I left off my last post for this series introducing the books The Shadow and Night and Legend of the Firefish. So what is it that links a far-future sci-fi story with a fantasy-based pirate novel?
In Firefish, Packer Throme is a failed seminary student who ended up studying swordmanship. He intends to find the elusive Firefish, hoping the discovery will help save his village and prove his worth for his love interest. Packer maintains his faith despite his aborted seminary training. Through his adventures he ponders the way God is moving him through the different scenarios. Interestingly, Packer leans into God's sovereignty in a few different episodes in the book. He stops even in times of great peril to decide that everything is God's will, and he almost passively sits by to accept whatever happens. (I have more thoughts on this book in posts from a prior blog tour here)
The Shadow and Night starts slowly, as forester Merral D'Avanos stumbles across minor attitude changes in the redeemed world of Farholme. Soon, little quirks that seemed odd unrelated fluctuations start pointing to a return of something that has not been seen in the Assembly of Worlds for over 10,000 years: evil. Merral is in the center of all that is transpiring, yet he often is slow to act because he also is content to trust in God's will. His confusion in the face of renewed evil is very understandable - since evil has been absent for such a long time, Merral and his colleagues have only ancient reports of how to act in the face of this adversity.
Is the theme I'm drawing out becoming more apparent?
I'm not discussing this as a criticism of these two books in this series. I want to discuss the idea of God's sovereignty and how that can affect how a protagonist acts in a novel. These two books happen to be strong examples of the idea of sovereignty entering into a story of tension. We'll continue on this track next time.
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