Terry Greer
Sage
I think its impossible to avoid your beliefs (religious, social or otherwise) affecting your work.
I'm an atheist - I doubt everything until I'm shown proof - or evidence, and I've always found it hard to believe that religion is ever taken at face value. My protagonists often meet this head on - and a recurring theme is how fact and history get warped and incorporated into belief systems.
This isn't to say that I take a stand on morality being firmly on one side or the other - it isn't. My stories tend to show that morality is not correlated with any particular belief system. People in my work can be good or bad irrespective of what they believe. But I do tend to have more doubters and rational people in my fiction (on all subjects) than most probably do.
I find it easy to explore social beliefs such as society structure, politics and gender, and building worlds, planets, cultures, alien bilogy and ecologisty and extrapolating science all come really easy and fun. But I do find it very hard to write about religion being real (even in a fantasy setting) as I find that stretches fantasy to breaking point for me. I can believe/accept anything in fantasy - but not the existence of a real deity - unless I'm writing something satirical.
I try to keep any 'propaganda' element of my beliefs out of my stories - as I hate seeing points of view (on either side) pushed heavily in a story I read, so I'm very conscious of this - but I'm not sure how effective I am - that would be for a reader to decide.
I'm an atheist - I doubt everything until I'm shown proof - or evidence, and I've always found it hard to believe that religion is ever taken at face value. My protagonists often meet this head on - and a recurring theme is how fact and history get warped and incorporated into belief systems.
This isn't to say that I take a stand on morality being firmly on one side or the other - it isn't. My stories tend to show that morality is not correlated with any particular belief system. People in my work can be good or bad irrespective of what they believe. But I do tend to have more doubters and rational people in my fiction (on all subjects) than most probably do.
I find it easy to explore social beliefs such as society structure, politics and gender, and building worlds, planets, cultures, alien bilogy and ecologisty and extrapolating science all come really easy and fun. But I do find it very hard to write about religion being real (even in a fantasy setting) as I find that stretches fantasy to breaking point for me. I can believe/accept anything in fantasy - but not the existence of a real deity - unless I'm writing something satirical.
I try to keep any 'propaganda' element of my beliefs out of my stories - as I hate seeing points of view (on either side) pushed heavily in a story I read, so I'm very conscious of this - but I'm not sure how effective I am - that would be for a reader to decide.