la_marquise | Writing and belief: a stray realisation

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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'?

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

to me, one of the things about science is that it explains things. And the things that science can't explain? those are the 'more things in (isn't there a 'your' in there somewhere?) heaven and earth' parts. I mean, I know that the biologists can explain all kinds of things about how my body works. I know that they can explain 'why' in the sense of the mechanics, or even give sensible reasons for some things, e.g., the 'fight or flight' response and its connection to adrenaline bursts. But get to the questions of *why* why, like why four fingers, or such variation in human bodies, when cows and pigeons are pretty much the same? I'm not entirely sure science can give truly satisfactory answers.

That tends to be my feeling also. But I suppose I've imbibed the notion that those writers who are all with the science are some how more meaningful. Or so0mething. Faith is neither a popular nor a routinely accepted subject for sf and fantasy, and most kinds of faith manifested therein tend to be dismissed with little thought by many critics. Why that matters, and why I don't still with my own views, I know not!

I wouldn't think of myself as being particularly religious, and I love science and scientific explanations for things. But when I get down to it, I am always pulled toward the whole prime mover thing. Nothing in sf seems impossible to me (unless the scientists tell me it's stupid science). Fantasy? yeah, less believable (with the exception of Gaiman and Pratchett, both of whom I find utterly believable, always). But the universe? Any universe? Has an ineffable quality to it that I'm not sure science will ever really fully explain.

And you know? totally ok with that. I like living in a world where we can know more and more, every day, and come up with rational, provable explanations for things, every day, and still know that there is always something else. It does sometimes annoy me that it keeps philosophers and theologians in work, but still, knowing that there will always be more to discover is part of being kinda in love with the universe.

The answer to the five digits of the vertebrates is, simply, because, by chance (or by some evolutionary pressure of which I am currently unaware) the common ancestor of all of them had five digits. I don't honestly think there is anything that is inexplicable, though there are things that are, as yet, unexplained.

Sensawonder is something I look for in science - that moment when you understand how something works, for instance, evolution or plate tectonics (both of which gave me an incredible high when I first really understood them and what they meant.) The sheer size of the universe does the same thing

Science generally leads me to ask more questions -- that may be a side effect of being a historian: we chase every detail.

But the thing is that with certain theories, suddenly all the little details fit into place just like a jigsaw, and you can see the picture. So that's how it works moments.

The difference between the sciences and the arts is that science has the advantage of being able to predict and test in the modern world. If this is happening then this must be so, so let's have a look, design an experiment and see if it works. The arts do not have this advantage.

I may know too many astronomers and theoretical physicists, but I have found that eventually you get down to 'well, X is like that because it is'. It's like Russian dolls, somehow. Fascinating and endlessly recursive.

That is certainly true of the far reaches of physics, but the point is that, if it cannot be tested, it is and remains an hypothesis. Science sometimes just describes "what is" rather than "why it is."

There is no Universal Field Theory, but both Quantum Mechanics and Relativity have been tested extensively, and they both work. What they predict will happen, happens. We may never know how they fit together, but that does not make them any less true.

Zelazny has one of his characters say it best: "I bow to the unknown, to the unknowable I bow not."

That's an excellent quote: thank you. Trust Zelazny to sum it up.

I'm not sure I've got the wording exactly right, but it's Rama in Lord of Light which is, I suppose, the perfect example of a story that is pure SF, but reads like fantasy - its magic is, indeed, science.

It is wonderful, isn't it? One of my favourites.

Me too. My list changes, but this gets to be number one more often than not.

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.

Writing and belief: a stray realisation

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