"In the ancient legends, the god Darwin prophesied in a world in which tradesmen struggled in competition. The god Newton appeared in a world that had discovered machinery; the god Einstein in an age when. . ."
"Awa' wi' ye and yer gods. I don't think they were gods at all, but only Terrans that the One God gifted with wisdom."
"The One God?" The Fudir had always imagined the gods as beings much like men, but with powers beyond those even of the Hounds, and with an ability to act unseen greater than that of Greystroke. As Newton controlled the motion of stars and planets, Maxwell and his demons shaped and moved whole galaxies and the electric roads that entwined them. And the quarrel between them could not be resolved even by the god Einstein, who sought a rune that would join them. The idea that there might be only one god astonished him.
"Och, list' tae me loshing. I said there'd be nae religious arguments, and here I am starting one myself."
"I never argue about the gods," the Fudir said. "It leads nowhere, and can only irritate them."
--The January Dancer by Michael Flynn
The January Dancer is a very, very different book from Flynn's excellent Eifelheim (which I reviewed here). The gulf between them shows the breadth of SF as a genre: Eifelheim is a sort of alternate history tale about aliens in the Middle Ages (and 21st-century researchers' discovery thereof); The January Dancer is straight-up space opera, complete with space battles, ancient relics, and a star patrol. It's not my favorite kind of SF, but I did appreciate Flynn's playfulness with language, particularly in the early chapters, and the exchange above on the religion of the far future.
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