[stellarexplorer]

Second post

On the influences to this book:

I had my own thoughts about this as I was reading. Then in the acknowledgements Gaiman says, "Once I'd written the first draft I realized that a number of other people had tackled these themes before I ever got to them..." and he cites James Branch Cabell, with whose work, sadly, I am unfamiliar; Zelazny; and Harlan Ellison, "whose collection Deathbird Stories burned itself onto the back of my head when I was still of an age where a book could change me forever."


For me, the Ellison influence stuck out strongly. (As an aside, I think it worth mentioning that the idea that God is dead, and dead due to the failure of belief by his erstwhile adherents goes back at least to Nietzsche. And the marginalization of God, gods, and belief seems to go back to the Enlightenment, God as the Watchmaker who wound up the clock of the world and disappeared, no longer needed; man increasingly pushed away from the center along with his gods, as our unremarkable place in the universe supplanted Man as the Measure of All Things. But that's a whole other discussion, as interesting as I find it.)

I went back and reread Deathbird Stories. The stories speak for themselves as dark, gritty offerings to the new objects of worship. I think it is worth quoting from the Introduction, because I found it remarkable as one of the principal sources for the ideas in AG:

"...gods...are made viable and substantial only through the massed beliefs of masses of men and women. And when puny mortals no longer worship at their altars, the gods die.
To be replaced by newer, more relevant gods.
...Already we begin to worship these other, newer gods.
This group of stories deals with the new gods, with the new devils, with the modern incarnations of the little people and the wood sprites and the demons. The grimoires and Necronomicons of the gods of the freeway, of the ghetto blacks, of the coaxial cable; the paingod and the rock god and the god of neon; the god of legal tender, the god of business-as-usual and the gods that live in city streets and slot machines. The God of Smog and the God of Freudian Guilt. The Machine God.
They are a strange, unpredictable lot, these new, vital, muscular gods..."