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blatherskiteSince Zornhau raised the issue of gods, it's probably timely to recap some thoughts inspired while attending this panel discussion. First, a brief usage note: In Western culture, a distinction is made between "God" (the Judeo-Christian deity) and "a god" (any other deity); this follows from the editing convention that proper nouns are capitalized, whereas common nouns are not. A god in any other religion has his, her, or its own name, and that name should also be capped. Whether or not you choose to honor this distinction, you should be aware that it's important to many people and heed Shaw's observation that "a gentleman is someone who never unintentionally gives offence". I've chosen to honor this distinction for both ethical and editorial reasons, but that's just me. Muck about with this usage if you intend to offend or provoke or otherwise exhibit rude behavior—just be aware that you're doing it.
The panel did not really discuss monsters in any way, so I'm assuming the title refers to the film Gods and Monsters, which doesn't seem (on the face of it) to have much of anything to do with God or gods, other than via the
somewhat obscure Frankenstein reference.
This panel began with the provocative notion that in fiction (particularly fantasies), gods seem to serve two primary purposes: to bicker among themselves, and to meddle in human affairs. The discussion never really touched on science fictional use of religion, so I'll come back to that towards the end of the essay. Based on the model of the Greek myths, both purposes usually seem to have been achieved simultaneously. But this is a very Western viewpoint, and it's interesting to speculate about whether this dualism of purpose is necessarily true for every other human culture (it certainly seems ubiquitous) and whether it would necessarily be true in any fictional culture, whether human or alien (not necessarily). The latter is interesting, because it gives us a chance to write something very different from what has come before.
In a very real sense, we authors are the gods of the universes we create, and we tend to exhibit the same kind of arbitrary and flawed behavior towards both our worlds and the characters that suffer through them as the Greek gods exhibit to the unfortunate mortal Greeks. If we want the gods of our world to serve a different role, and particularly if we want them to subvert well-established archetypes, we must invent them and use them specifically to support that goal, and must carefully lead our readers to an understanding of how we're changing the rules of the game. Sometimes we want the familiar (e.g., Zeus and kin), and sometimes we want something very different. It seems to me that the comfort of the familiar is far more popular, and it's risky to try for something too different if we're not prepared to do the work required to create something interesting and self-consistent.
Within our story world, the gods can be literal and real, as they are in most fantasies, or they can serve a primarily metaphorical role. For example, sometimes they seem to be there mostly so we can claim that our actions aren't our fault, as in most fantasies that invoke Fate or Destiny. They can also be omnipowerful and multicompetent (unlike the single "portfolios" administered by traditional gods such as those of the Greeks and Romans), or they can be simpler beings who have great but strongly constrained powers.
Limitations make them more interesting, as recent revisionist takes on the classic superhero character have revealed. I never much liked the original Superman comics because Superman's limitations were too ad hoc, generally adopted and implemented specifically as a plot gimmick rather than as something integral to the character; I always liked Batman better simply because he was human, and had human limits—far though they were from any limits I could myself experience. This is one reason why, if you poll fans of The Lord of the Rings about which character they like the most, Sam Gamgee usually appears at the top of the list; Sam is an ordinary guy, surrounded by gods and demigods, and yet he survives purely through the force of his character. It's important to note that he's also the only character in the story who voluntarily relinquishes the ring of power.
Deus ex machina works best if we define the terms of the game right from the start, namely that if humans do X, Y, and Z, the gods will intervene. As a plot device, it's overused, and it's often a lazy way to avoid creating characters with true agency who are willing to take matters into their own hands and suffer the consequences. But if the device is consistent with the rules of the world that we establish early in the story, it's an acceptable and effective solution. You can also invert this trope for dramatic purposes, as the writers of Torchwood did in their Children of Earth miniseries, when they set us up to expect Dr. Who to intervene (as he has done so often in the past) to save Earth from the latest menace. When he doesn't show up to save the day, the dramatic impact of the decisions faced by Jack Harkness are greatly magnified, and that's an unusual and clever dramatic touch.
When we use gods in fiction, there's an interesting dramatic tension between their reality (what they would be like if we could actually meet them) and how organized religions, sects of those religions, and worshippers see them. The characteristics, desires, and failings we assign to the gods at each of these levels tell us much about the human society that created these religions. That's particularly true when we ask ourselves whether anyone can gain access to a god, or whether this is a privilege restricted to a small elite such as some sort of priest. (Interestingly, this is a surprisingly strong difference between Judaism, in which God is a personal god, and Christianity, in which access to God is via an intermediary, whether Christ or a Chistian minister or priest.) The power dynamics differ enormously between a society that restricts access, and therefore emphasizes control and constraints on free will and free thought, and one that emphasizes the universality of access, and thus personal responsibility. At first glance, the latter would seem to be freer and a nicer place to live, but that's a simplistic analysis; in reality, such a society might end up becoming far more restrictive, since those who hold the reigns of power loosely would have a stronger incentive to seek means of controlling their subjects.
Many human religions assume a Manichaen good versus evil dichotomy, in part because we humans are more comfortable with clear categories than we are with shades of grey. But in many world cultures, as in Hinduism, matters are far less clearcut, and when the gods take on different roles and adopt different moralities in response to the demands of the situation, the possibilities for dramatic outcomes are far broader and more interesting than with a simpler dichotomous worldview. Steven Brust did a wonderful job of this in his novel To Reign In Hell—highly recommended if you've enjoyed Brust's other writing or any of Roger Zelazny's writing about human demigods.
The difference between (say) Christian monotheism and Hindu polytheism in our own world reveals a potential flaw in most fantasy worlds: they assume a monolithic heaven and an equally monolithic religious structure beneath that heaven. The reality is usually far more complex, with a great many cultures that have their own religions, and great diversity in sects within a given religion. It's been said that mankind was created in the image of God, but in practice, it more often seems to me that gods are created in the image of mankind.
In fiction, it's also interesting to speculate whether gods can act physically upon the world, as in the example of every thunder god who appears in the world's religions, or only metaphysically, by shaping how people act. One classic trope of fantasy fiction is that gods only exist and have power to the extent that people believe in them, leading to the corollary that the easiest way to eliminate an inconvenient god is to massacre their followers—sadly, something that seems more common in our world's real history than in fiction. But there's also a long tradition of this in fantasy fiction.
More recently, Neil Gaiman's American Gods dealt with this concept in a wistful and often painfully melancholic tale centered around the belief that gods survive only so long as they are worshipped, and must change and adapt as their worshippers evolve. The endlessly funny and endlessly wise Terry Pratchett has considerable fun taking this concept in a very different direction in his novel Hogsfather.
That pretty much covers the fantasy end of the religious spectrum, which was all the panel discussed. But what about science fiction? Interestingly, there seems to be a general consensus among science fiction writers that God cannot exist in a science fictional universe. In that view, God does not exist and never has, and any advanced civilization will eventually realize this and give up on any notion of a deist religion. Star Trek is the example of this attitude that most readers and TV viewers are familiar with, and in Trek, about the only chapel you'll ever see is Nurse Christine Chapel. There's a brief scene in the episode Balance of Terror in which the fiancee of a slain crewman is comforted by Captain Kirk in a chapel of sorts that is carefully free of any overt religious symbolism, but there's no mention of anything divine. The Vulcans apparently have a religion, but it's not deist in any way; it's more about meditation and emotional discipline, and thus more like Buddhism. (Buddhism is apparently palatable to the modern science fiction writer because it doesn't require the existence of God.) The crew of the Enterprise certainly encounters small-g "gods" every so often, but they're not recognizably divine; most are nothing more than petty, but powerful, beings, mortal or otherwise. Possibly they're more like Greek gods in that sense.
Given that I'm unaware of any human society that has eliminated all forms of deist religion for any length of time, this view always struck me as completely unrealistic. At best, it's simplistic and unnuanced. There are many science fiction writers who are religious and deist, but apparently most feel deeply uncomfortable writing about their religion; I'm drawing a blank coming up with any good examples. Possibly some of Gene Wolfe's writing that I'm not familiar with would be relevant in this context. That ignorance (and ignoring of) religion is a shame, particularly given that even if humans abandoned anything resembling a deist belief system, it seems rather unlikely that an entire universe stocked with interesting aliens would have no deist equivalents recognizable to us provincial humans.
Be that as it may, the essence of God is that he is unknowable by means of science, and that's probably the best explanation for why science fiction generally avoids the whole issue. Indeed, some might say that as soon as you take God seriously, you've left the realm of science fiction and have entered the realm of fantasy. I don’t share this belief, and I believe it's at best simpleminded and at worst racist to write such fiction. As authors, we owe it to our readers to recognize that whatever our personal beliefs, the world contains a great many people who do believe in God or in one or more gods, and the worlds we create should contain such people. Moreover, they should be treated with the same respect with which we treat all our characters—or the same lack of respect if our goal is to prod everyone's beliefs in sensitive spots to get our readers thinking.
I'll return to this later when I discuss the panel on "writing the other".
The panel did not really discuss monsters in any way, so I'm assuming the title refers to the film Gods and Monsters, which doesn't seem (on the face of it) to have much of anything to do with God or gods, other than via the
somewhat obscure Frankenstein reference.
This panel began with the provocative notion that in fiction (particularly fantasies), gods seem to serve two primary purposes: to bicker among themselves, and to meddle in human affairs. The discussion never really touched on science fictional use of religion, so I'll come back to that towards the end of the essay. Based on the model of the Greek myths, both purposes usually seem to have been achieved simultaneously. But this is a very Western viewpoint, and it's interesting to speculate about whether this dualism of purpose is necessarily true for every other human culture (it certainly seems ubiquitous) and whether it would necessarily be true in any fictional culture, whether human or alien (not necessarily). The latter is interesting, because it gives us a chance to write something very different from what has come before.
In a very real sense, we authors are the gods of the universes we create, and we tend to exhibit the same kind of arbitrary and flawed behavior towards both our worlds and the characters that suffer through them as the Greek gods exhibit to the unfortunate mortal Greeks. If we want the gods of our world to serve a different role, and particularly if we want them to subvert well-established archetypes, we must invent them and use them specifically to support that goal, and must carefully lead our readers to an understanding of how we're changing the rules of the game. Sometimes we want the familiar (e.g., Zeus and kin), and sometimes we want something very different. It seems to me that the comfort of the familiar is far more popular, and it's risky to try for something too different if we're not prepared to do the work required to create something interesting and self-consistent.
Within our story world, the gods can be literal and real, as they are in most fantasies, or they can serve a primarily metaphorical role. For example, sometimes they seem to be there mostly so we can claim that our actions aren't our fault, as in most fantasies that invoke Fate or Destiny. They can also be omnipowerful and multicompetent (unlike the single "portfolios" administered by traditional gods such as those of the Greeks and Romans), or they can be simpler beings who have great but strongly constrained powers.
Limitations make them more interesting, as recent revisionist takes on the classic superhero character have revealed. I never much liked the original Superman comics because Superman's limitations were too ad hoc, generally adopted and implemented specifically as a plot gimmick rather than as something integral to the character; I always liked Batman better simply because he was human, and had human limits—far though they were from any limits I could myself experience. This is one reason why, if you poll fans of The Lord of the Rings about which character they like the most, Sam Gamgee usually appears at the top of the list; Sam is an ordinary guy, surrounded by gods and demigods, and yet he survives purely through the force of his character. It's important to note that he's also the only character in the story who voluntarily relinquishes the ring of power.
Deus ex machina works best if we define the terms of the game right from the start, namely that if humans do X, Y, and Z, the gods will intervene. As a plot device, it's overused, and it's often a lazy way to avoid creating characters with true agency who are willing to take matters into their own hands and suffer the consequences. But if the device is consistent with the rules of the world that we establish early in the story, it's an acceptable and effective solution. You can also invert this trope for dramatic purposes, as the writers of Torchwood did in their Children of Earth miniseries, when they set us up to expect Dr. Who to intervene (as he has done so often in the past) to save Earth from the latest menace. When he doesn't show up to save the day, the dramatic impact of the decisions faced by Jack Harkness are greatly magnified, and that's an unusual and clever dramatic touch.
When we use gods in fiction, there's an interesting dramatic tension between their reality (what they would be like if we could actually meet them) and how organized religions, sects of those religions, and worshippers see them. The characteristics, desires, and failings we assign to the gods at each of these levels tell us much about the human society that created these religions. That's particularly true when we ask ourselves whether anyone can gain access to a god, or whether this is a privilege restricted to a small elite such as some sort of priest. (Interestingly, this is a surprisingly strong difference between Judaism, in which God is a personal god, and Christianity, in which access to God is via an intermediary, whether Christ or a Chistian minister or priest.) The power dynamics differ enormously between a society that restricts access, and therefore emphasizes control and constraints on free will and free thought, and one that emphasizes the universality of access, and thus personal responsibility. At first glance, the latter would seem to be freer and a nicer place to live, but that's a simplistic analysis; in reality, such a society might end up becoming far more restrictive, since those who hold the reigns of power loosely would have a stronger incentive to seek means of controlling their subjects.
Many human religions assume a Manichaen good versus evil dichotomy, in part because we humans are more comfortable with clear categories than we are with shades of grey. But in many world cultures, as in Hinduism, matters are far less clearcut, and when the gods take on different roles and adopt different moralities in response to the demands of the situation, the possibilities for dramatic outcomes are far broader and more interesting than with a simpler dichotomous worldview. Steven Brust did a wonderful job of this in his novel To Reign In Hell—highly recommended if you've enjoyed Brust's other writing or any of Roger Zelazny's writing about human demigods.
The difference between (say) Christian monotheism and Hindu polytheism in our own world reveals a potential flaw in most fantasy worlds: they assume a monolithic heaven and an equally monolithic religious structure beneath that heaven. The reality is usually far more complex, with a great many cultures that have their own religions, and great diversity in sects within a given religion. It's been said that mankind was created in the image of God, but in practice, it more often seems to me that gods are created in the image of mankind.
In fiction, it's also interesting to speculate whether gods can act physically upon the world, as in the example of every thunder god who appears in the world's religions, or only metaphysically, by shaping how people act. One classic trope of fantasy fiction is that gods only exist and have power to the extent that people believe in them, leading to the corollary that the easiest way to eliminate an inconvenient god is to massacre their followers—sadly, something that seems more common in our world's real history than in fiction. But there's also a long tradition of this in fantasy fiction.
More recently, Neil Gaiman's American Gods dealt with this concept in a wistful and often painfully melancholic tale centered around the belief that gods survive only so long as they are worshipped, and must change and adapt as their worshippers evolve. The endlessly funny and endlessly wise Terry Pratchett has considerable fun taking this concept in a very different direction in his novel Hogsfather.
That pretty much covers the fantasy end of the religious spectrum, which was all the panel discussed. But what about science fiction? Interestingly, there seems to be a general consensus among science fiction writers that God cannot exist in a science fictional universe. In that view, God does not exist and never has, and any advanced civilization will eventually realize this and give up on any notion of a deist religion. Star Trek is the example of this attitude that most readers and TV viewers are familiar with, and in Trek, about the only chapel you'll ever see is Nurse Christine Chapel. There's a brief scene in the episode Balance of Terror in which the fiancee of a slain crewman is comforted by Captain Kirk in a chapel of sorts that is carefully free of any overt religious symbolism, but there's no mention of anything divine. The Vulcans apparently have a religion, but it's not deist in any way; it's more about meditation and emotional discipline, and thus more like Buddhism. (Buddhism is apparently palatable to the modern science fiction writer because it doesn't require the existence of God.) The crew of the Enterprise certainly encounters small-g "gods" every so often, but they're not recognizably divine; most are nothing more than petty, but powerful, beings, mortal or otherwise. Possibly they're more like Greek gods in that sense.
Given that I'm unaware of any human society that has eliminated all forms of deist religion for any length of time, this view always struck me as completely unrealistic. At best, it's simplistic and unnuanced. There are many science fiction writers who are religious and deist, but apparently most feel deeply uncomfortable writing about their religion; I'm drawing a blank coming up with any good examples. Possibly some of Gene Wolfe's writing that I'm not familiar with would be relevant in this context. That ignorance (and ignoring of) religion is a shame, particularly given that even if humans abandoned anything resembling a deist belief system, it seems rather unlikely that an entire universe stocked with interesting aliens would have no deist equivalents recognizable to us provincial humans.
Be that as it may, the essence of God is that he is unknowable by means of science, and that's probably the best explanation for why science fiction generally avoids the whole issue. Indeed, some might say that as soon as you take God seriously, you've left the realm of science fiction and have entered the realm of fantasy. I don’t share this belief, and I believe it's at best simpleminded and at worst racist to write such fiction. As authors, we owe it to our readers to recognize that whatever our personal beliefs, the world contains a great many people who do believe in God or in one or more gods, and the worlds we create should contain such people. Moreover, they should be treated with the same respect with which we treat all our characters—or the same lack of respect if our goal is to prod everyone's beliefs in sensitive spots to get our readers thinking.
I'll return to this later when I discuss the panel on "writing the other".