religion | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Book Review: Sha’Kert by Ishmael Soledad

Sha’kert: End of Night by Ishmael Soledad

Temple Dark Publications, 2021

ISBN: 9781685132040

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

The future.

The polar ice caps have melted.

Those who survived…(whoops, that was Waterworld. Let me try again)

The future.

The Amish have crash-landed on a distant planet.

Those who survived…have adapted to a new world.

That’s the odd but entertaining genesis of Sha’kert, one of the more unusual sci-fi books of the past few years. It’s a creative, enjoyable read for fans of human conflict stories, brought down only a bit by a somewhat muddled ending.

It’s important to note that this is not a survival story in the same style of masterpieces like Verne’s Mysterious Island and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. There’s little detail concerning how the characters survive on a new world, while starting with minimal supplies. The story’s focus is the conflict between the Amish and another family that survived the crash, consisting of Greg, his wife Louise, and their daughter Penny. They aren’t Amish, but are the typical modern, tech-obsessed, cell phone-crazed family. A doubting Amish youth, Henry, also contributes as a character who is sort of in the middle. It’s the discord between old and new ways that the author concentrates on and he does a good job of it, presenting both sides without sounding preachy or political. In the story, all the characters need each other at first to survive, but once they get established and survival is ensured, strife ensues over the possibility of outside contact. Greg and Henry want to explore the planet in hope of finding others, while most Amish would prefer to have no contact with anything or anyone, preventing their being influenced by outside ideas. It’s why the left Earth in the first place: dealing with outsiders was becoming unavoidable. To the author’s credit, all the characters have viewpoints reasonably presented, and the book avoids coming off as biased towards either old or new ways. It’s an engrossing story of personal convictions, and the problems that stem from the inability to compromise.

It’s only the last quarter of the book that is a bit of a letdown. The communication between the characters and what they are trying to convey gets somewhat confusing, and the plot wanders away from the original premise with a new religious angle that doesn’t fit with the rest of the book. The story could have been wrapped up in a neater, less metaphysical fashion.

Bottom line: this is a good sci-fi tale that does well when it stays on focus, and has more meaning and material worth pondering over then the standard science fiction novel. Recommended.

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson.

Help a Reader Out: Are Myths Fiction or Nonfiction?

Interestingly, this question popped up in keyword searches a number of times, so I’m going to briefly address it.

“Are myths fiction or nonfiction?”

The answer probably depends on who you ask and why. I imagine that if you ask an atheist, you’ll get the answer “fiction”. But in the wonderful world of the Dewey Decimal System, books (and other media) on mythology are in the 200s, the category for philosophy and religion. So for straight mythology or books about mythology, it’s considered nonfiction. Poetry (like Homer’s Odyssey will generally end up in the 800s, with other books of poetry. Yes, poetry is considered nonfiction.

Novels and stories inspired by mythology usually end up getting pulled from the 800s and end up shelved with fiction, though. So if you’re asking because you want to know where Rick Riordan’s books fall on the shelf, you’ll find those in fiction. And if you are asking about a graphic novel, it kind of depends on the library. Some libraries will shelve all graphic novels under 741.5, the number for that format, and some pull the graphic novels into a separate section and shelve them by either subject (my daughter’s elementary) or author (my son’s middle school).

So the answer is that, especially in the library, it’s complicated. And sometimes it is kind of hard to figure out. If you’ve encountered Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods”, it probably falls in nonfiction, even though it is written in the annoying contemporary voice of a fictional character(that’s just my personal opinion, my kids love it) and “updated” versions of many myths. But the novels will end up shelved in fiction. Ultimately, though, the myths of a culture are stories of their gods, and their religion, and as long as people believe in gods, mythology is nonfiction.

It occurs to me that, given that this site focuses on horror fiction, someone reading this might think “Well, what about the Cthulu mythos? That’s a mythology, right? Why isn’t Lovecraft in the 200s?” As it was originally the invention of one person recognized as a writer of fiction, and how that person felt about religion is publicly known, I don’t see why it would be anywhere except in fiction. If you do know a person who worships the Elder Gods, please encourage them to seek help.