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The God Painter [Print Replica] Kindle Edition
In the year 2035 humanity is rescued from a lethal solar flare by seven mysterious beings and transported across the universe to the uninhabited planet of Ansar. Earth's major cities are recreated, and a stunned but thankful humanity mostly carries on with life and society. But is everything as it appears? Just who are the semi-omniscient beings who rescued them? What do they really want? And to what secret place do they retreat every night? With that appearance of the seven, all the old divisions concerning gender, privilege, and power re-emerge in unexpected and increasingly dangerous ways. Conspiracy theories abound. Among those searching for answers are Joy, a gay commercial artist, and her friend, Leo, a widowed theology professor and Vatican consultant. In the end, the truth may prove more costly than either imagined.
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateDecember 13, 2021
- File size4795 KB
Fire Tablets
Editorial Reviews
Review
--Alexandria Barbera, Contributor, Women in Theology (blog)
"Pegis tells a gripping story with theological underpinnings, in the vein of Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God, and Michael Flynn's Eifelheim. The God Painter is a major new contribution to this fascinating subgenre of science fiction."
--William D. Lindsey, editor of Fiat Flux
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B09NMR6PQZ
- Publisher : Stone Table Books (December 13, 2021)
- Publication date : December 13, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 4795 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Not enabled
- Enhanced typesetting : Not Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Format : Print Replica
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,209,838 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #12,802 in First Contact Science Fiction eBooks
- #18,162 in Alien Invasion Science Fiction
- #19,224 in First Contact Science Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Jessica Pegis is a Canadian writer and editor, and author of The God Painter. Her non-fiction work has appeared in the Toronto Star, the Financial Post, Xtra!, NOW, and Eye Weekly.
Customer reviews
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- Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2023We'd like to imagine that cataclysmic and life-shaking events would jolt most of out of our dogmatic slumber, and awaken us to really engage with the universe, God, and what it means to be human. Pegis' thoughtfully crafted novel shows us that many people, alas, carry their worst prejudices with them, even across the galaxy.
The novel opens with a life-shaking event. The entirely population of earth is saved from a solar flare, thanks to mysterious, possibly god-like beings who rescue them all (plants and animals include) and transport them to a new world, far across the universe, where they are free to recreate the conditions of life as previously lived, with a few significant differences. One is the absence of scarcity. The other is the presence of the "hosts" who rescued them.
In this new world, the two central protagonists, Joy and Leo, find themselves involved in many of the same power struggles that existed on earth, as certain hierarchies insist on protecting themselves. Joy, an artist is the one who seems to shake off most thoroughly the prejudices and preconceptions of their old world. Her questing and adventurous spirit, her need to know, will be a catalyst for the conflict with the old guard - the conservative, right-wing religious groups who are afraid of this new world and the challenges it poses to their rigid ideas about sex, identity, and God.
This is a beautifully written novel and I hope for a sequel!
- Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2021Jessica Pegis’s The God Painter takes us to a universe where people’s material needs are largely satisfied in an environment identical in most details to the “real world” from which they have recently been rescued. Through a process whose mechanism is unclear, people can obtain whatever food and drink they like, clothing, shelter. There is no conflict caused by limited resources. As a result, only social and spiritual needs require effort, and we watch as a few central characters realize and respond to some of their own wishes. In this Edenic setting, complete with garden, the nature of human beings is explored while the influence of physical (but not emotional) needs is held constant. While much of this nature is seen as positive, hatred and prejudice are still at work.
The planet where the characters of The God Painter find themselves also contain their rescuers. These semi-gods or demi-gods, with powers and knowledge beyond the human, are both parental and ambiguously threatening to the humans who do not understand the abilities or motives at work. The garden also contains animals who are simultaneously charming and dangerous. These beings, taken as a group, have apparently human sides, mingled with Olympian distance and perhaps even a small touch of the Moomintrolls.
The sexuality of the central character, Joy, can be seen as a prominent theme because she is not binary, but in fact I read her thoughts and emotions as representative of the needs of all human beings for intimate connections of every kind with others. Joy’s choice of physical partners has little relevance when compared to her spiritual longing for connection. The dream/vision sequence in which Joy sees one of the semi-divine creatures opening her arms for an embrace crystallizes the spiritual nature of the longing that Joy usually expresses by painting. (This scene, by the way, struck me as one of the peaks of Pegis’s ability to summon readers to share emotion , in this case the simultaneous agony and delight of yearning.)
A second central character, Leo, was easily recognized by me as one of a long list of academics I have known, truly engaged in friendship with Joy, but at the same time living his real life in the various committees and reports that he would probably say he loathes. Leo’s spiritual needs are vastly different from Joy’s, and even as his character helps to advance the story, he serves to remind us that no single theme of development or motivation describes all humans equally.
In a sense, The God Painter is a novel of development in the guise of a science fiction story. Both Joy and Leo grow and change in the course of the book, and as is the case for real people, it is not always clear in what directions they are going. Marked from early on by their ability to see, know, and perhaps want more than most people do, these characters combine individuality with a shared representation of the nature of human beings when allowed to be free from material need.
I see that another reviewer has attempted to locate The God Painter with respect to other science fiction authors’ styles. I found the book somewhat reminiscent of Theodore Sturgeon at his best, with his conjuring of human emotion in a context of fantasy. As was the case for Sturgeon’s work, there is much ambiguity and many unresolved mysteries in The God Painter. I believe this novel is to be part of a series, but although I would like some explanations of Joy’s and Leo’s experiences, I do not really expect to get any. On the contrary, Pegis’s view of the complexity, ambiguity, and unresolved nature of human life is the real answer to the questions Joy and Leo ask.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2021The God Painter represents a valuable contribution to a sub-genre of science fiction in which sci-fi and fantasy themes coalesce with imaginative theological investigation in a way that promises to interest people in both the fields of literature and religious studies. Pegis’s novel is situated in a distinguished lineage of novels in which sci-fi and religious thinking coalesce: it follows in the footsteps of Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God, Michael Flynn's Eifelheim, and many other similar works.
Of particular interest in The God Painter, and a major contribution to this sub-genre of science fiction, is the novel’s fascinating probing of the theme of intersexuality and how even to conceptualize gender in an intersexual way subverts hierarchical orderings of the world, and the institutional hierarchies that depend on maintaining and promoting such orderings. Pegis’s musings on this theme are informed by Origen’s intuition (echoing ancient rabbinic proposals) that “original” humanity may have been intersexed. Using this notion as a springboard, she proposes that representing ourselves as male or female tout court might well be to deny the totality of the humanity in each person.
There’s all this and so much more in this cleverly written novel rich with mythic resonances — gardens, trees, paradise aplenty — that will catch the interest of readers from both the literary and religious studies sides. For Vatican-watchers, there’s interest aplenty, piqued with wonderful snark, as in this line: “It wouldn’t be a Vatican commission if it didn’t give itself permission to talk about the very people—in this case, the very extra-terrestrials—it isn’t talking to.”
There are as well wonderful throwaway lines like the following, which could not be more relevant in the post-truth political-religious-cultural milieu in which many of us now find ourselves living:
“’What is factual?’ the host asked him, throwing another pebble.
‘Mathematics. Evaporation. Moses did not write the first five books of the bible—his own death is included in Deuteronomy. Those are facts.’
‘Are important questions always factual?’”
Tolle lege, and I suspect you won’t be sorry you did so.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2022The lasting impression I have of Jessica Pegis' The God Painter is of the wonderful imaginative way in which she stretches the reader’s understanding of visual beauty, beyond what we can normally see. A true nourishment of the imagination, and one that I found very lovely.
Top reviews from other countries
- Margaret HoogeveenReviewed in Canada on March 14, 2023
4.0 out of 5 stars If humanity had a chance to start over...
If humanity had a chance to start over on a new planet, what kind of society would they create? Jessica Pegis takes us on a journey through that re-creation. And it's fascinating to learn about the world she imagines might result. People in Pegis’s world encounter a being who is wonderful and powerful but hard to define or describe. Perplexed and confused, people end up leaning into issues significant in our world today… like gender fluidity, religious zealotry, and conspiracy theories. Perhaps it's a little disheartening to imagine what human foibles some people cannot leave behind... but it’s also heartening to see others striving to understand the unknowable.