can set a bone, remove infection, and other remarkable things. They don't seem to be able to sense microscopic objects, such as blood cells or platelets.
The loss of contact with the ordinary world gives the healer the ability to sense, as it were, a second, parallel world, the world sensed only by groundsense. The same ability, in a lesser degree, seems to be expressed on other occasions. This reminds me of the two worlds seen by some of Tolkien's characters. In The Fellowship of the Ring, just as Frodo is crossing the Ford of the River Bruinen, on the way to Rivendell, the house of Elrond, he sees that parallel world, rather than the ordinary one. Glorfindel, an elf-lord, and the Riders of the enemy are "seen" especially well by Frodo, his peers, and Aragorn, a human, less so.
There are dangers in becoming too obsessed with the parallel world shown by groundsense. A Lakewalker, especially a healer, can become groundlocked -- conscious only of the world shown by groundsense so long that she cannot come back to the ordinary world. If this happens, she dies.
Ground, as indicated above, can be detected by others. So, to a Lakewalker, being with lots of people can be like receiving too many radio broadcasts at once -- noisy and distracting. Lakewalkers can voluntarily shield their grounds from other people. When they do so effectively, they cannot use their groundsense.
Dag discovers that he can extend, and use, a hand he doesn't really have (he lost his real hand in a fight with a malice). Arkady, an accomplished maker, can also do this.
Dag also discovers that he can groundrip other objects -- remove the ground from them, so that they die, or if not living, lose their structural integrity. He uses this as a weapon, ground-ripping a small cross-section of Crane's spinal cord, which paralyzes Crane, and making a hole in the heart of a bat-based slave of a malice, thus causing its death.
Ground, and the story of Fawn and Dag, are essential to the Sharing Knife books.
Thanks for reading.
I now expand on the setting, by describing one special aspect of Bujold's sub-creation, namely, ground. A Wikipedia author, in the article on Passage, the third book in the series, compared ground to the traditional Chinese concept of ch'i, or qi. The comparison seems to have some merit. I would like to describe Bujold's ground, as well as I am able. I do not think in those terms, myself.
All material objects possess ground. Living things have more of it than non-living objects, and humans have more of it than any other living things. Embryos and fetuses have especially active ground. Some adults have more active, or intense, ground than others. A person with groundsense can distinguish between people, using only this sense, which tells us that there must be some property, or properties, of ground that make it so distinguishable.
Lakewalkers all develop groundsense during adolescence. The amount of groundsense varies. Groundsense has a range. For Dag, this is about a mile, normally, although during some times when he has been stressed, it is much less. Most Lakewalkers do not have a range as great as Dag's. Some Lakewalkers are especially talented. They are healers, or makers of sharing knives. I described sharing knives in my first post in this series.
Some farmers have a little groundsense. Fawn's Aunt Nattie has some. Fawn, herself, has none.
Not only can Lakewalkers detect individual humans, other living things, and inanimate objects (such as hidden sandbars in rivers) but they can manipulate other objects with groundsense. They can, for example, make mosquitoes stay away from them. Dag, at least, can attract fireflies to himself. He can also fish and hunt using his groundsense, attracting game animals and fish to him, using his ground.
Dag puts a broken glass bowl together, using his groundsense. Healers, and even ordinary Lakewalker patrollers, can do some medical work with their groundsense. When doing so, they lose contact with the ordinary world, and sense details of the body to be healed that would not be perceptible to a person lacking groundsense. They can set a bone, remove infection, and other remarkable things. They don't seem to be able to sense microscopic objects, such as blood cells or platelets.
The loss of contact with the ordinary world gives the healer the ability to sense, as it were, a second, parallel world, the world sensed only by groundsense. The same ability, in a lesser degree, seems to be expressed on other occasions. This reminds me of the two worlds seen by some of Tolkien's characters. In The Fellowship of the Ring, just as Frodo is crossing the Ford of the River Bruinen, on the way to Rivendell, the house of Elrond, he sees that parallel world, rather than the ordinary one. Glorfindel, an elf-lord, and the Riders of the enemy are "seen" especially well by Frodo, his peers, and Aragorn, a human, less so.
There are dangers in becoming too obsessed with the parallel world shown by groundsense. A Lakewalker, especially a healer, can become groundlocked -- conscious only of the world shown by groundsense so long that she cannot come back to the ordinary world. If this happens, she dies.
Ground, as indicated above, can be detected by others. So, to a Lakewalker, being with lots of people can be like receiving too many radio broadcasts at once -- noisy and distracting. Lakewalkers can voluntarily shield their grounds from other people. When they do so effectively, they cannot use their groundsense.
Dag discovers that he can extend, and use, a hand he doesn't really have (he lost his real hand in a fight with a malice). Arkady, an accomplished maker, can also do this.
Dag also discovers that he can groundrip other objects -- remove the ground from them, so that they die, or if not living, lose their structural integrity. He uses this as a weapon, ground-ripping a small cross-section of Crane's spinal cord, which paralyzes Crane, and making a hole in the heart of a bat-based slave of a malice, thus causing its death.
Ground, and the story of Fawn and Dag, are essential to the Sharing Knife books.
Thanks for reading.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
The Sharing Knife, theme
In the first post in this series, I attempted to set the stage, including some description of the two types of people in these books. A later post, on the subject of ground (unique to these books) is here. A later post, on religion in the books, is here.The final post in the series, on how I found illustrations of important Christian ideas in the books, whether Bujold intended them or not, is here.
In this one, I'll discuss the theme of the four books.
That theme is that Lakewalkers and farmers should, even must, get along, and respect each other and interact more. Does this have political overtones? Probably, but the idea could be applied to many pairs of cultures, religions, ethnic groups. Bujold has said that ". . . if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF [Fantasy and Science Fiction stories] are fantasies of political agency." (See here.)
Most obviously, this theme is set forth explicitly in action at the end of the second volume. Dag's mother insists that Dag is not really married to Fawn. She demands that he abandon her, and a council of Lakewalkers, from that particular area, is called to deal with the matter. When Dag sees that half of the council is going to agree with his mother, and believes that they are doing so out of prejudice, he declares that he is going to leave the camp with Fawn, and does. In part, this is out of protest, but Dag has also had conversations with the captain of the Lakewalker patrol, and with the most important healer, and told them that he believes that farmers and Lakewalkers are too distant from each other. Dag's mother is not receptive to such an argument, but the captain and the healer see that it has merit. The third and fourth volumes describe how Dag and Fawn connect with farmers and Lakewalkers, and how they get at least a few of these to see that Dag's vision is correct.
Why does Dag feel as strongly as he does about Fawn, his farmer wife?
One reason is because he sees Fawn as a woman with great ability. She cannot sense and manipulate ground, except that the bit of Dag's ground in her marriage cord tells her whether he is alive or not. Although she lacks this special ability, found in Lakewalkers, she has great courage, an ability to grasp what needs to be done, and can understand and articulate the heart of important issues. She is a loving wife, and a hard-working companion. Fawn is involved in each of the four malice kills described in the books. She personally killed the first one. The story of how Dag threw Fawn his sharing knife, and she killed that malice, the Glassforge malice, guided Dag's aunt, and patrol captain, Mari to throw her knife to Dirla, who killed the second malice in these stories, the Bonemarsh malice. After that malice was killed, Fawn sensed, from miles away, that Dag was in deep trouble, and rescued Dag and several other Lakewalkers, including an important healer, from the aftereffects of the encounter with the second one, acting in a way that no Lakewalker had understood how to do, namely using a sharing knife on Dag's leg. In the third encounter, she was nearby when Rase, working under Dag's leadership, killed a young malice. In the fourth encounter, she encouraged her brother, Whit, to make the actual kill, and crafted the weapon that did the killing. That weapon included a sharing knife, already made and primed by Lakewalkers.
If Fawn is so capable, in spite of her short stature, her youth, and her lack of groundsense, there must be other farmers who also have great ability.
Another reason for Dag's pursuit of a better relationship is that Dag sees farmer abilities as equivalent to the Lakewalker's ability to manipulate ground. In the first book, Dag and Fawn watch glassblowers in action. Dag examines the ground of a bowl that a farmer craftsman has made, and finds that its ground is well made, even though the farmer is not aware of ground. Later, he describes farmer commerce -- ordering goods from hundreds of miles away, and paying for them with coin minted by remote towns -- as a sort of farmer magic.
Also, Dag is afraid that, if farmers aren't taught about malices, and ground, and sharing knives, a malice will emerge close to a large farmer town, and, in enslaving a large group of farmers, gain energy, ground and knowledge that will make it impossible to destroy. But, if they are taught what to look for, and how to react to malice threats, most of the townspeople could escape, and they could warn Lakewalkers early, so that the malice can be killed. This argument resonates most clearly with Lakewalkers.
I believe that Bujold wants us to see that Dag's most important reason for trying to begin a fusion of the two groups is that Dag sees their common humanity. He understands and respects the farmers he has grown to know. He sees their hurts as worth as much care as Lakewalker injuries, and believes that their medical needs cannot be ignored, as they have been. In spite of prohibitions against explaining ground, and sharing knives, to farmers, he begins to do just that, in part so that farmers won't see Lakewalkers as cannibals or ghouls.
In all this, Fawn supports him. There are farmer prejudices against Lakewalkers, too, and she tries to combat those. The two of them have begun to achieve their vision by the end of the books. The last scene takes place in the home that Dag and Fawn share with Fawn's brother, Whit, and his wife, Berry. Dag has become a healer of all who come to him, using his ability to manipulate ground to repair their injuries. He does not always succeed, but usually does. Barr, who entered in the third book as a self-centered, immature Lakewalker, comes to them. He confesses that he had a fling with a farmer girl, and that he has discovered that the result was a daughter. The girl's mother doesn't want anything to do with Barr. Barr is disturbed, and seeks advice from Dag and Fawn. They tell him to not give up on the possibility of helping out his daughter, and Barr is eased by that. Then Fawn's infant daughter, also a half-breed, the future of the two cultures, must be cared for, by both her parents, as Barr observes.
Bujold doesn't sugar-coat the difficulty of getting along with people of a different culture. She indicates that doing so must be done on a one-on-one basis, and that both groups must make changes in their way of thinking. I think she has hit the nail on the head.
Thanks for reading.
In this one, I'll discuss the theme of the four books.
That theme is that Lakewalkers and farmers should, even must, get along, and respect each other and interact more. Does this have political overtones? Probably, but the idea could be applied to many pairs of cultures, religions, ethnic groups. Bujold has said that ". . . if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF [Fantasy and Science Fiction stories] are fantasies of political agency." (See here.)
Most obviously, this theme is set forth explicitly in action at the end of the second volume. Dag's mother insists that Dag is not really married to Fawn. She demands that he abandon her, and a council of Lakewalkers, from that particular area, is called to deal with the matter. When Dag sees that half of the council is going to agree with his mother, and believes that they are doing so out of prejudice, he declares that he is going to leave the camp with Fawn, and does. In part, this is out of protest, but Dag has also had conversations with the captain of the Lakewalker patrol, and with the most important healer, and told them that he believes that farmers and Lakewalkers are too distant from each other. Dag's mother is not receptive to such an argument, but the captain and the healer see that it has merit. The third and fourth volumes describe how Dag and Fawn connect with farmers and Lakewalkers, and how they get at least a few of these to see that Dag's vision is correct.
Why does Dag feel as strongly as he does about Fawn, his farmer wife?
One reason is because he sees Fawn as a woman with great ability. She cannot sense and manipulate ground, except that the bit of Dag's ground in her marriage cord tells her whether he is alive or not. Although she lacks this special ability, found in Lakewalkers, she has great courage, an ability to grasp what needs to be done, and can understand and articulate the heart of important issues. She is a loving wife, and a hard-working companion. Fawn is involved in each of the four malice kills described in the books. She personally killed the first one. The story of how Dag threw Fawn his sharing knife, and she killed that malice, the Glassforge malice, guided Dag's aunt, and patrol captain, Mari to throw her knife to Dirla, who killed the second malice in these stories, the Bonemarsh malice. After that malice was killed, Fawn sensed, from miles away, that Dag was in deep trouble, and rescued Dag and several other Lakewalkers, including an important healer, from the aftereffects of the encounter with the second one, acting in a way that no Lakewalker had understood how to do, namely using a sharing knife on Dag's leg. In the third encounter, she was nearby when Rase, working under Dag's leadership, killed a young malice. In the fourth encounter, she encouraged her brother, Whit, to make the actual kill, and crafted the weapon that did the killing. That weapon included a sharing knife, already made and primed by Lakewalkers.
If Fawn is so capable, in spite of her short stature, her youth, and her lack of groundsense, there must be other farmers who also have great ability.
Another reason for Dag's pursuit of a better relationship is that Dag sees farmer abilities as equivalent to the Lakewalker's ability to manipulate ground. In the first book, Dag and Fawn watch glassblowers in action. Dag examines the ground of a bowl that a farmer craftsman has made, and finds that its ground is well made, even though the farmer is not aware of ground. Later, he describes farmer commerce -- ordering goods from hundreds of miles away, and paying for them with coin minted by remote towns -- as a sort of farmer magic.
Also, Dag is afraid that, if farmers aren't taught about malices, and ground, and sharing knives, a malice will emerge close to a large farmer town, and, in enslaving a large group of farmers, gain energy, ground and knowledge that will make it impossible to destroy. But, if they are taught what to look for, and how to react to malice threats, most of the townspeople could escape, and they could warn Lakewalkers early, so that the malice can be killed. This argument resonates most clearly with Lakewalkers.
I believe that Bujold wants us to see that Dag's most important reason for trying to begin a fusion of the two groups is that Dag sees their common humanity. He understands and respects the farmers he has grown to know. He sees their hurts as worth as much care as Lakewalker injuries, and believes that their medical needs cannot be ignored, as they have been. In spite of prohibitions against explaining ground, and sharing knives, to farmers, he begins to do just that, in part so that farmers won't see Lakewalkers as cannibals or ghouls.
In all this, Fawn supports him. There are farmer prejudices against Lakewalkers, too, and she tries to combat those. The two of them have begun to achieve their vision by the end of the books. The last scene takes place in the home that Dag and Fawn share with Fawn's brother, Whit, and his wife, Berry. Dag has become a healer of all who come to him, using his ability to manipulate ground to repair their injuries. He does not always succeed, but usually does. Barr, who entered in the third book as a self-centered, immature Lakewalker, comes to them. He confesses that he had a fling with a farmer girl, and that he has discovered that the result was a daughter. The girl's mother doesn't want anything to do with Barr. Barr is disturbed, and seeks advice from Dag and Fawn. They tell him to not give up on the possibility of helping out his daughter, and Barr is eased by that. Then Fawn's infant daughter, also a half-breed, the future of the two cultures, must be cared for, by both her parents, as Barr observes.
Bujold doesn't sugar-coat the difficulty of getting along with people of a different culture. She indicates that doing so must be done on a one-on-one basis, and that both groups must make changes in their way of thinking. I think she has hit the nail on the head.
Thanks for reading.
Monday, August 03, 2009
The Sharing Knife tetralogy, by Lois McMaster Bujold
I have recently read the Sharing Knife tetralogy, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Bujold is one of the few authors who have won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and also a Mythopoeic Award. The Sharing Knife books haven't won any of these awards, so far as I know, perhaps because they are low-key -- there aren't any major wars, there's no evil human wizard -- but they are well done, and I enjoyed reading them. They are fantasy literature. I expect to base my next few posts (except for a Sunspots) on these books.
I plan to summarize the books in this post, because some background will be necessary to set the stage for some additional posts. The four books are Beguilement (2006), Legacy (2007), Passage (2008) and Horizon (2009), all published by Eos (HarperColllins).
The setting appears to be North America, after some unspecified disaster, several centuries previous to the time of the books. The culture is pretty standard for sword and sorcery works, in that there is no gunpowder, and no internal combustion engines, and there is magic, or at least there are abilities and a sense that we don't possess. There are two types of humans. They speak the same language, exchange goods, can produce half-breed offspring, and live in close proximity. The Lakewalkers are taller, and live longer than the farmers. (Bujold does not capitalize "farmer," but does capitalize "Lakewalker.") The Lakewalkers can practice magic, although they don't call it that, and farmers can do little or none of this. The Lakewalkers usually see themselves as noble guardians of the ungrateful farmers. Farmers usually see Lakewalkers as proud and aloof, and, to some farmers, as cannibals and grave-robbers.
The main characters are Fawn, a farmer girl, who is eighteen, newly pregnant, and running away from home at the beginning of the series, and Dag, a Lakewalker who has lost most of one arm in a battle. He is over fifty. Bujold uses each of them about equally to establish her point of view, as the tale progresses.
To summarize the four books, Dag and Fawn fall in love, and marry, to some opposition from both groups, especially the Lakewalkers. They overcome four malices, the evil spirit beings that are the bad guys of the books. Dag decides that the two groups have been too separate, and should respect each other more, and work together. He and Fawn travel across hundreds of miles, first by boat, then by wagon train, and, in the process, begin to bring Lakewalkers and farmers more closely together.
What, you may ask, is a sharing knife? First, I need to discuss the concept of ground. Ground, in these books, is some sort of non-material property or essence that is possessed by everything in existence. Humans, including unborn ones, have ground, more than all other material living things. Animals, even insects, have ground, but not as much as humans. Plants, rocks, and even human-made artifacts have ground. Ground is said not be the same as a soul. Lakewalkers can sense the ground of other entities, whether they are animate, or even if they are underwater obstacles in a river. They can do this over a range, which varies from Lakewalker to Lakewalker. Dag's range is normally a little over a mile. That is exceptional, but not unprecedented. Lakewalkers can shield their grounds from other beings able to sense it -- which means that they also are curbing their own groudsense. They can also manipulate ground. Some of them are very good at this, and use this ability to aid their work as healers. When healing, a healer loses awareness of the visible physical world, but becomes aware of the parts of the body to be healed, in intimate detail, including, for example, blood vessels. A healer can connect blood vessels, and do other major repairs, through ground manipulation.
It is possible to rip the ground out of some organism, which kills it. (A similar operation can be done on an inanimate object, but is rarely done. If it were, the essential structure of that object would be destroyed.) When this is done, the victim's ground becomes a detectable addition to the ground of the manipulator, until fully assimilated. It is dangerous to rip the ground out of any complex and intelligent organism, because it may be difficult to assimilate that much ground.
It is possible to become ground-locked. That can happen during healing, when the healer, in effect, is unable to leave the state of heightened ground-senses required for healing, and return to the real physical world. If another person with skill at manipulating ground is not available to help, a ground-locked Lakewalker will die.
Another danger to farmers and Lakewalkers is that, when a Lakewalker does groundwork on a farmer, usually to heal, the farmer may become beguiled -- strongly emotionally attached to the Lakewalker, and desiring more groundwork by the Lakewalker, whether it is needed or not.
Now, I need to consider malices. A malice is a powerful evil being that lives by taking ground from other entities, including the very rocks and plants. An area where a malice has lived is unlivable, often for many years after the malice has been killed. Material that has had its ground taken out of it is gray and loses most of its features and structure, and an area of this type is called a blight. Blights are eventually healed by natural processes -- living things gradually invade and replace the blight. Malices live and grow by not only taking ground from other things, but by taking the attributes and abilities of vertebrates, including humans. They can gain the power of speech by capturing a human. They can use animals or humans as slaves, and are also able to change animals into an almost human form, making them more valuable slaves, in a ghastly metamorphosis. (They can also produce animals which are unlike anything normal, including extra-large wolflike beings, and creatures like bats, able to fly, but much larger, and with the power of speech.) These changed, or created beings are called mud men. They die quickly when their malice is killed. Malices can control the thought and actions of their slaves. Left unchecked, malices would destroy the world for all life. Malices seem to have originated during some sort of unspecified experiment, that went badly awry, probably connected to the disaster referred to above. This is apparently meant to have been a result of our own real civilization doing something stupid. They have been seeded throughout the land, and remain dormant, until they appear at unpredictable times and places. They start as sessile -- not moving. When they have grown for a while, they become mobile, taking their slave armies with them to better sources of ground, such as human settlements. Human children and the unborn have ground which malices find to be especially valuable.
A sharing knife is a device constructed by certain Lakewalker craftspeople. (Males and females are equal in both societies, or at least any position of leadership, or any craft, seems open to both sexes.) A sharing knife is made from one of the long bones of a dead Lakewalker. When another Lakewalker is about to die, he or she is, if possible, killed by such a knife, or commits suicide with a prepared knife. The death is with the consent of the dying person. Part of their ground goes into the knife, which, thus, has some part of two different Lakewalkers, and is both prepared, from a bone, and primed, with ground. A prepared and primed knife can be used to kill a malice, and is the only way this can be done. Malices do not die natural deaths. Groups of trained Lakewalkers patrol the entire land, as often and as thoroughly as possible. Each group must have at least one sharing knife. Because of these patrols, no malice has threatened to destroy the entire land. There have been malices that grew large, with large armies. As human populations get larger, the malice threat becomes more dangerous, as a malice might be able to capture the humans from a large town, and thus obtain lots of valuable ground, and a large army, which would make getting close enough to kill the malice difficult, perhaps even impossible. When possible, Lakewalker patrollers carry two sharing knives, one primed, to kill a malice, and one prepared, to be primed with their own death. The books do not consider the question of whether a sharing knife could be made from a farmer bone, or using a farmer's ground.
Lakewalkers use other weapons, including knives, swords, and bows and arrows.
In future posts, I hope to say more about the characters, and about religious aspects of these books. Thanks for reading.
The next post, on the theme of these books, is here. A later post, on the subject of ground (unique to these books) is here. A later post, on religion in the books, is here. The final post in the series, on how I found illustrations of important Christian ideas in the books, whether Bujold intended them or not, is here.
I plan to summarize the books in this post, because some background will be necessary to set the stage for some additional posts. The four books are Beguilement (2006), Legacy (2007), Passage (2008) and Horizon (2009), all published by Eos (HarperColllins).
The setting appears to be North America, after some unspecified disaster, several centuries previous to the time of the books. The culture is pretty standard for sword and sorcery works, in that there is no gunpowder, and no internal combustion engines, and there is magic, or at least there are abilities and a sense that we don't possess. There are two types of humans. They speak the same language, exchange goods, can produce half-breed offspring, and live in close proximity. The Lakewalkers are taller, and live longer than the farmers. (Bujold does not capitalize "farmer," but does capitalize "Lakewalker.") The Lakewalkers can practice magic, although they don't call it that, and farmers can do little or none of this. The Lakewalkers usually see themselves as noble guardians of the ungrateful farmers. Farmers usually see Lakewalkers as proud and aloof, and, to some farmers, as cannibals and grave-robbers.
The main characters are Fawn, a farmer girl, who is eighteen, newly pregnant, and running away from home at the beginning of the series, and Dag, a Lakewalker who has lost most of one arm in a battle. He is over fifty. Bujold uses each of them about equally to establish her point of view, as the tale progresses.
To summarize the four books, Dag and Fawn fall in love, and marry, to some opposition from both groups, especially the Lakewalkers. They overcome four malices, the evil spirit beings that are the bad guys of the books. Dag decides that the two groups have been too separate, and should respect each other more, and work together. He and Fawn travel across hundreds of miles, first by boat, then by wagon train, and, in the process, begin to bring Lakewalkers and farmers more closely together.
What, you may ask, is a sharing knife? First, I need to discuss the concept of ground. Ground, in these books, is some sort of non-material property or essence that is possessed by everything in existence. Humans, including unborn ones, have ground, more than all other material living things. Animals, even insects, have ground, but not as much as humans. Plants, rocks, and even human-made artifacts have ground. Ground is said not be the same as a soul. Lakewalkers can sense the ground of other entities, whether they are animate, or even if they are underwater obstacles in a river. They can do this over a range, which varies from Lakewalker to Lakewalker. Dag's range is normally a little over a mile. That is exceptional, but not unprecedented. Lakewalkers can shield their grounds from other beings able to sense it -- which means that they also are curbing their own groudsense. They can also manipulate ground. Some of them are very good at this, and use this ability to aid their work as healers. When healing, a healer loses awareness of the visible physical world, but becomes aware of the parts of the body to be healed, in intimate detail, including, for example, blood vessels. A healer can connect blood vessels, and do other major repairs, through ground manipulation.
It is possible to rip the ground out of some organism, which kills it. (A similar operation can be done on an inanimate object, but is rarely done. If it were, the essential structure of that object would be destroyed.) When this is done, the victim's ground becomes a detectable addition to the ground of the manipulator, until fully assimilated. It is dangerous to rip the ground out of any complex and intelligent organism, because it may be difficult to assimilate that much ground.
It is possible to become ground-locked. That can happen during healing, when the healer, in effect, is unable to leave the state of heightened ground-senses required for healing, and return to the real physical world. If another person with skill at manipulating ground is not available to help, a ground-locked Lakewalker will die.
Another danger to farmers and Lakewalkers is that, when a Lakewalker does groundwork on a farmer, usually to heal, the farmer may become beguiled -- strongly emotionally attached to the Lakewalker, and desiring more groundwork by the Lakewalker, whether it is needed or not.
Now, I need to consider malices. A malice is a powerful evil being that lives by taking ground from other entities, including the very rocks and plants. An area where a malice has lived is unlivable, often for many years after the malice has been killed. Material that has had its ground taken out of it is gray and loses most of its features and structure, and an area of this type is called a blight. Blights are eventually healed by natural processes -- living things gradually invade and replace the blight. Malices live and grow by not only taking ground from other things, but by taking the attributes and abilities of vertebrates, including humans. They can gain the power of speech by capturing a human. They can use animals or humans as slaves, and are also able to change animals into an almost human form, making them more valuable slaves, in a ghastly metamorphosis. (They can also produce animals which are unlike anything normal, including extra-large wolflike beings, and creatures like bats, able to fly, but much larger, and with the power of speech.) These changed, or created beings are called mud men. They die quickly when their malice is killed. Malices can control the thought and actions of their slaves. Left unchecked, malices would destroy the world for all life. Malices seem to have originated during some sort of unspecified experiment, that went badly awry, probably connected to the disaster referred to above. This is apparently meant to have been a result of our own real civilization doing something stupid. They have been seeded throughout the land, and remain dormant, until they appear at unpredictable times and places. They start as sessile -- not moving. When they have grown for a while, they become mobile, taking their slave armies with them to better sources of ground, such as human settlements. Human children and the unborn have ground which malices find to be especially valuable.
A sharing knife is a device constructed by certain Lakewalker craftspeople. (Males and females are equal in both societies, or at least any position of leadership, or any craft, seems open to both sexes.) A sharing knife is made from one of the long bones of a dead Lakewalker. When another Lakewalker is about to die, he or she is, if possible, killed by such a knife, or commits suicide with a prepared knife. The death is with the consent of the dying person. Part of their ground goes into the knife, which, thus, has some part of two different Lakewalkers, and is both prepared, from a bone, and primed, with ground. A prepared and primed knife can be used to kill a malice, and is the only way this can be done. Malices do not die natural deaths. Groups of trained Lakewalkers patrol the entire land, as often and as thoroughly as possible. Each group must have at least one sharing knife. Because of these patrols, no malice has threatened to destroy the entire land. There have been malices that grew large, with large armies. As human populations get larger, the malice threat becomes more dangerous, as a malice might be able to capture the humans from a large town, and thus obtain lots of valuable ground, and a large army, which would make getting close enough to kill the malice difficult, perhaps even impossible. When possible, Lakewalker patrollers carry two sharing knives, one primed, to kill a malice, and one prepared, to be primed with their own death. The books do not consider the question of whether a sharing knife could be made from a farmer bone, or using a farmer's ground.
Lakewalkers use other weapons, including knives, swords, and bows and arrows.
In future posts, I hope to say more about the characters, and about religious aspects of these books. Thanks for reading.
The next post, on the theme of these books, is here. A later post, on the subject of ground (unique to these books) is here. A later post, on religion in the books, is here. The final post in the series, on how I found illustrations of important Christian ideas in the books, whether Bujold intended them or not, is here.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Falling Free, by Lois McMaster Bujold
I recently read Falling Free, by Lois McMaster Bujold. The book, published in 1988 (Riverdale, NY: Baen) is part of the Vorkosigan saga. Miles Vorkosigan, the main character in that series, does not appear until about two centuries after the events in this book.
I last posted on this saga here. The saga is space opera, an often superficial type of fiction, but Bujold works in important ethical and moral issues. At least one character in the saga is a Christian.
In Falling Free (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1988), Bujold explains the origin of the quaddies, intelligent, capable humans with four arms, two of them replacing their legs, and some less obvious differences from normal humans, deliberately bred by GalacTech, so as to work in low or zero gravity. The plan is to use them as temporary labor, with GalacTech getting the pay for their work. (There are a few quaddie characters in subsequent books.) Leo Graf, an engineer, is sent to the Habitat, where they live, and discovers that they are not paid in any way (although they do have a place to stay, and food), that they are taught a distorted view of history, and that they are considered the property of the company that developed them, at least by the company. They are also told who to breed with, as parts of a breeding program, and who to breed with may be different for each child. Their babies may be taken from them, to be raised by normal human cartakers. All this is in the interest of quickly establishing a large breeding population.
There are characters in the book who believe that the production of the quaddies in the first place is a moral monstrosity. Graf, and some others, believe that their subsequent treatment is the moral monstrosity.
There is a sudden development -- scientists from Beta, a scientifically advanced civilization, have produced a new gravity-making device, which makes the quaddies obsolete. GalacTech decides to move the quaddies to a gravity world, and let them fend for themselves, or just kill them all.
Van Atta stopped abruptly, and backed up two screens on his vid. What had that said again?
Item: Post-fetal experimental tissue cultures. Quantity: 1000. Disposition: cremation by IGS Standard Biolab Rules. (293) Thus, some faceless person in GalacTech's General Accounting & Inventory Control has declared the quaddies, who are sentient, intelligent, moral agents, and biologically human, no more than "tissue cultures."
Graf decides to lead a quaddie escape to an asteroid belt. He has a little help from a man who has been doctor to the quaddies for many years, and a jump pilot helps them escape, because they are giving him the jump ship that they have taken. But the initiative is Graf's:
"This isn't crime. This is -- war, or something. Crime is turning your back and walking away."
"Not by any legal code I know of."
"All right then; sin."
"Oh, brother." Ti rolled his eyes. "Now it comes out. You're on a mission from God, right? Let me off at the next stop, please."
God's not here. Somebody's got to fill in. (161.) Leo thinks the last line, and he has, indeed, filled in for God, righting a monstrous wrong. Ti is going to be the pilot. Graf, like some other Bujold characters, is acting for a deity, doing God's work. He doesn't realize it, though.
The quaddies, since they have been oppressed, feel morally superior. This is a mistake, as one of them finds out. Silver felt that she had to use a weapon on an uncooperative jump pilot, or the quaddie escape wouldn't succeed. (She didn't kill him.) Her thoughts:
Was this the pleasure in power Van Atta felt, when everyone gave way before him? It was obvious what firing the weapon had done to the defiant pilot; what had it done to her? . . . So. Quaddies were no different than downsiders after all. Any evil they could do, quaddies could do too. If they chose. (199)
Bujold writes good books, well-written, and exciting, and she puts in moral and ethical, even sometimes religious questions.
Thanks for reading.
I last posted on this saga here. The saga is space opera, an often superficial type of fiction, but Bujold works in important ethical and moral issues. At least one character in the saga is a Christian.
In Falling Free (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1988), Bujold explains the origin of the quaddies, intelligent, capable humans with four arms, two of them replacing their legs, and some less obvious differences from normal humans, deliberately bred by GalacTech, so as to work in low or zero gravity. The plan is to use them as temporary labor, with GalacTech getting the pay for their work. (There are a few quaddie characters in subsequent books.) Leo Graf, an engineer, is sent to the Habitat, where they live, and discovers that they are not paid in any way (although they do have a place to stay, and food), that they are taught a distorted view of history, and that they are considered the property of the company that developed them, at least by the company. They are also told who to breed with, as parts of a breeding program, and who to breed with may be different for each child. Their babies may be taken from them, to be raised by normal human cartakers. All this is in the interest of quickly establishing a large breeding population.
There are characters in the book who believe that the production of the quaddies in the first place is a moral monstrosity. Graf, and some others, believe that their subsequent treatment is the moral monstrosity.
There is a sudden development -- scientists from Beta, a scientifically advanced civilization, have produced a new gravity-making device, which makes the quaddies obsolete. GalacTech decides to move the quaddies to a gravity world, and let them fend for themselves, or just kill them all.
Van Atta stopped abruptly, and backed up two screens on his vid. What had that said again?
Item: Post-fetal experimental tissue cultures. Quantity: 1000. Disposition: cremation by IGS Standard Biolab Rules. (293) Thus, some faceless person in GalacTech's General Accounting & Inventory Control has declared the quaddies, who are sentient, intelligent, moral agents, and biologically human, no more than "tissue cultures."
Graf decides to lead a quaddie escape to an asteroid belt. He has a little help from a man who has been doctor to the quaddies for many years, and a jump pilot helps them escape, because they are giving him the jump ship that they have taken. But the initiative is Graf's:
"This isn't crime. This is -- war, or something. Crime is turning your back and walking away."
"Not by any legal code I know of."
"All right then; sin."
"Oh, brother." Ti rolled his eyes. "Now it comes out. You're on a mission from God, right? Let me off at the next stop, please."
God's not here. Somebody's got to fill in. (161.) Leo thinks the last line, and he has, indeed, filled in for God, righting a monstrous wrong. Ti is going to be the pilot. Graf, like some other Bujold characters, is acting for a deity, doing God's work. He doesn't realize it, though.
The quaddies, since they have been oppressed, feel morally superior. This is a mistake, as one of them finds out. Silver felt that she had to use a weapon on an uncooperative jump pilot, or the quaddie escape wouldn't succeed. (She didn't kill him.) Her thoughts:
Was this the pleasure in power Van Atta felt, when everyone gave way before him? It was obvious what firing the weapon had done to the defiant pilot; what had it done to her? . . . So. Quaddies were no different than downsiders after all. Any evil they could do, quaddies could do too. If they chose. (199)
Bujold writes good books, well-written, and exciting, and she puts in moral and ethical, even sometimes religious questions.
Thanks for reading.
Friday, February 27, 2009
The Hallowed Hunt, by Lois McMaster Bujold
In previous posts, I have written about Lois McMaster Bujold's The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls.
The Hallowed Hunt is set in the same universe, some time before the other two books, and with no overlap in characters, but with the same theology. That theology involves five gods, apparently joint deities, with no one ascendant over the others. A principal feature of this religion is that, at death, five animals, one representing each of the gods, are brought to the body of the dead person. Usually, one of the five makes some gesture indicating that that particular god has chosen to take the spirit of that dead person unto him or herself. (Two of the gods are female.) The religion seems to be Universalist, or nearly so -- almost everyone is, at the end, united with one of the gods.
Another feature of this religion is that there are a few saints. A saint is a person who has experienced one of the gods -- seen and talked with this being, in some spirit world, and returned to more or less normal life. Saints are created by the will of the gods -- they call some people to themselves before they die, then send them back.
The practitioners of this religion believe that no spirit being, even a god, can exist in the world of matter without some living being, human or animal, who acts with and for the god. They also believe in free will -- it is possible to reject a relationship with a god, or to not respond to a command from a god.
In The Hallowed Hunt (New York: Harper Collins, 2005) another aspect of the religion is revealed. That is that, when a human or an animal dies, it is possible for a shaman to receive the spirit of that human or animal into one's own, thus becoming a combination of two (or more) spirits).
I won't give away much of the plot. I will say that the previous paragraph is important in it, and point out that the consequences of uniting with too many spirits, animal or human, and obtaining too much power, are, in the end, negative. One character who has done this, and, by doing so, survived for centuries, wants nothing more than final oblivion. I will also say that the book includes a love story. The two main characters are married in the end.
Bujold is a good read. The theology she has invented for this book, and the other two she has written, which have the same setting, is well thought out, and interesting. It's clearly not Christianity, though. I'll stick with One Triune God. She has written other books, which do not share this theology. At least one of them seems to have a Christian character.
Thanks for reading.
In a series posted later, beginning here, I have written about Bujold's four Sharing Knife novels, also fantastic literature.
The Hallowed Hunt is set in the same universe, some time before the other two books, and with no overlap in characters, but with the same theology. That theology involves five gods, apparently joint deities, with no one ascendant over the others. A principal feature of this religion is that, at death, five animals, one representing each of the gods, are brought to the body of the dead person. Usually, one of the five makes some gesture indicating that that particular god has chosen to take the spirit of that dead person unto him or herself. (Two of the gods are female.) The religion seems to be Universalist, or nearly so -- almost everyone is, at the end, united with one of the gods.
Another feature of this religion is that there are a few saints. A saint is a person who has experienced one of the gods -- seen and talked with this being, in some spirit world, and returned to more or less normal life. Saints are created by the will of the gods -- they call some people to themselves before they die, then send them back.
The practitioners of this religion believe that no spirit being, even a god, can exist in the world of matter without some living being, human or animal, who acts with and for the god. They also believe in free will -- it is possible to reject a relationship with a god, or to not respond to a command from a god.
In The Hallowed Hunt (New York: Harper Collins, 2005) another aspect of the religion is revealed. That is that, when a human or an animal dies, it is possible for a shaman to receive the spirit of that human or animal into one's own, thus becoming a combination of two (or more) spirits).
I won't give away much of the plot. I will say that the previous paragraph is important in it, and point out that the consequences of uniting with too many spirits, animal or human, and obtaining too much power, are, in the end, negative. One character who has done this, and, by doing so, survived for centuries, wants nothing more than final oblivion. I will also say that the book includes a love story. The two main characters are married in the end.
Bujold is a good read. The theology she has invented for this book, and the other two she has written, which have the same setting, is well thought out, and interesting. It's clearly not Christianity, though. I'll stick with One Triune God. She has written other books, which do not share this theology. At least one of them seems to have a Christian character.
Thanks for reading.
In a series posted later, beginning here, I have written about Bujold's four Sharing Knife novels, also fantastic literature.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Paladin of Souls is the second of a trilogy of books, by Lois McMaster Bujold. I have written about the first such book, in particular, I examined whether or not it was a Christian novel. (It's not, but it has some Christian elements.)
The first link in this post is to the Wikipedia article on the book. That article covers matters of plot, and I don't wish to deal with them more, except as it relates to a brief analysis of the theology of the books, particularly this one.
One aspect of the theology of the three books is that no spirit being, even a god, can do anything in the world of matter without some willing help from a human:
So. You dragged me here, whichever of You harries me. But you cannot force me through that door. Nor can you open it yourselves. You cannot lift so much as a leaf; bending iron or my will is a task equally beyond your capacities. (Paladin of Souls. New York: HarperCollins, 2003, p. 170) Ista, the main character, is thinking to the gods. Emphasis in original.
Ista comes to see that service, freely given, is a good thing: ". . . What can the gods give me?" His brows twitched up in an expression of remarkably disingenous goodwill. "Why, work, sweet Ista!" (p. 172) The Bastard (one of the five gods) speaking to Ista in a dream.
It follows that the free will of humans is quite strong.
Bujold is a good writer, and well worth reading. I'll stick to my own God, however, rather than a made-up set of them. Thanks for reading.
The first link in this post is to the Wikipedia article on the book. That article covers matters of plot, and I don't wish to deal with them more, except as it relates to a brief analysis of the theology of the books, particularly this one.
One aspect of the theology of the three books is that no spirit being, even a god, can do anything in the world of matter without some willing help from a human:
So. You dragged me here, whichever of You harries me. But you cannot force me through that door. Nor can you open it yourselves. You cannot lift so much as a leaf; bending iron or my will is a task equally beyond your capacities. (Paladin of Souls. New York: HarperCollins, 2003, p. 170) Ista, the main character, is thinking to the gods. Emphasis in original.
Ista comes to see that service, freely given, is a good thing: ". . . What can the gods give me?" His brows twitched up in an expression of remarkably disingenous goodwill. "Why, work, sweet Ista!" (p. 172) The Bastard (one of the five gods) speaking to Ista in a dream.
It follows that the free will of humans is quite strong.
Bujold is a good writer, and well worth reading. I'll stick to my own God, however, rather than a made-up set of them. Thanks for reading.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
For a decade or more, I read suggestions that Lois McMaster Bujold is an important science fiction author. I sampled one of the many books from her Vorkosigan saga several years ago, but dismissed it as space opera, and read no more of the books.
Sometime last year, I came upon Bujold's The Curse of Chalion. This is how. I was looking for Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winning books that I had not read, but which might be worthwhile to read. The Wikipedia article on The Curse of Chalion had this amazing statement: The Curse of Chalion is noted for its focus on religion and metaphysics. This is not only a novel about self-sacrifice and redemption, but also a piece of speculative theological fiction which closely examines the relationship between free will, fate, and divine intervention.
I have now read that book, and two sequels. The Wikipedia article is correct in its analysis. I have a post that considers the question of whether The Curse of Chalion is a Christian novel. The short answer is no. Nonetheless, I found it well written and interesting, and with some Christian themes, such as self-sacrifice. Well, said I, what about the Vorkosigan Saga? Am I missing something interesting? After all, stories from the series have won four Hugo awards and a Nebula award.
(As an aside, Bujold is in rare company, indeed, as an author writing in English who has won important awards for both science fiction and fantasy. I am aware of only two others, Ursula K. Le Guin and Elizabeth Moon, who belong in this company with Bujold.)
What about the Vorkosigan saga? It is space opera, in that the stories are played out on a grand scale, between solar systems. It is also space opera in that it is melodramatic, romantic, and involves warfare with powerful weapons. But it is more than that. The characters are well drawn. Miles Vorkosigan is the main character in most of the books, and he clearly wants to do good, and is clearly flawed -- among other things, he doesn't take orders well. He is also physically flawed, being extremely short, and with weak bone structure. There are some ethical issues raised, but they aren't raised very high. For example, is it right to use artificial wombs? Some characters think so, some don't. In the books I have read (about half of the series) such issues are minor. Political, romantic, and business decisions make up the main parts of the plots. Every now and then, some character will make fleeting reference to a god, or use God's name in vain, but no one seems serious about it, with one exception.
I found something that I didn't expect. One character, Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, who is the mother of Miles, is apparently meant, by Bujold, to be taken as a Christian. Here's my evidence:
. . . "I suppose -- I see myself. Or someone like myself. We're both looking for the same thing. We call it by different names, and look in different places. I believe he calls it honor. I guess I'd call it the grace of God. We both come up empty, mostly."
"Ah, yes. I recall from your file that you are some sort of theist," said the Emperor. "I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days."
(Barrayar, 1996 version, published as the second part of Cordelia's Honor. New York: Baen, p. 230. Emperor Ezar, who is dying, to Cordelia, about Aral Vorkosigan, her new husband.)
"Besides, your mother's religion grants some kind of good karma for visiting the sick and prisoners, and I hear you've been the two in one." (The Vor Game. 1990, Riverdale, New York: Baen, 103) Emperor Gregor, to Miles, about Cordelia. (See Matthew 25:31-40)
Does this make the saga Christian? I wouldn't say so, any more than having, say, a devout priest on a couple of episodes of Law and Order would make the series Christian. But it's nice that Bujold includes a Christian character, even though the evidence of her faith (unless I missed it) is scarce, indeed. There are a few references to prayer, or to a God, but these are never more than a sentence or two, except for the passages above. In Ethan of Athos, there is a reference to whether Ethan can absolve another character's sins (p. 333) Cee, that character, who is the result of biological engineering, thinks that he isn't human. Ethan sets him straight, however:
"So what is the test of humanity?"
"Well -- you have free will, obviously, or you could not be opposing your creators. Therefore you are not an automaton, but a child of God the Father, answerable to Him according to your abilities," Ethan catechized. (335)
Bujold deals with ethics relating to medical ethics, but they aren't allowed to get in the way of her stories, although sometimes her stories depend on them. In Falling Free, there is a race of humans with no legs and feet, but a second set of arms and hands in their place. Miles, Mystery & Mayhem, (Baen, 2001) combines her Cetaganda, Ethan of Athos, and "Labyrinth." Bujold wrote, in the afterword, that, although all three works deal with reproductive technology:
"Yet in all these different societies, the test of humanity comes out the same, and it has nothing to do with genetics. No one can be guilty of their own birth, no matter what form it takes. We need not fear our technology if we do not mistake the real springs of our humanity. It's not how we get here that counts; it's what we do after we arrive." (p. 502)
A Civil Campaign has genetic engineering of insects as an important feature. And, of course, Miles himself would not have been born without the use of an artificial womb. Some of the societies on the Hegen Hub use these, in some it is a matter of choice. At least one planetary society, Athos, is absolutely dependent on these devices, as this race is without females.
All that being said, I wouldn't say that Bujold explores the implications of biological technology so much that the books are mainly about it. And she doesn't explore the implications of some sort of alternate society as much as Ursula K. Le Guin did in The Left Hand of Darkness (which was about a planet where an individual could be either male or female in any reproductive cycle, according to mostly chance factors). But Bujold is well worth reading, and if we want to read about biotechnology, I guess there are more factual sources.
So, in sum, I'm glad I started the Vorkosigan books. I have read almost all of them, and hope to finish them some day.
Sometime last year, I came upon Bujold's The Curse of Chalion. This is how. I was looking for Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winning books that I had not read, but which might be worthwhile to read. The Wikipedia article on The Curse of Chalion had this amazing statement: The Curse of Chalion is noted for its focus on religion and metaphysics. This is not only a novel about self-sacrifice and redemption, but also a piece of speculative theological fiction which closely examines the relationship between free will, fate, and divine intervention.
I have now read that book, and two sequels. The Wikipedia article is correct in its analysis. I have a post that considers the question of whether The Curse of Chalion is a Christian novel. The short answer is no. Nonetheless, I found it well written and interesting, and with some Christian themes, such as self-sacrifice. Well, said I, what about the Vorkosigan Saga? Am I missing something interesting? After all, stories from the series have won four Hugo awards and a Nebula award.
(As an aside, Bujold is in rare company, indeed, as an author writing in English who has won important awards for both science fiction and fantasy. I am aware of only two others, Ursula K. Le Guin and Elizabeth Moon, who belong in this company with Bujold.)
What about the Vorkosigan saga? It is space opera, in that the stories are played out on a grand scale, between solar systems. It is also space opera in that it is melodramatic, romantic, and involves warfare with powerful weapons. But it is more than that. The characters are well drawn. Miles Vorkosigan is the main character in most of the books, and he clearly wants to do good, and is clearly flawed -- among other things, he doesn't take orders well. He is also physically flawed, being extremely short, and with weak bone structure. There are some ethical issues raised, but they aren't raised very high. For example, is it right to use artificial wombs? Some characters think so, some don't. In the books I have read (about half of the series) such issues are minor. Political, romantic, and business decisions make up the main parts of the plots. Every now and then, some character will make fleeting reference to a god, or use God's name in vain, but no one seems serious about it, with one exception.
I found something that I didn't expect. One character, Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, who is the mother of Miles, is apparently meant, by Bujold, to be taken as a Christian. Here's my evidence:
. . . "I suppose -- I see myself. Or someone like myself. We're both looking for the same thing. We call it by different names, and look in different places. I believe he calls it honor. I guess I'd call it the grace of God. We both come up empty, mostly."
"Ah, yes. I recall from your file that you are some sort of theist," said the Emperor. "I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days."
(Barrayar, 1996 version, published as the second part of Cordelia's Honor. New York: Baen, p. 230. Emperor Ezar, who is dying, to Cordelia, about Aral Vorkosigan, her new husband.)
"Besides, your mother's religion grants some kind of good karma for visiting the sick and prisoners, and I hear you've been the two in one." (The Vor Game. 1990, Riverdale, New York: Baen, 103) Emperor Gregor, to Miles, about Cordelia. (See Matthew 25:31-40)
Does this make the saga Christian? I wouldn't say so, any more than having, say, a devout priest on a couple of episodes of Law and Order would make the series Christian. But it's nice that Bujold includes a Christian character, even though the evidence of her faith (unless I missed it) is scarce, indeed. There are a few references to prayer, or to a God, but these are never more than a sentence or two, except for the passages above. In Ethan of Athos, there is a reference to whether Ethan can absolve another character's sins (p. 333) Cee, that character, who is the result of biological engineering, thinks that he isn't human. Ethan sets him straight, however:
"So what is the test of humanity?"
"Well -- you have free will, obviously, or you could not be opposing your creators. Therefore you are not an automaton, but a child of God the Father, answerable to Him according to your abilities," Ethan catechized. (335)
Bujold deals with ethics relating to medical ethics, but they aren't allowed to get in the way of her stories, although sometimes her stories depend on them. In Falling Free, there is a race of humans with no legs and feet, but a second set of arms and hands in their place. Miles, Mystery & Mayhem, (Baen, 2001) combines her Cetaganda, Ethan of Athos, and "Labyrinth." Bujold wrote, in the afterword, that, although all three works deal with reproductive technology:
"Yet in all these different societies, the test of humanity comes out the same, and it has nothing to do with genetics. No one can be guilty of their own birth, no matter what form it takes. We need not fear our technology if we do not mistake the real springs of our humanity. It's not how we get here that counts; it's what we do after we arrive." (p. 502)
A Civil Campaign has genetic engineering of insects as an important feature. And, of course, Miles himself would not have been born without the use of an artificial womb. Some of the societies on the Hegen Hub use these, in some it is a matter of choice. At least one planetary society, Athos, is absolutely dependent on these devices, as this race is without females.
All that being said, I wouldn't say that Bujold explores the implications of biological technology so much that the books are mainly about it. And she doesn't explore the implications of some sort of alternate society as much as Ursula K. Le Guin did in The Left Hand of Darkness (which was about a planet where an individual could be either male or female in any reproductive cycle, according to mostly chance factors). But Bujold is well worth reading, and if we want to read about biotechnology, I guess there are more factual sources.
So, in sum, I'm glad I started the Vorkosigan books. I have read almost all of them, and hope to finish them some day.
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Is Lois McMaster Bujold's The Curse of Chalion a Christian novel?
Lois McMaster Bujold is an important author of fantastic literature. She has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. She has written both science fiction and fantasy literature. I recently read her The Curse of Chalion (New York: HarperCollins, 2001) a fantasy novel. There are miracles, there are no spaceships, the weapons are swords and spears, and there is no explicit real location in the book. In this post, I attempted to summarize the novel. See here for the Wikipedia article on it.
The title of this post asks whether The Curse of Chalion is a Christian novel. In order to answer that question, I need to know what makes a novel Christian. Over three years ago -- a long time in blog years -- in a fit of near-hubris, I attempted to answer that question. My answer was complex, and not completely satisfying, even to me. Others certainly might have good reason to disagree with me. There are several insightful comments, some of them from practicing Christian authors. (Of books, that is, not blogs.)
All that being said, I apply my own flawed instrument to the question. I proposed these criteria, in the characters and/or plot:
1) A Christ-figure.
2) Belief in important Christian doctrine.
3) Praying to a monotheistic divine being.
4) Expressing a relationship with God.
5) Consciousness of supernatural guidance.
6) Explicit rejection of personified evil.
1) Is there a Christ-figure in Curse? It depends, of course, on what is meant by a Christ-figure. I believe that Cazaril is such a figure. He willing offers himself to die to keep Iselle, the young lady he tutors and is responsible for, from marriage to an evil man. He also willingly sacrifices himself to keep a young man, a fellow galley slave, from being punished or killed. Cazaril could have died in both of these situations, and, in fact, he appears to have been saved from death in both of these cases by divine intervention. Or, actually, in both these cases, and another one, Cazaril is resurrected.
2) Is there belief in important Christian doctrine? (Such as, for example, the trinity, or substitutionary atonement) I didn't see such.
3) There is prayer, by several characters, including Cazaril. These characters clearly believe that their prayers could be answered. In some cases, they are answered. However, there's a problem. The prayers are not to a single God. As this Wikipedia article details, there are five deities in Bujold's sub-creation. That's four too many.
4) With the same caveat as for the previous item, there are characters who know that they have some sort of relationship with one of the deities. There are at least five such characters, including Cazaril.
5) Cazaril is conscious of supernatural guidance. In fact, this may be said to be the main theme of the book -- does Cazaril have the capacity to choose to disobey that guidance? He does not seem to have ever disobeyed it, and the question of whether he could have is not clearly answered, at least to me. There are discussions about the matter between the characters.
6) Cazaril, and other characters, reject evil, as personified especially in the dy Jironal brothers. Cazaril is presented with important moral choices. He rejects lucrative offers to betray Iselle, his pupil and ward. He tries to help people he doesn't have to help. He cares for others, and loves them unselfishly.
So, in summary, is The Curse of Chalion a Christian novel? Not quite, I'm afraid. The five-fold god theology makes that impossible. But it's a good book, and it gives an example of a main character, and some others, who seem to be wholly unselfish, without being preachy or unreal. I'm glad I read it, and I expect to read it again. There are two more books written about the same setting, and I expect to read them, too. Thank you, Ms. Bujold!
I have also written posts on specific works of fantastic literature, including novels by Patricia McKillip, Elizabeth Moon (here and here), J. K. Rowling and Juliet Marillier, attempting to ask the same question about them. For these works, at least, I have not come to a firm conclusion, but I believe that the attempt was of use, at least to me. I found important Christian elements in works by all of these writers, including Marillier, who is a self-confessed Druid.
An on-line listing of important authors of fantastic fiction, giving information about their religious affilation, does not list Marillier, McKillip, Moon, or even Rowling. In my opinion, all of these are important enough to be added, but it's not my web page. The author does list Bujold, but is not aware of information on her religious affiliation. I have none, either.
Thanks for reading.
On October 5th, I corrected some ambiguity in point 5 of my discussion of the novel.
* * * * *
On April 2, 2009, E Stephen Burnett wrote an essay, asking questions about how far a Christian author could go in writing fiction which has a God who is significantly different from the Christian God, and whether a Christian could legitimately create a fictional character who is in defiance of God. I posted tentative answers to these questions, which are related to the subject of the post above, on April 13, 2009.
The title of this post asks whether The Curse of Chalion is a Christian novel. In order to answer that question, I need to know what makes a novel Christian. Over three years ago -- a long time in blog years -- in a fit of near-hubris, I attempted to answer that question. My answer was complex, and not completely satisfying, even to me. Others certainly might have good reason to disagree with me. There are several insightful comments, some of them from practicing Christian authors. (Of books, that is, not blogs.)
All that being said, I apply my own flawed instrument to the question. I proposed these criteria, in the characters and/or plot:
1) A Christ-figure.
2) Belief in important Christian doctrine.
3) Praying to a monotheistic divine being.
4) Expressing a relationship with God.
5) Consciousness of supernatural guidance.
6) Explicit rejection of personified evil.
1) Is there a Christ-figure in Curse? It depends, of course, on what is meant by a Christ-figure. I believe that Cazaril is such a figure. He willing offers himself to die to keep Iselle, the young lady he tutors and is responsible for, from marriage to an evil man. He also willingly sacrifices himself to keep a young man, a fellow galley slave, from being punished or killed. Cazaril could have died in both of these situations, and, in fact, he appears to have been saved from death in both of these cases by divine intervention. Or, actually, in both these cases, and another one, Cazaril is resurrected.
2) Is there belief in important Christian doctrine? (Such as, for example, the trinity, or substitutionary atonement) I didn't see such.
3) There is prayer, by several characters, including Cazaril. These characters clearly believe that their prayers could be answered. In some cases, they are answered. However, there's a problem. The prayers are not to a single God. As this Wikipedia article details, there are five deities in Bujold's sub-creation. That's four too many.
4) With the same caveat as for the previous item, there are characters who know that they have some sort of relationship with one of the deities. There are at least five such characters, including Cazaril.
5) Cazaril is conscious of supernatural guidance. In fact, this may be said to be the main theme of the book -- does Cazaril have the capacity to choose to disobey that guidance? He does not seem to have ever disobeyed it, and the question of whether he could have is not clearly answered, at least to me. There are discussions about the matter between the characters.
6) Cazaril, and other characters, reject evil, as personified especially in the dy Jironal brothers. Cazaril is presented with important moral choices. He rejects lucrative offers to betray Iselle, his pupil and ward. He tries to help people he doesn't have to help. He cares for others, and loves them unselfishly.
So, in summary, is The Curse of Chalion a Christian novel? Not quite, I'm afraid. The five-fold god theology makes that impossible. But it's a good book, and it gives an example of a main character, and some others, who seem to be wholly unselfish, without being preachy or unreal. I'm glad I read it, and I expect to read it again. There are two more books written about the same setting, and I expect to read them, too. Thank you, Ms. Bujold!
I have also written posts on specific works of fantastic literature, including novels by Patricia McKillip, Elizabeth Moon (here and here), J. K. Rowling and Juliet Marillier, attempting to ask the same question about them. For these works, at least, I have not come to a firm conclusion, but I believe that the attempt was of use, at least to me. I found important Christian elements in works by all of these writers, including Marillier, who is a self-confessed Druid.
An on-line listing of important authors of fantastic fiction, giving information about their religious affilation, does not list Marillier, McKillip, Moon, or even Rowling. In my opinion, all of these are important enough to be added, but it's not my web page. The author does list Bujold, but is not aware of information on her religious affiliation. I have none, either.
Thanks for reading.
On October 5th, I corrected some ambiguity in point 5 of my discussion of the novel.
* * * * *
On April 2, 2009, E Stephen Burnett wrote an essay, asking questions about how far a Christian author could go in writing fiction which has a God who is significantly different from the Christian God, and whether a Christian could legitimately create a fictional character who is in defiance of God. I posted tentative answers to these questions, which are related to the subject of the post above, on April 13, 2009.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Bujold's The Curse of Chalion: The Story
Some weeks ago, having read all the fantastic literature that I really wanted to, and not having any books that I really wanted to re-read, I looked for guidance as to something new to read. Going over the winners of various yearly prizes in fantastic literature, I found, rather to my amazement, the following in the Wikipedia: "This is not only a novel about self-sacrifice and redemption, but also a piece of speculative theological fiction which closely examines the relationship between free will, fate and divine intervention."
The article was on The Curse of Chalion, (New York: HarperCollins, 2001) by Lois McMaster Bujold. I decided that I would read that novel, and I am glad that I did. I have already quoted the novel in two posts, one on the effects of war.
I plan to consider the question of whether the book is a Christian novel in a future post. First, I need to summarize the plot.
Cazaril is the main character. When we first meet him, he is clearly poor, and in bad physical shape. Two events begin to change his fortune, and, eventually, his health. First, a soldier mistakenly gives him a valuable coin, enabling him to go to Vallenda, the nearest city, and pay for new clothes and a haircut, so that he may present himself to the castle of the local royalty. Secondly, he finds a man who has died, and is able to honorably obtain his clothes (the body is burned). He also finds out that the man has died as a result of what is called death magic.
As the book progresses, we learn that Cazaril used to be a page in Vallenda, that he rose to a responsible position in the army of Chalion, the country, and that Dondo dy Jironal, a man evil in almost every possible way, saw to it, with his brother, Martou dy Jironal, that Cazaril was turned over to Chalion's enemies as a galley slave, which accounts for his poverty and his physical condition. At one point, he was beaten nearly to death, because he defended a young galley slave from the slavemasters. His back carries the scars of that beating.
We also learn that death magic isn't exactly magic. It is possible, in this sub-creation, to pray to one of the five gods of Chalion that someone else die, and, as part of the answer to that prayer, you will die, too. Cazaril learns more about this from a notebook left in the dead man's clothes -- the dead man died after praying that an evil man would die. Not just anyone can be killed by this sort of prayer. Only evil people may be.
For more on the religion of Bujold's fictional universe, see this article.
Cazaril presents himself at court, and is given the position of tutor and secretary to Iselle, a teenaged girl who is half-sister to the current Roya, or king, by Iselle's grandmother, who is the ruler of Vallenda. Betriz, Iselle's companion, also becomes his pupil.
After a time, Cazaril and his charges are called to the capital city, where Cazaril is responsible for them. Iselle's younger brother is also required to go, but he is not Cazaril's charge. The court is tainted by evil. The Roya is under a curse, and has ceded almost all authority to Martou dy Jironal, his chancellor. Cazaril conducts himself wisely. There is no decision he makes, in the entire book, to advance himself at the expense of others, or to choose evil over good. He does everything he can to promote Iselle's well-being. Iselle and Betriz learn from him, and they, too, are wise and good, which is difficult, under the circumstances of living in an evil court. Betriz queries Cazaril about what is wrong, and he tells her that a royal court needs a moral center.
The chancellor persuades the king to have Iselle marry his brother Dondo. In addition to being a drunkard, cruel, a womanizer, and evil in other ways, he is also over twice Iselle's age. She does not want to marry him. Finally, in desperation, Cazaril decides that the only thing that he can do to stop the wedding is to pray that Dondo will die, and that he, Cazaril, will die simultaneously. In other words, he prays for death magic. Dondo does die, but, Cazaril does not, an unprecedented event. However, Dondo's soul, and the demon that took his life, are encapsulated in a tumor in Cazaril's abdomen. Somehow, this event gives Cazaril spiritual discernment found only in a few, and he sees that not only is the Roya cursed, but Iselle and other members of her family are, too.
Iselle decides, correctly, that she must take action to forestall any other evil marriages arranged by the chancellor. Her younger brother dies, as a result of an evil action suggested to him by Dondo, before Dondo's death. Iselle takes the body to Vallenda for burial, and sends Cazaril to Ibran, a nearby kingdom, to try to arrange a marriage with the heir of that kingdom. Cazaril succeeds in persuading the young man's father that this would be a good marriage, in part because it turns out that the prospective groom was the young slave that Cazaril tried to protect. Cazaril didn't know of the young man's position -- he was incognito at the time.
Cazaril is told that the only way that the curse can be lifted is if someone is willing to die three times to lift it.
Martou dy Jironal, seeing Iselle escaping from his influence, is enraged, and tries to kill Cazaril. When his sword enters his body, Cazaril has a vision of one of the gods of Chalion. But the sword thrust releases Dondo's soul, and the demon, and the demon kills chancellor Martou dy Jironal.
Cazaril has died three times, and been brought back to life by a supernatural intervention each time -- once as a galley slave, once when he prayed that Dondo would die, and once when Martou stabbed him. The curse is lifted, Iselle and her new husband begin what appears to be a just and good reign (her brother's action has led to the Roya's death) and Betriz insists that she wants to marry Cazaril (who has wanted to do this). A storybook ending.
A question that occurs, to Cazaril, or to his friends, at various points in the story, is the question of his free will. Has he been chosen to lift the curse, and start Iselle's reign, or did he do this on his own initiative? Did he have any choice in the matter? The question is not completely resolved, but it is clear that serving the gods has its costs, as well as its rewards.
The book is well written, with interesting characters and situations. I found it especially interesting because of its religious nature. In other words, I found the quotation from the Wikipedia article on the book, given above, to be accurate.
Thanks for reading.
The article was on The Curse of Chalion, (New York: HarperCollins, 2001) by Lois McMaster Bujold. I decided that I would read that novel, and I am glad that I did. I have already quoted the novel in two posts, one on the effects of war.
I plan to consider the question of whether the book is a Christian novel in a future post. First, I need to summarize the plot.
Cazaril is the main character. When we first meet him, he is clearly poor, and in bad physical shape. Two events begin to change his fortune, and, eventually, his health. First, a soldier mistakenly gives him a valuable coin, enabling him to go to Vallenda, the nearest city, and pay for new clothes and a haircut, so that he may present himself to the castle of the local royalty. Secondly, he finds a man who has died, and is able to honorably obtain his clothes (the body is burned). He also finds out that the man has died as a result of what is called death magic.
As the book progresses, we learn that Cazaril used to be a page in Vallenda, that he rose to a responsible position in the army of Chalion, the country, and that Dondo dy Jironal, a man evil in almost every possible way, saw to it, with his brother, Martou dy Jironal, that Cazaril was turned over to Chalion's enemies as a galley slave, which accounts for his poverty and his physical condition. At one point, he was beaten nearly to death, because he defended a young galley slave from the slavemasters. His back carries the scars of that beating.
We also learn that death magic isn't exactly magic. It is possible, in this sub-creation, to pray to one of the five gods of Chalion that someone else die, and, as part of the answer to that prayer, you will die, too. Cazaril learns more about this from a notebook left in the dead man's clothes -- the dead man died after praying that an evil man would die. Not just anyone can be killed by this sort of prayer. Only evil people may be.
For more on the religion of Bujold's fictional universe, see this article.
Cazaril presents himself at court, and is given the position of tutor and secretary to Iselle, a teenaged girl who is half-sister to the current Roya, or king, by Iselle's grandmother, who is the ruler of Vallenda. Betriz, Iselle's companion, also becomes his pupil.
After a time, Cazaril and his charges are called to the capital city, where Cazaril is responsible for them. Iselle's younger brother is also required to go, but he is not Cazaril's charge. The court is tainted by evil. The Roya is under a curse, and has ceded almost all authority to Martou dy Jironal, his chancellor. Cazaril conducts himself wisely. There is no decision he makes, in the entire book, to advance himself at the expense of others, or to choose evil over good. He does everything he can to promote Iselle's well-being. Iselle and Betriz learn from him, and they, too, are wise and good, which is difficult, under the circumstances of living in an evil court. Betriz queries Cazaril about what is wrong, and he tells her that a royal court needs a moral center.
The chancellor persuades the king to have Iselle marry his brother Dondo. In addition to being a drunkard, cruel, a womanizer, and evil in other ways, he is also over twice Iselle's age. She does not want to marry him. Finally, in desperation, Cazaril decides that the only thing that he can do to stop the wedding is to pray that Dondo will die, and that he, Cazaril, will die simultaneously. In other words, he prays for death magic. Dondo does die, but, Cazaril does not, an unprecedented event. However, Dondo's soul, and the demon that took his life, are encapsulated in a tumor in Cazaril's abdomen. Somehow, this event gives Cazaril spiritual discernment found only in a few, and he sees that not only is the Roya cursed, but Iselle and other members of her family are, too.
Iselle decides, correctly, that she must take action to forestall any other evil marriages arranged by the chancellor. Her younger brother dies, as a result of an evil action suggested to him by Dondo, before Dondo's death. Iselle takes the body to Vallenda for burial, and sends Cazaril to Ibran, a nearby kingdom, to try to arrange a marriage with the heir of that kingdom. Cazaril succeeds in persuading the young man's father that this would be a good marriage, in part because it turns out that the prospective groom was the young slave that Cazaril tried to protect. Cazaril didn't know of the young man's position -- he was incognito at the time.
Cazaril is told that the only way that the curse can be lifted is if someone is willing to die three times to lift it.
Martou dy Jironal, seeing Iselle escaping from his influence, is enraged, and tries to kill Cazaril. When his sword enters his body, Cazaril has a vision of one of the gods of Chalion. But the sword thrust releases Dondo's soul, and the demon, and the demon kills chancellor Martou dy Jironal.
Cazaril has died three times, and been brought back to life by a supernatural intervention each time -- once as a galley slave, once when he prayed that Dondo would die, and once when Martou stabbed him. The curse is lifted, Iselle and her new husband begin what appears to be a just and good reign (her brother's action has led to the Roya's death) and Betriz insists that she wants to marry Cazaril (who has wanted to do this). A storybook ending.
A question that occurs, to Cazaril, or to his friends, at various points in the story, is the question of his free will. Has he been chosen to lift the curse, and start Iselle's reign, or did he do this on his own initiative? Did he have any choice in the matter? The question is not completely resolved, but it is clear that serving the gods has its costs, as well as its rewards.
The book is well written, with interesting characters and situations. I found it especially interesting because of its religious nature. In other words, I found the quotation from the Wikipedia article on the book, given above, to be accurate.
Thanks for reading.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Cazaril, from Bujold's The Curse of Chalion, on a proper royal court
"Does this court . . ." Betriz frowned, clearly trying to frame unfamiliar thoughts, "Does this court have a center?"
Cazaril vented a wary sigh. "A well-conducted court always has someone in moral authority. . . . (Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion, New York: HarperCollins, 2001, page 137.)
By "court," here, Cazaril means the people around the ruler, not a court with a judge.
Thanks for reading.
* * * * *
I have gotten several spam comments on this post, so I'm no longer allowing comments on it.
Cazaril vented a wary sigh. "A well-conducted court always has someone in moral authority. . . . (Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion, New York: HarperCollins, 2001, page 137.)
By "court," here, Cazaril means the people around the ruler, not a court with a judge.
Thanks for reading.
* * * * *
I have gotten several spam comments on this post, so I'm no longer allowing comments on it.
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