Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk

by James Lovegrove

  His Gaia.

  BONUS CONTENT:

  “The Four Authors of the Apocalypse” Blog

  IN DECEMBER 2009, the Solaris Books blog ran a feature, “The Four Authors of the Apocalypse,” in which we invited four of our authors to write about the grim future: was it really going to be as grim as all that, exactly how grim are we talking, and is there anything we can do about it. James was kind enough to contribute, and given the message of human agency and responsibility running through these stories – and especially the environmental issues in Age of Gaia, we thought it would be worth reproducing it here...

  MICHAEL CRICHTON’S STATE of Fear, an anti-environmentalist diatribe fashioned roughly in the shape of a thriller, concludes with an “Author’s Message”. In part, this asserts:

  I suspect the people of 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more energy, have a smaller global population, and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don’t think we have to worry about them.

  The late – and admirable – Crichton was a far smarter man than I will ever be. His intellectual superiority, especially in matters scientific, means his opinions on climate change and global warming carry considerably greater weight and authority than mine ever will. I’d like to believe his prophecies to be accurate.

  I just can’t.

  Something in my gut tells me his optimistic outlook is wrong. More than that, any optimistic outlook is wrong. If you ask me, humankind is doomed to a future of rising sea levels, extreme weather events, mass starvation, resource wars, unsustainable mass-migrations from poorer to wealthier nations, animal extinctions, power shortages, and markedly reduced life quality and life expectancy. A hundred years from now I see a global population reduced by two or three billion, almost everyone sheltering from rampant flood waters in quasi-feudal enclaves, surrounded by husks of redundant technology and fighting off invaders with a mix of modern and medieval weaponry. A little bit Mad Max, in other words, and a little bit A Canticle for Liebowitz.

  The stars? Intergalactic colonisation? The outward urge? Sowing the seed of humanity across the cosmos? Not a chance. Such grand visions never come to pass. No one is prepared to pony up the trillions necessary to fund that kind of dream-scale project. No one has the vision. Governments are irredeemably short-termist. They plan five years ahead, if that. This is why I don’t write space opera. To me it isn’t SF, it’s pure fantasy.

  Things to come are things to dread. My two sons will grow up in a world where the best is past and where our present era will seem like a golden age – unlimited travel, plentiful food, material affluence, technological superabundance. They will look back on my generation with envious amazement, wondering how we could have been so reckless, so lacking in foresight, so wilfully vandalistic, so damn lucky. And all I’ll be able to do, if I’m still around, is apologise and say we couldn’t help ourselves. We tried but we just couldn’t break the habits of greed and squandering. We recycled our bottles and newspapers, but we knew it was a drop in the ocean. We installed low-energy lightbulbs, but our immense flatscreen TVs made up the difference in electricity consumption. We wanted to go veggie, but the lure of a fat juicy steak was too great.

  I was in the dentist’s chair the other day, having a checkup. The dentist enquired about an article I’d written in the paper, prognosticating dire times ahead for planet earth. She told me, with a grim chuckle, that I was about to have a very uncomfortable experience at her hands if I genuinely believed everything was as dark as I’d stated in that piece. She would show her disagreement as only a dentist knows how.

  With scenes from Marathon Man playing in my head, I desperately racked my brains to recall whether anything I’d submitted to the FT lately matched what she was describing. Maybe some book review where I’d blithely let slip that I reckoned civilisation was screwed? Then, light dawned. There’d been a case of mistaken identity.

  “Oh, you mean James Lovelock,” I said. “The great prophet of eco-catastrophe. That’s not me. Definitely not. You can put away your rather enormous drill now. I disagree with everything the man says.”

  I don’t, though.

  BONUS CONTENT:

  Age of Aztec Interview

  IN APRIL 2012, with the fourth Pantheon book, Age of Aztec, hitting the shelves imminently, the Solaris Books blog opted to interview James and ask him a few questions about the book. Of course, he also obliged us with his thoughts on gods, writing about them, and which god he’d most like to be, so we thought it would be of interest to our fine readers...

  HE'S WRITTEN ABOUT an armed uprising against distant but powerful Egyptian divinities, a high-powered slugfest between battle-suited humans and super-heroic Greek gods, and a gritty firefight between an infantry company and an army of ancient Norse giants, but now James Lovegrove - author of the 100,000-selling and New York Times best-selling Pantheon series, is changing history to take us into a world dominated by an ancient culture...

  In bookstores and online now, Age of Aztec features a desperate fight by a masked vigilante in a contemporary London dominated by the oppressive and bloodthirsty Aztec Empire.

  We asked James about the success of the Pantheon series, why he writes, and why he'd love to be an ancient god ...

  • Tell us a bit about Age of Aztec and why people should buy it.

  With Age Of Aztec I wanted to achieve two things. I wanted to write a “dark jungle” novel, very much under the influence of Joseph Conrad, especially Heart Of Darkness, and I also wanted to write a story about a masked vigilante – a freedom fighter or a terrorist depending on your viewpoint – one man pitting himself against the system, sort of like a cross between Batman and V from V For Vendetta. I had very little prior knowledge of the Aztec pantheon before embarking on the book, but what I did know something about was the Aztec empire. They were the hardest and maddest of all the Mesoamerican nations, in thrall to human sacrifice, a brutal, blood-soaked theocratic regime that treated its own people not much better than it treated its enemies. All those hearts being hacked out atop ziggurat temples, plus the Erich Von Däniken-style associations with flying saucers and spacemen gods – who could resist that as the basis for an SF action thriller? The essential counterfactual premise of the novel is that the Aztec empire wasn’t overthrown and eliminated by the Spanish Conquistadors but instead fought back, using technology unknown at the time (the 15th century), and went on to conquer the rest of the world. Now, in the present day, it rules with an iron fist and a very bloody priestly knife, but rebellion is afoot, a resistance both human and otherworldly... And more than that, I shall not say. If potential readers aren’t sold on the strength of that summary, they’d have to be mad.

  • With the central premise being worlds where gods are real, how do you keep the format so fresh?

  The trick is to approach each Pantheon novel as though it’s a completely new thing, an independent entity. I have an innate horror of repeating myself, so I’m obliged by my own inner compulsions to find new ways of tackling the material. What helps is that every ancient pantheon is so different from its peers. I mean, granted, there are often similarities. There’s always a “bad boy” god, for instance, a troublemaker like Set or Loki or Tezcatlipoca, but the overall mythologies vary hugely. That’s something I ruthlessly exploit. As soon as I start the background reading for research, I find the tone, the flavour of the book I’m about to write, and proceed accordingly. The pantheon itself determines the novel that I make out of it – the interrelationships, the exploits, the characters. That’s where the freshness comes from, both from within me, my own ADD-type restlessness, and from outside, the well of pre-existing stories I draw from.

  • Are you worried you’re going to run out of gods to focus on?

  Not yet. I can think of at least three more pantheons I could use that I haven’t so far, and that’s on top of Age Of Voodoo, which I’m currently writing. I certainly have plans for a novel with one of them, and the other two could probably be pressed into serv
ice if someone twists my arm hard enough. At some point somebody is going to say, “Enough!” It may be the readers. It may equally be me. In the meantime, though, I’m having too much fun not to carry on.

  • Tell us a bit about your writing routine.

  It may shock some people to learn that I write first drafts longhand. Each day, I spend the morning scribbling with pen on paper, ensconced on a sofa with my cat curled up next to me and showing his sheer indifference to the creative struggle by being fast asleep and snoring. Come midday, I’ll then sit down at my computer and transfer what’s on paper – usually about 1,000 to 2,000 words – onto the screen, after which I’ll spend some time tinkering and rewriting, installing little bits of research gleaned from the internet, and footling around on email and Facebook and the like. I can’t write directly onto a computer. My brain just isn’t wired that way. I’m of the generation that came before word processors and to me there’s nothing as immediate or “real” as seeing prose come out of the tip of a Parker Rollerball onto rules A4. I like all the crossings-out. I like my appalling handwriting, which is kind of a personal shorthand and which anybody else would find almost impossible to decipher. I liken the process to drawing a comic. You do the pencils, the longhand draft, and then ink them, the transcription onto computer, to make the original art cleaner, smoother and tidier.

  • How do you feel about the Pantheon series selling more than 100,000 copies?

  After years of critical acclaim and indifferent sales, I’d long resigned myself to being one of those authors whose work is esteemed rather than bought in great quantities. It completely blew me away when I looked over my most recent royalty statements, checked the sales totals, did a little bit of adding-up, and realised the series had hit that milestone. I’d known the books were doing well, but this was a true surprise. A thoroughly pleasant one, I hasten to add. What’s most remarkable to me is how well the novels are doing in the States. I’m something of a parochial writer, and I’ve never cynically courted the American market by writing in an American style with an American setting and an American protagonist, as some authors do, mentioning no names Lee Child. I’m English through and through, and my fiction reflects that. However, Stateside, people seem to “get” the books, and enjoy them, and that’s very gratifying and also exciting. The home audience does too, though, and don’t think I take that for granted.

  • What advice would you give to new writers hoping to break into the field?

  I’ve been in the business so long now that I can barely remember what it was like to be starting out (he said, stroking his long white beard and taking a puff on his pipe). The main thing is to have talent. Don’t go fooling yourself that you can write when you can’t. Ambition comes next, but it should be tempered with realism. Not everyone in publishing makes as much money out of it as Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. You can’t expect to hit that big, and in fact you shouldn’t expect even to make a living at it. You should do it because you want to and because you feel an overwhelming compulsion to. Always read plenty, imitate but don’t copy your favourite authors, develop your own voice and style, and never, never, never give up, because you can bet there’ll be plenty of setbacks and rejections along the way, and if you let them get the better of you and discourage you, you won’t get anywhere.

  • If you were to be one of the gods you’d featured in the Pantheon series, which one would it be?

  Ha! I think Quetzalcoatl in Age Of Aztec is pretty cool. He’s tough but fair, and tries to do the right thing. Mind you, he slept with his own sister, which is a little bit icky. But aside from that, I wouldn’t mind being him. I’m also pretty fond of Ares in The Age Of Zeus, just because he’s proud of who he is, has no illusions about himself, and takes no prisoners. Oh, and Xipe Totec in Age Of Aztec, for much the same reasons as Ares.

  The date is 4 Jaguar 1 Monkey 1 House – November 25th 2012 by the old reckoning – and the Aztec Empire rules the world.

  The Aztec reign is one of cruel and ruthless oppression, encompassing regular human sacrifice. In the jungle-infested city of London, one man defies them: the masked vigilante known as the Conquistador.

  Then the Conquistador is recruited to spearhead an uprising, and discovers a terrible truth about the Aztec and thier gods. The clock is ticking. Apocalypse looms, unless the Conquistador can help assassinate the mysterious, immortal Aztec emperor, the Great Speaker. But his mission is complicated by Mal Vaughn, a police detective who is on his trail, determined to bring him to justice.

  “The kind of complex, action-oriented SF Dan Brown would write if Dan Brown could write.”

  The Guardian on The Age of Zeus

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  Lex Dove thought he was done with the killing game. A retired British wetwork specialist, he’s living the quiet life in the Caribbean, minding his own business. Then a call comes, with one last mission: to lead an American black ops team into a disused Cold War bunker on a remote island near his adopted home. The money’s good, which means the risks are high.

  Dove doesn’t discover just how high until he and his team are a hundred feet below ground, facing the horrific fruits of an experiment blending science and voodoo witchcraft.

  As if barely human monsters weren’t bad enough, a clock is ticking. Deep in the bowels of the earth, a god is waiting. And His anger, if roused, will be fearsome indeed.

  ‘A full-blown thriller, high on action and violence.’

  Eric Brown, The Guardian on Age of Aztec

  ‘One of the SF scene’s most interesting, challenging and adventurous authors.’

  Saxon Bullock, SFX Magazine on The Age of Ra

  ‘Lovegrove is vigorously carving out a godpunk subgenre – rebellious underdog humans battling an outmoded belief system. Guns help a bit, but the real weapon is free will.’

  Pornokitsch on The Age of Odin

  ‘5 out of 5. I found myself unable to put it down, and plan to reread it soon.’

  Geek Syndicate on Age of Aztec

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  POLICING THE DAMNED

  They live among us, abhorred, marginalised, despised. They are vampires, known politely as the Sunless. The job of policing their community falls to the men and women of SHADE: the Sunless Housing and Disclosure Executive. Captain John Redlaw is London’s most feared and respected SHADE officer, a living legend.

  But when the vampires start rioting in their ghettos, and angry humans respond with violence of their own, even Redlaw may not be able to keep the peace. Especially when political forces are aligning to introduce a radical answer to the Sunless problem, one that will resolve the situation once and for all...

  New York Times bestselling author James Lovegrove tells a very different sort of vampire story.

  ‘Difficult to put down... a thoroughly entertaining novel that I would recommend to those looking for a summer blockbuster’

  Sacramento Book Review on Age of Odin

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  A BAD DAY IN THE BIG APPLE

  The eastern seabord of the USA is experiencing the worst winter weather in living memory, and John Redlaw is in the cold white thick of it. He’s come to America to investigate a series of vicious attacks on vampire immigrants – targeted kills that can’t simp
ly be the work of amateur vigilantes.

  Dogging his footsteps is Tina ‘Tick’ Checkley, a wannabe TV journalist with an eye on the big time.

  The conspiracy Redlaw uncovers could give Tina the career break she’s looking for. It could also spell death for Redlaw.

  ‘You fully expect to hear that someone has snapped up the rights to a film version of the book... Well-written, gripping and hopefully the start of a long-running series.’

  Sci-Fi Bulletin on Redlaw

  ‘A lot of fun to read and gives you pause for thought at the same time. I really hope this is the start of the series and not a one-off.’

  Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review on Redlaw

  ‘A stonking good read and a refreshing change to the paranormal romance that seems to dominate the bloodsucking genre. Buy it, read it, enjoy it.’