Author Topic: PC286: The Calendar of Saints  (Read 11649 times)

Fennel

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Reply #25 on: November 27, 2013, 12:30:51 AM
I loved this story. One thing I really liked was how the author negotiated between tweaking so many elements slightly, but retaining a lot of the cultural and historical feel of Catholicism and Catholic history. I also found the way this world treated gender fascinating. The story could have conceivably been written with a male main character, but there were times that the difference in the way this world viewed gender struck me pretty hard. God is referred to as female, women are seen as fighters equal if not superior to men, and, although prostitution is still viewed as a dirty trade, Jan's origins don't hamper her employment by the church as much as one would expect. I think the story did a good job exploring the culture that surrounds martyrdom, where a saint's death is revered almost as much as the saint's actions in life, if not more. Jan's suicide seems to be both a matter of pride and a matter of spirituality. It seems like a pointless waste to me, but I can't deny that, in her culture, it is a powerful act.



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Reply #26 on: November 27, 2013, 01:52:12 AM
Just read a relevant quote that I'll paraphrase. "Science is the search for God. It just comes at it from a different angle than religion."

All cat stories start with this statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...”


InfiniteMonkey

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Reply #27 on: November 27, 2013, 06:28:26 AM
Just read a relevant quote that I'll paraphrase. "Science is the search for God. It just comes at it from a different angle than religion."

I just don't agree.

Science is a search for fact. If you think that the combined sum and total of all facts equals God, well, so be it.

I'm not sure how many would agree with that, however.



amalmohtar

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Reply #28 on: November 27, 2013, 11:49:41 AM
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Science is a search for fact. If you think that the combined sum and total of all facts equals God, well, so be it.

I think this approach is actually very recent, relatively speaking. A significant amount of the motivation for early scientists -- certainly the people recognised as founders of modern scientific knowledge and inquiry -- was spiritual in nature. As late as the 19th century scientists and innovators were also occultists, and the occult nature of their interests sometimes directly led to their discoveries. Think of how much easier it is to invent the telephone when you can conceive of spirits with whom you can communicate beyond the grave.

/citation needed to all of this because I'm being lazy and have a cut on my finger but it's backed up with research I promise.



chemistryguy

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Reply #29 on: November 27, 2013, 12:15:22 PM
Perhaps with enough supercomputers and knowledge of all the variables you could work it out, but that would take too long.

Nope.  The Gospel according to Saint Heisenberg says nuh-uh.
Not quite.
The Gospel according to Saint Heisenberg states that as you increase the accuracy of your measurements of one quality, you decrease the accuracy of another. Specifically: you can either know the path or the exact position of high-energy particles at any given time to a high degree of accuracy, but not both.

Yes, we all operate using classical Newtonian physics pretty well and it could be used to describe each dodge, thrust and parry without the unnecessary complications of either quantum mechanics or relativity.  But I do believe that the accumulation of trillions and trillions of subatomic particles/waves have an impact on the bigger world.  The alternative is a universe that is pre-determined, and that just doesn't sit right with me. <--- Very scientific statement   

But I do agree that the Uncertainty Principle gets thrown around as some kind of a unscalable  brick wall when it's not, and I'm guilty of doing so in this thread.  In reality, it defines just how fine a resolution we can focus in on.  It's a universal limit, just like light speed...without warping space anyway.  And that is life in a nutshell...ya gotta work with what ya got!

Quote
How about a duel?

Naw.  I'll buy the first round and we discuss something less controversial like politics.


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Reply #30 on: December 02, 2013, 04:58:01 PM
The classic conflict of Science vs. Spirituality is one that I've never really understood.  If I had to call myself anything I'd say I'm an Agnostic Theist, but also a scientist.  IF God created the universe, there is nothing about scientific discovery that changes that.  The conflict really seems to arise when new scientific discoveries contradict long-held beliefs of a specific religion, but that has always bugged me because surely discovering new aspects of the universe is just a fine-tuning of our conception of the plan. 

Much like I've never really understood conflict of Science vs. Magic.  They are not incompatible.  Science is a process by which to understand the workings of the universe, however those workings happen to function.  If magic exists, science would catalog its form and function.

Anyway,regarding the actual story:  it took me a little while to figure out that this was an alternate list of saints, particularly the mentions of Galileo.  I wasn't really that interested in the saint list until then, nor particularly interested in the protagonist who was so focused on her function as to be a non-entity, the blade which she is titled with, and not very interesting.  I've always thought it bizarre than anyone could be satisfied with a duel as a means of determining rightness, because it seems like it should be obvious to any thinking being that the outcome means nothing but that one person beat the other.  But I guess if you believe in God guiding every action, one could extend that to believe this, even though I don't really fathom it.  The story really got interesting at the very resolution of the story where she actually proved herself to be a thinking entity rather than a tool in the hands of others by making a decision for herself.  That made the story pretty worthwhile, even though it took almost the entire story to get there.  Overall, though, since it did take so long it's not a story I'd be likely to recommend to others.



Jen

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Reply #31 on: December 04, 2013, 08:40:31 AM
I liked this story without really understanding what was going on. Like other commenters, I found the idea of dueling for honor silly and pointless, especially in a world where science is the word of God. I also really don't get how all this would work, religious teachings alongside scientific fact, but I am an atheist, so I admit my ignorance here.

What made this enjoyable were the little snippets of the saints' feast days (especially once they started getting unusual) and the excellent reading.

A small nitpick/question: if the main character's name is Jeanne (assuming I heard it right), why do they refer to Saint Joan of Arc instead of Jeanne d'Arc?



amalmohtar

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Reply #32 on: December 04, 2013, 05:37:22 PM
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A small nitpick/question: if the main character's name is Jeanne (assuming I heard it right), why do they refer to Saint Joan of Arc instead of Jeanne d'Arc?

I wondered that myself while reading! One was written Joan of Arc, the other was written Jeanne. I rationalised it to myself with the thought that Calendar snippets are from a different (English?) society observing the feast days and customs, so Jeanne D'Arc has been anglicised due to the historical distance while Jeanne of the Knife is a recent enough addition that her name is what it is.



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Reply #33 on: December 04, 2013, 06:23:08 PM
Quote
A small nitpick/question: if the main character's name is Jeanne (assuming I heard it right), why do they refer to Saint Joan of Arc instead of Jeanne d'Arc?

I wondered that myself while reading! One was written Joan of Arc, the other was written Jeanne. I rationalised it to myself with the thought that Calendar snippets are from a different (English?) society observing the feast days and customs, so Jeanne D'Arc has been anglicised due to the historical distance while Jeanne of the Knife is a recent enough addition that her name is what it is.

Makes sense to me.



Jen

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Reply #34 on: December 05, 2013, 09:24:50 AM
Makes sense, yes. I also thought that maybe Jeanne does live in an English-speaking country, but her parents were creative and decided to give her a French name :)
(I like thinking about things like this. It's pretty fascinating the way names of cities or even countries change when "translated".)



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Reply #35 on: December 05, 2013, 03:15:51 PM
Makes sense, yes. I also thought that maybe Jeanne does live in an English-speaking country, but her parents were creative and decided to give her a French name :)

I've seen the name Jeanne in various forms enough in the US that it doesn't strike me as a foreign name.

(I like thinking about things like this. It's pretty fascinating the way names of cities or even countries change when "translated".)

Yes!  We've been running into that at work.  We're on the verge of releasing a new product targeted at European markets.   There's a region selection control which has "Germany" as one of the selections.  But someone sensibly pointed out "You know that anyone who should be selecting that value would be calling it "Deutschland", right?  Um, yeah, good point.



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Reply #36 on: December 06, 2013, 01:29:39 AM
I'm late to the party, but I just listened to this story and i have to say that I was disappointed in the end. The story was good in the sense that it pretty much ruined my day--I spent all day trying to understand why the MC would do what she did, so the story accomplished its goal by sticking in my brain and making me think. In the end, it just wasn't my cup of tea. I can't really put a finger on why, but... I just didn't like it. Maybe because I was expecting the sword to start talking to her or perhaps I wanted something more, but it felt like the MC copped out for some reason.

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olivaw

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Reply #37 on: December 09, 2013, 11:18:53 PM
In my head, this story was taking place in the world of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, or one very like it.
That just added to the cool of both.



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Reply #38 on: December 10, 2013, 12:29:54 PM
I really enjoyed the world and the writing.  If you enjoyed this, then I recommend both "Swordspoint," by Ellen Kushner, which avoids the anticlimactic nature of final duels by having a plot that just sort of meanders around pointing at interesting tourist attractions in the worldbuilding and then stops at a semi-arbitrary point, and the King's Blades series by Dave Duncan, which is more swashbuckly but has some interesting and amusing takes on the idea of (in this case magically) sworn weapon-wielders.  (The idea tangentially appears in one of my favorite series, "The Silent Tower" and "The Silicon Mage" by Barbara Hambly, but I can't recommend those to fans of swordfights.  I do enjoy the sworn-weapon character in that series, though, and his eventual resolution.)

I was as confused as most other people when it came to who was arguing what side of which argument in the duel in question.  The explanation of challenging a scientific principle as heretical in a religion where scientific principles are God-ordained truth makes sense and clarifies why she went for the tie answer (or at least why she wanted to lose the fight in the first place, with the tie being her way around her pride.)  I have a creeping fridge-logic feeling that there's no way to make this a coherent religion, though, not with the way science is always overturning and/or refining theories as our understanding refines itself.

I was pleasantly surprised at the female pronoun applied to God, but then I went, "Wait, why would a female Deity be hung up on the purity and chastity of women?"  That's strictly a male concern, just from an evolutionary perspective, even without the accreted cultural baggage.  Not sure if that was just a whoopsie-let's-not-change-society-TOO-too-much-lest-the-reader-collapse-from-novelty-fatigue thing or something that the author just didn't notice.



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Reply #39 on: February 19, 2014, 06:23:47 PM
Way, way late to the party.

Unfortunately, not being that much into science, I didn't catch onto the special nature of the saints until I heard St. Galileo, which made me wonder: wait, were all the saints scientists? Now I'm going to have to go back and listen. I did like this world, although like many, I too was a little unclear on her final duel. But I love the idea of this world and how this world is built on science being God's truth. And after that recent debate on science vs creationsim (which I found both sides to be ridiculous; more interested in talking past each other without having a genuine conversation) I found this story a refreshing twist on that debate. Definitely a world I would love to revisit.

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