OK, just finished Ethan of Athos, and I have to say that it was masterfully done. Like, it’s clear that the Athosian religion is pretty whack… And yet, Ethan, a devout follower of that religion, uses his religion as a vehicle for his inherent kindness. And the society based on that religion is actually fairly functional. To write something like that convincingly takes finesse.
I’m also impressed that she wrote something so completely nonjudgemental of homosexuality in 1986.
I remember reading at the time that Jim Baen was rather upset by that book and told Ms. Bujold that there were to be no more books dealing with such subjects.
I really liked that one. She could have written such a premise in a way that was trite or cliche, but instead she made it nuanced and moving in its own way.
I always figured that it was the result of despite their religious focus being an obsessive fear & hatred of women - having isolated themselves from women, they had no women to torment nor as scapegoats to blame. So over time they drifted towards, not so much a more moderate position as a calmer one; women were still “evil”, but none of them were there so they were just an abstract issue that most likely didn’t think often about. Everyone had to get on with their life without targets they could focus blame or anger on, not when so much as media images of women were banned much less their presence.
It’s hard to get all that worked up about people you’ve never seen or heard, and who will never interact with your entire world.
Or to use some modern slang I find quite fitting, she didn’t make it “cringe”. A number of writers have written stories and shows about alternate-social-structures that have made me cringe, to be sure.
Ethan is such a decent person, but Lois gives the Athosians a variety of characters, like Ethan’s no-hoper lover, his manipulative boss, the understandably upset hopeful father, etc. And Elli pulls off a maneuver worthy of Miles.
Her characters are one of the best features of her writing. Often very interesting, very distinct from one another and very “real” feeling.
Yes, both in the Vorkosigan world, and also in the worlds of the Sharing Knife and of the Five Gods (Penric and Desdemona).
That’s next on my list!
The Penric and Desdemona books are a subset in the world of the Five Gods, but can be read as a separate series. This Wikipedia article gives the the full chronological series.
This lifelong atheist is absolutely enchanted with the theology and practices in the World of Five Gods, but if I WAS to take up religion here in my waning years, I think I would become a dedicat of T. Kingfisher’s Temple of the White Rat…
I would prefer the Temple of the White Rat too, for a start the religion in WFG is not a religion, is practically a science, you can experimentally prove the existence of the gods. (That’s why I’m not a fan of those books, they pretend to be fantasy but are sci-fi)
Say rather they’re at the intersection of fantasy and science fiction.
Oh, yes, not least because the Paladins’ god is really, actually, positively dead.
YMMV
That might be why I like them. I’m not huge into fantasy, but they seem more grounded and less fanciful than what I commonly consider fantasy to be.
In any case, both Bujold and T. Kingfisher have created wonderful worlds to explore.
I do occasionally perform the Bastard’s tally.
I would rate them:
Vorkosigan
White Rat
Wide Green World (Another sci-fi masquerading as a fantasy by Bujold, but somehow more tolerable)
World of the Five Gods.
I do like how often someone in the WotFG series will use “theology” the way we’d use “physics” or “engineering”. Not as a way of saying somebody is transgressing (or following) the words in some holy book, but referring to the actual metaphysics of the setting.
Along those lines, I very much liked the discussion of the Death Ritual in “The Curse of Chalion”.
Summarizing, when Caz is speaking to the Divine of the Bastard, that attempting the ritual is a crime of intent, but when granted, it is de facto a miracle of the God - not a crime. Of course, even he acknowledges that nuance has always be theoretical - no in every prior case, the demon carries of the souls of both the petitioner and the target.
Penric and Desdemona are my favorite before-bed popcorn reading. I liked the longer novels OK, except for The Hallowed Hunt, which never really grabbed me, but those are just the right length and ideal for re-reading whenever I haven’t got anything newer on my Kindle.