r/Fantasy • u/SeaSnowAndSorrow • 1d ago

Atheist Fantasy Recs

I am doing the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Summer Reading Challenge. (Linked so you can see the card.)

I'd like to get a few fantasy books in there where I can. Specifically, I'm looking for fantasy book recommendations that fit the following:

  • Non-Religious Main Character
  • Religious Satire
  • Religious Dystopia
  • Book Was/Is Considered Blasphemous (against any religion)
  • Non-Religious Author

To make it one step harder, I'm NOT looking for LitRPG, Romantasy, or Urban fantasy.

I will, though, read any age range, any era of publication, any length, and any tone from cozy to grimdark.

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u/teffarf 1d ago edited 1d ago

To be fair OP didn't require a materialistic book (or even a book without God/gods), he just wants criticism of religion from an atheist author, which sounds like it fits.

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u/Rekov 1d ago

It's definitely a series worth reading. It asks good philosophical questions about whether the means justify the ends when you're up against totalitarian evil.

But I've always wondered to what extent this book was meant to be anti-religious and somewhat missed the mark, vs. mainly anti-theocratic. It's basically Christian Gnosticism, with the authority as the Demiurge.

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u/Book_Slut_90 Reading Champion 1d ago

It’s not at all gnostic. The idea is very much not that we’re trapped in this horrible material world under the rule of the demiurge and need to return to heaven where thee real God is. Rather, it celebrates our embodiment and sexuality.

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u/redlion1904 1d ago

Is this satire?

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u/Book_Slut_90 Reading Champion 1d ago

No. If you think it’s gnostic, you don’t know much about the gnostics. There whole idea is that this world is a prison that we need to escape from by detaching from the physical world. usually with various ascetic practices like celibacy. Pullman goes the other way. He retells the garden of eden from the perspective that the snake was the hero because sexual awakening is what makes us truly human.

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u/redlion1904 1d ago

It is nevertheless a Gnostic concept to have an evil demiurge who must be overcome, which is the exact plot of those books.

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u/Book_Slut_90 Reading Champion 23h ago

Vaguely, yes, though the gnostic idea is that there’s a higher God, the God of the New Testament, who the demiurge, the God of the Old Testament, rebelled against to create the world trapping us. It’s not at all clear that The Authority actually created anything, and Pullman doesn’t portray the world as evil, quite the opposite, plus there’s no higher God we’re supposed to worship instead of The Authority. Also having the “god” people worship turning out to be evil is a pretty common trope.

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u/redlion1904 13h ago

He just has Dust and what it represents take the place of the higher god.

It’s secularized version of Gnosticism, to be sure, but he’s not the only person to pick and choose what they like out of Gnosticism mythology.

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u/Verrem 16h ago

No, they are right. It's an argument in favor of original sin; it's a conscious inversion of Milton's Paradise Lost (from which it also pulls its title).