Reincarnation
May. 7th, 2009 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
An exchange with
kitsunealyc has got me thinking about one of the aspects I really love in Changeling: The Dreaming, namely, the fact that the premise incorporates reincarnation as one of its fundamental elements. The faerie souls are born into a series of mortal hosts, and sometimes they remember their past lives, which means you can have all kinds of fun with patterns and echoes and change over time.
Hell, that was the precise notion that set the ball rolling for Memento.
And it makes me wonder -- who out there has written fantasies that make use of this idea? Not just reincarnation, but remembering past lives, telling a story where the fixed and mutable characteristics of a soul are a central part of the tale. Katharine Kerr's Deverry books come to mind, and Jo Graham has started a series of history-hopping fantasies that appear to feature the same souls incarnating as central and peripheral figures in various periods (the Trojan War, Ptolemaic Egypt), but those are the only ones I can think of offhand. The Wheel of Time, I suppose, but that's one of a billion ideas swirling around in that series, and it doesn't get the exploration I'd like to see.
I had fun running the idea in Memento, and I had fun playing with it via Ree, my long-term LARP character. What's it like to remember -- in your early twenties -- that you generally don't live to see your twenty-fifth birthday? What does it mean for friendships and enmities when the universe hits the "reset" button on your lives? How can you take something that appears to be a fundamental part of your nature, on a metaphysical level, and work around and with it so you don't repeat the same mistakes you always have? I have no idea what kind of story I could use to explore those notions again, but I suspect I'll think of one eventually, because clearly my brain isn't done with it yet.
So where can I go to feed my brain? Kerr, Graham, Jordan -- who else?
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Hell, that was the precise notion that set the ball rolling for Memento.
And it makes me wonder -- who out there has written fantasies that make use of this idea? Not just reincarnation, but remembering past lives, telling a story where the fixed and mutable characteristics of a soul are a central part of the tale. Katharine Kerr's Deverry books come to mind, and Jo Graham has started a series of history-hopping fantasies that appear to feature the same souls incarnating as central and peripheral figures in various periods (the Trojan War, Ptolemaic Egypt), but those are the only ones I can think of offhand. The Wheel of Time, I suppose, but that's one of a billion ideas swirling around in that series, and it doesn't get the exploration I'd like to see.
I had fun running the idea in Memento, and I had fun playing with it via Ree, my long-term LARP character. What's it like to remember -- in your early twenties -- that you generally don't live to see your twenty-fifth birthday? What does it mean for friendships and enmities when the universe hits the "reset" button on your lives? How can you take something that appears to be a fundamental part of your nature, on a metaphysical level, and work around and with it so you don't repeat the same mistakes you always have? I have no idea what kind of story I could use to explore those notions again, but I suspect I'll think of one eventually, because clearly my brain isn't done with it yet.
So where can I go to feed my brain? Kerr, Graham, Jordan -- who else?
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Date: 2009-05-07 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 10:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 10:01 pm (UTC)I don;t play Changeling, but I do play Feng Shui, and reincarnation has been a major theme in that, too.
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Date: 2009-05-07 10:06 pm (UTC)Plus a song about the pain of disco. No, really. ^_^
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Date: 2009-05-08 09:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 10:31 pm (UTC)Even though I haven't read Lackey in years - she belongs to a very particular adolescent period - I still have most of her books, since (as you can imagine) Vanyel helped this little gay boy out a lot.
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Date: 2009-05-07 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 10:13 pm (UTC)The books are getting kind of hard to find, but worth it to track down -- this is one of the very few works I've read that actually influenced how I think about morality and the underlying structure of the universe.
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Date: 2009-05-07 10:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-08 03:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-08 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 10:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 11:49 pm (UTC)Kieron, Aliera, Dolivar, sibling elves.
Aliera reincarnated as a descendant of Kieron.
Dolivar reincarnated as human. Still has the "look, chaos!" power.
Exalted has reincarnation, though it'll only really come up for Celestial Exalts or Dragon Kings. The multi-partite soul does mean you can end up with "this is the hungry ghost of Quen guarding his body, and this is the ghost of Quen with his memories, and this is the young Solar who has the same Exaltation that Quen had and thus some of his memories." Properly reincarnating souls get a perfect memory wipe, like recycling atoms. I've imagined that Virtues and possibly Motivation or Intimacies could be carried on, in an attempt to make it less pointless and also vaguely inspired by Buddhism's "rebirth of causal factors" but that's a houserule.
(Though the newly splatted Infernal Exalted have detailed memories of their past Solar self, and there are mechanisms for personality blending or takeover.)
There's Lord of Light, and Tolkien's elves (mostly in some letters). I think those are more like transferring a full mind to a new body, though. Then again, a Changeling with Remembrance 5 would be similar to that, especially on the fae side of the personality.
I think Gordon Dickson was working on something like this with his Dorsai/Necromancer books but I don't know more.
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Date: 2009-05-08 01:47 am (UTC)The characters go through three separate lifetimes, with the first book of course setting in motion the circumstances behind them being reincarnated in the next two books. In the second book, most of the characters remember their past life, except for two, who remember over the course of the book. In the third book, everyone remembers from the outset, and that's when it really gets good because not only are the characters no longer caricatures of of people but become real people, this is also when all your expectations are turned around when one character says "You know what? I don't think I want to do what we've been planning for three lifetimes now."
The fourth book moves from one protagonist to the other, the one the reader has been conditioned to hate since book one, and in this one you learn to love the character because they've actually learned something over the centuries.
The first two books drove me bonkers, but Douglass' writing is good enough to have kept me engaged, and book three hooked me forever.
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Date: 2009-05-08 06:49 am (UTC)