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The God Engines by John Scalzi – Review
The God Engines by John Scalzi
No Tag“It was time to whip the god,” opens John Scalzi’s The God Engines. I immediately went pale. Remembering that the first chapter of The Android’s Dream was one extended fart joke, all I could think was, Please, no, don’t let this be a masturbation scene. Nothing doing. Very little of Scalzi’s trademark humor is in evidence in this story, a startling fantasy/horror/space opera mashup that may well be the bleakest and most violent thing he’s ever written. Scalzi has never been a writer to take bold, running leaps out of his comfort zone. Instead, he’s evolved at a calm and unhurried pace, making incremental changes in his storytelling approach each time. His Old Man’s War novels have gradually shifted from Heinlein-inspired space opera, to reflections on the nature of humanity and identity, to young-adult coming-of-age adventure. And they’ve done it so organically that each novel feels distinctly Scalzi, and all of a piece, despite having pretty different thematic concerns.
But a very different Scalzi has written The God Engines. So different, in fact, that I suspect what really happened was that John’s evil twin Spike chewed through his ropes, emerged from the crawlspace, disabled John with an impressive series of hapkido moves rated 8/9/9.5 respectively by John’s cats, and then left the poor man bound and gagged in an amusing position in the garage while writing the story and cackling to himself. I’d like to think that, because it’s one of those things where reality is probably less fun.
The story is actually a novella, published as an elaborately illustrated stand-alone hardcover by Subterranean Press. (And one look at its production values pretty much tells you all you need to know about the aesthetic inadequacies of ebooks.) Its future is one in which gods, who may or may not be highly advanced extraterrestrials, have a complex relationship to spacefaring humans. The Bishopry Militant is the body that appears to govern all human culture throughout inhabited space, and they in turn serve their One True Lord. This Lord has no name because he needs none. When your god is at the top of the divine food chain, names just get in the way.
There are other gods, but they have been beaten, vanquished, enslaved by the One True. The story’s title is literal: these lesser deities serve as the actual engines of the Bishopry’s spaceships, using their inexplicable powers to propel the vessels across vast gulfs of space. They do this very much under duress.
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