The Chiveis Trilogy Attempts Serious Themes With Un-Serious Craft
In the year 2042, plague and war wipe out human civilization. From the ashes, new medieval-like societies arises, ignorant, violent, and steeped in superstition. These new societies remember little of the “ancients,” and nothing at all of their religion. Then one day a copy of the Bible is discovered, and it becomes a catalyst for societal rebirth.
This is the fantastic premise of the Chiveis Trilogy (comprised of The Sword, The Gift, and The Kingdom), by Bryan Litfin.
A post-apocalyptic adventure whose pivotal event is the discovery of a Bible? It’s almost a wish list of subjects that would interest a Christian science fiction enthusiast.
I started reading with high expectations.
The Trilogy starts out well enough, and for the first few chapters it seems that it might live up to the potential of its premise.
But, slowly at first, then with plummeting acceleration, Chiveis devolves from a mediocre adventure story into something that I can only describe as comprehensively bad. It is predictable to the point of self-parody, ridiculous to the point of surreality, and its presentation of Christianity is so poor and muddled that I suspect it would do more harm than good to non-Christian readers.
A world ‘without’ Christianity
Worldbuilding is essential to good speculative fiction, and Chiveis’s premise of a post-Christian post-apocalypse has great potential for a compelling world. This is supposed to be a future in which all knowledge of the Bible has been lost, where people have never heard of Christ, are unfamiliar with Christian symbols, and have no knowledge of Biblical history.
How surprising, then, that this future has a Pope! From Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, he presides over a “universal fellowship” called the “Christiani” who worship “Deu,” the “one true god.” The Christiani have orders of monks and nuns, warriors called “Knights of the Cross,” and bishops who perform the Eucharist (in Latin).
The above paragraphs probably have you scratching your head. There are “Christiani,” yet no knowledge of Christ? There is a “Pope,” yet no knowledge of the Apostles? That doesn’t make sense!
No, it does not. The whole scenario is completely ridiculous, despite some belated attempts to rationalize it late in the story. Chiveis’s worldbuilding lacks any sort of unifying logic, to the point of being genuinely nonsensical. This is a world in which “Knights of the Cross” who literally tattoo crosses on their foreheads do not know what a cross is.
This fatally undermines the Trilogy’s premise. Time and again, the reader is told that this world knows nothing of Christianity, but time and again that is shown to be untrue. The culture and politics for the Trilogy’s world are actually founded on longstanding tensions between pro-God and anti-God factions. The only reason the pro-God faction isn’t “Christian” is because it has—implausibly, impossibly—forgotten its Deity’s biography. To describe this as a world that has “forgotten Christianity” is a dishonest pretense.
Predictable protagonists
The plot is as ridiculous as the world it takes place in, but for almost the opposite reason. Rather than being disjointed, the plot is a tight nesting of cliches within cliches, so slavishly conventional, so completely unimaginative that there were times I laughed out loud at how predicable everything was.
There are two protagonists, Ana and Teo. You already know all about them because they are fairy-tale archetypes: Ana is the fair and virtuous maiden who get kidnapped, and Teo is the strong and noble knight who rescues her. This encapsulates a majority of the Trilogy’s plot.
The inciting event in The Sword is Ana being kidnapped by barbarians who want her for a sex slave. Teo pursues them and rescues Ana moments before she is to be raped.
That specific scenario repeats over and over again. Ana is attacked by would-be rapists and is on the verge of being violated when Teo suddenly intervenes to save her virginity. By the time The Kingdom concludes, this has happened not once, not twice, but no less than six times. And that’s just when Teo saves Ana from rapists! He also saves her from assassins, drowning, wild animals, and being thrown into a volcano. Saving Ana takes up so much of Teo’s time that it is almost the only thing he does on purpose throughout the entire story. Virtually every other plot development (including finding copies of the Old and New Testaments) is either a side quest while saving Ana, or something that a character blunders into quite by accident.
One might assume that this “save the maiden” trope was recycled out of simple laziness if not for the fact that both Ana and Teo note and comment on it. Teo even has a catchphrase, “I will always come for you,” which he recites to Ana during and after rescues, and which she recites to herself while awaiting rescue. This cycle of rescue and abduction and rescue is evidently supposed to pass not only for plot development, but also for romance.
Christianity changes no one in Chiveis
But the worst thing about Chiveis is not its incompetent worldbuilding or its silly plot. The worst thing, ironically, is its presentation of Christianity.
Christianity is supposed to change people. Christians are supposed to be “born again.” But Christianity changes no one in Chiveis. With the exception of one deathbed conversion, every character who ultimately believes in God is already a “good person” when they are introduced. Ana and Teo are almost cartoonishly perfect, models of virtue and beauty too. Conversely, all of the characters who ultimately reject God are “bad people” from their introduction. This pattern is so consistent that the reader can generally predict which characters will become Christians after reading only one or two lines of their dialogue.
This inverts the Gospel: rather than the Gospel making people good, it is portrayed as something that people who are already good are drawn to. Instead of a world where “all have sinned” and are on an equal footing before God, Chiveis presents a world in which good people inexorably mature into Christians, while bad people do not.
Another significant theological problem stems from the nature of the villains. The villains in Chiveis are not “regular” bad guys. They are Satanists, motivate by love for Satan, and eager to prove their devotion to the original dark lord by being as cartoonishly evil as possible. They wear black hooded robes. They torture animals. They summon demons. Their motto is “Cruelty is strength.” They are united in an ancient blood pact. The villains are so over-the-top evil that they are impossible to take seriously, much less empathize with as human beings.
This is bad writing, of course, but it has the consequence that Chiveis never really deals with the concepts of sin or repentance. The bad guys are so bad that there is never any prospect of their repenting, and the concept of sin seems too nuanced to apply to them.
Conversely, the good guys are so good that they have nothing to repent of. Ana and Teo each commit a token sin in an evident attempt to give some arc to their otherwise flat characters, but in both cases the sin is such a sudden and brief aberration from their normal behavior that there is no sense of transformation, renewal, or struggle when they turn from it. They briefly swerve from their virtuous statī quo and then immediately swerve back, as if nothing had happened. There are two side characters who go through more realistic repentance, but in both cases they are repenting of collaboration with the Satanists, and their repentance is not a rejection of sin as such, but rather a rejection of the Satanists’s overtly sinister agenda.
It is this shallow reduction of Christianity that makes Chiveis a very bad story. Instead of explaining concepts like sin, repentance, atonement, or eternal life, Chiveis treats Christianity almost as a sort of white magic that empowers people who posses a sufficient level of virtue. While Christians might just roll their eyes at this simplistic and inaccurate depiction of their faith, this misinformation could be dangerous to a person who is genuinely ignorant of Christian doctrine.
The Chiveis Trilogy is comprehensively bad and was enormously disappointing. I give it zero stars, and I recommend it for no one. Its only redeeming quality is that it is so bad that many parts are inadvertently funny, and they can be enjoyed on a “so bad it’s good” basis.
Wow. This was brutal.
I looked up the books and (surprise! surprise!) it has many great reviews. I assumed it would. Because the thing is, this book is delivering the actual worldview of most evangelical church-goers in their middle-years. This series is really the result of that sub-culture being perverted, more than just the aberration of one bad writer who happens to have a degree in journalism (?!?!).
What blew my mind the most was that this guy has a PhD in Ancient Church History and a Masters in Theology, and now works at Moody Bible Institute (according to his Amazon bio). He should know better.
I wanted to posit that he got those advances degrees from a diploma mill, but it looks like he actually went to a real university and a real seminary. Tho it explains a bit about his female character to know he writes for the Gospel Coalition.
Many of the people writing for the Gospel Coalition would laugh at his portrayal of female characters. Meekness is not the same as inaction or an inability to get out of dangerous situations. It certainly doesn’t demand some sort of Savior-complex-endangered-woman-fetish to be written into a story. In addition, meekness is a quality of Godly men as well as Godly women, so when Christians talk about meekness in women as a positive trait, they don’t always intend to imply that men should not be meek. Anyways, from his review above, and in response to your comment below, it seems moralism saves the day, not Calvinism. I feel a little bad beating the guy up. The only thing that makes it difficult for me to keep feeling bad is the knowledge that the guy is clearly intelligent, so it’s hard for me to not believe he knew what he was doing. All of this just kind-of makes me scratch my head. Also, I don’t have the patience to read the book to get a more informed opinion.
People accidentally write certain ways based on skill level, maturity, etc. Even if someone was, say, good at writing articles, that doesn’t mean they are immediately going to be skilled with fiction and, in particular, how to portray characters and themes. There are circumstances that can make even a skilled fiction writer turn out poorly made stuff too. Tight deadlines, for example. Not saying that’s what happened here, but being a ‘smart guy’ doesn’t necessarily keep people from making annoying mistakes, especially writing ones.
Right, which is why I feel bad about beating him up. It’s too difficult to tell what was intentional and what wasn’t, and what the exact intent was. That’s why I generally shy away from being brutally critical of other writers–even if I hate what they wrote. But in this case, the guy portrayed theology and the human experience in a way that does not reflect reality, while his job is to portray spiritual reality to people in college…? Maybe I’m misunderstanding his job at the college, it just is hard for me to believe he didn’t do this intentionally. Idk, again, too hard to tell from a distance and without reading the actual books. So… I’m really not informed enough to critique the guy. But it all sounds very strange.
Yeah. I kind of try to make sure I discuss stories as if the author themselves could hear. Or to word criticisms the same way I would if I were saying them to the author’s face. That’s kinda hard sometimes, but thinking that way helps as far as not being too brutal. And everyone makes theological mistakes. Lots of them, in fact. Even if they’re teachers with an education. Maybe the education can even make things worse in some regards, if they’re being influenced more by teachers rather than studying to actually verify and question things. Education is great, but people rely on it too much sometimes.
…yes, but if you are a teacher and you get the very basics wrong in something like a published book, that’s different from the honest mistakes we all make.
Yeah. I guess it just looks to me like so many people are getting those basics wrong whether or not they’re teachers and whether or not it’s in books. Or the basics might be generally accurate but aren’t applied very well. So, I’m just not surprised.
And maybe being a teacher with an education means that people are more likely to just take what he says or feel less able to criticize him, so maybe he wasn’t getting the feedback he needed.
Very true that writing nonfic articles is very different from fic, but I think the maturity factor the Thing here.
What do people like about apocalypse stories (ETA: or isekai stories)? It’s wish fulfillment, basically, that corrupt society dies in its own bile and now the seeds of a utopic society can flourish. And you can learn a lot about people on what their wish fulfillment looks like.
Does their wish fulfillment look like That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime or like Mad Max? Log Horizon or (ugh) Sword Art Online?
Hm…yeah, there might be wish fulfillment involved here, but it’d be a mistake to assume that an apocalypse someone writes is automatically some form of wish fulfillment for them. Many people might like apocalypse stories because they see darker stories as more mature in some way. Or an explanation of what COULD make society go down hill. Or how destructive human nature could be if societal structure was removed. Basically an exploration of human nature or a way to vent about how bad people are.
So even if maturity is a major factor, it might not be in the sense of wish fulfillment.
At this point of market saturation, I doubt it. This guy doesn’t seem like a Cormac McCarthy, and these books don’t seem like The Road.
Given what this Josh has told us, he spends waaaay more page-time on damsel rescuing than on the reasons why Calvinism Theoretically Saves Society. That smells like wish fulfillment. (And neckbeards and fedoras.)
And honestly, it’s not really about wish fulfillment, more about how his wishes suck. And part of the sucking is the sheer repetition.
Like, I am willing to accept one instance of cheesy damsel rescuing. But does he have something else to offer? Apparently not.
I have to agree with notleia on this one… Although I see what you mean Autumn, and you make good points, as well. I just think notleia’s closer to home in this instance.
Ok. Sounds bad, clearly awful world-building, thanks for the warning.
I do want to say though there is some justification for portraying paragons of virtue in stories. Not always of course but at times showing someone who is basically flawless allows an author to highlight what he or she thinks it means to be a moral person. So there’s a purpose for some stories in the portrayal of people intended to be flawless.
But of course there’s much to be gained by stories that show people more realistically too. Including showing that sin really does corrupt every human being in one way or another.
My initial reaction is “eww, boring,” but I’d like to unpack this idea a lil bit.
We have a lot of different meanings mishmashed into the idea of what makes a “good” character. Does it mean they are dynamic or realistic or likeable or moral? At least one of those, but not necessarily all of those at the same time, right?
Most moralizing (boring) stories seem to conflate “moral” with “follows the rules” and also that with “likeable.” And when we, the readers, are informed that this char does rightthink, that we are supposed to like them without any more work on their part.
Though that’s still a different problem than when an author means us to find a behavior likeable or relatable when we, in fact, do not. Like a scene to make us think our hero is tough and authoritative, and we read them as douchey instead.
In a lot of ways it’s about not writing a Mary Sue. A major symptom of Mary Sues is that the plot sort of subconsciously props them or their ideals up in some way. Like, if they get bullied, it’s so they can check the box for ‘being an outsider’ or ‘being strong and standing up for themselves’ or even in a poorly veiled attempt to gain sympathy. There’s different levels of Mary Sue, of course. And some chars might not really be Mary Sues per say, but at least possess traits of.
Irisviel from Fate Zero would probably be a kind and virtuous char done right. She’s not a powerful warrior and she IS in a more supportive role to her husband, but she’s her own person through and through. In one scene, for example, it indicates that she feels disconnected from her husband’s feelings and goals, but she chooses to support him because she loves him and sees his goal as the only way to keep their daughter from suffering the same death she herself will soon endure. Obviously not all virtuous chars need to be in supportive roles and whatnot, but she would have been an easy char to make shallow. But instead the writers gave her depth and believability.
LOTR is full of characters who face moral temptation–but also has some characters who show no sign at all of “moral complexity.” They are good, period (e.g. Samwise Gamgee) or evil, period (Sauron).
The paragon characters are not inherently less interesting than the complex characters in my opinion. Or certainly are not boring, anyway.
Perfect characters are boring and unbelievable, though. That means the intended effect doesn’t reach the reader. It just falls flat. Thus, there are much better ways to show what it means to be a moral person.
Samwise Gamgee is essentially a perfect character, morally speaking. So are a number of other LOTR characters. Not every character in LOTR is like that of course, but the idea that a perfect character is inherently boring is based, I think, on you not really being fair about what a “perfect” character actually is.
In fact, the very idea of epic fantasy good-versus-evil struggles requires as least some flattening of what is good and what is evil. Because while Game of Thrones style gray versus gray may be keenly interesting to some people, that isn’t what epic fantasy has been about, historically speaking. (I’m assuming you don’t hate all epic fantasy–but who knows, perhaps you do…)
Likewise superhero stories–you may not be a Superman fan, but Superman was always a paragon of virtue (and isn’t the only superhero like that). And numerous super villains have been paragons of vice. Sure, you don’t want every character or every story to be like that, but some stories are that way for a purpose and function as such. At least for some readers!
Eh, I wouldn’t call Sam an essentially perfect character, so I think you’re right that our definition of “perfect” is different. Sam lacks intelligence, and has his own selfish desires. He also lacks mercy toward Gollum. I think that’s what makes him so compelling as a character–those flaws mixed with his general intent toward good.
I find Superman super lame. Andddd pretty much the rest of the population does, too. Again, there’s just better ways to accomplish what you’re getting at. I’m not saying you don’t have a point. Just that there’s more powerful ways of delivering it to the reader.
This is basically a fanfic for the Protestant Reformation. It’s not really Christianity that saves the day, but Calvinism. Through boringness, I guess.
Also I found out that one of my high school classmates has embarked on her 2nd marriage (to be fair, her starter marriage to her babydaddy was a BAD idea).
I’m glad I achieved escape velocity from the South.
Oh, yeah, I think I read the second book in this trilogy ages ago. Well, I started reading through it, but then started skimming before giving up.
From some of the scant things I remember, one of the moral failures wasn’t instantaneous, at least. Like, the main girl char was tempted into inappropriate behavior by some of the more worldly people while she was separated from the main guy char? Kinda don’t remember all the circumstances, but they showed a sense of steps or escalation at least.
And I vaguely remember them encountering a gay char too or something? Society ended up rejecting the gay guy and the main chars looked upon him more kindly than society did, and there was a moment where they realized that some people were turned off by the guy’s mannerisms, but the main chars didn’t mind the mannerisms…?
I dunno. Looked like the author tried with some things but didn’t know how to portray things very well. A lot of the things stated in your review are true, unfortunately.
One thing to point out is that if the world is based on the premise that the apocalypse happened and the world ‘forgot’ Christianity, Christianity would have probably left marks on the world still. So showing vestiges of that is fine (people being named things like Mark or Rebecca for example) But yeah, if the book states that people don’t know what crosses are and chars that literally use the word ‘cross’ in their group name look confused when crosses are mentioned…that’s taking it way too far.
THANK! YOU! I was so enthralled by the premise of The Sword when I picked it up at the library, because it truly is genius (and that cover is simply gorgeous). But by halfway through the book I was in shocked denial, because surely no book that horrendously sappy and mortifyingly cringey could get published, could it? By the end I was thoroughly incensed, not only at the awful writing and gag-worthy portrayal of Christianity, but at the fact that such an awesome story concept had been wasted on such twaddle. Ana’s nonsensical transition from a fierce, self-sufficient woman who hunts tigers in her spare time at the beginning of the book, into a helpless flower being kidnapped incessantly was ridiculous. (So, she could kill a full-grown tiger single-handedly, but she couldn’t fight off one lecherous drunk guy?)
The entire book really felt, to me as a reader, like the author’s attempt to tell “kids these days” what they need to hear so they don’t become evil, horrible sinners who paint their toenails black (something that was actually done by the high priestess of evil in the book). But it was so, so very badly done, all it’s going to accomplish is to showcase how out of touch the author is with reality. And, as this is marketed as a Christian book, that carries a high risk of sending the message that all Christians and the stories they write are as out of touch with reality as this one.
I could literally rant for hours about these books, they’re that bad, but I’ll just end by saying that the one redeeming factor was laughing at my best friend’s running commentary that she texted me about it while one of her coworkers was listening to the audio version where she had to hear it too. Priceless!
I can’t really disagree with much of what you said here, Josh. I was actually one of the few who read all three books and wrote far gentler reviews as they first came out, starting back in 2010. (Anyone interested can find them here: https://rebeccaluellamiller.wordpress.com/?s=Chiveis&submit=Search). As I looked over those again, I said as you did that the characters were flat (I called them “thin) and the repetitive action, predictable. I also thought there were theological problems, and that surprised me most because the author was (is?) a professor of theology. I now assume that those issues are more a result of his weaknesses as a novelist. He simply didn’t know how to develop characters. I thought the premise had lots of potential, but the actuality fell flat.
It made me upset with Christian publishers who would choose to publish books like these and then declare that they couldn’t sell fantasy. Had it not crossed their minds that they couldn’t sell BAD storytelling, no matter what genre? That they could decide to publish these books over others is head-scratching.
Becky