Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

ReReadable Books

(August 2007)

"The Soul's Journey: Power, Justice and Responsibility"

By

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Not all the books I review here come via publicists. I also rescue books from the Public Library sell-off shelf, and I find them at conventions. Sometimes Amazon tosses one at me and I catch. I don’t review them in the order I get them, or even in the order I read them.

This column is about what students of the occult can learn from reading sf, fantasy, or any related genre. Why should you bother to read fiction? What can you learn from it? And how can you learn that efficiently?

Clearly, what I learn is not what you learn. My soul’s journey is not your soul’s journey. But my method could very well be the key that unlocks your closed doors.

So this is how I do it, so you can do it with what you’ve been reading. At the equinoxes and/or solstices, I search for patterns in what I’ve just read or am following on TV and films, in the world’s issues and in my life.

Life is the counter-entropic force that organizes manifest reality into patterns. Some patterns come handily embedded in reality (i.e. galaxies tend to become spirals), but life has the power to shape new patterns, or more accurately trim the dross to reveal the inherent pattern, just as a writer has the power to build an imaginary world and reveal an hidden truth.

Last month we began an in-depth discussion of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, which Butcher says is about Power. As readers of this column know, I often write about Power because SF/F tends to be about Power. Predictably, The Dresden Files TV series crystallized my understanding of the last few months’ reading.

So I have 4 oddly mundane novels to discuss along with another Vampire Detective, and the Lifetime network TV Series Bloodties about a Private Eye and a Vampire.

In January and March ’07, I mentioned Tanya Huff’s Blood Books omnibus reprints upon which the Lifetime Series Bloodties is based. The episode titled Deadly Departed is about a mother who uses her magical powers to turn one of her sons into a serial killer. When he’s caught but could have gotten off on a technicality, she causes him to commit suicide while in jail, binding his ghost to her and using it to murder the lawyers, judge and attempt to murder the cop who covered up the technical flaw in the evidence.

Vicki saves the cop’s life. The cop is Vicki’s ex-boss who rides her about violating procedure while deep in her past lies this whopper of a violation and coverup.

In this episode, the vampire, Henry, leads Vicki (the Private Eye) to information about magic. This could be an episode of Supernatural – stop a supernatural killer.

Off the plot-line in the byplay between Celluci (Vicki’s ex-partner cop) and Henry (the vampire who writes romance for a living.) we see that Celluci still believes all vampires are evil and that Henry kills. We see Henry feed without killing then resist a magical spell of seduction. And questions are raised about the "evil" nature of the scars on Vicki’s wrists that bind her to a – well, demon? – somewhat as Harry Dresden is bound to the Shadow of a Demon.

This episode raises questions about "good" and "evil" and "power" just as The Dresden Files does, but it isn’t about Power. It might be about Justice vs. Law – since a magic-driven serial killer was illegally incarcerated then murdered his cell mate before becoming a ghost-serial-killer.

DAW has also re-printed two novels "of the Cleveland Undead" by S. A. Swiniarski under the omnibus title Blood and Rust. These novels are of ordinary cops becoming vampires without knowing what’s happening to them. The worldbuilding depicts a horror fantasy universe where Evil can barely be overcome by Good. Each scene is played and written for cinematic horror punched home with powerful visuals. The characters have no relationships but they are strong characters, well drawn, fully realized and even likeable – but they don’t form any meaningful bonds.

This past Spring, the USA has been mesmerized by a gun-spree on a University campus in Virginia. The typical portrait of the disturbed psychopathic loner has focused public attention on Relationships and psychological health.

Keep Dresden’s life story in mind as you think about this. Must Relationship be part of the definition of Good? And how intimate must a healthy relationship driven life be?

Nora Roberts writing as J. D. Robb has a long series with ". . .In Death" in the title. This is a series about a woman cop, Eve Dallas, in the near future married to an ex-mobster tycoon, Roark, with business interests on other planets. The SF worldbuilding is totally lacking. This is really a mundane mystery series, but I love it. Memory In Death brings Eve Dallas’s abusive childhood (think Dresden) back to haunt her and she has to work a case seeking Justice for a woman she has good cause to hate. She has to overcome that hate to solve the case. The series is graphic, but I do recommend it.

Kay Hooper, a best selling author, has a mystery series I got at the Library sell-out rack and had in my stack for years. I only got to reading them a few weeks ago, but isn’t it an odd coincidence how they dovetail into the issues raised by Dresden Files and Bloodties?

In Stealing Shadows we follow the emotional recovery of a psychic who worked effectively with the Los Angeles police, then in anguished defeat, retreated to an inherited property in a small town on the Eastern seaboard. Her aunt, who left her the property, was likewise a wounded psychic. The family produces women who are telepaths.

From the background roar of thoughts, she notices when someone is hatching homicidal plans. She tries to warn the authorities in the small town and eventually has to confront the serial killer who defeated her in L.A.

Hiding in the Shadows is about another character who turns up in Stealing Shadows, an FBI agent who is studying psychics for personal reasons. In this novel, a woman psychic who knows she’s going to be kidnapped and murdered but is in love and doesn’t want to die – transfers her psyche into a woman friend who is in a coma. She wakes without any personal memory.

The story is about the romance between both women and the man the psychic loves. He enlists her aid to find his kidnapped lover, not knowing this body contains that lover.

If you have the Power to transfer your soul or consciousness (which is which?) into an empty body, should you? Is any body ever empty as long as it breathes?

Naomi Ragen – another hot selling author – explores another kind of Power and soul journey to resolve conflicts of Responsibility and Justice – around a core of Honor. In The Covenant, Ragen gives us a group of women who survived the concentration camps together by binding themselves to each other with Kabalistic Magic. This Covenant will bring all to the aid of one in a crisis.

One of the survivors’ children lives in Israel, pregnant, with husband and other children. She has friends, but her mother has The Covenant which brings a group of rich, powerful and connected old women and their children to her aid when the pregnant woman’s husband is kidnapped by terrorists, sending her into premature labor.

The old women uncover an international plot, deep cover spies, double-agents, and intrigue. The path leads even into a harem in Egypt’s royal family. So we see the entire Middle East situation from a unique perspective. For that alone, this book is worth reading.

The Covenant has marvelous character sketches from various points of view. These people sneak up on you and suddenly you’re wrung out with their emotions. This book is a shower of an astonishing breadth of facts juxtaposed and arranged with the spare clarity of a Japanese Brush Painting. I finished it thinking, "After such a book is published, how could there still be war? Perhaps terrorists don’t read?"

But the neatest twist is at the end where one of the old women says that as a young girl in the concentration camp, she just made up the Kabalistic Ritual that bound them – it wasn’t real, but it has shaped their lives.

That made me shiver – because all the events in this novel ring and echo with Magick.

If you have the Power to mete out Justice, do you also have the Responsibility to do so?

There is a principle in all religions and even in psychology. Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. You can’t judge yourself. In judging another person, you must always consult experts, other points of view, and even listen carefully to an accounting of motivations.

The soul’s journey is a team effort. We need our friends, relatives, and even our enemies. Relationships are the key.