books in which the universe is not what you thought
I have, since childhood, made it a point of honor to accept an author's work on the terms it is given. In fact, it may not be so much a point of honor as my natural direction as an audience.
For instance: in reading the Narnia books, Aslan was clearly the deity of that universe; and reading further, it became clear that Lewis was saying, without putting it explicitly into words, "When you meet up with Jesus, you're going to be meeting up with Aslan."
I became an agnostic somewhere around fourth grade, when I realized that once everyone had believed in Zeus & Co.; why shouldn't everybody believe something quite different a thousand years from now? It was unclear to me why this particular rock in the stream was stable for the foot to land upon. And I was always quite a child for stability. (When I thought about college, I'd think, "I want to learn a subject that will be as true centuries from now as it is today. I don't want to learn something whose template will be replaced with something better later on.")
I'm not sure I ever found that elusive subject. But my attitude toward books was, and remains, quite the opposite. I understood that in the universe of the Narnia books, God existed, and it was the God Lewis later described in very practical terms, as less a sparkly shower of grace and more reaching down from Heaven with strong hands to make or destroy.
Every book of fiction, whatever the subject, points to a coherent universe created by the author. Events happen in such-and-such a way; people behave according to principles you may disagree with, but which are consistent with what the author believes reality to be (or sometimes, doesn't believe but wishes to sentimentally portray). Movies and television, group creations though they are, partake of the same sensibility. I once had a conversation at a writers' party in which I tried to describe this, saying, "When Richard Burton and Jean Simmons head off to the arena at the end of The Robe, they're right, because in that universe they're going to be martyrs and have an eternal reward in heaven."
"What about in this universe?" one writer asked warily.
"A painful and pointless death," I said.
I stopped watching the prison drama Oz after a while, because while I loved the writing, it gradually became clear to me that that universe was the grim product of a cruel god (Tom Fontana). It wasn't just the prisoners whose bodies, along with their most sensitive emotions and identities were specifically tormented; you had the sense that every person in that world, even those outside the prison you hadn't met, led desperate lives of greater or lesser pain.
My understanding of the rules changes as I move from simulation to simulation. (You may have heard there’s a theory that we’re all living in a simulation, perhaps created by an artist who is himself living in a simulation.) Here in the audience I am comfortable as a citizen of the multiverse. I don't entirely understand, to be honest, how else you can enjoy a piece of art. (Though clearly people do.) Once, in a discussion of Tolkien, someone took him to task for making such a big deal about Aragorn's bloodline and why it should make him any worthier than anybody else. I responded, a little taken aback, that I'd always assumed that in Tolkien's universe having a special ancestry mattered in a physical way -- that all that stuff about the blood of Numenor meant that certain people really did have abilities and strengths others didn't. Nobility and bloodline went together and meant something real. Of course, in our world, at this point in history, any such idea would be rightfully offensive. I'm not sure I was able to convey my sense of a difference between the reality of Tolkien's universe and the reality of, well, reality.
Some books put the idea of a different reality's mindset into ruthless practice, so nobody misses it. You enter these worlds and you learn pretty quickly to put down one standard and pick up another. Aliette de Bodard's Obsidan and Blood novels, for instance. When I picked up the first one, I thought, "Well, this is going to be interesting. A story from the pov of an Aztec priest? How is the author going to meet this challenge?" Because, of course, what the Aztec priests did horrifies us. Mass slaughter in the service of religious delusions. For all our talk of multiculturalism, like everybody else we believe that there are aspects of culture throughout human history that "they got wrong." And this one is impossible to paint in a good light. Estimates vary, but at the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, between 10,000 and 80,400 people were sacrificed over the course of four days. At the top of the pyramid there were four tables, arranged so that victims could be conveniently slid down the sides of the temple. The number of people killed each year could be as high as a quarter of a million, including one in five children. There's just no way to pretty this up.
You can't think about it without wondering, "How did they get there?" How did they convince themselves, step by step, getting in deeper and deeper, that they had to murder so many? Samuel Delaney wrote a novel about a generational starship in which the people become obsessed with ritual, with replicating the duties they were taught and assigning a religious meaning to them, becoming hostile to anyone who objected. The logs of the ship later show execution after execution.
We're capable of this sort of thing, we humans, because we've done it - it’s simply a matter of degree and of what to modern human minds is the wastefulness of the carnage. And while I understand such horror lurks in our DNA, and I know the Aztecs fell prey to a potential we all share, I thought, "Good luck to any author hoping to make a priest sympathetic to modern-day readers."
So, yes, it's impossible to paint this wholesale killing in a good light. In our universe. What if we were in a universe in which everything the Aztecs believed was objectively true? What if these were in fact the rules of that universe, and mass sacrifice was necessary to keep the world from ending? Then it becomes the price of preserving all those other children -- of preserving humanity. Which is only what their citizens believed, after all. And we in the audience would forgive these characters willingly if we shared their belief. Perhaps this is not morally fair of us, but that's the way it works.
I enjoy the Obsidian and Blood novels on their own terms -- and their terms are made ruthlessly clear to all.
And then there's Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman, which quite took me by surprise. Having read Those Across the River, I knew he had a poetic sensibility and could write slowly unfolding, character-centric horror, and I thought I was in for more of the same. But this is almost whimsical, in a Stephen King-like way. The story begins in 1348, in a France ravaged by the Black Death, and follows Thomas, knight and disgraced war veteran, who links up with a young orphan girl. It's all interesting and quite realistic... until it isn't. Until things start to happen. And gradually you begin to realize that this is a universe in which medieval belief systems were true. Where Bosch-like grotesqueries wander the countryside, waiting in swollen rivers or animating church statues. Where corpses may be re-animated to entice you from your duty. Where devils are neither evil at its most banal nor glittering lords of darkness, but sadistic creatures who hate you, with the all-encompassing hate of someone who, say, despises women or those of another race or anyone who fits their yardstick of irrevocable contempt. (The way they talk to humans, when they're not troubling to hide -- it's more than sarcasm, and I'm not sure there's a term for it in the English language; a sort of enhanced speech, brightly saying things that are untrue and you both know are untrue. It rang familiar; it's a hatred that yearns to inflict harm.)
And they're smarter than you.
Bosch, the road to Hell:
I referenced Bosch specifically, because both the demons on Earth and those met during the protagonist's unforgettable sojourn in Hell recall the fascination and horror of the abnormal that Bosch evoked. (And what a fully realized Hell, by the way, not one of those creations that palms you off with "an eternity of boredom" or even "other people." And a Hell realized not only in its physical and psychological torments, but in its medieval notion of sin; among other things, the protagonist is made to suffer in an artistically appropriate fashion for each time he took the lord's name in vain.)
And after all this, the book manages to reconcile the strict medieval judgment of the soul with love and redemption. I only wish I knew what became of Hell's doorkeeper.
Before I go, I share this charming marginal threat:
For instance: in reading the Narnia books, Aslan was clearly the deity of that universe; and reading further, it became clear that Lewis was saying, without putting it explicitly into words, "When you meet up with Jesus, you're going to be meeting up with Aslan."
I became an agnostic somewhere around fourth grade, when I realized that once everyone had believed in Zeus & Co.; why shouldn't everybody believe something quite different a thousand years from now? It was unclear to me why this particular rock in the stream was stable for the foot to land upon. And I was always quite a child for stability. (When I thought about college, I'd think, "I want to learn a subject that will be as true centuries from now as it is today. I don't want to learn something whose template will be replaced with something better later on.")
I'm not sure I ever found that elusive subject. But my attitude toward books was, and remains, quite the opposite. I understood that in the universe of the Narnia books, God existed, and it was the God Lewis later described in very practical terms, as less a sparkly shower of grace and more reaching down from Heaven with strong hands to make or destroy.
Every book of fiction, whatever the subject, points to a coherent universe created by the author. Events happen in such-and-such a way; people behave according to principles you may disagree with, but which are consistent with what the author believes reality to be (or sometimes, doesn't believe but wishes to sentimentally portray). Movies and television, group creations though they are, partake of the same sensibility. I once had a conversation at a writers' party in which I tried to describe this, saying, "When Richard Burton and Jean Simmons head off to the arena at the end of The Robe, they're right, because in that universe they're going to be martyrs and have an eternal reward in heaven."
"What about in this universe?" one writer asked warily.
"A painful and pointless death," I said.
I stopped watching the prison drama Oz after a while, because while I loved the writing, it gradually became clear to me that that universe was the grim product of a cruel god (Tom Fontana). It wasn't just the prisoners whose bodies, along with their most sensitive emotions and identities were specifically tormented; you had the sense that every person in that world, even those outside the prison you hadn't met, led desperate lives of greater or lesser pain.
My understanding of the rules changes as I move from simulation to simulation. (You may have heard there’s a theory that we’re all living in a simulation, perhaps created by an artist who is himself living in a simulation.) Here in the audience I am comfortable as a citizen of the multiverse. I don't entirely understand, to be honest, how else you can enjoy a piece of art. (Though clearly people do.) Once, in a discussion of Tolkien, someone took him to task for making such a big deal about Aragorn's bloodline and why it should make him any worthier than anybody else. I responded, a little taken aback, that I'd always assumed that in Tolkien's universe having a special ancestry mattered in a physical way -- that all that stuff about the blood of Numenor meant that certain people really did have abilities and strengths others didn't. Nobility and bloodline went together and meant something real. Of course, in our world, at this point in history, any such idea would be rightfully offensive. I'm not sure I was able to convey my sense of a difference between the reality of Tolkien's universe and the reality of, well, reality.
Some books put the idea of a different reality's mindset into ruthless practice, so nobody misses it. You enter these worlds and you learn pretty quickly to put down one standard and pick up another. Aliette de Bodard's Obsidan and Blood novels, for instance. When I picked up the first one, I thought, "Well, this is going to be interesting. A story from the pov of an Aztec priest? How is the author going to meet this challenge?" Because, of course, what the Aztec priests did horrifies us. Mass slaughter in the service of religious delusions. For all our talk of multiculturalism, like everybody else we believe that there are aspects of culture throughout human history that "they got wrong." And this one is impossible to paint in a good light. Estimates vary, but at the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, between 10,000 and 80,400 people were sacrificed over the course of four days. At the top of the pyramid there were four tables, arranged so that victims could be conveniently slid down the sides of the temple. The number of people killed each year could be as high as a quarter of a million, including one in five children. There's just no way to pretty this up.
You can't think about it without wondering, "How did they get there?" How did they convince themselves, step by step, getting in deeper and deeper, that they had to murder so many? Samuel Delaney wrote a novel about a generational starship in which the people become obsessed with ritual, with replicating the duties they were taught and assigning a religious meaning to them, becoming hostile to anyone who objected. The logs of the ship later show execution after execution.
We're capable of this sort of thing, we humans, because we've done it - it’s simply a matter of degree and of what to modern human minds is the wastefulness of the carnage. And while I understand such horror lurks in our DNA, and I know the Aztecs fell prey to a potential we all share, I thought, "Good luck to any author hoping to make a priest sympathetic to modern-day readers."
So, yes, it's impossible to paint this wholesale killing in a good light. In our universe. What if we were in a universe in which everything the Aztecs believed was objectively true? What if these were in fact the rules of that universe, and mass sacrifice was necessary to keep the world from ending? Then it becomes the price of preserving all those other children -- of preserving humanity. Which is only what their citizens believed, after all. And we in the audience would forgive these characters willingly if we shared their belief. Perhaps this is not morally fair of us, but that's the way it works.
I enjoy the Obsidian and Blood novels on their own terms -- and their terms are made ruthlessly clear to all.
And then there's Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman, which quite took me by surprise. Having read Those Across the River, I knew he had a poetic sensibility and could write slowly unfolding, character-centric horror, and I thought I was in for more of the same. But this is almost whimsical, in a Stephen King-like way. The story begins in 1348, in a France ravaged by the Black Death, and follows Thomas, knight and disgraced war veteran, who links up with a young orphan girl. It's all interesting and quite realistic... until it isn't. Until things start to happen. And gradually you begin to realize that this is a universe in which medieval belief systems were true. Where Bosch-like grotesqueries wander the countryside, waiting in swollen rivers or animating church statues. Where corpses may be re-animated to entice you from your duty. Where devils are neither evil at its most banal nor glittering lords of darkness, but sadistic creatures who hate you, with the all-encompassing hate of someone who, say, despises women or those of another race or anyone who fits their yardstick of irrevocable contempt. (The way they talk to humans, when they're not troubling to hide -- it's more than sarcasm, and I'm not sure there's a term for it in the English language; a sort of enhanced speech, brightly saying things that are untrue and you both know are untrue. It rang familiar; it's a hatred that yearns to inflict harm.)
And they're smarter than you.
Bosch, the road to Hell:
I referenced Bosch specifically, because both the demons on Earth and those met during the protagonist's unforgettable sojourn in Hell recall the fascination and horror of the abnormal that Bosch evoked. (And what a fully realized Hell, by the way, not one of those creations that palms you off with "an eternity of boredom" or even "other people." And a Hell realized not only in its physical and psychological torments, but in its medieval notion of sin; among other things, the protagonist is made to suffer in an artistically appropriate fashion for each time he took the lord's name in vain.)
And after all this, the book manages to reconcile the strict medieval judgment of the soul with love and redemption. I only wish I knew what became of Hell's doorkeeper.
Before I go, I share this charming marginal threat: