I’m going according to my own personal order of precedence: Lord of Light is in my opinion perhaps not the best, but certainly the coolest, thing next to Dune.  It’s by far the best of the few Zelazny works I have read (although “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is similar enough), and top-drawer among far-reaching, ambitious science fiction.

Lord of Light takes place on a colony world that has all but forgotten the existence of “vanished Urath”–but much of culture we would recognize does persist. Specifically, the conflict between Hinduism and Buddhism. The technology that (long before the era of the story) has set the plot in motion is a “reincarnation” device that allows rich or powerful enough people to transfer to new bodies, but as a technology this barely plays a part. The real kick-start to the story is that those who control this technology have by now lived long enough to have discovered and developed within themselves certain psychic abilities … and that they declare themselves the gods of the planet, based on the Hindu pantheon. They are opposed by an original settler of the world, Sam, who plays out the Buddha’s role, speaking for the oppressed against the status quo.

I read Lord of Light long before I knew anything significant about Eastern religions, and it blew my mind. I have since studied Hinduism academically, and Lord of Light loses nothing with increased familiarity. I referred earlier to this book as being simply cool. Read this:

Being a god is the quality of being able to be yourself to such an extent that your passions correspond with the forces of the universe….

It’s all the better when I tell you that this, my favorite speech in the novel, comes from Yama, the Deathgod. But then it’s better still when you reflect that this is not inconsistent with the teachings of all sorts of religious cosmologies. There is a natural law, which one can access by digging deep enough within oneself. Or, in slightly more Hindu terms, the universe is one. It gives me courage.

Courage, however, is not why I read Lord of Light. There’s a couple of awesomely written scenes. There’s some wry characters. There’s some to be learned, and far more to consider. And, as in many of my favorites, there are no easy answers.

Personally, I am a proper Dune fanatic. Dune is the War and Peace of speculative fiction, and, yes, I say that believing War and Peace is the greatest novel yet written. Dune, too, encompasses everything:

• War
• Peace
• Guerrilla tactics
• Religion
• Fanaticism
• Time
• Space (tesseracts)
• Love
• Death
• Psychology
• Compromise
• Ecology
• Legend
• &c…

The plot is intricate and deeply thought out, several of the characters can break a reader’s heart, and the world-creation is quite simply complete.

I first encountered the Dune world at age 13, through the David Lynch movie adaptation.  I read the novel immediately afterwards, and since then have owned somewhere on the order of a dozen copies, most of which I have given away (indeed, the purpose of having extra copies on hand).  I generally try to start reading the book slowly with lots of processing time; this works with many books I love, but in the case of Dune I am inevitably absorbed, and I career through the last 150 pages in a short evening.  I am left feeling somewhat heartsick each time, for Dune ends but does not resolve: the story is wide-ranging and messy, and even the “right” solution to the crises involve lots of death and–worse–soul-destruction and the breaking of barriers that protect people, like self-preservation.  None of which will be forgotten or forgiven, the ending makes clear.  I love the story for its truth to life that way. 

I have seen a friend become a creature.

In my family, I should note, “proper Dune fanatic” means that we attempt to forget the existence of all series books subsequent to Dune itself.  Or at least to spare ourselves any interaction with them.  Dune ends openly, and so theoretically open to sequel, but Herbert was quite evidently utterly unable to keep up the intensity of engagement that any true succeeding volume would have required.  I don’t necessarily hold this against the author; I have been told that many of the subsequent books were written to make money for Mrs. Herbert’s medical bills, and I tend to imagine that Dune as a universe is something powerful enough that it existed (somehow) prior to the books, while Herbert merely (somehow) saw it and tapped into it.  Which is a great accomplishment in and of itself, and should be enough.

The Sparrow raises all sorts of thoughts and conflicts in my mind.  Perhaps I’ll eventually get the chance to write about several of them. Let’s start with the engagement of religion in fantasy/SF. Bryn and other writing persons recently commented here on the utility of religion in world-building, but Russell comes at it from the other side: instead of basing her “built” world (in this case, a small planet in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri) on a religious system, she brings modern human religions (in the form of a Jesuit-led mission incorporating also characters of other faiths) into contact with this new situation, ecology, civilization, evolutionary biology–and explores the challenges posed to faith and by faith.

As such, Russell’s novel has perhaps more in common with Orson Scott Card’s Folk of the Fringe and Francine Rivers’s The Last Sin Eater than with Marie Brennan’s Doppelganger world and Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy books. The subtlety, however, with which Russell credits religion is far beyond Card’s or Rivers’s. Both Folk of the Fringe (or, more specifically, its opening story, “West”) and The Last Sin Eater disturbed me deeply, in that the authors both chose to argue for the peace of religious acceptance by contrasting it with unqualified atrocities in their characters’ pasts.  In my world, the reason for believing is not horror at the prospect of unfettered human amorality, which it seemed to me Card and Rivers (whose books, by the way, share nothing else) both implied.  The Sparrow is one of those books that jumps back and forth chapter by chapter between then and now; I realized late in the novel that the reason had to be that the reader would feel too disoriented and betrayed by the pain and confusion and despair of the now if the beauties and hope of the then had been all that preceded it in the reading.  So you see that the horrors in The Sparrow happen inside the context of religion.  God doesn’t just come in to make everything okay.  God makes (arguably, everything), and the humans decide on their own what of it is okay, and how to deal with it.

I suppose some of my first experiences with religion in speculative fiction were probably Dune (Frank Herbert, of course) and Guy Gavriel Kay’s trilogy The Fionavar Tapestry (beginning with The Summer Tree).  The former is–well, it’s everything (I’ll get back to that contention someday)–but I was going to say that Dune is, of the categories I sketched out, in the “Let’s see what happens to religion in this world” rather than the “Let’s see what kind of world such a religion suggests.”  Religion is organic to the world of Dune, and one cannot imagine the Fremen without it, but as on our Earth, religion is a human institution.   The Tapestry has actual gods appear and speak with, give gifts to, have sex with, &c., mortal characters, although the gods don’t rise to the level of characters themselves.  They’re more forces of nature, which is of course one perfectly appropriate way of looking at divinity (see Greek pantheon).

Jacqueline Carey’s take on religion in the D’Angeline world is quite sophisticated–the religions she presents (mostly adaptations of regular-human religions) are deeply suffused into the characters’ lives, simply a part of how they were brought up and how they experience their world, although higher beings of one form or another do show up, too.  When I wrote to Carey to tell her how deeply I identified with some of the spiritual experiences in the series, she wrote back that it was nice to hear from someone who appreciated that aspect of the story for its own sake (though she’d heard from others who read for the adventure, intrigue, politics, or for the sex).

Any other particularly interesting religious-system SF/F that you can point me towards?