Reincarnation

[swan_tower]

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?

Comments

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

Tezuka. Tezuka, Tezuka, Tezuka. If you like these stories, you MUST read Osamu Tezuka's "Phoenix" series -- it is one of the most magnificent and well-considered treatments of reincarnation, karma, immortality and all that stuff you are ever likely to see. For bonus points, read it in conjunction with "Buddha," which presents something of the flipside of the tale.

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.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I've added both of those to my wish list.

[kurayami-hime.livejournal.com]

They have them at SF public, FYI.

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

It has been pointed out to me offline that, in fact, Apollo's Song is a much better introduction to Tezuka's work with these themes, in that it's a single volume and still widely available. Phoenix is, by far, better, but its also much denser and less approachable than AS, which is still quite excellent.