Dualist fatigue.

[changeling]

I'm still reading City of Bones, and I'm getting slightly annoyed about a plot element, the way I have frequently in recent times, including at the marvellousness that is Preacher.

I'm sick of dualist mythologies. No more angels and demons, where the bad guys can always be told by their rotting flesh, sores, lazy eyes, horns, stench etc. I'm not a monotheist or duotheist. I'm not Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Zoroastrian. I'm a polytheist. I want complex worlds where, if you're lucky, an orc might help your party into the keep. Of course, he'll probably be executed by his tribe later as that was a terrible betrayal of his people, but that's the point. People, human or not, have a choice. They can be good or evil depending on our outlook, and depending on their own.

I know there doesn't seem to be much out there – angels and demons are very, very popular. Pratchett's done it, and Holly Black's fairies are (thankfully) amoral rather than PURE EVIL*. Most of Diana Wynne Jones's fantasies tend not to be dualist, too, probably because hers are people driven rather than creature driven. Gaiman's obviously done it – Stardust is just about People, but some might have pointy ears or glow a bit; Neverwhere is about People; Anansi Boys and American Gods are polytheist. I'm not sure I can think of anyone who's done it better than Pratchett or Gaiman, actually. (No wonder I love the pair.)

So. Please, please advise me. Recommend me authors and books. Give me fantasies, urban or otherwise, that have shades of grey†. Make them sexy. Make them cool. Above all, make them readable.

And meanwhile, I'll get back to my NaNoWriMo and its polytheistic 1930s London, where there's a herm on every street corner, and little niches to the household gods outside people's doors.

* One of the things that annoyed me about City of Bones is the fact that the fairies are tied into the Heaven/Hell fallen angel mythos. I almost threw the book, then remembered that this is a historical viewpoint; just admittedly one that I don't like very much.

†I'm not very big on European world fantasies and/or epic fantasies. The few I have liked have generally been at least a little ironic, self-referential or funny.

Comments

[serizawa3000.livejournal.com]

Didn't I already mention China Mieville to you before? :)

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

You may have, but certainly cupiscent who's in my writer's group has.

What would you suggest to start with? I have a copy of ... erm, the red one ... Iron Council, but I rather failed to get through that the first time. This may not be a fault with Mr Mieville, but rather might have been a problem with the reading environment. Still, I might try a different one first and come back to it.

[serizawa3000.livejournal.com]

I haven't read King Rat. I have (and have read) Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. The Scar is maybe my favorite (PIRATES! and sea monsters), though they're all good. He also wrote a YA novel not too long ago called Un Lun Dun or something like that...

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

I've just checked, and my local library is out of all of them. So I might have to wait a bit for Mr Mieville. ;)

Thanks for the recommendations, though.

[dorukai.livejournal.com]

Vaguely second Perdido Street Station. I enjoyed it, and there were some great concepts, but other bits jangled.

WHat are China's other books like?

[serizawa3000.livejournal.com]

King Rat takes place in an alternate London, to my knowledge. Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council all take place in that steampunkified world of Bas-Lag. Each book can be read on its own, but there's little references to events and suchlike that happened in the other books...

[dorukai.livejournal.com]

Oo. King Rat might be a goer then (I blame Hellgate: London). Thanks!

[mawaridi.livejournal.com]

UnLunDun is charming. I haven't read any of Mr Mieville's other books, but I really liked that one :) It's not polytheistic (or -theistic at all) but it plays around with conventional fantasy plots and its full of wonderful characters and clever wordplay.

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

I'm not so much looking for polytheistic, or other -theistic, books, but rather ones where Christian or Jewish mythologies aren't the norm.

I'm looking forward to checking out UnLunDun. I've heard interesting things about it.

[chn-breathmint.livejournal.com]

Just don't get attached to any characters. Learned that the hard way with Perdido Street Station.

- Mel

[aphephobia.livejournal.com]

Heh. That makes me think of the angels and demons thing I was thinking about writing for NaNoWriMo, where you couldn't actually tell which one was which until right towards the end when they were both freaking out about acting out of nature. :)



One of the reasons I didn't write it was because I thought I'd completely fucked up the genre by trying to write it like that.

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

I think genres exist to be fucked up. Same with stock characters. Tension isn't just for your plot; it can also be for story elements.

My first NaNo was a fantasy noir, where the main character was a lesbian witch who dressed as a man, and her partner was the standard fucked-up noir hero. Who had killed himself, and now hung around as a ghost.

[erl-queen.livejournal.com]

Well, you already hit two of my favorites with Gaiman and Black. I'll also echo a recommend for Mieville's UnLunDun. One of my favorite authors hands-down is Charles deLint. Urban fantasy, though in some books a good amount of time is spent in the Otherworlds. Let's see...

The Hollow Kingdom by Clare Dunkle
The Guardian's Key by Anne Logston
Poison by Chris Wooding
War for the Oaks by Emma Bull
The Hunter's Moon by O.R. Melling

Oh, and along slightly different lines, but something I think you'd enjoy:

Little, Big by John Crowley

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

Heh, of course, DeLint. I keep meaning to check him out. I had a look for Mieville, and every single copy is out in my local library. I might have to reserve a copy!

Thanks for the list; I hadn't heard of anyone on it. How exciting! I *have* heard of Little, Big, but I can't remember where. I'm pretty sure it's mentioned a couple of times in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy by John Clute and John whatsisname, so perhaps that's what I'm thinking of.

[erl-queen.livejournal.com]

DeLint is amazing. My favorite is Forests of the Heart.

Little, Big is an odd book. I'm not sure I can ever explain it to anyone. I want to say it has a Victorian feel, and yet there are hints in it that place it in much more recent times. It's not quite about faeries, but it kind of is. I don't know, you just have to read it - and it's a large book, and it takes some commitment because it's not a breezy sort of read, but I think it's well worth it.

[naewinter.livejournal.com]

de Lint has a website, with a great list to check out. I loved Greenmantle, it was the first book of his I ever read.

[subtle-eye.livejournal.com]

Rusalka by C.J. Cherryh

Russian folk mythology ... more animist than polytheist.

Can dig out and lend to you if you're interested and can't find?

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

Awesome - I'm seen some Cherryh in the bookshop (I remember the spelling), so I know we stock him/her/zie. I'll keep an eye out for Rusalka. I've liked what I've read of Russian fairytales.

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

Well, I am trying to write you some (or, at least, write some, although one is an epic fantasy - it is, however, rather ironic AND meta, and features a large number of obviously Powerful Entities [angels, gods, what have you] all explaining Exactly How The World Works and contradicting each other left and right]). Is that okay? >.>

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

Also, they do tend to be somewhat epic, but have you read much Guy Gavriel Kay? He manages to do the different viewpoints while writing an alt-universe based on ours (which means the dualist perspectives come to cultural ascendancy), without betraying any of said viewpoints.

[pezzae.livejournal.com]

That's who I was going to suggest too. Particularly The Last Light of the Sun and The Lions of Al-Rassan. Don't be turned off by The Fionavar Tapestry, if you've read any of that; it's stock-standard (though good quality) Goodies vs Baddies, but his later works have much more depth.

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

See, I don't even consider FT to be entirely stock-standard dualistic; while there's a clear "bad", the "good" gods are frequently demanding, fickle, and prone to kill people or demand lives for (to humans) nonsensical purposes/needs, and then there's the Entirely Random that's necessary for the universe and doesn't really care, as long as something's not bothering it right NOW - sure, technically an ally against the Bad, but only because he wants to tell them what to do and control them, too.

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

I think I've read one of his short stories in Legends or Legends 2 ... (Nope, just checked it was George R.R. Martin. At least he also starts with a G ...?)

I'll check him out. But if his alternate fantasy world is strongly populated with angels, demons, and possibly Old Nick and/or Yahweh/Jehovah/Allah, I might leave him for later when I'm not feeling so sick of the Christian (etc) worldview.

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

*laugh* Not so much.

The Fionavar Tapestry is his first, big, unabashed epic, but it hurts SO GOOD. And is, in many ways, somewhat like LotR with a pagan basis instead of Christian (you have deities like Mjornir of the Thunder and Dana the Mother, along with Ceinwen who is like a Gaelic-clothed Artemis right down to " . . . you just saw me hunting/doing something by myself, you're now DEAD"). It has a Big Evil, but it's I don't find it a Satan comment, and in many ways the "good" guys are only really united because, well, if he wins EVERYONE loses. And I can't really be more explicit without spoilers. But. His latest, Ysabel, is set in the same, um, universe, sorta?

Song for Arbonne and Tigana are both set in entirely separate worlds and are standalones, but alt-earths, and almost entirely human focused. Lions of Al-Rassan is likewise very human-focused (I don't think there's any actual magic in it), and in the same reality as The Sarantine Mosaic, Last Light of the Sun and . . . wait, my bookshelf says that's it.

The last three are very much alt-earths, in that the history of these worlds parallel ours, so Sarantium is Byzantium and Al-Rassan is in Spain leading up to the reconquest, and LLotS is in England during the Viking raids. So yeah, in them, there are a lot of the monotheists, but he explores (interestingly and movingly, I think) the people involved, and the crashing between the pagan-polytheistic and the monotheistic in Sarantine Mosaic and Last Light of the Sun particularly, without really giving precedence to either worldview (beyond the fact that by the numbers, culturally, the latter won). Al-Rassan as I said I don't think has much in the way of magic or gods in it; its focus is much more the human involved, with no metaphysics really involved.

Anyway. I gush embarrassingly.

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

Mjornir of the Thunder
*snerk*

No, not gushing embarrassingly. Very useful. Thanks for giving me an idea of the books!

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

I'm probably alone in one of my favourite scenes being a mildly cranky exchange between Mjornir and Dana near the end of the first book. If you read it, I think you'll know which one it is (it's one of the few times the narrator tells us what the Gods are saying to each other; otherwise, we're very linked into close-thirds most of the story).

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

And peering up at a clarification above: Tapestry might be your best bet for now, as, as indicated in my gushing comment, the last three are in a parallel-running alt-Earth. I find them fascinating mostly for the historical detail in a fantasy-drama patina, and his ability to deal with that historical detail WITHOUT ever indicating "this is the right way, this is the wrong way" - although I will note the only Powers ever to directly show up in those books are the pagan-parallel ones (in one of the old Western European gods, the work of a Classical pagan man, and the Fair Folk, specifically); Jad, the Yaweh parallel, is never on-screen, as it were. But if you're sick of anything that even tastes of it, wait until you can/might appreciate them. Tapestry has something entirely different.

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

Hee! *hugs* That's okay. :D

[dorukai.livejournal.com]

I can't recommend the Otherland series (by Tad Williams) highly enough. Fantastic stuff, sort of fantasy/quest stuff set 3/4 in hyper-real cyberspace worlds, 1/4 in the real world. Much better than his Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, though that was already better than average fantasy. The most recent book of Williams that I've read started with a typical "man gets sucked into the realm of faery", and got very weird. Also good though. It's called The War of the Flowers.

Read any Hobbs? If not, the Liveship Traders series (detailing a world in which the best traders have ships that become sentient when their captain dies on board, or similar) is phenomenally good.

[mattador.livejournal.com]

I just read City of Bones, and I agree- though to be fair, faeiries being partially fallen angels is by no means a new idea.

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

I know. I noted that above. ;) It's what stopped me throwing the book at that point – she's not shoe-horning things in to make it fit her dualist universe, she's drawing on a historical "Haha we defeated the Celts and now all their gods and boogeymen are EVIL" perspective. *slightly wicked*

[mattador.livejournal.com]

XD

I enjoyed the book more or else, but... original thought was not among its virtues. At all.

[mattador.livejournal.com]

More or less. Not else. Typos...

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

It sounds like K J Parker fits the bill, particularly the Fencer trilogy - Colours in the Steel, The Belly of the Bow, and The Proof House, or the latest trilogy-in-progress, the Engineer trilogy - so far Devices and Desires and Evil for Evil have been published.