Sunday 10 June 2012

Religion in Poul Anderson II

This is a second short extract from "CS Lewis and James Blish" (here) with a cover illustration of Flandry and Aycharaych added.

Returning briefly to Anderson’s Technic History, whose religious themes we have by no means exhausted, red-blind beings, unable to see the light of a proto-sun from within a nearby nebula, regard the, to them, entirely dark nebula as the Sky Cave and the Gate of the Dead. 

Aycharaych manipulates this race’s leaders by meeting them on a nebular proto-planet. While exploiting other races’ religions, Aycharaych himself sees meaning in mystery and death as a completion. He pities God, the immortal and omniscient. (The Chereionites, who were also the Ancients, were not necessarily theistic. Aycharaych, the last Chereionite, might speak figuratively either because he works for Merseia or because, in the Sky Cave, he addresses the terrestrial, Flandry. As a telepath, he knows how to influence his opponents.)

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