We’re a believing species. Belief, or faith if you like, is a complex thing. It’s a part of us, as much present in Richard Dawkins as in the devout walking to Lourdes, or Muslim fanatic blowing himself up and maiming and killing innocents, as in anyone who believes ‘the Science is settled.’

Belief is neither good nor evil, any more than a gun is good or evil. What you do with it, just as in what you do with the gun, is an entirely different matter. But it is, and to pretend it does not exist is stupid. The most hardened empirical scientist believes in things he cannot know. He believes for example, that he’ll get paid at the end of the month. That’s a position taken on trust, based on experience, which the scientist remembers, or if this is his first job and month, has seen or heard others provide the evidence of that end result in the past. But as a social species our lives are based on faith, in belief in things we cannot know, things we just have to trust, until we establish we can’t trust them. The central example of this in most of our lives is fiat money. Let’s be real here, a million dollars of paper money is – without the belief that it is worth something, without the trust in things we cannot know – near worthless – it’s lousy toilet paper, worse firelighters, and not even much good as insulation. But we have faith in the issuer of that money, and trust that dollar to buy us a dollar’s worth of goods, just as the vendor trusts that the dollar he gets from us to buy him a dollar’s worth of what he wants.

In social species that faith is as much part of their nature as the fur they grow or enzymes they produce. It’s there in the dogs, wolves, horses, and even, oddly (but to a lesser degree. There are separate rules for them, as all of those of us who are owned by cats know) cats (I believe it to be a partial retention of juvenile characteristics in cats, which are not particularly social, otherwise. This is why your loving kitty puts her bum in your face. A good mummy cat would know exactly what to do, and your cat is rather disappointed by your ignorance.).

It cannot really exist without memory, although the predisposition to believe, to trust to have faith may be in our genes, as is the instinct to seek out those we trust. The more complex the minds and the more dependent on their group they are, the more memory they have to shape it, and the more complicated it gets. Humans, despite some evidence to contrary (I’ll ignore politicians, unless you can definitively prove they’re not cryptic slime-molds, or possibly prion infections) have rather a lot of mind and the memory associated with it.

We have it. To the writer who tries pretend it’s not there, it’s like trying to pretend you can do without water. I suppose you could write sf about a species in which this was not intrinsic, but they’d be rather hard for the reader to grasp. And oddly, there two aspects of faith, of belief, of trust that deeply affect books. The first is the faith we have in certain writers. I know I can trust Sarah to give me a good read. I trust I will not be disappointed by the ending or the story. At one time — perhaps thirty-forty years ago — that faith was far broader. If it was in print, it had something. I still trust that if I buy a Baen book there is a good chance I’ll like it. But, put quite simply, publishing saw that faith 40 years back… and decided to pull a Paul Krugman – which in publishing terms is to take something the reader saw as on average worth a dollar’s entertainment, (a position the reader/buyer reached by experience) and slip some duds in, worth say fifty cents. After a little while, readers sees all books as worth a little less. And if you repeat the process a few more times, a book is not worth spending on. For individual authors, the same applies. Or charge for an e-book what you do for paper… Krugman – and publishers – trade on the idea that the buyer will believe he’s getting a dollar’s worth, but actually you’ve stiffed him with 90% (or less) of the value he expected… And then they expect this sort of conduct to have no effect on the trust of the buyer has in them. The concept of loyalty being a based on mutual trust and being a two way street, just never got through to them. There is always another sucker, and the suckers don’t talk to each other, or observe and learn. Of course this is almost mind-bogglingly stupid and arrogant, but somehow you’ve always got the ones who believes that trust is something you don’t have to guard and nurture. I believe they like to tell us they’re too big to fail, and I suspect there are some of the big six of publishing who may find this is not true.

The second, of course, is that as creatures of faith, we identify with that in the character we read about. If the character betrays those values, the faithless lover, the untrustworthy hero who betrays in the end… it may be true to life, but tends to be a book (and an author) which we do what we do with people who do this to us. It’s a recurring theme in my books, which is because this is important to me, and I assume it is important to you. It’s why I have taken the rather unusual step of writing about men of faith, and about people you could trust because of that. It’s not PC, but I have failed at that anyway.

There is a third aspect of faith which affects authors particularly. And it is one in which inverse law applies. The more ability… the less we have, so often. That is in faith in ourselves. Self-doubt seems directly proportional to knowledge and ability (it’s rather like the idea of letting 14 year olds run the world while they still know it all. And hoping they’ll vacuum the house). I’m going to spoil my reputation here and be serious: If we do not have faith in ourselves, how can we expect others to have it in us? Such trust is part of a two way street between us and our readers (not the faithless injectors of inflation – which says how much their marque is worth, doesn’t it?). You and I do our best to write the best stories we can.
Then we have faith in readers.