Every writer has a few stories that linger in the back of their mind long after they’ve been written. Sometimes it’s because of the characters. Sometimes it’s because of the setting. And sometimes it’s because, after the dust settles, you realize you’ve been telling a larger story all along.
That’s how A Clockwork God came to be.
The novella is assembled from a series of stories I wrote for the Crazy 8 Press ReDeus anthologies, a shared-world project with Robert Greenberger and Aaron Rosenberg built around a simple but unsettling premise: What if the gods returned? Not metaphorically, not spiritually, but physically. What if Zeus, Odin, Vishnu, and hundreds of other deities suddenly reappeared and demanded the worship that had once been theirs? How would governments react? How would religions respond? And how would ordinary people cope with a world where the impossible had become everyday reality?
The ReDeus series explored those questions from a variety of perspectives through the work of many writers: Lorraine Anderson, Kevin Dilmore, Dave Galanter, David R. George III, Allyn Gibson, Phil Giunta, Robert Greenberger, Robert T. Jeschonek, William Leisner, Steve Lyons, David McDonald, Kelly Meding, Scott Pearson, Aaron Rosenberg, Lawrence M. Schoen, Janna Silverstein, Lois Spangler, Dayton Ward, and Steven H. Wilson
My contributions focused on a man who was probably the least qualified person imaginable to navigate such a world: FBI Special Agent Irwin Benjamin.
Irwin is a divorced, middle-aged, culturally Jewish atheist. He’s not anti-religion so much as uninterested in it. He doesn’t spend his days debating theology or searching for meaning in the cosmos. He has a job to do, a retirement clock ticking away in the background, and a life that has settled into a comfortable routine. If he possessed any ambition to change the world, it had long since faded beneath the practical realities of middle age.
In another era, Irwin might have been an iconoclast. In this one, he’s just trying to make it to his 20-year pension.
Unfortunately for him, the world has other plans.
As the gods return and humanity struggles to adapt, Irwin finds himself drawn into events that challenge everything he thinks he knows. Central to those events is a mysterious figure known as Junker George, a man who claims to have witnessed the Crucifixion nearly two thousand years ago. George has spent centuries pursuing a singular mission: the destruction of the returned gods he considers false and dangerous.
Whether George is a madman, a prophet, or something else entirely is the central question facing Irwin. The deeper he becomes involved, the more he discovers that surviving in a world of miracles may require a very different set of skills than surviving in the FBI.
Although the stories were originally written as part of the larger ReDEUS saga, I realized they formed a complete narrative of their own. Collected together, they trace Irwin’s journey from reluctant observer to a participant in a conflict that reaches back to the beginnings of recorded history.
At its heart, A Clockwork God isn’t really about gods. It’s about belief, doubt, responsibility, and the uncomfortable realization that reality is often stranger than anything we can imagine. It’s also about an ordinary man trying to make sense of an increasingly extraordinary world.
Which, come to think of it, is something most of us can probably relate to.
The first sword and sorcery I ever read was Robert E. Howard’s Conan, in the books published in the mid-1960s in paperback by Lancer Books, with the soon to become iconic cover paintings by Frank Frazetta. My father had brought home a recently published paperback edition of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs that someone had left behind at his office. I recognized the Ape Man from the movies I’d seen on TV, but I wasn’t prepared for what I read. It was like I had discovered the real-life version of what was, essentially, portrayed as a grunting cartoon character in the movies. It floored me. I still think it’s a great novel, as close to literature as pulp fiction got when it was published in 1912. I reread it every few years.
Fafnir and the Gray Mouser stood out from the barbaric crowd. First, they weren’t exactly barbarians. I mean, technically sure, the giant swordsman and minstrel Fafnir and his partner, the diminutive former wizard’s apprentice and swordsman hailed from barbaric roots, but they were more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than their loin-cloth wearing brethren. Fafnir and the Mouser were rogues and more true-to-life, characters who acted in the world instead of just reacting. Not only were Lieber’s stories witty, his characters had senses of humor. No grim and gritty angst-filled monologues for these cheating, brawling, larcenous, wenching adventurers. Their swords were for hire and life was good.
I fixed that but good in 1992 when I revived the character in 1992’s Arion the Immortal miniseries (with art by Ron Wilson). It’s 45,000 years later, Atlantis has long sunk beneath the sea (taking all but the most minute bits of powerful magic with it), and there’s a colony of surviving Atlantean deities living in modern-day New York City. Arion is one of them, the quintessential “you kids get off my lawn or I’ll turn the hose on you!” old man, wrinkled and frail looking. He lives in a one-room apartment over Carnegie Hall and makes his living as a three-card monte dealer in Times Square. His ancient foe owns a deli on the Lower East Side that he eats in all the time. And when the magic returns, making Arion young again, well, chaotic hilarity ensued.
