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

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

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.

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

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.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

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."

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

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

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

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.

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

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

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

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