Enchantress From the Stars

 Book by Sylvia Engdahl.

This was a thoroughly original and thought provoking sci fi novel. I don’t think the author intended for any religious overtones at all, but I couldn’t help but see some parallels and themes that resonated with me concerning faith, power, love, sacrifice, hope, progression, faith and reason being complementary rather than contradictory, and being endowed with power through ritually making and keeping an oath (covenant) to uphold a cause greater than self.

There is no objectionable content, but the themes are probably too mature for the elementary crowd. Similar to The Giver in terms of recommended age.

Quotes:

“fear isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s a natural result of aiming high.”

“pain’s not categorically bad any more than fear is. Where the aim is to build a person up rather than to break him down, it can serve a constructive purpose.”

“Who are you to say that human suffering is unnecessary?” Hotly I asked, “Are you telling me that it is necessary? Why?” “Because people advance only through solving problems; and if there were no problems to solve, no one would get very far.”

“I didn’t see how I could possibly feel reassured and safeguarded at such a time. Then I realized that he was transmitting to me in the other way, the way that gives you not words, but deep knowledge. In this case it was a sort of faith in the underlying rightness of things that I would never have found in my own mind. He was giving me his conviction that no matter what happened, it would turn out all right.”

“The road you spoke of—it is worth traveling! There’s something beyond what you know, something hundreds of years in your …future, that justifies ‘faith in human destiny’ as you put it. Only you aren’t permitted to see…, because the seeing would interfere with the traveling.”

““It isn’t supposed to be easy. It isn’t a matter of deserving, either. Someone, a very wise man, once told me that to make things easier for the most deserving would be the surest way to mess up the whole business.”

“of this I am sure: there is more to things than we imagine. Beyond the stars are worlds without number, perhaps, and had I never sought to look beyond my own I should be the poorer for it.”

“should I not be guarded, and should aught befall me that is a grief to you, there will be no cause for your trust in enchantments to falter… its power will be no less for my misfortune.”

“Of all the stages Youngling peoples have to go through, I do believe the age of disenchantment must be the hardest. To see so much, by methods you think are scientific, that you’ve no faith in there being anything you don’t see—it must be awful.”

“The outcome of belief … can certainly surpass all hope, I realized dazedly. I thought of how close I’d come to taking Georyn’s away from him. Why, if nobody believed anything except what they understood, how limited we’d be!”

“For us to love, and weep for it, was but the price of the victory;…Without this love I could have done nothing, and the Dragon would have overcome the world.”

“A hard job? Of course, because there were evils to be avoided in the process, evils like the one almost committed on this planet; and if you were involved, you had to accept personal responsibility, not some vague share of a collective guilt that didn’t really exist. Yet you had to be involved. Where would anything ever get if everybody who had any moral scruples dropped out?”

““the Oath demands more of us than blind obedience. Its literal words are a mere reflection, a poor attempt at expressing something that can’t be fully expressed. They are anchors, not shackles.”

“We act in the light of the knowledge we have.”

“somewhere, in that strange enchanted realm beyond the stars, she lived as she had lived here, and experienced all the joys and sorrows to which her human heart was heir.”