Odin adapted as a fictional character;
ancient gods still existing and interacting with personified/deified information technology;
gods existing because they are believed in and retiring when they are no longer believed in. (See Where Do Gods Go?)
For the second and third points, see Poul and Karen Anderson's "A Feast For The Gods," discussed in Gods Stories.
At the same time, Anderson's hard sf and speculations about interstellar travel do not overlap with anything in Gaiman's works.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And in Anderson's historical novel THE GOLDEN SLAVE Odin began as a man, Eodan, who became a great king and was apotheosized after his death into a god.
Sean
Paul and Sean:
Dennis Schmidt did a fantasy trilogy, Twilight of the Gods, based along similar lines (although including some genuinely supernatural events/powers). Voden wasn't a god, he was the son of a proto-Viking named Borr and a highly-trained concubine Borr captured from "the Sunrise Empire" (proto-China). In the place of Loki, there was Lao-Ke, a warrior woman also from the Sunrise Empire ... and it was pretty clear that a lot of her troublemaking was because she was in love with Voden, and very, very jealous.
Not a great trilogy — not up to Michael Scott Rohan's Winter of the World series, for instance, though it covered some of the same ground — but I found it worth a look.
The blog archivist strikes again.
Paul:
In 2014, a fellow named Matt Kelland reviewed the first book of Twilight of the Gods with the statement:
Cheesy 80s sword & sorcery, but an unusual mix of Norse and Babylonian myth underpinning it.
[After reading the rest of the trilogy, he added the following two paragraphs to his review.]
Wow. This is one of the most unusual and adept retellings of Norse myth I have ever read. It's really quite astonishingly inventive, mixing in all sorts of mythologies and cultures in a truly unique way. I'm at a loss to understand why this wasn't hailed as one of the great works of 80s fantasy - I know I would have loved it when I was an anthropology student in Cambridge and a regular member of the Fantasy Society, Jomsborg.
If you like mythology, then this is a must-read series - if you can find it anywhere.
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