Monday 22 January 2001

Pic of the day: Have you noticed that the Sims don't pray or say grace? I'll explain why. (But not why they say "This graw is fredashay!")

Sweet little gods

As most of my speculations, this has a history. It all restarted with the online comic Acid Reflux, and its introductory setting in which a child goddess inherits her sister's discarded world.

Today, in a creative frenzy, I mated that two-tier concept with some of my own old multicosmology. I think it is far enough removed to not be fanfic, but first let's look at a basic challenge to this kind of writing.

How does a monotheist fantasy writer deal with the concept of gods in his fictional world?

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One approach is to dismiss it out of hand. This is what my online comrade TimberBram has done in his Erath stories. Everyone knows that there is just the Creator, and any pretenders to godhood are put down by their fellow mortals. For a more famous writer with a similar approach, try Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. While I know nothing about that author's personal view of things, his world is one where people implicitly accept the reality of a Creator and a Dark One, with no need of organized religion.

Another approach is that of C.S. Lewis in his Narnia books, in which the local god is strongly implied to be a manifestation of the One True God, or in this case of Jesus. (It's not extremely preachy, so I don't think it ruins the books for non-christians at all.)

Then there's J.R.R. Tolkien, who solves the god problem by making the local gods be explicitly created by the One God, as some kind of archangels or cherubs or some such. This comes in handy because sometimes the nature of the creative work is such that small gods have a natural part in it; and editing them out completely would render the work into something entirely different.

Finally, I shall mention the approach of DC and Marvel comics, who have made the old gods into magical superheroes. Basically, a humanoid species of extremely long life and superhuman mental or physical power, but fundamentally mortal. A similar approach at limited "gods" can be found in the backstage pages of Al Schroeder's fantastic fiction, in the section on Kaanho.

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I have favored the "magickal supermen" approach myself. In favor of it is the insight of modern cosmology, that the universe is a really big place and pretty advanced too. "Gods" like Zevs or Odin simply are not up to the task of creating and maintaining even a single planet, much less an intricate pattern of billions and billions of galaxies, black holes and exotic matter. (I'll leave out the theological implications of that, for now.)

In my new fantasy, however, I take things along a different route. The gods of Splendor actually create universes - but these are bubble universes, pocket universes, limited in size and scope and inheriting by default traits from the world of their creators, only in less than perfect detail. The gods of Splendor are basically authors, or directors, or virtual reality game designers ... only the medium they work with is Primordial Ether, which they manipulate magickally to create self-contained bubble universes.

So the gods of Splendor are created beings, ultimately mortal, magickal supermen ... but also creators, with godlike powers over the worlds they create. This of course raises some thorny issues about the status of any writer of fiction. I take it that most of us fiction writers at least don't step into our worlds or try to make our creations worship us! :)

I'm pretty satisfied with my cop-out, which neatly allows small gods while never ever challenging other world-views, such as my own monotheism or some readers' atheism. And small gods can be great fun ... just read the book Small gods by Terry Pratchett! Well, I thought it was kind of funny, though I'm by now really really fed up with Discworld stuff and probably won't read it again.

"I love gods with small flaws." (Erich von Däniken)