Samuel Okoli: "Dear Bridget Smith: The Uncharted Lands of Myth and Religion"

Dear Bridget Smith: The Uncharted Lands of Myth and Religion

By Samuel Okoli

            [Question: As the people who will be reading and writing the future of SFF, what would you like it to look like?]

To be completely honest, I like stories to which I can relate. Now yes, I know relatable stories and their characters are all required more often than not in the field of fiction to start with, but the relatability I refer to is a bit more conceptual that that. The speculative fiction genre has taken huge strides over the years, expanding its horizons all across the territories of race, ethnicity, and sexuality—all fields often labeled as “land mines” yet integral to any audience.

And yet there is still one field that I seldom see explored, and when I do it, it is rarely as nuanced as the other aforementioned fields. In short, if there is anything I would like to see in the speculative fiction field and its genres, it is narratives centered around myth and religion, tackling how people deal with such beliefs and traditions in the modern day. And it is the knowledge that I know speculative fiction is capable of this that makes me want it all the more

Religion affects the lives of nearly half (if not more) of the world’s population; it will color lives in some capacity. For me personally, it is as impacting as my race or my gender. To see such stories represented in popular culture and then discussed would be a refreshing experience (perhaps that is why I enjoyed Zelazny’s Lord of Light so much).

Granted, it can be seen as a sensitive issue. But so too was sexuality once (or at least that outside of the heterosexual, cis standard). So too was race. Yet once they were discussed, they became popular sites of discussion, of analysis. Because that is what science fiction does; it analyzes the human condition in speculative scenarios. Fantasy is meant to encourage imagination, to allow us to imagine what could be. What is to say that the topic of myth and perhaps even its connection to religion will not yield the same results?

And on another note, mythology itself is rife with speculative potential. From magic and monsters to gods and world origins, there is much at an author’s disposal. And as for the narratives themselves, historians and anthropologists and other qualified critics have been dissecting their meanings and drawing interpretations for thousands of years. What’s to say authors of our time cannot do the same? What’s to say we can’t make a myth of our own, for our modern-day society?

In fact, I can see myth becoming a new genre of its own (a sub-genre of fantasy, perhaps). We basically do it now. Superman, Batman—they have become the modern American myths of our times. Star Wars is essentially a mythos all on its own. Tolkien’s works are explicitly mythopoeia, based on the intent to give the author’s homeland a myth of its own. The basic fundamentals are there, many of which are drawn from the techniques, narrative structures, and even the characters of ancient myths. We are doing now what our ancestors did millennia ago, only with new characters and plots instead of those we recognize from established religion.

Of course, such novelty is not wrong. But what I am thinking of is a wholesale adaption, an updated tale that interests them, that informs and entertains them. History has its hand in the formations of the ancient stories. Conversations do exist concerning religion’s role in justifying many injustices from discrimination against women to the wholesale slaughtering of innocents. But what if one was bold enough to take these stories and present them in a new light?

There have been a few notable attempts recently—Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology comes to mind. However, even that is simply a glorified remastered edition of ancient works, which of course is useful in its own right. No, what I am calling for is the courage to take these stories and update them to the modern day, even if it means changing some things.

Imagine Eve in a new setting—she eats the fruit, but instead of simply moping around outside of Eden, she determines to right her wrong and sets out on an adventure to do so. What would that have to say to us? What if multiple pantheons existed in the same world—what would that imply? It is questions like these that interest me, questions I would love to see occupying the fields of science fiction and fantasy.

My two cents.