ince this is one of my favorite books, it gets a post all to itself. Small Gods (1992) is one of the stand-alone books that doesn't fit into any of the mini-series of the Discworld, and to me it's a great entry point to the world on the whole.
The story is fairly simple for all the complex topics surrounding the themes of the tale. Brutha, a novice in the religion of the state of Omnia, encounters a tortoise in the vegetable garden that speaks to him. Said tortoise is, in fact, the great god Om upon whom the religion is based - or rather, upon whom the religion was once based. Now, Om has become a small god, reduced in size in power as the number of believers in him has shrunk to just Brutha. The state of Omnia revolves around the traditions and precepts of the religion, but the religion has taken on a life of its own, separate from the god. Now Om is trying to regain his power, if nothing else than to have the ability to turn into something more mighty than a tortoise.
Terry Pratchett had a lot of thoughts on religion, and a good number of them show up on this book. The idea of separating the belief in the religion from the belief in a god, for example, is something that definitely can make a person think, especially if they (for example) grew up in a church that was very strict in the Right Ways to Be, all of which came from God by way of the prophets and the Bible. Thinking that maybe the prophets weren't presenting the commandments directly from a god, but rather that they may have their own agendas that influenced their writings, can come across as utterly blasphemous the first time you hear it. It certainly did to me, and that was years after I had stopped attending church regularly as a child.
In college was the first time I approached the Bible of Christianity as an historical work, rather than a purely religious text. Looking at the ways that translations can influence how the messages from the prophets and others are received by later generations is something that made my brain twitch uneasily; I had spent every Sunday from ages 5 to 11 in a Baptist Sunday school, and one of the main things I was taught was that the Bible was literally true in every word. Learning that the words had changed over the years and those changes impacted the actual meaning of the verses, in addition to having meaning change across language, meant that the Bible my Mexican grandparents read was actually not the same as the one I read. It was a difficult blow to my beliefs, even though I had stopped going to church when my family moved to Spain when I was 11.
Small Gods was the first work of fiction I ever read that put a lot of the questions I'd had into a context that made them make more sense to me. Taking something from the real world and putting it into a fantasy world makes it easier to examine in a lower-stakes setting, giving the reader a chance to study and think things through in a way that feels more safe. It's yet another reason why I love speculative fiction and why you'll never see me arguing against escapist fiction.
Next time, we're going back to the Witches with Lords and Ladies! Granny Weatherwax versus the fae - it's going to be a knock-down, drag-out fight and I can't wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment