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Too-Human Demons
28 Oct 2013 12:00 amApr/May 2013
Snake Agent / The Demon and the City - Liz Williams - Nightshade Books, 2008
* * * / * * *
I am not generally keen on books that feature gods, angels or demons as secondary characters. A supernatural entity as the chief villain who must be defeated by mortals is fine - that's pretty much the plot of Lord of the Rings. So are stories where the main characters are gods or have god-like powers, such as the Greek myths or most superhero stories. But stories with human protagonists but deistic or demonic cameos don't really work for me. The problem is the balancing of character actions - logically, the supernatural beings should be running the show and that's usually where such stories end up, with the human protagonists' agency taken away by a Deus ex Machina. You can give the deistic characters mysterious reasons for limiting their interference in human lives, or have the protagonists acquire powers or artifacts that put them on the same level, but neither of these is an intuitively satisfactory solution. Liz Williams does neither of these things in her Inspector Chen novels. However, I don't think her solution is much better.
( Read more... )
Snake Agent / The Demon and the City - Liz Williams - Nightshade Books, 2008
* * * / * * *
I am not generally keen on books that feature gods, angels or demons as secondary characters. A supernatural entity as the chief villain who must be defeated by mortals is fine - that's pretty much the plot of Lord of the Rings. So are stories where the main characters are gods or have god-like powers, such as the Greek myths or most superhero stories. But stories with human protagonists but deistic or demonic cameos don't really work for me. The problem is the balancing of character actions - logically, the supernatural beings should be running the show and that's usually where such stories end up, with the human protagonists' agency taken away by a Deus ex Machina. You can give the deistic characters mysterious reasons for limiting their interference in human lives, or have the protagonists acquire powers or artifacts that put them on the same level, but neither of these is an intuitively satisfactory solution. Liz Williams does neither of these things in her Inspector Chen novels. However, I don't think her solution is much better.
( Read more... )
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