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Sharon Shinn's Samaria series is kind of offensive sometimes.
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.
Naturally, in this world full of people accustomed to public violence against those with different religious beliefs, nearly every single stranger Tamar meets is kind to her, with the exception of those actually employed by Bael. The interplanetary sociologists must be falling all over themselves trying to explain Samaria. Tamar feels no particular resentment towards the individuals whose apparent complacency in the face of brutality has separated her from everyone she's ever known. She feels guilty for misleading them!
Following the slaughter of some more of her allies, she is inevitably rescued by an angel, Jared. She mistrusts him for logical reasons, until she changes her mind for no reason whatsoever. When she' finally reunited with the surviving Jacobites, she finds that she doesn't actually like them much; her internal monologue describes them as mindless extremist rabble. She'd rather hang out with angels! Fortunately for her, her long-lost twin sister Lucinda turns out to be an angel! Tamar's actually an angel's daughter! Well, that's all right, then.
Due to series of coincidences, Lucinda manages to reach the spaceship and provide proof of what it is, completely independent of the Jacobites. The leader of the Jacobites, who has been risking his life for this for years, demonstrates his true character by freaking out and screaming, "There is no god!" when he realizes that people are not immediately going to abandon their beliefs for his own. Why, he was just like Bael all along! Tamar thinks sadly that it's too bad that he's always sucked so much. He raised her, by the way?
As far as I can tell, everyone except this guy then calmly decide that they believe in a god who fits the basic parameters of what they used to think the spaceship was, except unable to intervene directly in their lives - something which I would think would be pretty central to their faith, after several hundred years of believing in a god who answers their prayers directly and in a material way. But, you know, whatever. It's not like people have been dying over this for decades, or anything.
The spaceship names Lucinda the next Archangel, because it's actually very wise and holy, and has been waiting for the day that its human charges were ready for the truth. It doesn't seem to have anything to say to the people whose friends died trying to expose that truth.
The thing that makes this book so astonishingly unpleasant is how visibly its story warps around Shinn's own bigotry. I mean, let's distill the premise to its basics: A group of people are being murdered for their religious beliefs. But for whatever reason, though Shinn's willing to acknowledge that they might not be as bad as the villains, she can't stomach them as heroes. As a result, she writes them as people who, even though they're right, go about everything wrong, and thus don't deserve any credit for it. The ones who should be praised are those nice angels who got involved right at the end when they'd stirred up too much trouble to be ignored, and then did the real work of listening to them complain. PROTIP: The tone argument can be useful in downplaying mass murder.
The only Jacobite the narrative genuinely feels for is Tamar, an angel's daughter and an angel's twin, who leaves the movement as an organic part of her process of coming of age. Portions of the Jacobites' message are co-opted by Jared and Lucinda, powerful people whose power was derived directly from said message's long suppression, and the rest of it is discarded. There's no indication given that the Jacobites' work will be remembered, or their dead honored. Though they get what they want, they still lose.
(I here carefully restrain myself from making specific comparisons to certain present-day usages of the rhetoric of the American civil rights movement.)
I think it's appropriate to assume that what happens in this book is a reflection of Sharon Shinn's actual feelings about atheists; the idea that atheism is some kind of emotional problem that people need to get over also shows up in Jenna Starborn and Wrapt in Crystal. The thing that I don't understand is how she got herself in the position of even needing to write this story.
She had to have realized, when she first began work on the Samaria series, that she was describing a world in which she would eventually have to side with people she didn't like. If she didn't have it in her to tell a story where the hero doesn't believe in god, then why did she choose the computer-god premise in the first place? I don't think she realizes how badly she's exposing herself with this book, or I doubt she'd have let it be published, but it can't have been comfortable for her to write - the cognitive dissonance must have been terrible.
Sharon Shinn's books used to be reliable comfort reads for me, but after the Islamophobia in Jovah's Angel and this, I don't think I can read her anymore.
-
* The thugs are all Jansai, Samaria's pseudo-Muslims, who I think didn't usually get along with the angels in the previous books? (Because, as we all know, Islam totally doesn't go in for angels.) But being Muslims, they're obviously always up for some mindless religious extremism and abuse of women, so I guess Bael was able to work something out there. I remember reading that there's a sympathetic Jansai character in the fourth or fifth book. I'll bet five hundred internet dollars an angel rescues her from an honor killing.
Shinn's apparent Islamophobia fortunately wasn't anywhere near as noticeable in this book as in Jovah's Angel, where the heroine had some unbelievably awful inner monologue going on. The Jansai in Archangel were all either evil guys or tragically oppressed/dead women. If I recall correctly, exactly one of them (dead woman) got a name.
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.
Naturally, in this world full of people accustomed to public violence against those with different religious beliefs, nearly every single stranger Tamar meets is kind to her, with the exception of those actually employed by Bael. The interplanetary sociologists must be falling all over themselves trying to explain Samaria. Tamar feels no particular resentment towards the individuals whose apparent complacency in the face of brutality has separated her from everyone she's ever known. She feels guilty for misleading them!
Following the slaughter of some more of her allies, she is inevitably rescued by an angel, Jared. She mistrusts him for logical reasons, until she changes her mind for no reason whatsoever. When she' finally reunited with the surviving Jacobites, she finds that she doesn't actually like them much; her internal monologue describes them as mindless extremist rabble. She'd rather hang out with angels! Fortunately for her, her long-lost twin sister Lucinda turns out to be an angel! Tamar's actually an angel's daughter! Well, that's all right, then.
Due to series of coincidences, Lucinda manages to reach the spaceship and provide proof of what it is, completely independent of the Jacobites. The leader of the Jacobites, who has been risking his life for this for years, demonstrates his true character by freaking out and screaming, "There is no god!" when he realizes that people are not immediately going to abandon their beliefs for his own. Why, he was just like Bael all along! Tamar thinks sadly that it's too bad that he's always sucked so much. He raised her, by the way?
As far as I can tell, everyone except this guy then calmly decide that they believe in a god who fits the basic parameters of what they used to think the spaceship was, except unable to intervene directly in their lives - something which I would think would be pretty central to their faith, after several hundred years of believing in a god who answers their prayers directly and in a material way. But, you know, whatever. It's not like people have been dying over this for decades, or anything.
The spaceship names Lucinda the next Archangel, because it's actually very wise and holy, and has been waiting for the day that its human charges were ready for the truth. It doesn't seem to have anything to say to the people whose friends died trying to expose that truth.
The thing that makes this book so astonishingly unpleasant is how visibly its story warps around Shinn's own bigotry. I mean, let's distill the premise to its basics: A group of people are being murdered for their religious beliefs. But for whatever reason, though Shinn's willing to acknowledge that they might not be as bad as the villains, she can't stomach them as heroes. As a result, she writes them as people who, even though they're right, go about everything wrong, and thus don't deserve any credit for it. The ones who should be praised are those nice angels who got involved right at the end when they'd stirred up too much trouble to be ignored, and then did the real work of listening to them complain. PROTIP: The tone argument can be useful in downplaying mass murder.
The only Jacobite the narrative genuinely feels for is Tamar, an angel's daughter and an angel's twin, who leaves the movement as an organic part of her process of coming of age. Portions of the Jacobites' message are co-opted by Jared and Lucinda, powerful people whose power was derived directly from said message's long suppression, and the rest of it is discarded. There's no indication given that the Jacobites' work will be remembered, or their dead honored. Though they get what they want, they still lose.
(I here carefully restrain myself from making specific comparisons to certain present-day usages of the rhetoric of the American civil rights movement.)
I think it's appropriate to assume that what happens in this book is a reflection of Sharon Shinn's actual feelings about atheists; the idea that atheism is some kind of emotional problem that people need to get over also shows up in Jenna Starborn and Wrapt in Crystal. The thing that I don't understand is how she got herself in the position of even needing to write this story.
She had to have realized, when she first began work on the Samaria series, that she was describing a world in which she would eventually have to side with people she didn't like. If she didn't have it in her to tell a story where the hero doesn't believe in god, then why did she choose the computer-god premise in the first place? I don't think she realizes how badly she's exposing herself with this book, or I doubt she'd have let it be published, but it can't have been comfortable for her to write - the cognitive dissonance must have been terrible.
Sharon Shinn's books used to be reliable comfort reads for me, but after the Islamophobia in Jovah's Angel and this, I don't think I can read her anymore.
-
* The thugs are all Jansai, Samaria's pseudo-Muslims, who I think didn't usually get along with the angels in the previous books? (Because, as we all know, Islam totally doesn't go in for angels.) But being Muslims, they're obviously always up for some mindless religious extremism and abuse of women, so I guess Bael was able to work something out there. I remember reading that there's a sympathetic Jansai character in the fourth or fifth book. I'll bet five hundred internet dollars an angel rescues her from an honor killing.
Shinn's apparent Islamophobia fortunately wasn't anywhere near as noticeable in this book as in Jovah's Angel, where the heroine had some unbelievably awful inner monologue going on. The Jansai in Archangel were all either evil guys or tragically oppressed/dead women. If I recall correctly, exactly one of them (dead woman) got a name.
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Though I can definitely understand your confusion as to why Shinn even attempted to do the whole computer-god thing. Did she even realize that she was setting herself up for failure?
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