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Thanks to @TheBookOfAllan, I decided maybe Twitter slapfights about fantasy authors might not be Too Online to talk about here. I mean, let's face it, the nerd quotient here is pretty damn high. On the rare occasions I write a top-level post, it's usually about the intersection of Culture War squabbles and hobby drama. So -
First They Came for the Fantasy Authors
Brandon Sanderson, in case you don't recognize the name, is a best-selling fantasy author. In impact on the genre today, he's probably second only to George R. R. Martin. He famously finished Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, and he churns out new books at a rate that makes Stephen King look lazy.
(I have read quite a few of his books, and find them reliably entertaining, but Sanderson is a mediocre writer whose schtick is rigorously-defined magic systems and world-building, to the point that his books sometimes read like LitRPGs, and a big overarching cosmology called the "Cosmere" that unites every one of his series into his own personal MCU.)
Sanderson is also a Mormon. If you've noticed we're in the Culture War thread, you might have an inkling where this is going.
From time to time over the years, some LGBT folks have taken a run at Sanderson over his religion. In 2007 or so, he wrote a blog post offering a sort of milquetoast apologetic, basically saying he was totally cool with The Gays but he also believed in the divine revelations of his church so gay marriage is still a no-go, mmkay? He's been under continual pressure by fans to "update" his views, and he kind of has, saying he continues to "learn and grow." He's tossed a few gay and trans characters into his stories, and he's even written a FAQ: How Do You Feel About Gay Characters?. However, he remains a practicing Mormon, continues to tithe to the LDS, and has very carefully never actually walked back the belief that homosexuality is a sin.
So how has he avoided getting the Orson Scott Card/JK Rowling treatment? Well, for one thing, Sanderson is a genuinely nice guy who is affable with everyone, loves his fans, is very encouraging of new authors, and most importantly, generally avoids any kind of culture war and does not get into Twitter fights. He's got legions of defenders, and most of them accept his bland statements of tolerance and acceptance. It's pretty obvious that he does not personally dislike gay people, and I'm sure he would be thrilled if the LDS elders announced tomorrow that they just received a new revelation from God that He's totally cool with The Gays.
For most people, this is sufficient. There are people who are zealous and dogmatic about everything their church teaches, and there are those who clearly struggle sometimes with a religious doctrine that conflicts with their personal feelings. Most people recognize that everyone wrestles with cognitive dissonance, think "live and let live" is good enough, and if they like Brandon Sanderson despite disagreeing with his religious beliefs, they'll recite "no ethical consumption under capitalism" or "how to be a fan of problematic things."
Most people, but not Gretchen Felker-Martin.
Gretchen Felker-Martin is a transwoman with a single published book: Manhunt. If you wanted to create a hostile caricature of an unpleasant leftist conflict theorist who checks every stereotype, you'd have a hard time finding a better archetype. Think trans Arthur Chu with a foothold in SFF.
Manhunt is about (caveat - I haven't read it, this is what I gathered from reviews) a plague that turns all cis men into feral zombies, and in the post-apocalypse, brave stunning transfolx battle for survival against cismen and TERF hordes. (Yes, seriously.) They also harvest testicles for hormones or something, there's a ton of graphic rape and murder, and also apparently there's a throw-away line about JK Rowling being burned alive in her mansion.
Manhunt was published by Tor, which also, incidentally, publishes Brandon Sanderson.
So, a few days ago, Felker-Martin posted this tweet. (ETA: Hilariously, Twitter's new "added context by readers" feature is now defending Sanderson. I wonder how enraging that is to Felker-Martin?)
In itself, this would be hardly a skirmish in the Culture War. Trans woman doesn't like a Mormon author, wants to cancel him, writes stupid Tweet. It looks an obvious move to try to kneecap a rival, but Felker-Martin probably bit off too much to chew this time and has mostly been mocked for presuming to have some sort of gatekeeping role in deciding who SFF will "tolerate."
But - the reason I wrote this is because I've seen the Sanderson criticism take off a little bit, more than in previous attempts. His haters are really trying to give it legs. The Midnight Society, for example, is a woke satirist who is actually, pretty funny most of the time with really on-point skewerings of SFF and horror authors (except when taking obligatory swipes at JK Rowling by portraying her as a slithering snake hissing about Jewssss and transsss), and this tweet started out great (a completely deserved send-up of Sanderson's tropes) before shifting to an unsubtle signal-boost of the discourse started by Felker-Martin.
Twitter and Reddit seem to have an awful lot of "Hey, did you know Brandon Sanderson is a Mormon?" threads. (It is amazing to me that there are people who've been reading his books for years and had no idea - he does not make it a secret, and also I guessed by the end of the first Mistborn trilogy that the author was a Mormon without knowing anything about him.)
You can see all the usual arguments being recycled: "Should we cancel all Mormon/Catholic/Christian authors then?" (Felker-Martin: "Unironically, yes.") "It's just his personal belief, has nothing to do with how he treats gay people." ("But he TITHES and that means he is funding the LDS's Anti-Gay Death Camps!")
So woke fandom tried to take a scalp and overreached (this time), because while Tor is pretty darn woke, they're still not going to drop one of their biggest cash cows. Yet.
Can You Cancel a Bestseller?
Not literally, no. But can you hurt even a big name? Yes.
JK Rowling is still mega-rich, still a best-selling author, still beloved in most of the world. Yet I'm sure it does sting, even if she never says so publicly, that she and her books will never be celebrated again without an asterisk, that Harry Potter fandom tries to put her name in small print if at all, that she will never be reunited with the stars who she saw grow up and considered friends, until they were forced to denounce her. (Though in Emma Watson's case, it doesn't seem like much forcing was needed.)
They might not be able to Voldemort Brandon Sanderson, but being turned into a homophobic villain who is reviled by fandom and no longer invited to conventions would definitely hurt him. More cynically, Felker-Martin might know that Sanderson was too big a target, but that much smaller Mormon (and Catholic and Baptist, etc.) authors might be intimidated.
(Which makes me tempted to say, "Okay, now do Muslims," but there are only a handful of Muslim SFF authors I know of. The most famous is probably Gwendolyn Willow Wilson, an American Karen who converted to Islam and writes the Ms. Marvel comic book series. Saladin Ahmed wrote a few fantasy novels and also the Miles Morales Spider Man. Amal El-Mohtar is very in with the woke Hugos crowd. All of them apparently believe that Mohammad was totally cool with The Gays. It will be interesting to see if an actual tradcon Muslim ever tries to break into the industry.)
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Mistborn alone was enjoyable. The two follow-ups moved it into the spectacular—largely because they engaged with the prophecied-one dynamics common to other stories. Given that you were cold on the original, I can’t say that you would find it worthwhile, butit’s about an opponent intentionally subverting such prophecy to play the long game . Coupled with certain puzzle pieces of the world building, I thought it was quite good.
I didn’t know Elantris was considered weak. It’s not as original, in some ways, but works well enough and commits very few sins. Though I was playing a lot of Dark Souls at the time I first read it, which may have improved my mental imagery.
But I agree completely that Sanderson is legibly conservative. While I’ve joked that it’s his women that give it away, you’re on to something with the willingness to play it straight, to make something leaning into those aesthetics. Other decidedly conservative authors, the David Webers and
Eric Flints[edit: David Drakes, Craig Alansons, etc.] of the scene, have something similar going on…Sanderson just stays a step or two ahead.In college, I had a professor who’d converted to Islam in order to marry in. He seemed to take it quite seriously, though. He also spoke fluent Farsi, so maybe he was spending more time in the Middle East. Point is—people can have all sorts of reasons. You don’t have to be attracted to the trad side, just willing to tolerate it.
David Weber is certainly conservative. Eric Flint is not even remotely conservative. While they've collaborated professionally multiple times (and generally come out the better for it; they tend to rein in each other's faults), their politics are very very different.
My knowledge of Flint was largely limited to 1632, which scanned as very conservative. But perhaps I’m just making assumptions from blazingly red-tribe it is?
Looking at his Wikipedia, apparently he was in fact a socialist and a labor organizer. Learn something every day, I guess.
On the other hand, we have @badnewsbandit claiming Weber doesn’t count as conservative. I don’t know how that shakes out.
He's reasonably conservative in the same way that the British system of government is a Democracy. An NRA member United Methodist (who have been undergoing their own amusing CW related schism over the past few years). Not welcome at a DSA meeting, but not a modal red triber either. That particular title I referenced is free to read, at least the first edition is, and the plot involves the somewhat progressive space British empire (ruled by a Queen) in the person of femHoratio Hornblower trying and initially failing to form an alliance with a small backward, vaguely Mormon coded conservative patriarchal Christan nation before proving her mettle protecting them from the even more backward schismed fanatics the next system over (who somehow code Muslim complete with Hijabs and Stoning's and rejecting Jesus). The final chapters and even the ending are pretty clear that the results will lead to a major social change, essentially ending the patriarchal structure of that society and that's a good thing. They have been saved by the enlighted Queendom and will be made the better for it.
The Honor of the Queen is the second book in a rather long series, and the Graysons (the patriarchal vaguely-but-actually-not-Mormons) recur pretty frequently over the course of it. While Grayson society does nudge a bit more liberal over the course of the series--and contact with Honor herself and diplomatic relations with Manticore (UK in Spaaaace) is not a small part of that--the process is complicated, not frictionless, gradual, and results in a society that would still be considered very conservative from both Utah and South Carolina standards. Grayson society is not held up as perfect--none of Weber's societies are--but even before its gradual liberalization, it's presented as reasonably healthy, on the whole.
Broadly speaking, Weber's societies can be grouped into healthy and unhealthy categories. The unhealthy tend to eventually converge into totalitarian hellholes with different color uniforms, but the healthy ones don't converge into a particular mode--the Andermani Empire (mostly-ethnically-Chinese Prussia in Spaaaace) is an absolute monarchy, but a mostly positive example. Also, Chien-lu Anderman, Herzog von Rabenstrange is great.
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The protagonist is the head of the United Mine Workers local. Flint was very much left wing; he was a card-carrying member of the Socialist Workers Party (the Trotskyites)
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One would be forgiven for not coming to that conclusion given the very overt neoliberal consensus feminism in The Honor of the Queen of course.
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There's a certain strain of converts who just puzzle me. They're generally liberal, so why they think Islam is going to be softer on sin I have no idea. Some of it is the kind of mistaken Afro-nationalism that imagines Islam as the 'true' faith of native Africans and Christianity as being imposed on the enslaved, so converting to Islam is going back to your true roots. But white converts don't have that.
And generally white converts do seem to convert because of the traditional and orthodox views that Islam retains, that it hasn't compromised with the modern world. But every so often you do get the types who seem to treat it as 'oh, everyone is Buddhist now, how about I try Islam?' for their fix of Exotic Eastern Religion. And the likes of this woman, who back in 2006 claimed she could be both Christian and Muslim, that being an Episcopal minister didn't mean she couldn't also be Muslim. Even for The Episcopal Church, which tolerates a certain looseness in adherence to doctrine, this was a step too far.
Since the original topic was fantasy authors, I can't help but bring up the inimitable Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker (born Phillip Barker), recently posthumously cancelled for having written a pro-nazi alternate history novel (published by the same company as The Turner Diaries) and serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Review. He was also a recognized scholar of Urdu and other languages. Truly an interesting guy.
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I'm going to guess that most of this (exceedingly rare - Western converts to Islam are a rarity in genral, after all) type are mostly just your garden-variety "truthseeker" type, and Islam (generally some personal, Westernized interpretation of Sufism) is just one "truth" to be tried on among the many for some time, a flavor of the day. The important thing is not the part of the truth journey they're on at whatever moment, it's the journey itself.
Sufism does seem to be the favoured version, I think because of the devotional poets who, since the 19th century to Western ears, seem a lot more approachable in terms of religious fervour. All cuddly mysticism and the touch of the exotic.
It's a terrible misrepresentation, but it's the same kind of fate Buddhism suffers with the "eat, pray, love" treatment or Kabbalah did when red-thread kabbalism became a fad back in the 90s among celebrities.
I think that's the phenomenon David Chapman writes about a lot in his essays on Buddhism -- how Westernized "therapeutic Buddhism" has very little in common with how Buddhism is actually traditionally practiced, and if anything resembles more 19th century German Idealism, of all things?
There's a strong history of contact between real Buddhism and German Idealism. Schopenhauer is the most well known of the lot to be influenced by Buddhism. Less well known are the various Germans who just went to Asia, became monks and never came back. Many great works of scholarly Buddhism were written by this sort of monk.
The point is there is a very deep continuum between Buddhism as traditionally practice and the stuff that goes on in corporate mindfulness trainings in the West. The core of Buddhsm always has been a particular lineage of meditation teachings. Anyone seriously investigating those teachings seriously is a Buddhist; whatever the particular cultural-religious penumbra he surrounds it with.
Interesting, thanks.
EDIT: ... did I say anything wrong?
I don't think you said anything wrong. What was the worry?
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Elantris was his debut novel, and it was poorly written, but the characters were likeable, even if most of them were defined by one or two quirks.
I'm surprised you liked the priest so much, since the Shu-Dereth church was such an obvious stand-in for the Roman Catholic Church, and the priest's whole arc is basically about discovering that his church is evil and the fantasy pope is a fraud.
Mormons apparently have a real grudge against Catholics - there's a great essay by an ex-Mormon (full of really annoying early-aughts LiveJournal memes and Tumblr-speak, but still worth a read) about how Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series is an allegorical Catholic-bashing Mormon fantasy.
For what it's worth, as a Mormon I didn't see this as anything against Catholicism. Sanderson has quite a few characters that lose their faiths (or otherwise grapple with them), all believing in very different sorts of religions. "Character loses faith in dominant church" is simply the story (out of those) which will be told most often because more characters will be members of the dominant church than any other. There's also something very Catholic about standard fantasy due to its origins in Tolkien's work. Like, the default assumption for fantasy is that it's set in a sort of medieval Europe.
In his latest book, the Stormlight Archive,there are another two characters who grapple with and eventually lose(?) their faith. One believes in a sort of Eastern made-up religion which worships stones, and another must convince the dominant church (called "Vorinism") that their god has literally died.
In Mistbornanother character grapples with a sort of "church of churches" which believes in all faiths and strives to remember all of their teachings. He eventually decides that the church is literally false, but that its teachings are both useful and beautiful. If Elantris were his only story of a character losing their faith, I'd perhaps agree with you, but given all the other stories about that that he's written I think it's pretty clearly not supposed to be any sort of point against Catholics.
I don't think Brandon Sanderson or Stephenie Meyer hate Catholics, and I doubt either of them intentionally decided to write Evil Fantasy Catholics into their stories. But it's impossible not to see the allusions. They almost certainly did it unconsciously, the same way anyone else deeply immersed in a particular culture will unintentionally write through that lens.
I'd argue Evil Fantasy Catholic's, because there's a hierarchy, are easier to write into a fantasy story than Evil Fantasy Protestant's.
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I haven't read Elantris, but I've read Mistborn, and what makes the religion particularly Catholic? I read big institutional religions as just that, big institutional religions, and I don't know that that would have to necessarily be Roman Catholicism, even if that's the best example. If I remember correctly, Mormonism itself is institution-focused enough to fit in some ways, which would be an obvious influence as well.
And whatever the case may be, in Mistborn, I read the worship as being for political reasons at the head (even if not in the rank and file), which is probably not true of any major group of Christians.
Mistborn didn't feature such an obvious "Catholic" church. It was a lot more explicit in Elantris, which even had monastic orders and a fantasy pope.
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To be fair, Dalinar’s arc is much, much better developed than the others. Part of that is experience, part of that is having several times as many words to play with.
I personally found Sazed’s approach to be the weakest despite how much I like where he ends up.
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I don't know why that should be, but it doesn't surprise me. Mormonism does have Protestant roots, and every new denomination that sprung up did have in common "At least we're not those durn Papists!" 😁 Also, we're probably the single biggest denomination in Western Christianity and we're pretty solid on "Sorry, no, you are not Christians and you are heretics".
This paper by a Mormon is a nice try, but doesn't work. No, you're not restoring the Catholic (meaning "small c" universal) church to the pure original before its corruptions, that's a staple of every split off sect since the Reformation.
I avoided all the Twilight books and movies as best I could, but by cultural osmosis I did imbibe some things - such as the sparkly vampires - and the Italian vampires, dressing in red and black, and looking like a stand-in for the Catholic Church. Of course they're the bad vampires while the Cullens are the good
Mormonsvampires 😁Catholic heretics, sure. I tire of all the people who say we're not Christians though. Even if we grant that the Catholic church is the one true church, with 100% correct beliefs, you still aren't in charge of dictionaries. And yes, this is fundamentally a debate about the definition of the word "Christian." State whatever you want about the beliefs themselves, but attempts to simply define them away just waste everyone's time.
Okay, generally I'm up for a theological fight but today I have a cold and am constantly sneezing, and it's pointless anyway. Mormons and Unitarians and Uncle Tom Cobley and all claim the mantle of Christianity merely by invoking the name of Christ, even in sects where Christ has been reduced down to "just this guy, you know?" and we're all equally divine and there are many paths up the mountain and besides what if you were born in a Hindu or Buddhist country and all the rest of it.
I think when it comes to the point of "all the doctrines of traditional Christianity are wrong, all the history of the Bible is wrong, we have the special unique extra true scriptures" then it's so different from the originating faith, it's not the same thing at all, so why call it Christianity? It would be like the USA maintaining the name of the Colonies long after the break with Britain and the monarchy.
I agree that a theological debate is pointless--I think we'd both agree that my definition of Christianity includes Mormons and yours does not. The question is which definition is more useful.
If they believe in Christ more than they believe in any other human, I'd call that Christianity, even if they don't believe he's divine. That's generally how we describe other faiths. Jews and Muslims probably believe in Christ more than people like Unitarian Universalists, but in everyday conversation it's easiest to call the latter Christians and the former two by their own names.
We literally don't believe any of this.
Most of them are correct, but getting just a few seemingly small things wrong can lead to big issues.
The history of the Bible is correct, and the Bible itself is mostly correct in its description of that history.
We have some of them, believe that others have yet to surface, others have yet to be written, and that still others have perhaps surfaced in other faiths but we don't yet know that they're scripture. I'd agree MORE with this statement if it was modified to [some of the special unique extra true scriptures]. Even then, it's less because those books are so special, and more just because they're newer and haven't been warped quite so much as older books of scripture have been over the years.
Well, I'd be fine with "The United Colonies of America" as a name. Going by our modern definition, they would no longer be colonies, but if they insisted that they were colonies, well, the UCA is powerful enough that we'd probably just say that "colony" now has two meanings. One for the original meaning of the word, and another for UCA-style countries which started out as colonies. Similarly, Marxism is nothing like what Marx wanted, but we still call it Marxism because that's just how the movement has evolved. We already do this with so many different things, and it's a natural part of the evolution of language. We still call the royal family the "King" and "Queen" even though they hold no power and are essentially glorified celebrities. We call smart phones "phones" even though they're exactly as phone-like as the original cell-phones, and far more computer-like than the original computers.
I'd honestly be pretty OK with some umbrella term besides "Christian" to describe non-Catholics, if not for the baked-in assertion that your church membership irreversibly determines your beliefs forever. Does someone with 100% Catholic beliefs instantly become non-Christian when they are baptized into another church, even if their beliefs don't change? What if they've never even heard of Catholicism and are just joining the best Christian church they know about? Seems silly to me to assert that these people aren't Christian even when they are following literally all of Christ's teachings to a T (pun intended and highly meaningful).
I can't speak for your interlocutor, but I would imagine that he would extend Christian farther than Roman Catholic. I'm guessing the key things that would be pointed to would probably be the trinity or maybe salvation-related things.
When people say Christian, they do mean more than "likes Jesus most," or at least I do. I'm not familiar with the Mormon conception of what Jesus is doing, though, because my impression is there are some pretty substantial soteriological differences, among other things.
I think the biggest difference is the concept of the Trinity. We still think Jesus is divine, died for our sins, saved us, and is God, but we don't think that he and God the Father are literally the same person.
I'd be willing to accept another definition of Christianity, but I think the Nicene Creed is a bit too restrictive. The entire doctrine of the Trinity seems unimportant to me relative to the doctrine of Christ and salvation through him.
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I can confirm this line of thinking having been raised Mormon.
I’d never even heard of “priesthood of the believer” until many years after leaving and so to hear Mormons tell it there’s
Catholics with their obviously political and non-Godly nicene creed and claim of papal connection to god
Mormons with their claim to modern day prophets and inspiration
the Protestants who didn’t like catholic rules so just made some stuff up
Funnily enough the latter is how Catholics will tend to describe Mormonism, while Protestantism is usually viewed as the result of being overly accommodating of some individual’s mental illnesses or more banal objections.
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Yeah, I don't really agree with the complaint that Brandon Sanderson's books are poorly written because of the prose. Prose is completely incidental to the quality of a book, IMO. I read books for the plot and for the characters (in that order), with prose only extremely rarely coming onto my radar. Literally the only time it happened was when reading Pat Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear, when I realized that while the protagonist was in the fae realm he started to speak in iambic pentameter. It was a neat trick, but otherwise meh. Not worth caring about.
My personal issue with Elantris is that it's just kind of boring. It's not bad or anything, but I honestly probably would've not finished the book if I hadn't already read Sanderson's work and liked it. I kept waiting and waiting for the story to get good, and it just never did. But it's his first book so I guess it's not unreasonable that it isn't as good as his later ones.
Prose isn't the most important aspect to me, though I do notice when an author's prose is clunky and their dialog wooden, and appreciate it when it's not. But when I say I think Sanderson is a mediocre writer, I don't just mean he doesn't write in high-falutin' literary style with pretty words. I mean his dialog is frequently as cringey as a dad joke, his storytelling is a trope parade punctuated by the sound of dice rolling, and his characters are collections of personality quirks referenced over and over. Especially his female main characters, who with a few rare exceptions like Vin in Mistborn, are basically all the same character. (If you played a drinking game every time the main female protagonist "blushes," you'd die of alcohol poisoning before finishing the first book.)
That reminds me of an old wheel of time drinking game - a shot every time someone expresses themselves through their nose - snorts or sniffs or the like. You're lucky to get through more than one chapter.
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Prose certainly can be important to the quality of the book. The Old Man and the Sea gets pretty much all its value from its style. The Lord of the Rings gets an awful lot out of it, with its ambiance of nostalgia. But yes, I agree that quite a lot of the time, I don't really care too much about it. People don't read Sanderson for the prose.
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