{
Towing Jehovah |
Blameless in Abaddon |
The Eternal Footman }
By
James Morrow, a trilogy of speculative novels centering on the literal bodily death of the
Godhead of
Judeo-Christian theology.
Jehovah. The
Prime Mover.
Creator and
Judge of the world.
I had the good fortune of attending a presentation ("
Stop Me Before I Kill God Again") by the author himself at
Philly Phrolics, where he likened the creative process of writing fiction to Einstein's
gedanken experiment - you have some
hypothetical initial conditions (God exists, and He is recently deceased), and an idea of how things behave in your
theoretical model (the
Corpus Dei decays like any other meat; much of
Western civilization has staked its faith on God's
eternal nature), and you set it in motion and watch for "
unexpected inevitabilities" to shake out. His thesis:
Fiction is interesting because of the way that an unfolding narrative reveals events at once
surprising and
necessary. It appeals simultaneously to our needs for
pattern (necessary, inevitable conclusions) and novelty (surprising, unpredictable... "
novel"). To Morrow, writing is all about
dispensing revelations in a way that keeps the reader hungry for more.