Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #103: Religion and Outer Space: "Antigone"

One of my earliest blogs was titled "A Funny Thing Happened on the way to Dagobah . . . or, How Science Fiction Got Religion" (read here). Early science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, and a host of lesser lights depicted the future in outer space as devoid of religion. In their stories, religion is simply gone, a relic that has passed off the scene along with mule trains and triremes. The supreme expression of this assumption was a story by Lester Del Ray called "Evensong," in which a desperate being is fleeing from pursuers, finds a planet where he thinks he is safe, but then is captured. Quoting from that blog:  His benevolent captor tells him he will be taken to a planet where he will be well-treated and have a nice home. The creature whimpers pathetically, "But I'm God!" His captor returns, "Yes, but I am Man." The story appeared in Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison. You can read it here.

So it was and still is in some science fiction. But the funny thing that happened was that science fiction suddenly became laced with religion. This was first apparent, at least to me, in Star Wars, where we learned about the Force, met the Jedi (who were rather like Shaolin monks), and encountered Yoda (whose name sounded like Yoga and who greatly resembled a Zen master). Religion, banished in the 1950s and 1960s, suddenly made a rather spectacular comeback.

Antigone, from the play

My story "Antigone" happily inhabits this new world where to talk about religion is okay. In my science fiction world-building, various religions thrive. The Mervogian races worships the "holy light" of the Besrid nebula. Numerous planets kneel before the Goddess Robinna. Earth, of course, has transported its religions into space. Some alien races have accepted earthly religion. The Barzalian and Golorian planetary systems have converted to Roman Catholicism—the Barzalians expressing the Catholicism of Saint Francis, the Golorians that of Cortez and the Conquistadors. Other religions exist in various places. Again, quoting my own writing, The human race … has always had religions. To assume religion will simply go away because people can fly into space seems a bit specious. And to assume other civilizations would not have religions is equally specious.

"Antigone" takes place on a colony planet that is part of the Earth-led Terran Alliance. In my world, the predominant race of the Terran Alliance, the most populous and influential, is the Indian race. The most common religion is Hinduism (though there is a significant "European" minority and all races have equal status). On Planet Antigone, a cult has grown up that worships the figure of Antigone. It draws mostly from the European population of the Indian-dominated planet, but attracts people from all faiths. They have Temples, icons of the goddess, and many converts. The government is tolerant, but the Thebans (followers of Antigone, who came from that city) are militant. When the government begins to develop a grove that Thebans consider sacred, they revolt.

Thebans: Antigone worshipers

Their revolt is well-planned. They surprise the army, win some initial victories and, as terrorists often do, take hostages. One of the hostages is Asha, the wife of Lorac, an army officer who is the main character of the story. She is a doctor.

The military counterattacks. They find the followers of Antigone are not well-trained. They are, however, led by a formidable military commander named Evangeline Müller. After some fierce fighting, the Terran military manages to surround the main force of Thebans. A group of commandos infiltrate the camp and find out the Antigone worshipers are in collusion with a hostile race of beings, the Housali, who are supplying them with arms. They also find out why many of the Theban militants claimed to have seen Antigone. The Housali have selected a young woman to impersonate her. They have done plastic surgery to make her look like images of Antigone. They also give her mind-altering drugs that enable her to project mental energy that induces a peaceful, ecstatic feelings in anyone close to her. The Thebans believe their blissful, supernal feelings come from being near the goddess. They are ready to give up everything and to die for her.

The Terran military also finds a Housali ship, with cloaking capabilities, moored in the middle of the Theban camp. And Lorcan sees the captured Asha. He controls his desire to liberate her.The Terrans seize the Housali ship and rescue Asha. She is quiet. After a while, Lorac realizes the Housali have sexually assaulted her.

Using the ship's monitor, they find the location of Evangeline Müller and capture her. The revolt dissolved without her leadership. The Terrans also capture the Housali woman who impersonates Antigone.

The aftermath of the revolt brings stern retribution. Insurgents are punished with death or imprisonment. The woman who impersonated Antigone is acquitted of all guilt because the Housali forced her, a slave, to participate in the ruse. Evangeline Müller is tried for treason and sentenced to be hanged. Lorac goes to her to tell her that neither he nor Asha bear her any ill will. She has been told that the guards who will execute her are planning to conduct the hanging in such a way that she slowly strangles to death. Lorac knows the soldier assigned to do the execution. She pleads with him to intervene for her so he will make it quick. Thinking of all the suffering Müller has caused, and what happened to his wife, he is reluctant but agrees and successfully intervenes on her part. When she is executed, she dies instantly. Asha is asked, at the last minute, to participate in the autopsy that certifies her death.

At the end, he and Asha pay a tribute to her. They realize how people are caught up in falsity and how all of us are vulnerable to deception. The ceremony they perform indicates Evangeline has been forgiven. The planet is renamed Gargi Vachaknu, after a Hindu sage. Worship of Antigone is severely restricted, though not forbidden.

The story appeared in Fiction on the Web. Read it here.

For more titles, see my Writer's Page.

Coming soon:  the sequel to my vampire novel, Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute. Read the first book in the series to prepare you for the second one.

Happy summer.

Happy reading.  

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #59: "Prosperity"

Inanna

I write about mythology a lot. In more recent days, it has become a niche area for my writing and, recently, I have published stories about Inanna, Sumerian goddess of beauty and fertility; Edesia, Roman goddess of hospitality; Pele, Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. I am composing a story about the Greek god of war, Ares; a couple of blogs ago, I talked about the story "At Your Desire," about the goddess of sex and beauty, Venus. Ancient deities are perpetually fascinating. So are gods and goddesses. The story "Prosperity" fell into this category, and was about a goddess still being worshiped.

The tale takes place during colonial times when the British ruled India. Lyle Durham, a British engineer who owns a boiler factory in India and is trying to perfect a high-velocity steam engine that can propel boats against the swift current of the nearby Wardha River. Making little progress, he receives a visit one morning from a beautiful Indian woman who introduces herself as Parvati Jaspreet and is responding to his need for a translator (he has not advertised this). He is surprised a woman, and one from a high caste, has applied for the job, since India was at that time a very traditional society and women generally did not work, especially upper class woman. Parvati tells him her husband is open-minded and she wants to see the city prosper. 

Things immediately begin to improve. The workers respect the woman—Durham assumes because she is high caste. Able now, through her translation, to make tasks and procedures clear to his workers, he begins to make significant progress on development of his steam engine. Not only this, but his workers' fortunes improve as well. They begin to prosper. One man, whose wife has not been able to have children for years, sees her give birth to a son. He throws a party, invites Durham, and tells her Parvati will be there as well. He agrees to attend—once more surprised that an Indian worker would invite him into his home, since segregation by race was the rule during that time.

 

He goes. During the party Parvati is friendly. He has not brought a gift so she gives him a bag of coins that seem almost to miraculously appear. She calls him by his first name and the two of them go for a walk. He knows the absurdity and immorality of thinking there might be something between them—but he is alone and lonely and she is beautiful. During the walk she places her hands on his head and then they return to the celebration.

Next came a part of the story my writer's group did not like. After the party, Aishwarya, one of Parvati's servant girls, comes to Durham's house on orders from her mistress and offers him a "blessing." The blessing is that she will give her body to him. Appalled, he refuses. She begins to sob.

            “What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked.

           “I don’t want to die.”

           “Die? You’re not going to die.”

           “If you refuse the offering of the mistress through me, I must kill myself.”

           I could only gape.

           "Please, let me bless you as I am instructed. Please don’t send me to my death.”

Aishwarya

His Victorian prudery and sense of ethics (she is very young) extends the argument, but when it's clear to him that she will indeed commit suicide if he refuses her, he consents.

Some people in my writer's group thought this was gratuitous. Some thought it was a bigoted representation of Indian culture. My intention was to show that the ways of another culture, and of a divinity, are different from those a person from another culture, and who is mortal, might hold. Aishwarya becomes Durham's mistress.

And his fortunes continue to change. He develops the engine but cannot find boat propellers that can take the stress from it. A German engineer happens to drop by to see Durham's factory and tells him he has just such propellers. His steamship is a success and opens trade up in the area, bringing prosperity to Durham and the people of the city and province in which he lives. He meets a young English lady living in India and marries her. His steam engine sells worldwide and he becomes a wealthy man. The area of India he lived in prospers as well

Years later, he and his wife go into an Indian temple and see an icon of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealthy and prosperity. Durham is stunned. The statue looks like Parvati. He knows, of course, that the resemblance is coincidental. Sculptors would make an image of Lakshmi beautiful, and ideas of what is beautiful are consistent in a culture, so the statue would look like a woman such as Parvati. Still, he remembers, the sudden appearance of gold coins at the party (did they fall from her palms?). He remembers the turn of fortune in his factory, and his life after she appeared—the sudden turn to prosperity. He cannot entirely dismiss the notion that he—the rational Victorian engineer—has encountered a goddess.

The story appeared in Catesbury Review, which is no longer in print. No archive of the publication seems to exist. Another story perhaps to re-market.

 A lot of mythic writing has come through my pen (I  write in longhand and then transfer it to a word processor). For a book of modern myth on an ancient race of beings with supernatural power, get a copy of Sinfonia: the First Notes on the Lute, a vampire story. Available 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 #43: "The Room of Mirrors," Horror and the "Other"

The idea for the story "The Room of Mirrors" came from a novel by Pearl Buck I taught one semester at Grand Valley State University. A class titled Literatures in English emphasizes works written in English but suggests instructors focus on books from outside America and the United Kingdom. I taught books written in English from Nigeria, India, Nepal, Australia, South Africa, and other cultures. I did teach one that semester by an American writer, Pearl Buck.

Pearl Buck is most famous for her novel The Good Earth, about China. She grew up as a missionary kid in China and often wrote about that culture and other Asian cultures. I didn't want to teach The Good Earth because instructors teach it frequently, so, as I often do, I picked one of her more obscure books. Mandala is a novel she wrote about India. I would call it good but not great; still, it gave me some ideas and focused my imagination on Indian culture. This led me to write a story about an Indian man's involvement with an American woman—a feature taken from Buck's novel.

But this was a horror story. A young woman who in college became a call girl now pursues that as a vocation. She ends up as mistress to an Maharini, the ruler of a province in India. He keeps her in a place called The Room of Mirrors, which is, as the name implies, completely covered in mirrors. The place creeps Phoebe out, but she likes the isolation of the estate the Maharini, Shashindra, maintains. She likes the quiet and the beautiful view of the Himalayas because she is contemplating an important choice. Her old boyfriend, Calvin, who knows about her choice of vocation, has offered to marry her. She wonders if she can leave her vocation and be faithful to him—and if he will continue to love her, given the trade she has plied the last few years. He says it doesn't matter to him. Phoebe is not so sure.

 She has a nightmare in which she sees every panel of mirror in her bedroom showing the face of a woman. Most are Indian, a few are African or European. And at last she sees a blonde woman covered with blood, standing next to her, outside of the mirrors. She cries out. One of the Indian servants comes to her, asks her what the dream was so he can interpret it, but when she describes it, he obfuscates. She dismisses the dream and tries to sort through the issues involved with her choice to go with Calvin or continue working as a high-class prostitute.

Calvin has met a girl named Charissa, who is Greek and an actress. He has told her about Phoebe (the story has two narrative streams). The same woman shows up at the Room of Mirrors and, tells Phoebe something she is not supposed to know that enables her to escape the room of mirrors.

First, she tells her about the room and explains the faces Phoebe saw in the mirror. They are the imprisoned souls of women who have served as mistresses to various rulers of the province. After they die, their souls are imprisoned. The sorcerer who arranged the spell so the Maharini's wives would not perceive their husbands' infidelity lives eternally from the energy of their spirits and from their anguish. Charissa had become one of the current Maharini's women in order to get acting roles. In her depression, she killed herself, but because she died in the Room of Mirrors by suicide, is able to get out. She is the key to freeing the women. Phoebe only has to lure the Maharini into the room for the women to exact their revenge.

Phoebe uses her charms to lure him up that very night. The women's arms and then bodies emerge from the room in a current of snaky distortion and engulf him. Charissa protects Phoebe. The women, however, do not kill the Maharini. He is unconscious but not dead at the end of his ordeal. A doctor proclaims a heart attack. Charissa can now resume her life and she and Phoebe see the women of the Room of Mirrors freed from the imprisoning spell and the spirit of the sorcerer who imprisoned them dissolve in anguish. Charissa resumes her career (she has an plausible explanation for where she has been for the last two years). Phoebe leaves with Calvin for a new life together with him.

Writing about foreign cultures is tricky. Edward Said's book, Orientalism, notes how Westerners often stereotype and exoticize third world peoples. I was aware of this danger as I wrote, though I might have fallen into the habit a little. Still, the story was written to give a moral lesson, and people of all races and creeds can exploit others. And I like to think justice was done in the story, though, I admit, the Westerner comes to "save" the people from the "other" culture, and so it does fall into the habits Said's book warned us against.

But the story stands and I think, even if it does have flaws, it is a good story. Can a Westerner represent other cultures equitably? Well, I'm trying and learning. "The Room of Mirrors" is possibly a first step and an experience that will teach me. Writers evolve.

"The Room of Mirrors appeared in a journal that is no longer published. Another story to re-submit!

And I have a new book out--ironically, about a non-Western character. The Sorceress of Time is about Asian culture and wuxia warriors (more cultural exchange here). Read for a story of choices, time travel, and the pursuit of justice and right. If you've seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you will know a little about wuxia. Only this story has a happier ending!

For more book titles, see my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.