Rantypants on Books...
Aug. 13th, 2010 10:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyesI swear, the best way to get me to talk about a book is to make my inner worldbuilder cry foul. Which isn't the best advice for authors, but...
I have a fondness for urban fantasy, which makes it nice to live nowadays, when it is absurdly popular. My favorite subgenre is the one where 'magic pops out of the woodwork some point in the recent past, so now it's modern society dealing with magic', but I've yet to find a really good example, unless we venture into the quasi-scifi Feed (by Mira Grant) (Summary: zombie virus gets out. Twenty-some years later, the book opens with the main characters poking zombies with sticks to amuse the internet public...) Some, like Lilith Saintcrow's Danny Valentine books were more 'it's not you, it's me' -- I'd rather read about a necromancer solving crimes in far-future mage-punk America than dealt with the machinations of Hell. Others, like Red by Jordan Summers got deported to 'do not skip the worldbuilding to get to the sex' remedial class.
I am suspecting that Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane is going to get this treatment too. At least, I'm some chapters in and have some issues with the worldbuilding.
So, let's start with the premise. The book takes place some decades after a massive influx of dead wakes up one late October night and ends up killing a large number of people -- the book quotes a third. A group of occult researchers discover a way to put them to rest, and they seize power as the Church of Truth, creating a single world government.
Now, my first problem is something that's also been mentioned in reviews of Feed. It's like this. When you kill large numbers of people, your infrastructure collapses. Basically, modern society needs a large number of people who do their jobs at producing goods, and then coordinating goods. For example, food. One farmer can grow a lot more food than a Renaissance farm family could, but then she has to pay for truck drivers and FDA inspectors and grocery store clerks and warehouse managers to get it to people. Now, the net is fewer people are needed to feed a given population, but that creates a lack of redundancy. In short, you need to kill fewer people to collapse the system on a large scale. And then, you get famines, and more people dying.
The second thing is communications and transport. The Internet is not a magic box -- it requires working power and network connections. Lose enough people, power goes out and you get a communications blackout -- which not only loses contact with the people in that zone, but any servers that happen to be hosting websites. Transport is perhaps less of an issue, but I'd be concerned about air travel.
Now, call me naive, but if you kill 1/3 of the population in weeks, then things will be a mess. I'm not talking urban decay and the occasional ghost attack, I'm talking 'make sure everyone is fed'. I'm a bit skeptical of any type of large-scale government bouncing back, even if they are the only people who can remove ghosts, because it would take time to train the sudden influx of people. I mean, unless they were some kind of large conspiracy that had placed exorcists in place and then undid the locks keeping the dead out themselves...
... but I don't trust large conspiracies in fiction without work. And I don't like them when I figure them out within 100 pages, unless the book is about taking them down. (Maybe it is, who knows.)
Second criticism invokes the oft-quoted saying about fascism in America, that it will arrive wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. Which is to say, because many Americans strongly believe in Christianity and American patriotism, the smart fascist will use that to push the right buttons on her followers. Furthermore, it gives several paths for your regime -- you can do an open theocracy, creating a national church that rules the country. Or, and I personally think this is more likely for America, you create a dictatorship that directly promotes patriotism and allows a limited number of Christian denominations (and tolerates a few more), but lacks a national church per se. Call me an optimist, but I think First Amendment!!! is enough into the American psyche that a watered down version of 'you can go to whatever Church you want, as long as they say the right things about Jesus' would persist. (I mean, even the 'America is a Christian nation' crowd don't get into Baptist versus Methodist versus Lutheran -- anything Protestant and not too weird seems to count.)
The Church of Truth in the book is a world-wide theocracy, powerful enough that no open churches of other faiths exist. It apparently arose from the people who knew enough about ghosts to exorcise and ward against them, and then took over the world government. It has all the trappings of a church, with a dose of magic -- since magic stops ghosts, anyone with talent is recruited -- holy books, weekly services, moral authority, church elders and ranks, a holy day in which business cannot be done...
Yet, it is explicitly atheistic. The heroine admits the sermons are pretty much short and useless, and mostly attended to see the immoral punished and to look good to the guys in charge. They use 'taxes', not 'tithes' -- a minor thing, but one an American would see as the affair of states, not of churches.
The heroine argues that seeing the dead rise, offering proof about what the afterlife was, proved their was no God, and people abandoned their faiths of birth. Which makes me wonder if the character was brainwashed or the author had never met a devout person, because if the dead started attacking the living, somehow I think that would make people believe in God more. Sure, tragedy can drive some people to atheism, but a lot of people get almost superstitious about things -- that if they just pray hard enough and in the right way, it'll appease God. People are really good at making things fit their preconceived views. Go to any place where a religious debate is happening and watch -- you get few conversions and a lot of people rehashing the same arguments over and over.
And, to tie back into the flag-and-cross point, I can't grasp why you'd go with a church model if you were an atheist movement. Maybe it's my own religious biases showing, but I'd think you'd want to do two things to encourage Americans to cheerfully submit to your control:
1. Toss in some generic references to God and the Bible that may not make much sense, but allow believers to feel like they aren't having to rethink life-long religious views.
2. Pattern your controlling organization after a state, rather than a church. Hate to say it, but it worked for Russia to have a atheistic controlling state, and plenty of other dictators to have a state with less emphasis on the minutiae of religion. Again, in my above hypothetical American fascism example, you could easily keep the domain open for churches as 'as long as you support our authority and conform to these views on magic, you are free to operate'. Co-opt existing systems of power and all.
It's sort of a general trend for me that fictional Evil Controlling Religions in SF and present/future fantasy in general raise my hackles because, well, religions don't usually rise out of the vacuum. Look at the big five religions, and you can see how Judaism, Christianity and Islam shared influence (and so did Hinduism and Buddhism). Even newer religions/sects like the Church of Latter-Day Saints are related to older ones. So, having some new being spring out of its founders head like Athena and take over everything feels a bit like walking along in the jungle and finding a polar bear -- it makes you wonder who was messing around to create such an unnatural occurrence. Lazy worldbuilding...
But it also feels a bit like the author wants an Evil Controlling Religion, but also doesn't want the risk of offending someone by radicalizing one of the existing religions, or even spawning off a sect. Which always feels like it should piss both sides off, rather than pissing one side off.
I have a fondness for urban fantasy, which makes it nice to live nowadays, when it is absurdly popular. My favorite subgenre is the one where 'magic pops out of the woodwork some point in the recent past, so now it's modern society dealing with magic', but I've yet to find a really good example, unless we venture into the quasi-scifi Feed (by Mira Grant) (Summary: zombie virus gets out. Twenty-some years later, the book opens with the main characters poking zombies with sticks to amuse the internet public...) Some, like Lilith Saintcrow's Danny Valentine books were more 'it's not you, it's me' -- I'd rather read about a necromancer solving crimes in far-future mage-punk America than dealt with the machinations of Hell. Others, like Red by Jordan Summers got deported to 'do not skip the worldbuilding to get to the sex' remedial class.
I am suspecting that Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane is going to get this treatment too. At least, I'm some chapters in and have some issues with the worldbuilding.
So, let's start with the premise. The book takes place some decades after a massive influx of dead wakes up one late October night and ends up killing a large number of people -- the book quotes a third. A group of occult researchers discover a way to put them to rest, and they seize power as the Church of Truth, creating a single world government.
Now, my first problem is something that's also been mentioned in reviews of Feed. It's like this. When you kill large numbers of people, your infrastructure collapses. Basically, modern society needs a large number of people who do their jobs at producing goods, and then coordinating goods. For example, food. One farmer can grow a lot more food than a Renaissance farm family could, but then she has to pay for truck drivers and FDA inspectors and grocery store clerks and warehouse managers to get it to people. Now, the net is fewer people are needed to feed a given population, but that creates a lack of redundancy. In short, you need to kill fewer people to collapse the system on a large scale. And then, you get famines, and more people dying.
The second thing is communications and transport. The Internet is not a magic box -- it requires working power and network connections. Lose enough people, power goes out and you get a communications blackout -- which not only loses contact with the people in that zone, but any servers that happen to be hosting websites. Transport is perhaps less of an issue, but I'd be concerned about air travel.
Now, call me naive, but if you kill 1/3 of the population in weeks, then things will be a mess. I'm not talking urban decay and the occasional ghost attack, I'm talking 'make sure everyone is fed'. I'm a bit skeptical of any type of large-scale government bouncing back, even if they are the only people who can remove ghosts, because it would take time to train the sudden influx of people. I mean, unless they were some kind of large conspiracy that had placed exorcists in place and then undid the locks keeping the dead out themselves...
... but I don't trust large conspiracies in fiction without work. And I don't like them when I figure them out within 100 pages, unless the book is about taking them down. (Maybe it is, who knows.)
Second criticism invokes the oft-quoted saying about fascism in America, that it will arrive wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. Which is to say, because many Americans strongly believe in Christianity and American patriotism, the smart fascist will use that to push the right buttons on her followers. Furthermore, it gives several paths for your regime -- you can do an open theocracy, creating a national church that rules the country. Or, and I personally think this is more likely for America, you create a dictatorship that directly promotes patriotism and allows a limited number of Christian denominations (and tolerates a few more), but lacks a national church per se. Call me an optimist, but I think First Amendment!!! is enough into the American psyche that a watered down version of 'you can go to whatever Church you want, as long as they say the right things about Jesus' would persist. (I mean, even the 'America is a Christian nation' crowd don't get into Baptist versus Methodist versus Lutheran -- anything Protestant and not too weird seems to count.)
The Church of Truth in the book is a world-wide theocracy, powerful enough that no open churches of other faiths exist. It apparently arose from the people who knew enough about ghosts to exorcise and ward against them, and then took over the world government. It has all the trappings of a church, with a dose of magic -- since magic stops ghosts, anyone with talent is recruited -- holy books, weekly services, moral authority, church elders and ranks, a holy day in which business cannot be done...
Yet, it is explicitly atheistic. The heroine admits the sermons are pretty much short and useless, and mostly attended to see the immoral punished and to look good to the guys in charge. They use 'taxes', not 'tithes' -- a minor thing, but one an American would see as the affair of states, not of churches.
The heroine argues that seeing the dead rise, offering proof about what the afterlife was, proved their was no God, and people abandoned their faiths of birth. Which makes me wonder if the character was brainwashed or the author had never met a devout person, because if the dead started attacking the living, somehow I think that would make people believe in God more. Sure, tragedy can drive some people to atheism, but a lot of people get almost superstitious about things -- that if they just pray hard enough and in the right way, it'll appease God. People are really good at making things fit their preconceived views. Go to any place where a religious debate is happening and watch -- you get few conversions and a lot of people rehashing the same arguments over and over.
And, to tie back into the flag-and-cross point, I can't grasp why you'd go with a church model if you were an atheist movement. Maybe it's my own religious biases showing, but I'd think you'd want to do two things to encourage Americans to cheerfully submit to your control:
1. Toss in some generic references to God and the Bible that may not make much sense, but allow believers to feel like they aren't having to rethink life-long religious views.
2. Pattern your controlling organization after a state, rather than a church. Hate to say it, but it worked for Russia to have a atheistic controlling state, and plenty of other dictators to have a state with less emphasis on the minutiae of religion. Again, in my above hypothetical American fascism example, you could easily keep the domain open for churches as 'as long as you support our authority and conform to these views on magic, you are free to operate'. Co-opt existing systems of power and all.
It's sort of a general trend for me that fictional Evil Controlling Religions in SF and present/future fantasy in general raise my hackles because, well, religions don't usually rise out of the vacuum. Look at the big five religions, and you can see how Judaism, Christianity and Islam shared influence (and so did Hinduism and Buddhism). Even newer religions/sects like the Church of Latter-Day Saints are related to older ones. So, having some new being spring out of its founders head like Athena and take over everything feels a bit like walking along in the jungle and finding a polar bear -- it makes you wonder who was messing around to create such an unnatural occurrence. Lazy worldbuilding...
But it also feels a bit like the author wants an Evil Controlling Religion, but also doesn't want the risk of offending someone by radicalizing one of the existing religions, or even spawning off a sect. Which always feels like it should piss both sides off, rather than pissing one side off.
