Writing and belief: a stray realisation

[la_marquise]

I've just realised that a key theme in my writing -- apart from water, which literally gets everywhere -- is rationalists and non-believers discovering that the irrational and the weird are real and can affect them.
I have no idea why. I'm not particularly religious/spiritual in the formal sense (though I may be superstitious and I do talk to saints and trees on occasion. Also to the late and loved Caspian cat). I wasn't brought up with any kind of faith. But it's there in Living with Ghosts, particularly through the characters of Thiercelin and Joyain. It's in quite a few of my short stories ('The Whale's Daughter, certainly; 'Coldrush'; 'Clocks'; to some extent in 'Seabourne') and in the various sections of the ongoing, unfinished Gaheris saga.
What's this about? Should I be worried? Is this a sign of Dangerous Fluffiness or WooWoo, a weake girly non-science-yness? Or is it an artefact of a background in, amongst the history, social anthropology, which leads me always to look at the stories cultures tell about themselves, their origins and their environment. I tend to find fantasy novels which either lack reference to beliefs of any kind, or import default cardboard ones, very unsatisfactory. (And somewhere someone must have written a story about J******h's W******s in their mission starship, banging on the doors of new colony worlds.) I tend to be much more convinced by books where the author has clearly thought through how and what peoples believe -- Violette Malan's The Sleeping God, glass_mountain's Children of the Shaman, freda_writes's Dark Cathedral, to list a few. It's about world-building and depth and texture.
And yet, none of that explains this writing tic I seem to have, this 'more things in heaven and earth' -ishness that I seem to be returning to, over and over.

Comments

[pennski.livejournal.com]

Interesting! Depth is very important to you and the fact that we are motivated by more than the mundane and practical is something that *should* be in lots of fiction.

Bother - brain is incoherent - hope this makes sense.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

Don't know that I can explain it, but it's one of the things I like about your writing. But here's a thought -- can you have sensawunda without 'more things in heaven and earth'?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I don't think you can, no. But the cool kids do it with science.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

With my lifelong SF and fantasy reader hat on, I say yes, I think so; with my professional scientist on, I add that the sensawunda inherent in the cooler edges of the purely rational aspects of the world we live in are sufficient to my finding this a thing worth doing with my life.

With my aspiring writer hat on, if it will balance atop the other two, I note that, while magic-as-science has been done well a few times, magic-as-science that feels the same sort of exciting and awe-inspiring as real cutting edge science is rare enough that I gave up and am closing on 70,000 words into doing it myself, though that particular project is back-burnered right now.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

(And somewhere someone must have written a story about J******h's W******s in their mission starship, banging on the doors of new colony worlds.)

I did very briefly interpret this as "Jonah's Whalers", and am now much taken with the notion of interplanetary whales, and the men who hunt them, and cutting them open to find living creatures within, transporting themselves between the stars...

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I would definitely read that!

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

You know, one of the odd things there is that Ian Watson's novel The Jonah Kit postulates a universe where God (of some sort) has been proven to exist, but that it created our universe as a sort of by-blow and hasn't even noticed it. Everyone (including the whales) immediately believes this (I mean, what sort of scientific evidence is going to convince a Young Earth Creationist???) and then everyone goes into despair and commits suicide.

I think it was meant to be satire, but the mind really does boggle.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure I've read that space whales being hunted story, more years ago than I like to think. I can sort of see the cover in my head...

[andrewducker]

Could it be that you wish there was more on heaven and earth...?

I mean, I'm strongly agnostic, and functionally an atheist, but I think it would be great (in some ways) if the world was magical.

[woolymonkey.livejournal.com]

Exactly what I thought. A kind of wishing for magical stuff that has actual supporting evidence, because then it would be ok to believe in it in a good, rational scientific way.
I have a reading tic for stories where people encounter weird supernatural stuff and just get on and deal with it in a very pragmatic, practical way.

[anef.livejournal.com]

I don't think it would be great. I think it would be horrid and scary.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

Hmm. And here, rationalists and non-believers can still enjoy ghost stories and be affected by them. Not in a way that changes their beliefs, but thinking on it, what would it take to do that? And is that something (one of many things) you explore with your characters, finding their tipping point?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Possibly, yes. I am engaged in a perpetual discussion with myself about what and how much I believe, so it makes sense that it would spill over.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

I think we don't necessarily consciously choose what our subconscious has decided to wrestle with.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Isn't this inherent in the whole fantasy concept? You start writing about a world wherein magic of some kind does exist; worldbuilding demands also that faith exists; at some point, you are going to wonder whether or not that faith is based on something more than wishful thinking. Where dragons are real, why would the gods not be?

And if you have unbelievers, there are better things to do than shun them. They can't be let walk blindly through the novel, where veils exist to be dropped and epiphanies enacted.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Yeees... but I avoid magic as much as possible, and when it crops up, it ends to relate to the religion/irrational rather than standing alone.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Not necessary. At least, I have never found it so. Magic can be treated as a form of science.

[ms-cataclysm.livejournal.com]

Would the J W starships have to travel in pairs ?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I think so, yes!

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I like books where the world has both faith and rationalism present; this seems to me a more balanced type of world building than wholly one or the other.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Indeed - except that where faith can be demonstrated true, then rationalism finds itself suddenly on shaky ground...

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The question this suggests to me, fwiw, is whether what matters is the actual irrationality/weirdness of whatever is doing the confronting, or the nature of the confrontation ?

OK, that's not as clear as I hoped, so to put it another way; if the weirdness being confronted is actually following a rationally explicable paradigm of its own, but in ways that the person in question has absolutely no idea of and experiences as entirely weird and irrational, does that feel to have the same sort of weight to you ?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

the weirdness being confronted is actually following a rationally explicable paradigm of its own, but in ways that the person in question has absolutely no idea of and experiences as entirely weird and irrational
Pretty much this is what I do, but in the context that the observer has heard of such things and knows they aren't real... but they are, but not in the ways he/she imagined. SO yes, what you are saying makes perfect sense to me. With the rider that I don't expect to provide -- or have my characters provide -- an absolutely correct answer at the end, only a good-enough answer.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I don't believe magic exists, but I can read and write about it. Same with faith or gods.

I am a militant atheist, but one of my favourite fantasy novels is Lilith.

I have never climbed a mountain in my life, yet, somehow or other, my characters often find themselves halfway up one - so much so that it has been remarked on far too often.

I am interested in magic that is not about gods or faith, but that is another form of science - or rather, about magic treated scientifically. (I hate to say this, but Orson Scott Card's Alvin books do this while at the same time retelling the Mormon experience. Books can do more than one thing at once!)

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I seem to be interested, on some level, in how people explain things to themselves, and how they justify themselves. Or something like that. And it comes out in stuff about ghosts and elemental forces.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

That was a key point in my story "The Monsters We Defy", in which it turned out that yes, the natives were right, and if you operate on the sick child a demon will show up and kill you.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I'd like to read that: it sounds intriguing.

[uk-sef.livejournal.com]

It's an inevitability of you writing fantasy rather than science fiction (or even factual stuff!). You know it isn't real and that others will know it isn't real; so you cope with that by writing in characters who find out that it *is* real.

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

Yes, and you put it so much better.

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

In fiction, if there is magic or other woo-woo, then I take it as part of the fictional universe, which is not my own. That's...all there is to it, really. I think this theme is just your preferred way (since you write fantasy) of illustrating the classic theme in fiction of people finding out that their world is bigger than they thought it was. I cannot quite see Thiercelin as Huck Finn, but it's much the same sort of thing.

In real life, if a phenomenon is sharing the universe with me, perceptible to my (non-malfunctioning) senses, then I'd take it as being as much part of the natural world as I am. Or to put it in non-rational terms: an entity perceptible to me is an entity on the same wheel as I am. The appearance of an unexplainable phenomenon would not "prove" that whatever religion is an accurate representation of the universe or that there is such a thing as the "supernatural". It would just show that something exists. And if something exists, then why is it not as natural as anything else?

As a side issue, I've noticed that the English-language debate about faith (a term of art in itself) and rationality is perhaps inevitably usually conducted entirely within the rigid mental paradigms imposed by monocultural monotheism. I won't bang on about this, but will merely point it out and remark that as usual, it's not that binary.

Also, I am that I am and require no justification for my existence.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Yes: we are horribly mired in our history when it comes to faith and I find that unbalancing sometimes. That may be another thing that's getting into my writing. Thank you.