Lunarians need a source of energy - antimatter - whereas elves just need to know the right spells. Poul Anderson's creative versatility and literary skills enabled him to construct, with apparent ease, fictional narratives based on either of these two very different sets of premises. Fantasies can assume either polytheism or medieval monotheism. Sf features characters who at least believe either in diverse monotheisms or in alternative religious metaphysics. Norse and other deities can appear as fictional characters in novels or short stories. The One God of several well known scriptural traditions intervenes less frequently but
can be there when needed.
Thus, the content of religious beliefs is at least a major background issue in Poul Anderson's works. For what it is worth, my most recent foray into theology, an attempt to improve on an earlier version, and now entitled "Prophecy And Contemplation," is here.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
A but oddly, perhaps, I don't see many strongly depicted Protestant characters in Anderson's stories. Two I do recall being that Lutheran minister in OPERATION CHAOS and the captain of the "Eleonora Christine" in TAU ZERO. Most clergy I recall seeing in his stories were Catholics,
Heinlein, alas, seemed to have thought Protestant ministers a pack of Elmer Gantrys. He seemed to have been esp. hostile to evangelical Protestants.
Ad astra! Sean
I can depict any religion sympathetically... 8-).
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have noticed that! Albeit you made an exception for the abominable cult of the Peacock Angel in THE PESHAWAR LANCERS. And you soon made it plain how ghastly that revival of the Aztec religion was in "Ancestral Voices" and "The Sixth Sun," two of your fairly few shorter works.
Ad asrtra! Sean
Well, those were the religions of the villains of the piece!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True, the idea being that truly nasty villains, if they have any faiths, will have even nastier and even more villainous religions.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, the Russians in that universe underwent such overwhelming trauma -- and survived only by cannibalism -- that their culture was permanently 'reset' into abominations.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I remember that! In THE PESHAWAR LANCERS the agony and despair of the Fall in the 1870's a Russian Orthodox priest concluded God is not truly God, the "true" God was Satan, and that life/existence was vile and loathsome, good was evil and evil was good, etc. Albeit Yasmin told Athelstan King and her other new friends that the reigning Tsar, however loudly he prayed to Satan in public, he was not eager to meet him, and that he wanted to leave a functioning Russian Empire to his sons and grandsons.
Hmmm, maybe by the time of PESHAWAR there were a few, very secret, Russians who were very secretly dissatisfied with their horrid faith? They could not all have been so depravedly devout as Count Ignatieff!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yeah. It's a dysfunctional religion, except in the circumstances of the Fall.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolutely! It's insane to cling to cannibalism, and to devise a religion around that and the worship of Satan.
Ad astra! Sean
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