And the first few pages seemed really annoying, because I felt like I would have to engage with the details of the made-up religion...who all the Gods and Goddesses were, and so on. But I read on, and I realised that wasn't really the point. It's about the social and organisational dimensions of the religion, and the theology barely matters at all.
And it's great - one of the best science fiction books I've read for a while. It depicts a future America - actually a future New York State, with much of the action taking place in Poughkeepsie and the rest in NYC - in which there has been a revolution, but a theocratic one, that has overthrown the Old World. Now the religion is in the process of being institutionalised, but doesn't fit very well into the structures being created - it's a polytheistic, decentralised sort of belief system, with magic, and multiple kinds of spiritual beings, and without a very strong good and evil thing going on.
It's also more than a little mad, at least by our thinking; the stories of Christianity or Judaism seem models of rationality by comparison. It's a bit like the ancient Egyptian myths, with gods eating each other and going into the Land of The Dead, but even that sounds more rational than the mythological world depicted here.
It reminded me a bit of The Handmaiden's Tale, in that there are odd juxtapositions of theocracy and 'normal' American life - alongside the institutions of spiritual policing there are still multinational corporations, bars and restaurants and supermarkets, and processed food. But reading about Rachel Pollack, I see that she is described as an "expert on divinatory tarot [and]...a great influence on the women's spirituality movement". And then I can't help wondering whether this is not, after all, a dystopian satire, but actually something else. And I feel weird for liking it so much, but I still think it's a great book.
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