Dave’s Anatomy: My History as a Writer, #73: Science Fiction and Religion: “The Priestesses of Light”

Deep Space Nine

Science fiction occupies several sub-genres. Hard Science Fiction deals with technology and contains quite a lot of “science”; this is what writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke used to do. Space Opera is Buck Rogers and Star Wars and the like. Cyberpunk centers around technology, artificial intelligence, and informational science. Military science fiction explores war and soldiering in future and interstellar settings—Elizabeth Moon’s Rules of Engagement comes to mind. My story, “The Priestesses of Light” is more on the sociological and cultural side of things.

Kai Winn, Bajoran Priestess

Think of Deep Space Nine, a Star Trek series that ran for several years and primarily deal with cultures, their interactions, conflicts, and natures. Deep Space Nine was a space station that orbited the planet Bajor. The Bajorans were a very religious race of beings. They had been conquered and occupied by the Cardassians, a ruthless, aggressive planet system who had cruelly oppressed the Bajorans, who are still recovering from the ill effects of the occupation and have allied themselves with the Federation. Deep Space Nine is a trading post and so attracted an endless variety of beings who represent different cultures and ways of life:  Klingon, Ferengi, Trill, Lurian, Vulcan, Romulan, and many more. They interact.

With the Bajorans, religion is important. This is an interesting development in science fiction. In the future worlds of Asimov and Clarke, religion has disappeared, and science fiction generally ignored the subject for years—then a funny thing happened on the way of Dagoba. Religion re-emerged very strongly in Star Wars. And it became a subject once more.

Re-enactor dressed as Roman Vestal Priestess

My story, “The Priestesses of Light,” deals with a planet strongly influenced by religion (the worship of a goddess). On this particular world, a parasitic creature that causes blindness infects children. The custom for female children so infected is to enroll them as priestesses of the Goddess Robinna, the deity worshipped on the planet. For centuries, the blind priestesses conducted worship. Until a physician named Lalayna, from the nearby planet Mervogia, discovers a cure. She is praised—but not by everyone.

Tradition is a strong element in most religions. A large faction on Planet Suva want to keep the tradition of blind priestesses. This creates an ethical dilemma. Will certain young women be denied the vaccine Lalayna has developed? Other planets that worship Robinna point out that there is nothing in the religion that demands priestesses be blind. Lalayna will attend and speak at a symposium where officials will announce that the serum preventing blindness will be offered to all children and the tradition of blind priestesses will end.

Lalayna, who has devoted herself to medicine has a revelation:  One winter noon, eating lunch and watching the snow fall outside the window of her office, she realized she was forty years old, unmarried, still a virgin, and without a single romantic prospect on this world or any other. Luck has it that she becomes engaged. In a few weeks, she will go to the altar as a virgin bride and become a wife.

She is disappointed that the chief priestesses cannot attend the session as promised. Lalayna gets up to speak, urges the people of Suva to accept change, and assures them that their religion will not be harmed by having sighted priestesses—after all, it so on the other planets in the area that worship their goddess. As she is speaking, an explosion shatters the windows of the building. Blaster fire erupts and she is seized and taken to a small room by partisans of the old traditions of the religion.

They tie her to a chair. One of their leaders holding white-hot iron rod tells her what he plans to do. “I can’t stop what you’ve set in motion, but I can ordain you as a priestess. We called them the Priestesses of Light because though they lived in darkness they give light.” As he lowers the glowing steel, Lalayna realizes, with horror, that when he blinds her, she will indeed be qualified to be a priestess of light in every way:  she is a woman, she is a virgin, and, now, she will be blind.

Lucine

A voice comes through the darkness: "Stop this at once.” Lalayna’s tormenter lowers the rod. It is Lucine, the chief priestess of the planet, She has learned of the plot to blind Lalayna and taken steps to prevent it. By this time, soldiers have secured the building and taken the rebels into custody. Asha, a colleague and friend of Lalayna, rushes to her and begins to care for her. She is shaken and sobbing but unharmed. The priestesses of light, though blind, have more insight than the traditionalists. The changes in religion will go on as planned. Lalayna will be married. The insurgency will come to an end.

The story appeared in a journal called Four-Cornered Universe, now defunct and with no archive. It was reprinted, however, in an issue of Startling Sci-Fi and is available for purchase. Get a copy here.

For additional titles, check out my Writer's Page.

How do lutes, vampires, Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth I figure in together? Find out:  Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #72: "The Dragons of Nova Zemyla"

Dragons never go away. They are a peculiar part of world myth—peculiar in that stories about them abound in areas as disparate as Europe and China. They breathe fire and they are, variously, villainous or wise. In my story, "The Dragons of Nova Zemlya," the dragons are wise and trying to survive. Things have changed for dragons. In the old days, when humans only had swords and lances with which to fight them, the dragons were not in much danger. But humans developed new weapons and a fire hotter and more destructive than their own. Humans are not to be attacked. They are no longer a source of food. They are dangerous predators to be avoided at all cost.

Nova Zemlya is an island north of Russia and part of Russian territory. It is large, covering 35,000 square miles, and lies near the Arctic Circle. The Russians knew of the island as early as the 11,000s and, especially during the Soviet era, valued it as a military base and also as a site for nuclear testing.

In my story, dragons live there in a large nest consisting of 51of them. Having greatly declined in numbers over the centuries, they are anxious about the continuation of their species. Several of the dragons who live there and are incubating eggs. The only trouble, though, is that dragon's eggs may take a century to hatch. The dragons of Nova Zemlya have found a deep cave with volcanic heat, the perfect place to locate their nests and eggs. Large herds of caribou and musk ox live on the island or in the lands near it and provide food for the creatures. The vast, uninhabited land mass is a great place for them to hide—until one of the dragons on the island buys into an ideology that is damaging to the herd.

Call it Dragon pride or Dragon assertiveness. One of the younger males named Lynzod decides to challenge one of the airplanes that often fly near the dragon lair. The Russian pilots destroy him with a missile. The dragons recognize the incident as being serious.

It is serious because the Russians use the island as a military base and for nuclear testing. The dragons are fine with the nuclear testing, since it doesn't harm them and they can take the heat of the blasts, but the airplanes are intrusive. The dragons avoid them--or did until Lynzod decided to take one on and lost the fight. Now the Russians, ever wary of intrusion and attacks, will investigate. One of the older dragons points out that if they find them they will capture them and study them; and if they find the various treasure hordes the 51 dragons who dwell in the lair have gathered, nothing will stop them from destroying the community.

They contemplate what to do. The unnamed narrator of the story, who is shy, young, and seldom participates in council, comes up with an idea. When she was younger and knights would attack her, she knew how to use her fire to magnetize rocks. The knights' armor would be drawn by the magnetism and pull them from their horses; or it would pull their lances out of their hands. She suggests they magnetize a huge rock in front of the lair. When the planes arrive to investigate, the magnetism of the stone will disrupt their flight.



The other dragons think it's a good idea. Several of them get together, heat the rock with their fire, and magnetize it just as the Russians send a squadron of planes to find out what is going up further up the island. The dragons hide. The heavily magnetized stone pulls the aircraft down so they almost crash and their instruments go awry. They are frightened and go back to home base to tell their experience.

And here I do something no one is supposed to do in fiction. I switch POV. The dragons are entirely left behind and the reader is redirected to a conference of pilots and their report on the incident to their commanding officer. The officer, whose name is Velten, asks for a report. He listens and says what they hit was probably an anomaly--something caused by the intense magnetism and the light playing through. The same thing, he argues, that causes northern lights could have also caused the apparition the pilots hit. One of them suggests they contact Moscow and arrange for an investigation, but he thunders "Nyet!" He does not want a group of nosey scientists roaming about the place. With his refusal, the question is settled. The meeting is adjourned. The report will say that the pilots fired on an object that turned out to be an optical illusion and the magnetic energy in the area detonated the missile. This will satisfy the higher-ups.

One of the pilots, though, leaves the meeting thinking that what he saw--what Velten will insist was an optical illusion--in fact looked like a dragon.

"The Dragons of Nova Zemyla" appeared in Orion's Child, now defunct. If anyone out there knows a magazine looking for a good dragon story, let me know.

For a good vampire story, check out Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute. Nelleke Reitsma is a world-renowned lutenists and guitarist. She is beautiful and talented--and deadly. 

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments on dragons, writing, or related topics.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #71: "Delphi."

I grew up in Indiana—wasn't born there, but my family moved there in 1955, and for the next 30 years, it was my home, and I still consider myself a Hoosier even though I've lived a lot of years in Michigan. So I was eager to participate in the Indiana Horror Anthology, published by James Ward Kirk publications. Indiana has always struck me as a very non-horrific state.  It does not have dark swamps like Louisiana; no old haunted houses like you might find in upstate New York; no history of witches like Massachusetts; no white alligators in the sewers, no Bigfoot. How to write a horror story?

Hemingway's sage advice, often quoted, is to write one story about each thing you know. Growing up in Indiana, I knew something about it—well, I knew lots about it. One thing Indiana has, or used to have, is natural gas. Deposits of it lay just under the surface in the central part of the state where I lived. There is a town not far from where I grew up called Gas City. And there is also a town called Delphi. At the turn of the century people did not know about the finitude of natural resources. They set up torches that burned the gas as tourist sites. Sometimes fires would start where gas seeped out of the ground ; people would travel for miles to watch them burn. In about a decade, the gas resources of north central Indiana were used up (I am told the gas is still there but too deep in the ground to make extracting it profitable).

Delphic Priestess

I mentioned Delphi. It was named after a city in ancient Greece. Gas fumes abounded there too,  so the city in Indiana where gas seeped out of the ground was named for that ancient  town. Something more about ancient Delphi:  it was the city where prophetesses lived. To deliver prophecies, they would go into caves where natural gas seeped out of the earth, breathe the fumes (which had hallucinogenic effects), and go into a trance during which they would utter prophecies about the future. The people of the day regarded their prophecies with such veneration that Kings and rulers would go to the "sibyls" before they made important decisions.

In my story "Delphi" a group of young people go into one of the caves for which Delphi, Indiana, was named because of the similarity to the caves in ancient Greece. Of course, they go there for a different reason. Liz Foreman, the main character, gets to go with a group of very popular boys and girls. She has decided it's time to lose her virginity and is delighted she will do so in good company. She follows instructions once in the cave, drinks some wine, and then bends down to sniff the gas coming up through a crack in the floor. She begins kissing one of the boys. He begins undressing her. But when she wakes up, she isn't in bed with him. She is chained to a chair in a shabby old house.

Eventually an old woman comes in. She remembers all the horror movies she has seen and supposes her captor will torture her to death. The older woman assures her no harm will come to her and her questions will be answered soon. Eventually, a younger woman appears, questions the older one, and again assure Liz that she will not be harmed. Then they hold her mouth open and force her to drink a potion. She falls into a drugged sleep.

Artist's re-creation of ancient Delphi

She wakes up in a place she does not recognize—not the old house, but a stone building with soft beds and gold trim on the walls. A young woman comes in and welcomes her. Liz demands to know where she is. The woman, Praxilla, tells she is in Delphi. When Liz says the place does not look at all like Delphi, she tells her it is Delphi in ancient Greece and she will become a pythoness, a virgin priestess of Apollo. When Liz demands to go home, the young woman becomes impatient with her, tells her the Fates have chosen her for this role and she needs to accept her place in life. She threatens to run away and is informed that if she does the local villagers will capture and return her. When she persists, Praxilla begins to lose her patience and sends as girl named Agatha to talk to her.

Delphic Priestesses

Agatha, a British girl who visited a nearby site in Greece in 1897, informs Liz that she has been taken to be a priestess, transported through time, and will live the rest of her life serving in the temple as a sibyl, "a chaste maiden in the service of the Oracle." She also warns Liz to behave herself and settle into the life the Fates have given her. She takes her out and shows her the massive three-tiered site of Apollo's Temple, the sounds, the beauty of the surrounding countryside and tells her that though she will never marry and never know the embrace of man, there are compensatory pleasures. She needs to surrender. She needs to accept.

The old horror theme of being abducted by powers you cannot oppose and forced into a life you would not have chosen operates in this story. We fear loss of freedom, of self-determination; we fear denial of our desires and dreams. These things fall on Liz and we are simultaneously filled with fear and pity (as Aristotle put it) when we enter into her story.

"Delphi" is still available if you purchase of copy of Indiana Horror Anthology 2011.

And for another scary read, check out my new novella, Sinfonia: the First Notes On the Lute: A Vampire Chronicle, Part One. Nelleke Reitsma is a talented lutenist, one of the best in the world. She tours and performs concerts internationally. She is also a vampire who has lived 300 years, played lute for Queen Elizabeth I and knew William Shakespeare--and many other figures from the music world in her lifetime--which continues as long as she can conceal her identity; and as long as she can find blood. 

For additional titles, check out my Writer's Page.

Comments are welcome. I would love to hear what you have to say.

Happy reading!

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #70: "The After-Hours Dating Service."

The Vampire Jancinda Lamott

Vampire stories became simultaneously popular in unpopular with the publication of the Twilight series. Lots of people wanted to read about vampires and were interested in the genre that has been popular since Lord Byron's buddie William Polidori wrote The Vampyre in 1819. Bram Stoker's Dracula established the genre and it has been popular in print and film ever since then. Twilight renewed interest in the genre. But there was anti-vampire reaction. The vampires of Twilight were different:  they sparkled when they came out in the light and they were hip, cool people, not the traditional vampires of old legend. People began to scoff and sneer at this development. I remember encountering "no vampire stories" when I would check the guidelines of journals; or, sometimes, "no sparkly vampires." But I wrote some stories anyway, created an ongoing vampire character named Jancinda Lamott and published several stories about her, the one I will discuss here included. (By the way, I am currently writing a new series about a vampire named Nelleke Reitsma—Sinfonia:  The First Notes on the Lute is book one in the series. Order a copy here.)

The first story I published about Jancinda was a funny one called "The After-Hours Dating Service." Jancinda crosses over—the term vampires in her world use to denote the transformation from human to one of the undying—and manages to make adjustment pretty well. A friend teaches her to hunt. She owns an online business, an editing service, and is able to earn a good living and not go out in the day, so the money is not a problem. But there is one big problem:  she can't meet guys.

There are vampire men, but not many, and a lot of them are taken. One night at a bar with some vampire friends she laments her situation. She asks an experienced vampire woman, Celia Campion, who has lived the vampire life since 1632, if she has had trouble finding dates:

“I’ve been in a couple of long-term relationships—very long term, I might add.”

“Not me. I can’t find a date to save me. I use the internet a lot with my job, and every search engine I track data on has a dating service. I can’t help looking at them. I wish there was one for”—she hesitated, not liking to say the word, but then finished her    sentence—“vampires.”

Celia Campion leaned in closer to her.

“Child, what makes you so certain there isn’t such a thing?”

Celia provides her with a web address for a vampire dating site. It is called The After-Hours Dating Service. Jancinda looks at profiles and arranges to meet a vampire man whose writes a fascinating description of himself.

The first man she meets is Constantine—Constantine Quintus Horatius Dominicus Maximus—who has lived since the days of Julius Caesar. She likes him, they hit it off and, in keeping with vampire habits of sexuality, soon become intimate. She learns his story. After a while, though, his melancholy bothers her. She finds out he has not gotten over the death of woman named Neria. Though she likes him, she is still restless and seeks out the company of another man, one named Deronda.

Deronda is handsome, dresses in Victorian clothing, and always shows his fangs. Knowing fangs emerge only when vampires hunt or are in danger, she asks him about them. He tells her there are ways to make them stay out all the time. He takes her to Goth bars, they hunt together, but after a while his dress and manner annoy her. When he wants her to dress up in a Victorian gown and chase her with a riding crop, Jancinda draws the line and goes back to the dating service.

She meets a Renaissance man called Aquinas and eventually finds out he belonged to the Borgia family, though he was not one of the major players in that rather infamous clan. He is religious as well and likes to go to church when he can, at night and in winter when the days are short. This annoys her. He has spoken to Calvin, Giovanni had talked with John Calvin, Melanchthon, Menno Simons, Ignatius of Loyola, Elizabeth Ann Seton, and Karl Barthes in attempts to come to grips with the religious questions connected with being a vampire.

Once he and Jancinda are out and are surrounded by vampire hunters who have been tracking Aquinas. They have magic to paralyze the couple while they get the stakes read. Jancinda manages to transform to a wolf and kills the hunters so the others flee. Rather than being thankful, Aquinas begins to treat her with coolness. She finds out her actions interdicted his ideal of what a woman should be like:  distant, pure, and other, like an angel. They split up after an angry quarrel in public. Jancinda is back to square one. She decides to call up Constantine. And, when she checks the dating service page, she has forty-three inquires. She smiles. Whatever her difficulties, the problem of not being able to find a date is at an end.

"The After-Hours Dating Service appeared in an anthology  Mon Coeur Mort published by Press. It is still available and you can get a copy.

Stories about Jancinda Lamott appeared in several anthologies and magazines. I will be writing more about her in the future.

And, to underscore, my latest vampire book, about a vampire who is a lutenist and classical guitarist who knew, in her time, Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, Sinfonia:  the First Notes on the Lute, is available from Amazon. Get a copy here.

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As A Writer, #69: "The Indian Boy"

The most common theory of creativity in the Western World is that of ex nihilo creation:  creation "out of nothing." The artist comes up with a unique idea, an innovative technique, something completely new and startling. Think Picasso, James Joyce, Bridget Riley, or, in his own day Raphael. This is the nature of true creativity. As God created the universe out of nothing, so the artist creates something never thought of before, something unique and new.

But in his book The Geography of Genius, journalist Eric Weiner notes that in the Eastern World—he gives the examples of China and India—creativity is seen as arranging material that is already there rather than coming up with something entirely new. I like this idea, because my stories and poems are often responses to literature, to art, to a work of creativity that already exists. I have, on occasion, been taken to task for this (especially by other poets). My critics (who are well-meaning) say that I have much life experience to write on, so why am I always relying on literature or art to supply me with themes for my poetry? Well, there are many ways of proceeding when one creates a work of art. The late Umberto Eco, who was both a novelist and a respected literary critic, once said, "All books speak of other books, and every writer tells a story that has already been told." Thus was the case with my short story, "The Indian Boy."

Titania

"The Indian Boy" derived from Shakespeare's play A Midsummer-Night's Dream and, like a lot of my favorite things in Shakespeare, it is obscure. Oberon and Titania, the King and Queen of fairyland, are arguing over custody of an "Indian boy"—the child of one of Titania's mortal serving women who died and left the child with her. In the 1999 film version of A Midsummer-Night Dream starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline, viewers get a short glimpse of the boy, riding on a white horse, as Titania narrates her remembrance of her deceased friend. He has long hair and his skin is dark blue, like the god Shiva's skin. This gave me the idea for the story. How about the Shakespeare play from the boy's point of view? His guardian mother and her husband are fighting over him (as in a modern custody battle). Why? I had studied the play enough to know the various interpretations of this phase of it, but none of them satisfied me. What would it be like to be such a young man?

Cobweb

In my story, the boy consorted with the fairies named in the play:  Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and Mustardseed. Oberon thinks it is time for him to enter the realm of experience and sets him up with Peaseblossom—a thing Titania does not like. The quarrel escalates and Titania and Oberon split up, angrily going their separate ways.

If you know the play, a lot happens, including Titania falling under an enchantment that makes her love a donkey-headed mortal (Nick Bottom). But what did all of this look like to the Indian boy?  What did he think of seeing his parents split over him? What kind of loneliness and despair did he feel? Like Stephen King, does now, Shakespeare often wrote about the suffering of children. He felt, I think from years of teaching and reading him, quite a lot of consternation at the way parents treat children, and this is seen in A Midsummer-Night Dream in Egeus' treatment of his daughter Hermia (and in many other plays: Juliet's father's treatment of Juliet, Lear's attitude toward Cordelia in King Lear, Polonius' bullying of his daughter Ophelia in Hamlet). Parents can be real creeps.

Shiva

One of the fairies casts a spell on the Indian boy that enables him to enter a dream. In it, he sees who his father is. Though the name is not given, it is obvious it is the god Shiva, the Destroyer, Lord of the Dance, Prince of Men. Just seeing Shiva gives the Indian boy grace. When he returns to his lover, Cobweb, she wants to worship him. He touches the chakra on her brow and she begins to grow in wisdom; their love begins to grow as well. Knowing his origin enables the child to grow confidently into a young man, no longer overwhelmed by circumstance.

"The Indian Boy" appeared in Pedestal Magazine. Read it here.

For more titles, and some great reads, see my Writer's Page.

I recommend, for late summer reading, my novella, Strange Brew. When a witch is in love with you, the magic can get serious.

Leave a comment. I love to hear your opinions.