In my family growing up, my parents would take each child on their first out of the country trip when they were a teenager. I want to continue that tradition in my family, so July started with a trip to Japan with our 16 year old. He helped pick the destination and some of the activities. Our biggest hits were the Nintendo Museum, playing in an arcade in Ahkihabara, Teamlabs Borderless interactive art museum, our amazing AirBnB in Kyoto, and all the tasty treats from the conbinis and vending machines. The biggest flops were the once-in-a-decade heat wave, the basically empty Japanese Sword Museum, and that time when we accidentally boarded a reservation-only train and got yelled at by the ticket collector. Also, parents take note: traveling with one teenager is such a major upgrade from traveling with four small kids. Highly recommended if you can swing it.
The musical Toads at the Nintendo Museum
As for the rest of the month, I’ve been trying to get a bit of summer in my summer instead of just working all the time—hard when I have so many fun projects to work on! We’ve been taking advantage of very late church to go on long family hikes on Sundays. We’re going to try to do Mount Timpanogos in August! I also gave in to my college self and bought Civ VII. I haven’t put in too many hours yet, but as a more casual player, I’m really enjoying the changes that make the game less cumbersome and more fun
At the top of Kyhv Peak in Provo
On the academic side of things, I had lined up a research position for fall, then lost it to the whims of HR rules that prevent hiring former students at less than full time. Luckily, I’ve been able to pull together a teaching position for fall that I’m really excited about (and it comes with library access): I’ll be back at BYU teaching persuasive writing!
I continue in my quest to revive my podcasting schedule as well. In case you’ve been hiding under a rock and missed the internet’s new favorite show, we’ve got a podcast about the religious aspects of KPop Demon Hunters over at Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree.
The biggest news of the month, of course, was officially launching Further Light: Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Latter-day Saint Tradition. This new little magazine already has more subscribers than this blog. I’m so happy that so many people have caught the vision of it. We’ve also received enough paid subscriptions to cover paying all of the authors for the first issue! Of course, there are still the printing costs that will be coming out of my own pocket, so if you’re able and inclined to support Latter-day Saint speculative fiction, please subscribe. I don’t plan to make any money out of this venture (a good bet since most magazines don’t), but I plan to use any profit to increase our pay rates for writers. I’ve also had several people reach out and volunteer to help us get off the ground—thank you for your generosity and keep it coming!
With all that happening, there are a few less book reviews than usual, but some real gems nonetheless.
I know this title sounds like a joke from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Probably a more accurate version of the title would be something like “What is God’s purpose?” but sometimes you have to go with the more clickbait-y version. Either way, the point here is not to ask the question of whether God exists, but to ask what he lives for. Why does God get up in the morning, so to speak? Why does He create things?
Obviously, theology has its own answers to this question. In the Latter-day Saint tradition, we would point to Moses 1:39 in which God explains to Moses that “this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” In other words, God exists to be in relation to his children and help to lift them up. With my limited understanding of other Christian denominations, I won’t speculate too much about how controversial this might be, but I have a sense this is not the norm.
I see some extensions of this idea in Brandon Sanderson’s latest novel, Isles of the Emberdark. I’ve written before about how LDS theology plays into the Cosmere’s magic systems, but Emberdark seems focused on this question. In particular, Sanderson uses two different characters to explore the idea of what a god’s purpose is, especially in relation to their followers.
**This rest of this post has some spoilers for Isles of the Emberdark. If you prefer to go in knowing nothing, you may want to save this post for after you finish reading.**
The most prominent deity/worshipper relationship in the novel is between Sixth of the Dusk (hereafter Dusk) and Patji. If you’ve read the novella that became the flashback sequence for the novel, you know that Patji is not a particularly nice god. In this world, the pantheon of gods is embodied in a series of islands that contain a valuable magical resource (the Aviar, several species of birds that grant magical powers) guarded by extremely deadly flora and fauna. Patji is the “father god” of this pantheon, so the most dangerous and most deadly. Dusk reverences Patji but also treats him as an adversary. As a trapper, he has spent his whole career training to avoid Patji’s dangers in order to retrieve the Aviar his society relies on. Their relationship is similar to Dusk’s relationship with his rival trappers: respectful but adversarial.
Dusk still speaks to Patji, in a constant background dialogue that reminds me of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Still, Dusk seems to never expect help or answers, only opposition, even as his society is being destroyed by colonial outsiders that threated traditional worship of the Pantheon islands. He can’t help asking “those itching questions he should not be thinking—about why Patji is so terrible” (loc 529**). Dusk feels abandoned by Patji, exclaiming, “The ones who protect you [from colonization and modernization] are the ones you try hardest to kill. […] You deserve to be destroyed!” (loc 1743).
Industry on Patji, art by Esther Hi’ilani Candari via official website
In this expanded version of the world, Sanderson reveals to readers a sort of answer to Dusk’s prayers. Why is Patji such a harsh god? Why does he make things difficult for his followers, including actively opposing and killing them? Does Patji do these things because he “hates all,” as Dusk seems to fear? (loc 1499).
As Dusk embarks on a very dangerous journey, which is all I can say spoiler-free, he suddenly realizes that Patji’s hostility prepared him for what he was now facing: “This was what he’d trained for, he was increasingly certain. Not this event, but this experience. Father, he thought. […] You made sure that some of us never grew soft from a life in the homeisles. You gave us the Aviar, but made us work for them, training, testing, preparing…” (loc 3078). Patji later speaks directly to Dusk, confirming this. Far from hating Dusk, Patji refers to him as “my son” (loc 3302)—a clear reference to the book of Moses, where God does the same for the biblical figure. Patji refers to everything that has happened to Dusk up to this point as training, a series of tests to increase his strength and ability to survive. “I have given you the tools,” says Patji. “Go forth and discover my will, trapper” (loc 3307).
Patji represents a god who wants us to suffer opposition to help us grow, a Latter-day Saint idea best reflected in 2 Nephi 2 and its discussion of opposition in all things. God doesn’t rescue his followers because he wants them to grow through trials and even dangers. Just like children need appropriate levels of risk to gain skills and confidence, God knows that we need a world full of danger, even sometime evil, in order to grow to be fully mature agents in our own right.
Now, this idea can be over-simplified into a pacifying solution to the problem of theodicy, and I think Sanderson is careful to avoid that here. Dusk’s realization of the purpose of his trials doesn’t immediately reconcile him to Patji. Dusk still seems to harbor some deeply buried resentment to the god who actively sought his death. However, these realizations are a step in coming closer to his god: “while he wouldn’t have said he had faith in Patji, he did respect the god. Fear him. And after so long living in the jungle, understand him” (loc 3081).
Sanderson pairs this tempered respect for a god who is more like a harsh, possibly psychotic coach than a loving father with a more positive view of the god/follower relationship in Starling’s plotline. At the very beginning of the novel, we find out that our secondary protagonist Starling is from a species of shapeshifting dragons. Due to their extremely long lives, Cosmere dragons tend to act as gods, acquiring followers and playing millennia-long games of strategy to bring about their purposes.
Emberdark doesn’t provide us a lot of information about whether these dragon gods tend to protect or rescue those who worship them. They very well might. One thing we do know they do is the way they answer prayers: “Her people lived to inspire others. They didn’t always live up to their own ideals, but the best of them—like her uncle—spent their entire existences sending comfort, confidence, and compassion to those who prayed to them” (loc 2617).
Starling portrait, art by Esther Hi’ilani Candari via official website
This inspirational role of dragons provides a mirror image to the negative relationship between Dusk and Patji. Just as Patji exists to transform his followers through opposition, dragons seem to exist to transform their followers through empathy and emotion. They don’t necessarily need to perform divine interventions to be an object of worship. Instead, dragons are gods because they are a source of solidarity. They suffer with their followers, which helps turn that suffering into something positive. This reminds me of Alma 7:11-13 which interprets Christ’s atonement to be not just about perfecting sin but about “tak[ing] upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people […] that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.”
Importantly, both of these examples of the god/follower relationship focus on the god’s desire to transform the follower into something better than they were before. The purpose of God is always found in relationship, not some dispassionate self-existential reason. In fact, the gods seem to desire the relationship almost as much as the followers. This kind of mutual need between a god and their followers seems very Latter-day Saint to me, an extension of the kind of thinking that says creation and creator are of the same kind rather than essentially different.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about Isles of the Emberdark in the comments below. My overall review will be in next month’s “What I Read,” but you can probably tell that I really enjoyed the book.
** All quote locations in this post are from the Backerkit non-DRM ebook file. They may not precisely match other editions, but it’s the best I can do.
The final conference in my post-graduation gauntlet of conferences was the Mormon History Association conference in Ogden. I presented my research on Orson Scott Card’s 1987 rewrite of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, which I’ve had a ton of fun researching. A few things about the presentation are still tied up in permissions, but if I get that straightened out, I hope to publish it someday.
I was shocked how much literature-related content has grown at MHA since the Bushmans introduced the idea at the 2022 conference. Whereas I’m usually struggling to find literary panels, this year there were several panels relating to the upcoming volume on Mormon rhetoric, a paper about a Harlem renaissance poet who joined the church, and a panel each on Nephi Anderson and Bernard Devoto, just naming a few. We got together the AML crowd for a nice lunch one day, and I got to watch Burgindie’s two outstanding short films, The Angel and Java Jive—both highly recommended. My only disappointment was that Emma Tueller Stone’s paper on Orson Scott Card and Heavenly Mother was scheduled for the same time as my paper on Card. (Which reminds me that I need to send her an email to get a copy…)
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The panel listing attentively as Steve Peck rightly extolls Piranesi
Later in June, I also spoke on a panel for The Compass Gallery’s exhibit of religious fantasy art with two of my favorite people, Chanel Earl and Steven Peck. We had a great time bouncing ideas off each other about the significance of imagination for building and practicing faith. Wayfare is currently serializing Chanel’s book about fairy tales and the atonement. The introduction and piece on Snow White are available now: both are excellent examples of how fantasy and faith can collide in interesting ways.
Over on Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, we released a double-length short episode on two recent Catholic films, Conclave and The Two Popes. Carl and I had an excellent discussion about the similarities and differences between Catholic and LDS leadership and succession and how Hollywood doesn’t seem to really understand either. We’re hoping to release at least one episode a month during the summer, then return to a regular biweekly schedule in the fall.
I’m taking a short break from presentations in July, but I’ll be back right at the beginning of August presenting at the Mythopoeic Society’s Online Midyear Seminar. My presentation is about Lev Grossman’s Arthurian retelling The Bright Sword, but there’s a whole track of Tolkien presentations as well. The conference is not very expensive and obviously online, so if you’re interested in these things, I’d love to see you (virtually) there!
This month continues my Hugo (and other fantasy awards) reading, so there’s a lot of new spec fic reviews below. Enjoy!
Speculative Fiction
Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky – For some reason, this book puts me in mind of The Murderbot Diaries, which is strange because the tone is almost entirely different. Whereas Murderbot is sarcastic and ironic, UnCharles is sincere and straightforward. But what they share is being robots/constructs that want to deny their humanity, even though the reader can clearly see it’s there. I quickly fell in love with the narrative style of avoiding attributing emotion to the robot by describing what it would be feeling *if* anyone was stupid enough to build a robot with feelings, which they wouldn’t.
While the characters are charming, the plot of the book leaves something to be desired. It’s very episodic: we stop at one place after another, displaying how the robots have gone wrong in each place via the very mechanisms which were supposed to make them more efficient. Service Model reads like a strong commentary on contemporary constrained LLMs, which makes it worth the slight tedium. The ending is a bit sudden but resolves several things well. Worth a read if you need to laugh before you cry about AI.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher – I was hesitant about this one, given the cover and my general feelings about horror. Indeed, this book made me genuinely unsettled while also being absolutely compelling. As a retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, you know it’s going to end badly for the Ushers. This isn’t the kind of book where you expect plot surprises; it’s the kind where you can see the horrible ending coming from a million miles off and you still remain glued to it like a trainwreck. If you’re up for skin-crawling body horror, it’s worth a read.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke – This will be my fourth review of Piranesi in only five years since it’s come out. So suffice to say, I think this book is here to stay as part of my life. I continue to discover new parts and pieces to it each time I read. This time, my focus was on what Clarke is saying about academia and the way it warps people, and how there might be other, better ways of deep knowing. (Should I write a paper on academia in speculative fiction? It seems to be trending…) Please, please, do yourself a favor and read this book. Preferably without knowing anything about where the book is going. You will be rewarded.
The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler – The concept of this book was interesting, but that’s really all it is: a concept. The book poses many interesting questions but provides no answers. No one acts, just reflects on past action. I expected characters to come into conflict over the morality of bringing back mammoths, the morality of getting funding by controlled harvesting of ivory to bring back mammoths, the morality of putting someone’s brain into a mammoth in order to . . . bring back mammoths. But no, everyone just seems to feel really ambiguous about things and then just continue on with the same course of life. I really just can’t recommend this one.
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo – Another one that disappointed me, which I finished only because the audio book was so short and it keeps popping up on award finalist lists. This book fits into the apparently growing genre where an angel and a demon become uneasy friends, like Good Omens or When the Angels Left the Old Country. The problem was that this book is almost entirely vibes. For a book that’s advertised as building an epic fantasy city, everything remains very nebulous. It’s unclear what type of culture the city has–at various points I thought we were in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, maybe even Africa. There’s nothing consistent or real about the worldbuilding, which is only there to give the two main characters things to vibe over in their will-they-wont-they enemies-to-lovers plot. There are hints that there could be really cool magic or a world behind all this, but it’s left completely undeveloped. For me, this book was like one of those Japanese plastic food models in the window of a restaurant: perfectly suited from a distance, but lacking nourishment up close.
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett – This one is billed as a “fantasy Sherlock Holmes,” and the beginning chapter is almost too on the nose. Our detective is living for the thrill of the next mystery, plays a stringed instrument, and tries to get the Watson-character to buy them some drugs to cut through the boredom. Luckily, the book soon moves beyond this color-by-numbers rewrite and brings in some really interesting magical worldbuilding and details. I enjoyed the simultaneous unfolding of a strange world with the methodical unraveling of the mystery. The magic is sufficiently explained for the eventual way it is used in the payoff, but less clear than a Sanderson-style hard magic. I also really enjoyed how the Watson-character’s learning disability was incorporated into the plot, as well as the extra little twist about the detective at the end. This book works well as a standalone, but I will absolutely pick up the next in the series.
Nonfiction
Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities by Gregory M. Colon Semenza – Even though the references to keeping everything on paper make this book a bit dated, it’s still the most comprehensive guide I’ve found to seeking an academic career in the humanities. Much of what you find online about grad school is geared towards STEM or social science fields, which operate very differently than the humanities. The individual chapters can be read individually as needed, but they also operate together as a whole. I look forward to applying this approach in my future endeavors.
Abroad in Japan: Ten Years in the Land of the Rising Sun by Chris Broad – I didn’t realize how early in his career I had started follow Chris Broad’s YouTube channel. As a result, I already knew many of the stories of this book. Nonetheless, it was interesting to see how they fit together. However, you don’t really read this book for the content so much as Broad’s fantastic voice–and I mean that literally, since he narrates the audiobook in a slightly toned-down version of his YouTube persona. If you’re interested in the experience of living long-term as a foreigner in Japan, beyond the starry-eyed gushing of many travel books, this is the one you should pick up. Broad doesn’t shy away from the bad parts of life in Japan as well as the anime-fueled dream many of us have been sold. A really fun read before my own journey to Japan.
You know how sometimes past-you makes plans that sound fun, but present-you ends up resenting those plans? Yeah, that was May for me. May was the month of conferences, all of which I wanted to attend individually, but maybe not all within the same 30 days. Ah well, I’m sure future-me will look back and be happy we did it, even if it made May pretty insane.
On May 9-10, I attended Storymakers, a local conference mostly for fiction writers. I’ve never been able to justify paying for a ticket before as fiction is mostly a side hobby for me, but when my friend from Seattle told me that her book was a finalist for the Whitney Awards, I decided this was my year. The Storymakers atmosphere is every bit as fun and friendly as I had heard, and we had a great time. I met up with several of my favorite Mormon lit friends and generally stuffed my brain full of writing advice. I tried to focus mainly on panels about editing, publishing, and marketing, since I have a project I’m working on that involves these things. (Watch this space…)
Looking like goofballs while sitting at a table with Charlie Holmberg and Jeff Wheeler!
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The next weekend was the Faith and Knowledge Conference at the University of Utah. Lots of great advice given about finding employment in Mormon studies-related circles as well as the relationship between faith and scholarship. It was nice to be in a space where we could talk about our various perspectives on these things openly without worrying about judgement or providing context.
Faith and Knowledge Conference attendees!
I had a bye week to celebrate the end of school with my kids and then we promptly took off for a family vacation in Ephraim, UT, which was also the location of the AML-MSH joint conference the next weekend. Since AML has only done virtual conferences since the pandemic, it was amazing to see so many of these people whose writing I’ve read in person. Also exciting to have a whole two tracks with lots and lots of Mormon literature scholarship, instead of just a few crumbs. Michael Austin’s keynote was a call to action to further scholarship on lesser-known authors, which some of us are already scheming to answer.
Of course, I still had one more conference to go at this point, but I’ll leave the summary of MHA for my June reading post.
If reading about all these conferences has you ready to jump in on the action (and you live in Utah), you have a chance tomorrow night! I’ll be speaking on a panel about faith and imagine at the Compass gallery on Center Street in Provo on Wednesday, June 18th at 7 pm. More details here. Come say hi and maybe we’ll grab Rockwell Ice Cream’s new Brandon Sanderlanche flavor afterwards.
Now on to the book reviews! You’ll notice that I’m loading up on a lot of the Hugo nominees below. That’s a trend that will probably continue for a few months, though after reading so many brand-new books in a row, I do have an impulse to follow CS Lewis’s advice and grab a few old books as a palate cleanser.
