-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Two, p. 27.
Japan is a modernized, industrialized, Westernized country that is not even nominally Christian. The Emperors are believed to be descended from the Goddess. An American or European author wanting to imagine what it might be like to visit an extrasolar but terrestroid and inhabited planet, e.g., Merseia or Ythri, might:
visit and/or study Japan;
highlight everything that seems different or "alien";
extrapolate the aliennesses while downplaying any human commonalities.
In Poul Anderson's Technic History, both the Merseian Roidhunate and the Ythrian New Faith are monotheist. "What is alien about that?," readers might ask. However, to give the aliens gods and temples would be equally anthropocentric. We soon learn that the Merseian and Ythrian monotheisms are distinctive and in no way compatible with any Terrestrial religions.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Commenting on your last paragraph: Exactly! I do expect non human alien races to have their own religions, ideas, and beliefs about God and "gods." And we do see a good bit about the interesting non human Ivanhoan religion seen in Anderson's "The Three Cornered Wheel."
Sean
The Japanese legends around the Great Kami have an odd feeling -- one of extreme age. It's an immensely old and sophisticated civilization, but the founding legends feel eerily primitive, like a window into an ancient shamanist world.
Mr Stirling,
You can say that again! Another ancient, alien-seeming religion is Jainism but its morality of harmlessness sounds up-to-date.
Paul.
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