Sunday 21 August 2016

Terrible And American Gods

Poul Anderson, Operation Luna (New York, 2000), Chapter 16.

Steve Matuchek lists terrible gods:

Kokopelli/Owiwi;
Apollo with his arrows;
Odin with his Wild Hunt;
Huitzilopochtli who eats hearts;
the vengeful Jehovah.

(I could put links to those divine names but page viewers can google them if they want to know more.)

When Matuchek says "...American gods..." (p. 150), he means "Native American gods," whereas when Neil Gaiman writes American Gods, (and see here) he means "immigrant gods." Some prose fiction reads as if its contents should have been presented in a visual medium. American Gods is to be televised and many of Anderson's works should be.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

American "gods"? Your comments here reminded me of a story I read in HITLER VICTORIOUS (ed. by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg, Garland Publishing: 1986) called "Thor Meets Captain America," by David Brin. The hypothesis being that the Nazis perpetrated their horrors as a kind of necromancy, to conjure up the Eddaic gods, the Aesir. The story ends with the idea a desperate US and the remnants of the Allies would call up far more powerful beings of their own to oppose the Aesir: Superman, Captain America, Captain Marvel, etc. Because "gods" springing from a scientifically oriented culture would be vastly stronger than Iron Age "gods."

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
Yet another ingenious twist to the ideas.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

I thought so too, Paul!

Sean