“Opera Vita Aeterna” by "Vox Day"
Jun. 22nd, 2014 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
divisionsandprecisionsSoulless magical elf spends a decade copying manuscripts in a Christian monastery to understand God. The story could have addressed some interesting questions, but doesn't. It doesn't move past arguments based on wordplay or "Why does God let bad things happen to good people?" Some questions that could have been brought in are silly (Does a creature need a soul when it is already immortal?) and some have obvious parallels in human history (exploring the attitudes of people toward those of other faiths). No story here, as no one reveals anything deep, no one learns anything or changes.
The oddness of putting explicitly Christian monks in a fantasy world with no thematic justification and no explanation in the context of the story may be a result of the publisher being an explicitly Christian publisher. The story seems to be a trivial copy of Michael Flynn's Eifelheim (about an alien in a monastery), a Hugo-nominated novel published by Tor (large publishers do not appear to have an antipathy toward explicitly Christian themes when the work is well written).
The oddness of putting explicitly Christian monks in a fantasy world with no thematic justification and no explanation in the context of the story may be a result of the publisher being an explicitly Christian publisher. The story seems to be a trivial copy of Michael Flynn's Eifelheim (about an alien in a monastery), a Hugo-nominated novel published by Tor (large publishers do not appear to have an antipathy toward explicitly Christian themes when the work is well written).
