Deities in Fantasy Worlds

Recently T. Kingfisher published the fourth book in her "Saint of Steel" series, PALADIN'S FAITH. (The others are PALADIN'S GRACE, PALADIN'S STRENGTH, and PALADIN'S HOPE.) Also in the same setting: The Clocktaur War duology (CLOCKWORK BOYS and THE WONDER ENGINE) and the stand-alone novel SWORDHEART. These works may be broadly described as sword-and-sorcery romances in a late medieval or an early steampunk milieu.

The premise of "Saint of Steel" is that the deity in the series title died, from a cause so far unknown. His paladins felt his violent death. The few who survived the cataclysmic trauma struggle to carry on with their lives despite a void where the bond with their god should be. Two gifts of their divine patron remain, the "voice" that empowers them to persuade anyone of almost anything (provided the paladin sincerely means what he or she says) and a battle frenzy called the "black tide," which grants them superhuman strength and speed but leaves scars on their souls. The surviving paladins have been taken under the protection of the temple of the White Rat.

The stories in this fictional universe feature three principal deities, although others are mentioned: The Saint of Steel, whose warriors fight evil and protect its victims; the pragmatic White Rat, whose temples are noted for exercising charity and correcting injustices, many of whose devotees are lawyers or investigative accountants; and the Dreaming God, whose servants specialize in exorcizing demons. As illustrated by a scene at the climax of PALADIN'S FAITH when the Saint of Steel speaks to a large crowd through the mouth of a character, everyone knows and takes for granted the existence of the gods. In the face of incontrovertible evidence, nobody disbelieves in supernatural beings. If there are any "flat-earth atheists" in this world, we don't meet them:

Flat-Earth Atheist

The background of the Dungeons and Dragons games is similar, but even more so. Everybody knows that multiple gods exist and that clerics acquire their magic spells by praying to their patron deities.

What would it be like to live in a world where the existence of deities is a routinely accepted truth? Faith in the sense of intellectual belief would be unnecessary and nonexistent. You don't have that type of "faith" in something definitely known. No matter how powerful, divine entities would be as mundane a fact as the sun and the moon. Faith in the sense of trust, of course, would be an entirely different matter. Granny Weatherwax in Terry Pratchett's Discworld doesn't approve of believing in gods; it only encourages them.

The rare person who experiences an epiphany like the characters in the aforementioned scene would presumably react with awe. Most ordinary people, lacking either a personal divine encounter or Granny Weatherwax's strength of character, would probably regard the gods as powers to be approached with caution, placating them but not getting too deeply involved. Rather like living next to a forest infested by semi-tame tigers, maybe.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Posthumous Unfinished Writings and Whether Characters Have a Life of Their Own

Last week I read TERRY PRATCHETT: A LIFE WITH FOOTNOTES, by Rob Wilkins, who worked as the Discworld creator's personal assistant for many years, right up to the end. Two points in this biography distressed me, as a reader, writer, and occasional literary critic. (Well, aside from knowing in advance about the sad conclusion, Pratchett's premature death from a rare form of Alzheimer's disease.) I reacted most strongly to the ceremonious crushing of the hard drive from Pratchett's computer, purposely obliterating his unfinished works. Pratchett ordered that his unpublished writings should stay unpublished and that there would be no posthumous Discworld fiction from other authors. Of course, an author has a right to express that wish and have it obeyed by his heirs. But utterly destroying every trace of those uncompleted stories? Very well, as per the author's instructions, don't publish them. However, I shudder at the thought of the loss to SF and fantasy scholarship. A library could have preserved them in an archival collection for academic study of Pratchett's work.

Some readers of Harper Lee's prequel to (or first draft of) TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD declared it should not have been published, that it only tarnished the reputation of her classic novel. "That isn't the point," I mentally screamed at the time. The point is the value of that prior work to scholars of her writing. Consider the abundance of posthumous publications and unfinished works by C. S. Lewis available to fans and academics. I would hate to have missed all that. And then there's the case of J. R. R. Tolkien, whose son spent decades compiling, editing, and releasing Tolkien's many surviving stories and fragments. What a loss to scholars and readers the withholding of that material would have been.

In one of my second-tier favorites of Stephen King's novels, LISEY'S STORY, I of course sympathize with the fictional bestselling author's widow, who has been constantly pestered since his death by academics demanding access to his manuscripts and other files. I also feel for those fictional scholars, though. While reading the book for the first time, I did wonder what the heck was taking her so long to get around to the obviously necessary task of releasing his papers for study. Granted, most of the people making those demands were portrayed as pushy, presumptuous, and often downright contemptuous of Lisey herself. I trust Pratchett scholars wouldn't act that way, and I mourn that we'll never know the contents of those destroyed files. If publication had been allowed, I would have paid a considerable sum to read even a fragment of a story about Susan Sto Helit as headmistress of her old school (one example mentioned in the biography).

Second and less important was a casual remark of Pratchett's quoted in passing, which nevertheless I felt like protesting. Once a fan asked him what Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork city Watch was doing in between two particular novels. Pratchett answered, "Nothing. I made him up." If a fictional character becomes vivid enough for readers to imagine he or she has a life outside the printed pages, isn't that a good thing? Pratchett himself certainly must have understood the fanfic-creating impulse, for he admits to perpetrating fanfiction at least once: As a teenager, he composed a PRIDE AND PREJUDICE rewrite set in the world of LORD OF THE RINGS. (It involved orcs.) Not only fanfic but also professional fiction attests to the irresistible desire to expand on the imagined lives of favorite characters.

I know of at least one novel speculating on what Heathcliff did in his years away from Wuthering Heights and how he made his fortune. A recently published book explores the wartime service of the March girls' father during the early chapters of LITTLE WOMEN. So many classic works leave gaps and unanswered questions. What was the full backstory of Bertha, the mad wife in JANE EYRE, and was she actuallly insane before Rochester locked her in an upstairs suite (not, as commonly said, the attic) with only one companion (THE WIDE SARGASSO SEA)? What happened to Ishmael after his rescue at the end of MOBY-DICK. (Jane Yolen recently published a YA novel spun off from that question.) What's the story of Captain Ahab's wife, fleetingly alluded to in Melville's book? There's a novel about her. In A CHRISTMAS CAROL, how do the events look from Marley's viewpoint? Several works have addressed that question. Why did young Ebenezer Scrooge's father detest him? (Ebenezer's mother couldn't have died in giving birth to him, as one classic film states, because his sister Fan is younger; if Scrooge senior was that bitter about his wife's death, he wouldn't have remarried.) Why is Ebenezer too "poor" to marry Belle right away? His father must have been prosperous, since he enrolled Ebenezer in an apparently respectable boarding school and eventually sent a carriage to bring him home; what happened to the family money? What happened to Fan's husband, the never-mentioned father of Scrooge's nephew? What is Tiny Tim's illness, which has to be something chronic but ultimately fatal and yet curable by nineteenth-century medicine? At the time of Scrooge's death in the future scenes, where is his nephew? It's hard to believe Fred, as portrayed in the present-day scenes, would ever give up on Uncle Ebenezer.

These are the kinds of questions deeply involved fans of stories ask. Speculating on the answers is a vital part of the fun of being a reader.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Meaning of Money

What gives money (or any "moneylike" form of currency) its value? What makes us willing to accept it in exchange for concrete items of value? Cory Doctorow dissects this conundrum in his latest LOCUS column:

Moneylike

After an attempt to define money, he explores its origin. He rejects the familiar hypothesis of its having been invented to solve the cumbersome difficulties of barter, labeling this a "folk-tale." Instead of a "bottom-up" model of the creation of media of exchange, he describes money as a "top-down" system imposed by governments, which required the existence of currency to collect taxes in order to provision their armies. Where, then, does the money itself come from? It's generated by governments, and problems can occur if the state issues either too much or too little of it. Doctorow illustrates and analyzes this model at length in an extended parable. Items other than official currency can be "moneylike," such as gift certificates. Elaborating on the concept of "moneylike" media of exchange, he goes into detail about how cryptocurrency works, especially with reference to internet ransomware.

Robert Heinlein includes a discussion of what constitutes value in STARSHIP TROOPERS, where the narrator's high-school teacher refutes the claim that labor alone creates value. Heinlein's TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE contains an amusing scene in which Lazarus Long, acting as the banker for a frontier planet colony, destroys a batch of paper money, to the horror of the man he's dealing with. Lazarus has to explain that money doesn't consist of a physical thing with objective value, but a consensus reality people agree on. As long as Lazarus keeps a record of the serial numbers from the bills he gets rid of, there's no need to preserve the bills themselves (which pose a theft risk).

In one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, the capital city adopts the Golem Standard. What could serve as a better backing for currency than objects that are almost impossible to steal, counterfeit, or destroy (especially since they're sapient and can defend themselves)?

In the Star Trek universe, conflicting information about the future economy appears in the various series. In the original series, Starfleet personnel must get paid somehow, as shown by Uhura's purchase of a tribble in "The Trouble with Tribbles." Outside of Starfleet, the existence of money is confirmed in "Mudd's Women" and the episode in which Spock poses as a Vulcan merchant. Supposedly by the time of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION the ubiquity of replicators has made the Federation a post-scarcity society with no need for money. Yet on the fringes (as in DEEP SPACE NINE) and outside the Federation's borders, as made clear by the Ferengi veneration of profit, money exists. Gold-pressed latinum as a medium of exchange is explained on the premise that it's one of the few substances incapable of being replicated. (We have to assume dilithium crystals must fall into the same category, or else obtaining them wouldn't be such a vital preoccupation in the original series.) It seems reasonable that luxury goods in the form of items not produced by replicators, such as the Picard family's wines, would require a medium of exchange for their sale. Or are we to assume creators of such products make them for the sheer joy of the process and give them away? Regardless of post-scarcity abundance, widespread actions like that would imply a radical change in human nature that we don't witness among the Terrans of the Star Trek universe in any other behavioral category.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Anti-Santas

You've probably heard of Krampus, the horned, hairy, bipedal monster from Austrian legend who prowls in December, mainly on Saint Nicholas Day (December 6), and stuffs misbehaving children into his sack to drag them to Hell:

The Krampus Legend

He even has his own website (which appears not to have been updated recently, since the calendar of festive events refers to 2015):

Krampus.com

The Jungian shadow of Santa Claus has other traditional representatives, however. While we joke about naughty children getting coal from Santa instead of presents, those scary Yuletide figures often take over the punishment task, allowing Santa to remain the good guy. Belsnickel, a fur-clad sidekick of Santa in Germany and among German immigrants in Pennsylvania, does play a dual role. He carries both switches to beat bad children and candy for good children. Similarly, another Christmas companion from Germany, Knecht Ruprecht, gives treats to good children but switches and coal to bad ones. He may also beat the naughty kids with the bag of ashes he carries. In the Netherlands, Zwarte Piet (Black Pete, referring mainly to his sooty appearance) whips bad children with a birch rod or carries them off in his sack. Joulupukki, the Yule Goat of Finland, is sometimes portrayed as an ugly creature who frightens children.

In THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS, an entertaining, in-depth exploration of how the true old-fashioned Christmas (which would look to us like a blend of Thanksgiving, Halloween, and New Year's Eve) was converted in the nineteenth century to the child-centered family holiday we know, author Stephen Nissenbaum analyzes the origins and purpose of Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" (aka "The Night Before Christmas"). Nissenbaum draws striking line-by-line parallels between Moore's poem and "The Day of Doom," written by a Massachusetts clergyman in the seventeenth century and still popular in the early nineteenth. The major difference between the two works is that the poem about Saint Nicholas includes no threats of "doom" or "judgment." The "jolly old elf" offers only gifts and good cheer, no coal or switches for naughty children. Christmas was being domesticated.

Traditions of anti-Santas bring to mind THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, the movie in which Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, fascinated by the idea of Christmas but not fully understanding it, tries to appropriate the holiday because he thinks it should be more like Halloween. Likewise, in Terry Pratchett's fantasy novel HOGFATHER, when the existence of the Hogfather (the Discworld equivalent of Santa Claus) is threatened, Death steps up to save Hogswatchnight by temporarily filling the role of his fellow anthropomorphic personification. Not surprisingly, Death handles the job in rather eccentric ways. I especially like the conclusion of the novel, in which the Hogfather reverts to his primal persona as a nature deity in animal form, and only saving his life can ensure that the sun will rise at the winter solstice.

At the end of that climactic scene, Death insists that if the Hogfather had not been saved, the sun would not have risen. Susan, Death's granddaughter, asks what would have happened instead. In his customary all-caps dialogue, Death replies, "A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD."

Happy winter holiday season to all!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Survival Through Storytelling

Recently I came across an ad for a book subtitled something like, "How to survive hard times by telling stories." I can't find it again, so I don't know the title, author, or specific subject matter. (Google and Amazon didn't help because the terms are so general.) Not knowing leaves me free to speculate about what that phrase means. To me, it suggests that we cope with difficult experiences by shaping them into narratives that discover purpose in the seeming randomness of the ups and downs of our lives.

We human beings are storytelling creatures. We share jokes, urban legends, and episodes from the daily news. If we're enthusiastic about a book or movie, we often can't wait to rave about it to fellow fans. Think of a small child trying to recite the plot of a film, each sentence starting with "and then. . . ." Everybody enjoys telling others about experiences they've lived through, good or bad, although some people do it more skillfully than others. Every family has tales passed down from parents, older siblings, and other relatives. Memories get polished into anecdotes retold and embellished over the decades and generations. Two of the world's major religions, Judaism and Christianity, have their roots in stories (the Exodus from Egypt and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, respectively).

As C. S. Lewis mentions somewhere, we can find "escape" in literature by reading even the most depressing or tragic work of fiction, because it provides a temporary distraction from our own mundane troubles. Moreover, stories impose order on the untidy incidents of everyday life, in which no sequence of events has a definite beginning or end. Narrative makes sense of the world. As writers are often warned, the argument "but it really happened" can't justify a farfetched scene in a novel. Reality doesn't have to be believable or logical; fiction does.

I'm reminded of my favorite Terry Pratchett passage, this often quoted dialogue between Death and his granddaughter in HOGFATHER:

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.”

Off topic, RE Halloween: Vampire fans might enjoy my duology TWILIGHT'S CHANGELINGS, starring a vampire-human hybrid psychiatrist:

Twilight's Changelings

Another good introduction to my vampire series is the stand-alone romance EMBRACING DARKNESS:

Embracing Darkness

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt