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I am about to spoil the premise of the Samaria series, and pretty much everything about book three, The Alleluia Files. You probably don't need to care about that, even if you're planning on reading the books, but I feel I ought to give warning.
So: in Samaria, there are angels and humans, the humans being regular people, and the angels being winged people with immense strength who can can control the weather by singing prayers to the god Jovah. Because Jovah listens to the angels' prayers and responds in a material way, they are the world's premier religious authorities, which also gives them significant political power. However, though even the angels don't know this, they're all colonists from another planet, Jovah is a spaceship controlled by an advanced AI, and the angels were genetically-engineered for weather-control purposes.
...listen, it's a romance series about making out with sexy angels. Let us simply accept that if you want to colonize a planet, you're going to need some angels singing. I think that's actually the current thinking on the subject anyway.
Book three, The Alleluia Files, is the one where the world finally finds out that they've been worshiping a spaceship. A group of atheist rebels called the Jacobites (...) has been searching for a semi-mythical set of documents called the Alleluia Files, made by an angel believed to have visited the spaceship. The primary viewpoint character is a Jacobite woman on the run from the archangel's thugs*. The archangel, Bael (...), has been capturing and killing the Jacobites to root out their heresy. Tamar, the heroine, is determined not to run away. She decides to disguise herself, infiltrate Samarian society, and continue to spread their message. But her companion Zeke is afraid, and decides to flee for another continent where Bael has less power, and where most of their people have already gone. Before he can make it to the boat, he's captured and beaten.
Tamar then spends about half the book hiding, having given up on the atheist-evangelism plan. It's symptomatic of the book's problems that Tamar, in hiding herself, considers Zeke (and by extension the rest of her friends) a coward for attempting to flee, and that there are later events calculated to vindicate her. The narrative does not recognize any of this as a contradiction.
( Read more... )
So: in Samaria, there are angels and humans, the humans being regular people, and the angels being winged people with immense strength who can can control the weather by singing prayers to the god Jovah. Because Jovah listens to the angels' prayers and responds in a material way, they are the world's premier religious authorities, which also gives them significant political power. However, though even the angels don't know this, they're all colonists from another planet, Jovah is a spaceship controlled by an advanced AI, and the angels were genetically-engineered for weather-control purposes.
...listen, it's a romance series about making out with sexy angels. Let us simply accept that if you want to colonize a planet, you're going to need some angels singing. I think that's actually the current thinking on the subject anyway.
Book three, The Alleluia Files, is the one where the world finally finds out that they've been worshiping a spaceship. A group of atheist rebels called the Jacobites (...) has been searching for a semi-mythical set of documents called the Alleluia Files, made by an angel believed to have visited the spaceship. The primary viewpoint character is a Jacobite woman on the run from the archangel's thugs*. The archangel, Bael (...), has been capturing and killing the Jacobites to root out their heresy. Tamar, the heroine, is determined not to run away. She decides to disguise herself, infiltrate Samarian society, and continue to spread their message. But her companion Zeke is afraid, and decides to flee for another continent where Bael has less power, and where most of their people have already gone. Before he can make it to the boat, he's captured and beaten.
Tamar then spends about half the book hiding, having given up on the atheist-evangelism plan. It's symptomatic of the book's problems that Tamar, in hiding herself, considers Zeke (and by extension the rest of her friends) a coward for attempting to flee, and that there are later events calculated to vindicate her. The narrative does not recognize any of this as a contradiction.
( Read more... )
