sigerson: (Default)
sigerson ([personal profile] sigerson) wrote2007-10-02 04:17 pm

pondering paper topics

Do any of y'all know of speculative fiction/scifi/fantasy novels that involve multiple faiths? I seem to be able to name ones that have One Big Church but an imagined world with multiple faiths isn't quickly jumping to mind. I must be missing something.

ETA: Wow. I must have had my brain turned off not to remember Small Gods. Thank you guys so much for these! (Now I have new reading material that doesn't involve the word "discourse"!)

[identity profile] thastygliax.livejournal.com 2007-10-02 08:58 pm (UTC)(link)
I'd second the suggestion of A Song of Ice and Fire, but if you haven't already read the series, it may be a bit too much to digest in a timely manner for whatever reasons you brought up the question. But offhand, there's the Seven Gods (dominant in most of Westeros), the tree-cult of the north, the pirate kingdom's Drowned God, the God of Light (an foreign fire cult), and (on the other continent) numerous other faiths, including one that claims to include ALL the other gods.

Piers Anthony's Tarot trilogy involves a colony on a new planet where just about every Earth religion has a representative, because everyone wants to know whether the weird phenomena on the planet will prove their faith to be the correct one. It's not the greatest story ever--even among Anthony's works--but has a few really interesting ideas, even if the execution is flawed.

[identity profile] 2h2o.livejournal.com 2007-10-02 09:01 pm (UTC)(link)
This reminded me of Zelazny's Lord of Light. Heh.