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.
In my series of blog posts for AML about Latter-day Saints and speculative fiction, I coined the idea of the “Mormon hat tip.” This idea is based on a complaint that Michael Collings made about Orson Scott Card’s science fiction in a Dialogue article: he claimed that Card included throwaway references to LDS ideas and culture because they were demanded by the audience but that he didn’t develop them into any interesting. I have relabeled these references as hat tip to reframe them in a slightly more positive way. A hat tip is a reference that the Latter-day Saint audience will instantly recognize, but that remains undiscovered to a general audience. It’s a wink or nod from the author to our shared culture.
I’ve obviously been delayed in my plans to post about these references in Brandon Sanderson’s first batch of secret projects. I still intend to come back to those. But I came across a hat tip yesterday in my re-reading of Wind and Truth that struck me so profoundly that I was compelled to come and post about it.
It seems to be almost universally agreed by fans that perhaps the best plot line in the otherwise flawed fifth Stormlight book is Adolin Kholin’s defense of a city against an overwhelming siege. It’s grimy, depressing, and stunningly hopeful in ways that are reminiscent of Kaladin’s original Bridge Four plotline. What makes the plotline work is Adolin’s internal wrestle with his own sense of inadequacy, which relates strongly to his lack of magical powers in a world full of near demigods and his father’s own journey from warlord to noble, nearly divine leader.
Adolin rages against the idolization of his father and of radiant oaths in general, a nice contrast to the importance of oaths in the rest of the magic ecosystem of the books. He tries to draw a distinction between the idea of oaths as unbreakable and inflexible vows and promises as intentions that can flex with changing circumstances.
Whether this distinction works or not is up for debate (Shardcast wasn’t a fan of it), but one of the examples that Adolin uses to draw the distinction will be familiar to anyone who has attended BYU:
“Too many people,” Adolin said as his armorers began to put on his Plate, “think the oath, and not what it means, is the important part. I heard something in one of my lessons once, from an ardent. About a man who took an oath to sit in a chair until told he could stand–and he stayed there for ten years.”
“Wow,” Yawnagawn said. “That’s impressive.”
“It’s idiocy,” Adolin said. “Pardon, Yanagawn–everyone celebrated him, but it’s pure idiocy. You know what I’d admire? A man who gave an oath, then realized it was storming stupid and broke it–apologized–and moved on with his life, determined not the make that kind of mistake again.” (Wind and Truth 500)
To me, this is a clear reference to a famous quote from Karl G. Maeser, the first principal of Brigham Young Academy (which would eventually evolve into BYU):
Karl G. Maeser was known not only for his intelligence and teaching skills but also for his humility and integrity. He said: “Place me behind prison walls—walls of stone ever so thick, reaching ever so far into the ground—there is a possibility that in some way or another I may be able to escape; but stand me on the floor and draw a chalk line around me and have me give my word of honor never to cross it. Can I get out of that circle? No, never! I’d die first!” (quoted in Ernest L. Wilkinson, The President Speaks, Brigham Young University Speeches of the Year [5 October 1960], 15).
There’s a statue of Maeser near the Honors building on BYU campus that is named after him. It’s pretty typical for some BYU students to have drawn a chalk circle around the statue because the quote is so well known. Or at least it used to be, when I did my undergrad in the early 2000s and presumably when Sanderson was here in the 90s as well. Lately, I feel like there’s been a bit of a reversal on Brother Maeser’s commitment to integrity in the same direction as Adolin’s criticism–that fanatical commitment to your word can be dangerous and even contrary to a commitment to doing what’s right. You can find criticisms of this story online in more progressive LDS spaces, like this 2016 post from Blair Hodges on By Common Consent.
I’ll try to continue to post these Mormon hat tips in smaller chunks as I come across them, though I’m pretty busy. I’m not sure what to do with these references yet, but I think they’re interesting to observe. Post a comment below if you noticed other LDS references in Sanderson’s recent works.
Once again, I’ve fallen behind in blogging, and I have no doubt it’s going to get worse as I work on my thesis over the next few months. But to catch up you up on the event most relevant to this blog, I attended Dragonsteel at the beginning of December with my two teenagers, who are also huge Sanderson fans. We didn’t cosplay ourselves but had to take photos with some of the amazing cosplayers we saw there. Also pictured is my son’s soul caster: immediately after putting it on, his first instinct was to do the Thanos snap, so I guess that puts “the Lesson” into an interesting perspective.
And of course, we have some of the cool merchandise pictured like the collectible card game that absolutely broke the convention. My boys have always loved the con games at Dragonsteel, but this one really went over the top. Through some hard work, we managed to collect all the story cards and even a good number of the more rare cards (even Heralds 7 and 9!). There was a really interesting panel on philosophy and religion in the series–I still definitely need to get in touch with the panelists about some of their ideas. As always, I enjoyed Brandon’s book launch speech, and the excerpt from the new non-Cosmere short story to be released. I’m finding it interesting that Sanderson keeps returning to write in the police/detective work genre (see also Snapshot, Legion), but I suppose it makes sense when you consider how many of his fantasy plots are also information-based. Definitely planning to come back next year, when hopefully things will be a little more chill since it won’t be a Stormlight year. (One can dream, right?)
Besides the convention, the end of the semester went well. I wrote an interesting paper on the uses of imagination for learning about God, as well as the dangers thereof, which I’ve already submitted to a conference. I finished my internship teaching persuasive writing and made a first pass at a teaching portfolio, which makes me feel like the end of grad school is in sight. There’s just one semester left, during which I’m writing my thesis, teaching two classes, and taking one class on women in Arthurian legend. I am savoring my graduate experience but also kind of ready for a short break. Orchestrating Christmas for a family while trying to write papers and grade was not very enjoyable.
As if that wasn’t enough to do, my conference schedule for this next semester is also packed. Here’s a summary of where you’ll find me this winter:
Feb 13-15: LTUE Symposium (Provo, UT) – I’ll be presenting my paper on LDS premortal theology in The Maze Runner and Matched, as well as a paper on The Mandalorian and religious clothing with my coauthor and podcast cohost Carl Cranney. I’ll also be on two panels discussing Dune and the work of Hayao Miyazaki.
Mar 19-22: ICFA (Orlando, FL) – I’m presenting the first half of my master’s thesis on the postsecular portrayal of religion in the Stormlight Archive.
April 4-5: Eaton Conference on Speculative Fiction (Riverside, CA) – I’ll be presenting the second half of my master’s thesis on secular and religious ways of knowing in the Stormlight Archive.
I’ve got a few more presentations lined up for spring at the MHA and MSH/AML conferences, but we’ll save those for another time.
As for my reading, I was forced to declare bankruptcy on actually writing full reviews for most of my reading for the past few months, so I’ve instead ordered them by my star rating on Goodreads, with a few sporadic notes below.
Speculative Fiction
5-star
The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis – Still my favorite of the Narnia books.
4-star
Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis – A necessary step to get my kids to Dawn Treader and Silver Chair. There are points in this book that are more pointedly allegorical than Lion, but also points that are more neo-medieval-classical than the other books as well. I didn’t remember nearly so much dancing!
Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson – Re-listened to this in prep for Wind and Truth. It’s the only one in the series that I never went back to since first reading it. The technical details felt a bit more organic this time around, but I still find the Kaladin plotline to be a bit dull and stretched out (though the final scenes are excellent). I would rather have Sanderson drop a few of the characters and actually focus on the ones who are the nominally stars of the book. (This problem gets even more intense in Wind and Truth.) However, it wasn’t as much of a trainwreck as I remember, so that’s something.
The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke – Really liked this except that it was too short. I would read a whole novel about this.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini – Overall, a fun SF book with some interesting remixes of ideas that have been done before. One thing that made the book tough for me to get through was the way that it keeps changing the entire conception of the plot every couple of chapters. You think you are reading one type of SF, then it becomes another, and just as you get used to it, it changes again. I got rather annoyed and resisted caring about our third set of characters, thinking the author would soon dump them. But this third set of characters turns out to stay put for the rest of the book, so not caring about them made it hard for me to want to keep reading. Something about the structure of the novel is just a bit off for me. The ending “standalone with series potential” ending kind of annoyed me after all the other switches the book pulled on me, but once I was done with it, I realized it made sense. Still, I don’t know that I’ll follow up with future books.
3-star
The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks
Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson – I am working on a longer review, plus writing my thesis on the series thus far, but here are a few initial thoughts:
The book doesn’t justify its length. At a panel with the editors at Dragonsteel Nexus 2025, they said they were proud of how they used typography tricks to avoid having to cut anything to fit the maximum page restrictions. I think this was a mistake; the book should have received more developmental editing. Perhaps this is a hazard of all authors that get too famous to delay publication in order to get the book right. I hope in the future, Dragonsteel avoids assigning launch dates before the book is finished (probably impossible).
The book is also marred by the heavy influence of current therapy culture. Mental health has always been a focus of the series, but it’s been done in a universal timeless way until Rhythm of War. Even the Rhythm of War version looks subtle compared to the therapy-worldview statements in this book, and not just in the Kaladin, Therapist to the Gods, plotline. I worry that this book will read as extremely dated in a decade.
On the positive side, this is Sanderson’s most fascinating book from a theological perspective. More elaborations to come, but at minimum, we have a real Paradise-Lost-ish explication of the Mormon Satan and an interesting argument for the need for an atonement. Also lots of interesting implications about the importance of belief in character’s lives, especially those who aren’t traditional believers. And Jasnah’s development in this book makes me extremely interested in where Sanderson intends to go with the character from here.
I am about to embark on a re-read to prepare for all the writing I need to do about this book, so I’ll report back with more considered opinions eventually
Fiction
5-star
Silence by Shūsaku Endō – Read this book again for the graduate class on divine silence. I’m pretty sure this is my fourth time reading it, some assigned and some by choice. This time around, I saw a lot of more of Endo’s intentionality in setting up Rodrigues’s conflict with God’s seeming silence in the face of suffering. I also read the ending as a lot more hopeful than I did as a college freshman. This time, I assumed that Rodrigues maintained his faith even though he was forced to remain silent about it, a reflection of God’s own silence towards the Japanese martyrs. I saw more hints in the strange economic log of the last chapter that Rodrigues kept secretly practicing his faith, especially with regards to Kiichijiro. Perhaps this is just contamination from watching the (amazing) film, but it just seemed so obviously intended to be read this way, which would surprise my college freshman self who read it as absolutely atheist in its ending.
Nonfiction
5-star
The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ– Finishing this week with the kids for our family scripture study. On to church history next year!
4-star
The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis – Still very readable even after all these years. Whereas in the past I’ve really focused on the educational implications, with the recent rise of AI language bots, the last chapter reads as very prophetic and important.
Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair by Christian Wiman
Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil
Cup My Days Like Water by Abigail Carroll
All Manner of Things: Meditations on Suffering, Death, and Eternal Life by Jeffrey A. Vogel
Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days: Volume 2: No Unhallowed Hand: 1846–1893 – The release of volume 4 finally inspired to make my way through all the volumes of Saints. This one does an excellent job of exploring the early days of Deseret and Utah, and doesn’t shy away from the tricky stories of polygamy.
3-star
Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis by Sarah Bachelard
The World of Silence by Max Picard
Dark Night of the Soul by John of the Cross – Read bits and pieces of this in three different translations, none of which were easier than others.
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach – Fun read for Halloween season. I liked this better than my previous Mary Roach readings, though she’s still not my favorite writer. Some chapters were more interesting than others, but some were more nauseating than I could handle. Still, I have brought up some of the interesting facts I learned here in conversation, so I suppose the book worked well enough.
I don’t know why I’m constantly behind on these book reviews, but it seems to be a fact of life, so I suppose I should stop apologizing for it. August started out with my daughter was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s a big milestone for our family since she’s the youngest child. Now they are all in. The baptism itself was a really special event where both her grandfathers gave talks about their testimony of the gospel. Thanks to all the family who came to support her.
Also in August, my mom and I also went to go see Further Up and Further In, Max McLean’s sequel play to The Most Reluctant Convert. I didn’t think it was quite as thematically unified as the first play though he does a good job of piecing together CS Lewis’s works from the period surrounding the second World War. It was really interesting to see him portray Lewis in person. I sent the info about the show to the BYU campus event coordinator; I’m really hoping to get the show (or both of them!) to campus.
September saw the start of a new semester. I’m only taking one seminar class, a theory-based course on the concept of divine silence–meaning our reaction to not receiving the answers or comfort we may desire from God. You’ll see the beginnings of the reading for that class reflected somewhat in the reviews below.
I’m also starting work on my master’s thesis, which right now is going to be an examination of the Stormlight Archive as a post-secular epic fantasy. My prospectus was approved by my committee, and I’m having an absolute blast doing the research for it so far, which I think is a good sign that I’ve found the right topic to discuss. I’m also teaching first-year writing again and training to teach advanced persuasive writing. It’s been an interesting experience so far working with juniors and seniors instead of freshmen; it’s a lot easier to fill out a discussion because they always seem to have opinions on what to say.
On the research front, Carl and I handed in the final draft of our paper on religious clothing in the Mandalorian. We’ll be presenting that work locally at LTUE in February, and I’m thinking I may submit it to ICFA this year as well (either that and my thesis research).
This weekend, I’m presenting at VICFA, delayed slightly due to the hurricanes in Florida. The theme is on “Pantheology in World-Building and Magic Systems,” so I’ll be presenting my paper about LDS premortal theology in YA dystopias. I’m excited to see lots of other research combining an interest in real-world beliefs and fantastical literature as well. Perhaps I’ll write up a report for the blog, if you’re interested.
