Brad Ideas - Why you don't want gods in your fiction - Comments

American Gods

brad — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:50:58 -0800

The difference is that American Gods, as overtly as possible, declares from page one what it’s going to be about. (And in addition, the gods of American Gods are not the sort of god we see in BSG, they are “just” superbeings fueld by mortal belief systems.) And American Gods is about the divine characters, which is fine, and doubly so because they are not that divine.

Your story can be about gods or about human (like) characters. But the more it is about the gods, especially all-knowing or all-powerful gods, the less the story of the human characters means. You always have to have some human characters for the audience to relate to of course, but if they are just puppets of the gods that’s not too exciting.

Religious fiction is fine, if that’s what it tries to be. It’s taking some good SF and declaring at the end, “actually this is religious fiction” that is a mistake.

in regards...

shannAnonymous — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:06:19 -0800

You definitely don't want to read American Gods then, because thats rife with gods in a fictional book.Or Good Omens...or Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal..all have gods of some kind in em. Just wanted to put that out there so you knew what to stay away from. :)

Gods and god-like powers

brad — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:13:54 -0700

There are a few subtle points here. I consider the use of an actual, intervening god fairly similar to the use of less divine characters with god-like powers. When Moore wrote he wished to avoid the use of god-like powers, he was writing wisely because divine (or divine-like) powers ruin the story, especially if they are a late introduction. They take things out of the hands of the real characters and put them into the realm on what we can’t understand. This is not to say you can’t use them, but you must be sparing.

Moore was wise to say he would eschew them, along with other things like time travel and aliens. He has the power to change his mind of course, and he did change his mind. However, it is fair to be critical of this change of heart. God-like powers are tempting to a writer to resolve plot points, to force the story in some fantastic direction that would be harder to write through purely natural means and human actions. It is because they are so tempting that they should be avoided. They are an easy and cheap way out.

They did do it through

Anonymous — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:23:09 -0700

They did do it through normal human actions. No one went Luke Skywalker, or Q and started shaping the world with god-like powers. The decisions made were still choices made of free will. All the mysterious power has done has orchestrated points of convergence where major "human" decisions had to be made. That is all. The decisions are still in the hands of humans. In fact, the only major decision this supposed god made was to create a parallel evolution planet for a restart. Funny how this power disappeared after that and left it all to "human" decision again. Even Baltar giving the information to Caprica 6 to start the events was all very human and done via free will and choice.

God-like powers...

When they make the edit with Kara Thrace and Adama launching fireballs out their asses at Cavil's forces while Lee is playing soccer with planets, come talk to me about god-like powers.

The point is that the human

Lisa — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:24:03 -0700

The point is that the human and cylon characters acting through "normal human actions" could not have brought about the resolution of the plot without divine intervention. It's up for debate whether that god-like character is, you know, actually supposed to be God.

exactly what i said, god had

Anonymous — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:10:28 -0700

exactly what i said, god had god-like powers. congrats, it is god, so they aren't god-like powers, they are god powers. no character (adama, lee, roslin, etc, even starbuck) actually uses any god-like powers.

so once again, other than god (whose powers cannot be god-like, by definition they are godly) show me a super powered act in the show. oh, wait, you can't. so even with the aid of the divine the actions of the characters are nothing more than normal human actions.

Angels in the Interpretation

Lisa — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 07:47:58 -0700

Via Galactica Sitrep, here's an interview with Espenson where she clarifies what Starbuck, the Not-God character, and head characters might be:

Question: Starbuck an Angel??? Really???

Espenson: I'm going to answer re Starbuck and the "head" people, too. Well, here's how I always saw it. If someone from a far-advanced culture somewhere in the universe took an interest in humanity, isn't it possible that with their advanced tech that they could have abilities that would seem to us miraculous. Maybe we'd think of them as "Angels." Maybe they're the whole reason we have a myth of "Angels." But that's just me. The great thing about great novels (or tv series) is that some things are left open to your own philosophical solutions.

Question: I was wondering if the angel Baltar in Times Square was actually Lucifer.

Espenson: I can see that -- there is something very much like the ol' bar bet about Job going on there, isn't there? There's something very appealing to me about Head Baltar having been the original source for the Lucifer character.

Question: ...I'm still a bit stuck on the Kara Thrace story...I don't make the conection on how she was the "Harbinger of Death" - it would seem that she was quite the opposite. Can you elaborate?

Espenson: I took that to be a reference to the fact that she led us to the place at which (pure) humanity ends -- from here on out, what we call human has Cylon DNA in it.

The Not-God Character

Lisa — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 07:15:42 -0700

did any character on the show have god-like abilities? god being god has those powers, being god, however, no character had "god-like" abilities. not to mention, what did god actually do?

The Not-God (the "String Puller" who has been mentioned in the show since the beginning) that headBaltar and headSix serve did three "god-like" things: (1) sent messengers with warnings to the Final Five as well as appeared to Baltar, Six, and Starbuck (Roslin too, but that's debatable); (2) through interaction with Starbuck gave the Colonials the Watchtower song, which were the jump coordinates to Earth; (3) created the Opera House vision/projection.

If this Not-God entity had not intervened with these "god-like" powers, the Final Five would have died on the 13th Colony and the Colonials would not have jumped to our Earth. Moore has left it ambiguous whether this entity is actually God or some other kind of intelligence, such as some kind of "ascended" being like Starbuck might have turned into.

I actually

Alvin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:13:11 -0700

I actually agree with you, my comment was directed at Ausir. Sorry.

either way, ron didn't

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:09:09 -0700

either way, ron didn't include those things. did any character on the show have god-like abilities? god being god has those powers, being god, however, no character had "god-like" abilities. not to mention, what did god actually do? gave them parallel evolution? wow, what a big aid that was in all the battles, oh wait...

Deal

Alvin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:05:11 -0700

Why can't people deal with the fact that people can change their minds? That's not what we should be complaining about. There's lots reasons to be disappointed, but most of you seem to be focusing on the inane rather than the legitimate.

And that is what they did.

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:01:09 -0700

And that is what they did.

Who attacked "Earth?"

Lisa — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:31:56 -0700

Moore recently answered this in a Discover magazine interview.

Who attacked the original Earth?

Moore: The backstory of the original Earth was supposed to be that the 13th tribe of cylons came to that world, started over and essentially destroyed themselves. There was some internecine warfare that occurred among the cylons themselves, which was another repetition in the cycle of “all of this has happened before and all will happen again.” Even they, who were the rebels that split off, [had] enough of humanity in them as cylons that they eventually destroyed themselves.

it's not clear

Richard Akerman — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:04:12 -0700

I always assumed (since they made sure to report both dead humanoid Cylons and dead robotic Cylons) that the robotic Cylons started a nuclear war, and then everyone on both sides eventually died. It was never made clear though - it could equally have been one humanoid Cylon faction fighting another, but with the same nuclear holocaust for all result.

Back to the Future

Alvin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:59:05 -0700

I recently purchased the BttF box set, and writer Bob Gale says something on the featurette that i'd like to mention. He says that, as a writer, you're never going to end up with the story you originally envisioned. As you are writing, and even as you are filming, your story will change, whether because your original ideas just aren't working out-- or as more often happens-- better ideas come to mind. I've been saying this for a while, but it was good to finally hear a writer say it.

Why you don't want gods in your fiction

brad — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:28:11 -0700

I won’t deny that some of my distaste for the religious ending comes from my own preference for a realistic SF story, where everything that happens has a natural, rather than supernatural explanation, and that this comes in part from my non-religious worldview.

Nonetheless, I believe there are many valid reasons why you don’t want to have interventionist gods in your fiction. God should not be a character in your story, unless you are trying to write religious fiction like Left Behind or Touched by an Angel.

The reason is that God, as we know, works in strange and mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. We don’t expect to understand them. In fact, there is not even a requirement that they make sense. Some even argue that if you’re going to write authentic fiction with God as a character his actions should not make sense to the characters or the reader.

The author of a story is “god” in that they can write whatever they want. But in real, quality fiction, the author is constrained as to what they will do. They are supposed to make their stories make sense. Things should happen for a reason. If the stories are about characters, things should happen for reasons that come from the characters. If the story is also about setting, as SF is, reasons come from the setting. Mainstream fiction tries to follow all the rules of the real world. SF tries to explore hypothetical worlds with different technology, or new science, or even ways of living. Fantasy explores fantastic worlds, but when done properly, the author defines the new rules and sticks to them.

But if you make a divine character, even an offscreen divine character, you give the author too much power. They can literally write anything, and declare it to be the will of god. You don’t want your writer able to do that. You may want them to be able to start with anything, but once started the story should make sense.

As BSG ended, Adama and Baltar describe (correctly, but not strongly enough) how improbable it is that evolved humans can mate with the colonials. In reality, the only path to this is common ancestry, ie. the idea that humans from our-Earth were taken from it and became the Kobolians. But Baltar is able to explain it all away in one line with his new role as priest, it’s the will of god.

In a good story, you don’t get to explain things this way. You need to work a bit harder.

Now, if you absolutely must have a god, you want to constrain that god. That’s not too far-fetched. If you were writing a story in Christianity, and you depicted Jesus torturing innocents, people would not accept it, they would say it’s at odds with how Jesus is defined (though Yaweh had fewer problems with it.) BSG’s god is never defined well enough to have any constraints.

He,and his minions, are certainly capricious though. Genocides, Lies, Manipulations, exploding star systems, plotting out people’s lives, leading Starbuck to her death to achieve goals which could easily have been done other ways. Making that cycle of genocide repeat again and again until random chance breaks it. Not the sort of god we can draw much from. (One hopes if we are going to have gods in our fiction, they provide some moral lesson or other reason for being there rather than to simply be a plot device that explains things that make no sense.)

In literature, bringing in the arbitrary actions at the end of a story to resolve the plot is called a Deus ex Machina and it’s frowned upon for good reasons. The BSG god was introduced early on, so is not a last minute addition. People will disagree, but I think the divinely provided link to real Earth is last minute, in the sense that nothing in the story to that point tells you real Earth is out there, just the rules of drama (that the name “Earth” means something to the audience other than that ruined planet.)

If you want to write religious fiction, of course you can. I’m less interested in reading it. Moore said he did not intend to write this. He wrote the miniseries and made the Cylons monotheists and the colonials polytheists (like the original) and the network came back and said that was really interesting. So he expanded it.

But he expanded it from something good — characters who have religious beliefs — to something bad. The religious beliefs were true. But they were some entirely made-up religion with little correspondence to any Earth religion (even the Buddhism that Moore professes) and as such with no relevance to the people who tend to seek out religious fiction.

Giving religions to the characters is good. It’s real. It’s an important part of our society worth exploring. However, resolving that some of the beliefs are correct, and bringing in the hand of god is another matter.

More loose ends

The Colony had several base ships. When it started breaking apart, base ships full of Cavils, Dorals and Simons should have jumped away. What happened to them, and why won’t they come a calling soon? (God’s will?)
Likewise, a force of Cavils, Dorals and Simons was invading Galactica and was in a temporary truce when fighting broke out again and Galactica jumped. What happened to them. In particular, since the first Hybrid predicted the splintered Cylon factions would be joined together again, why didn’t they?
We never resolved why the first Earth was destroyed 2,000 years ago, and that this was the same time as the fall of Kobol and exodus of the 12 tribes. Was this just a big mistake and all 13 tribes were supposed to flee at the same time?
I don’t know for sure about 150,000 years ago (it comes and goes) but 135,000 years ago the Sahara was covered by large lakes.