Risingshadow has the honour of publishing James Lovegrove's guest post.
James Lovegrove was born on Christmas Eve 1965 and is the author of more than 40 books. His novels include The Hope, Days, Untied Kingdom, Provender Gleed, the New York Times bestselling Pantheon series – so far The Age Of Ra, The Age Of Zeus, The Age Of Odin, and Age Of Aztec – and Redlaw and Redlaw: Red Eye, the first two volumes in a trilogy about a policeman charged with protecting humans from vampires and vice versa. Shortly to come is The Stuff Of Nightmares, the first of two Sherlock Holmes novels James has been commissioned to write, and the fifth Pantheon novel, Age Of Voodoo, plus a collection of three novellas, Age Of Godpunk.
James has sold well over 40 short stories, the majority of them gathered in two collections, Imagined Slights and Diversifications. He has written a four-volume fantasy saga for teenagers, The Clouded World (under the pseudonym Jay Amory), and has produced a dozen short books for readers with reading difficulties, including Wings, Kill Swap, Free Runner, Dead Brigade, and the 5 Lords Of Pain series.
James has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Society Award and the Manchester Book Award. His short story “Carry The Moon In My Pocket” won the 2011 Seiun Award in Japan for Best Translated Short Story.
James’s work has been translated into twelve languages. His journalism has appeared in periodicals as diverse as Literary Review, Interzone and BBC MindGames, and he is a regular reviewer of fiction for the Financial Times and contributes features and reviews about comic books to the magazine Comic Heroes.
He lives with his wife, two sons and cat in Eastbourne, a town famously genteel and favoured by the elderly, but in spite of that he isn’t planning to retire just yet.
Click here to visit the author's official website.
Age Of Godpunk Guest Blog Post (by James Lovegrove)
For someone who’s been writing about gods a lot lately, I sure as hell don’t believe in them. But there’s no paradox or contradiction there. To me, gods are fiction, I write fiction, therefore writing fiction about fictional beings is really no different from any other sort of fiction.
Gods are stories. They’re stories people have been telling other people for centuries, millennia even. They’re stories that explain the mysteries of nature, the cycle of the seasons, the brutality of animals, the miracle of crop growth. They’re stories that attempt to rationalise the indifference of the universe, personalising the impersonal. They’re stories that account for death and plague and murder and violence, all the arbitrary ills that visit us. They’re stories that attempt to fill in the blanks – who we were before we were born, where we’re going after we die, why what happens in between happens.
The monotheistic deities – the Big Three of God, Jehovah and Allah – are supernal father figures. They’re stern, disapproving, quick to anger, hard to know, ever ready with retribution and judgement. We strive to love them, as we do our own fathers, and are desperate for their love in return. They’re the dad whose approval we’ll never completely earn but want anyway. We’re children at their knee, and they spin us comforting bedtime fables about how goodness is rewarded and wickedness punished.
The polytheistic pantheons, by contrast, are sprawling, dysfunctional families. There’s almost invariably a patriarch presiding over each one, but he has a hard time keeping his unruly kin in check and is himself prone to peccadilloes: extramarital affairs, flashes of temper, sullen sulks. He exasperates his wife. She does her best to overlook his failings and support him.
There are siblings, and usually they’re at one another’s throats, forever trying to upstage and outdo one another. There’s a flawed, fallible “good” brother and a scheming but charismatic “bad” brother. There’s at least one black sheep. There’s a martial sister or two, strident and forceful. There’s a lame duck. There’s a trickster. There’s a beauty. There’s a beast.
They squabble. How they squabble. And their battles flicker like lightning across the heavens and make the earth shake.
But they’re just like us, that’s the thing. They’re immortal and they have super powers – phenomenal strength, the ability to transform into animals, an arsenal of thunderbolts – but they’re recognisably human. They’re knowable, unlike the Big Three. They’re a cosmic mirror.
And their stories are the best stories. They go on quests, they ravish half-willing mortal women, they get drunk and fall over, they play sometimes quite alarming pranks on their peers, they cross-dress, they bed-hop, they bicker, they brawl. And all they ask from us in return is a bit of respect, the odd sacrifice of cattle, the odd libation of wine. They don’t want our mindless, kowtowing obedience. They just want to be remembered and appreciated. They don’t hold out the promise of love conditional on good behaviour and unthinking devotion. They have a good time and by example encourage us to do the same.
That’s what makes them fertile ground for fiction. In my godpunk novels and novellas I’ve been ruthlessly mining the mythologies of polytheism for pure godly gold. The pantheons of old are joyous, complex creations which grew organically through generation after generation of oral storytelling, poets and priests passing on the old traditional tales, elaborating on them along the way, adding their own wrinkles and touches. There’s so much in those stories, so many themes and truths that can be reinterpreted and recast in modern guise.
The ancient mythologies were science fiction and fantasy long before those genres had a name. Epic poem, Edda, Veda, fireside fairytale – nowadays you buy them in bookshops, but way back when, you went to hear someone recite them to you. Temples were libraries. Gods were protagonists. There’s nothing new. The methods have changed, the delivery system is different, but the essence remains.
Opening a book? It’s an act of worship.
– James Lovegrove