Hmm. I may try the first book or two of the Imager Portfolio just to see what they're like.
Modesitt's done some stuff with quasi-gods before... or rather, people who have paranormal talents and kind of set themselves up as gods, and the religions that develop around them, but those are very early works. (Hammer of Darkness, a little bit in Timediver's Dawn and The Timegod. Those three are not very good books, btw, though they mash my power fantasy narrative kink buttons hard.) And he has used theocracies in at least some of his science fiction -- come to think of it, there are signs that the two cultures whose spaceships crash in Candar are a theoretically egalitarian theocracy and a militant atheistic culture kind of like internet MRAs and 'rationalists' had a totalitarian baby -- but again this is more in an anthropological way.
It's like, when he's writing a female protagonist and we can see her thoughts, she comes off as a perfectly normal person, though maybe with a few weird moments as Modesitt tries to signal her femininity. (This may simply be a happy side effect of his inability to write more than one basic personality type.) But women we aren't following in tight third-person, particularly ones who get shoved into the 'love interest' role, often turn into blatantly obvious and unfortunately stereotyped plot devices.
Tangentially, I think this is one reason I liked Zeldyan so much. She is a secondary character in three Recluce books -- Fall of Angels, The Chaos Balance, and Arms-Commander -- and arguably comes out of them as a better developed and more coherent character than either Nylan or Sarryn, the official protagonists. She definitely comes out more coherent than Ayrlyn and Ryba, probably because her story doesn't revolve around Nylan.
The dictatorship cheerleading pisses me off so much. I guess it's slightly better than the divine right of kings so much fantasy and space opera are hung up on. But not very much, particularly when accompanied by all that 'point of a sword' rhetoric.
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Date: 2016-08-27 11:19 pm (UTC)Modesitt's done some stuff with quasi-gods before... or rather, people who have paranormal talents and kind of set themselves up as gods, and the religions that develop around them, but those are very early works. (Hammer of Darkness, a little bit in Timediver's Dawn and The Timegod. Those three are not very good books, btw, though they mash my power fantasy narrative kink buttons hard.) And he has used theocracies in at least some of his science fiction -- come to think of it, there are signs that the two cultures whose spaceships crash in Candar are a theoretically egalitarian theocracy and a militant atheistic culture kind of like internet MRAs and 'rationalists' had a totalitarian baby -- but again this is more in an anthropological way.
It's like, when he's writing a female protagonist and we can see her thoughts, she comes off as a perfectly normal person, though maybe with a few weird moments as Modesitt tries to signal her femininity. (This may simply be a happy side effect of his inability to write more than one basic personality type.) But women we aren't following in tight third-person, particularly ones who get shoved into the 'love interest' role, often turn into blatantly obvious and unfortunately stereotyped plot devices.
Tangentially, I think this is one reason I liked Zeldyan so much. She is a secondary character in three Recluce books -- Fall of Angels, The Chaos Balance, and Arms-Commander -- and arguably comes out of them as a better developed and more coherent character than either Nylan or Sarryn, the official protagonists. She definitely comes out more coherent than Ayrlyn and Ryba, probably because her story doesn't revolve around Nylan.
The dictatorship cheerleading pisses me off so much. I guess it's slightly better than the divine right of kings so much fantasy and space opera are hung up on. But not very much, particularly when accompanied by all that 'point of a sword' rhetoric.