Gods might have made people in their image, but when the gods themselves are unmitigated bastards with their own hidden agendas, then no one is truly safe. I grew up with both the threat of hellfire and damnation due to my Catholic upbringing in a majority Catholic country, yet still practiced Buddhism alongside it due in part to Asian parents, where it was taught that the worthiest of saints can ascend to the heavens with something very much like godhood, and where the gods too, can be fickle and contrary. The contradiction has always remained a source of fascination for me, and the idea of flawed gods, how not even beliefs are not always set in stone, have heavily influenced how I write my stories.
In my book, The Never Tilting World, and its upcoming sequel, The Ever Cruel Kingdom, the goddesses had been very selfish. Now, Aeon is a planet waiting to die, split by a permanent, storm-swept night on one side and an unrelenting, scorching heat on the other. The resulting cataclysm had spawned the Great Abyss, where demons and other creatures of the damned crawl out of to terrorize what’s left of humankind. Naturally, the people blame the deities in charge, whose rash decision, made in a moment of weakness, had resulted in Aeon’s destruction. But the goddesses’ daughters, Haidee and Odessa, have also survived—and both are determined to change Aeon’s destiny before it’s too late, no matter the cost. But they are still their mothers’ daughters, and are just as susceptible to the same flaws that had caused the Great Abyss in the first place.
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The Never Tilting World
Misbehaving deities are a popular theme in the fantasy genre, but what makes these stories especially compelling to me is that when things go sideways for the gods and those who worship them, they almost always go south in the worst ways possible, making everything a matter of life or death. Below I talk briefly about some of my favorite series dealing with such gods and the resulting fallout from their destructive whims.
The Inheritance Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin
Enslavement is the worst thing to happen to any god, and it’s especially fatal to the people who incur the wrath of those who control them. Such is Yeine’s situation in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the first book in the series, where she is summoned to the floating city of Sky and named its ruler’s heir along with two other competitors for the throne. In the struggle to survive the captive gods long enough to solve her mother’s murder and ascend the throne, Yeine will discover her connection with these powerful deities and make a fateful choice. The brilliant way Jemisin carries out the plot, resulting in that ultimate, final choice, cements this for me as one of my favorite reads, and enforces my love for trickster gods (I’m looking at you, Sieh!)
The second and third books also deal with the fallen beings who’d been rendered powerless and human from the events of the first book, and their fight to regain their godhoods by whatever means they can in their much more vulnerable bodies.
The Belgariad by David Eddings
Prophecy moves in strange ways; not even the gods can change their destinies. But the evil god Torak is unwilling to accept his fate, and he’s prepared to wreak destruction upon the world and corrupt the prophecies to ensure it is he who emerges victorious. And when the young farmboy Garion discovers that he is the chosen one born to fight that ancient evil—and that his Aunt Pol and Grandfather Belgarath are not the simple folk they said they were, but are in fact two of the greatest magicians in the world—nothing will ever be the same again. I read these five books as a very young teenager, and I still learn a lot about how to write character likability—and also how not to write them—from this series.
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
I am a huge fan of Pratchett, and even when it’s hard to choose which of his Discworld books are my favorite, Small Gods is one that ranks high up that list. In an attempt to reincarnate himself for the eighth time, the god Om discovers that his powers are gone, that all but one of his faithful still believes in him (and even they have some doubts on that score), and that he’s now stuck in the body of a mostly useless tortoise. In his quest to once again regain his abilities, Om and his lone follower go on a journey through libraries and deserts, and weather through the (in)Quisition, where he learns compassion with his newfound mortality. The book was intended as a satire of religion, but it’s got the most heart out of any book I’ve ever read.
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
This beautifully written books tells the story of Casiopea, who finds the bones of the death-god Hun-Kamé in her grandfather’s chest, and is bonded to him as a consequence., Tand that pitch alone blew my mind when I first heard of it. A god searching for his own body parts? I love the macabreness of it!
Now tasked with finding the rest of the deity’s body, Casiopea must navigate a world full of spirits and demons while Hun-Kamé seeks to take back rulership of Xibalba, the Mayan underworld, from his brother, Hukub- Kamé – the one responsible for imprisoning him in the first place.
Fengshen Yanyi / Investiture of the Gods
Allegedly written by Xu Zhonglin, the Fengshen Yanyi is one of the most popular works in Chinese literature, and is a fictionalized retelling of King Zhòu and the decline of the Shang dynasty. For a sprawling epic with roughly a hundred chapters that detail the bloody wars preceding the Zhōu dynasty, the catalyst to the conflict was a rather small offense—King Zhòu had disrespected the goddess, Nuwa, by writing lustful poems about her on the walls of her temple. Naturally, the only way to regain her honor was to send fox spirits posing as courtesans to enchant him and bring about an end to his reign—violently. A reasonable progression of events I suppose, when you’re the goddess responsible for creating the whole of humanity.
Rin Chupeco wrote obscure manuals for complicated computer programs, talked people out of their money at event shows, and did many other terrible things. They now write about ghosts and fairy tales but is still sometimes mistaken as a revenant. They were born and raised in the Philippines and, or so the legend goes, still haunts that place to this very day. They wrote The Girl from the Well, The Bone Witch, and the Hundred Names for Magic series. Her next book, The Never Tilting World, is the sequel to The Ever Cruel Kingdom, and will be out from HarperTeen on November 10, 2020.
I hate to be That Guy, but you have your Eddings backwards: you’ve described the Belgariad, not the Elenium, although anyone can be forgiven when confusing multi-book sagas with heros wandering the world looking for a good blue rock to use against an evil red rock.
Rick Riordan’s Apollo series set in the Percy Jackson universe– “The Trials of Apollo.” Zeus turns spoiled, obnoxious Apollo into a spotty-faced 13 year-old human who must earn his way back to godhood. Apollo’s voice is really funny as he whines and complains through these books yet still manages to act like a decent human being despite himself. Even if you’ve not read any of the other series, it should be accessible.
Louise Cooper’s Time Master trilogy, that deserves to be better known, involves some gods that are flawed.
@1 – Although the Elenium is just chock full of flawed gods too. :) Eddings is good at this trope. He also is quite good at making gods who are good traveling companions; which was fairly unique for his time.
Brust has some difficult gods in his Taltos series, including Verra who is everyone’s cranky Hungarian aunt.
I’ll second the Riordan recommendation @2. Lots of flawed gods in all of Riordan’s various pantheons.
Not to mention the entire Malazan series.
mndrew@2: Oh, absolutely. I snark at Eddings out of love.
I need to read this author’s books, and The Inheritance Trilogy! I LOVED Gods of Jade and Shadow!!!
Nice list!
Came here to be *that guy* and comment about mixing The Elenium and The Belgariad. But since people already took care of that, I’ll say instead that WarBreaker by Brandon Sanderson is a very nice take on flawed divinities (or what we make of them).
Eight Days of Luke by Diana Wynne Jones. Every version of Loki is troublesome, but here the rest of the Norse gods don’t come off well either.
American Gods may be the ultimate gods-behaving-badly novel — or at least the ultimate the-gods-are-just-like-people novel: some are utter rotters, some are decent sorts, some are good but for a price, and way too many are swayed by bent arguments rather than thinking for themselves.
A bit of a stretch: the Sartre play The Flies comes down to a confrontation between [simplification alert] a frightened dictatorial Zeus and humans who’ve had enough of his interference.
Since the title says “books” I’ll leave out a lot of shorter works — but IMO Ellison’s “The Deathbird” is still worth reading.
And somehow — even with the columnist’s example of Moreno-Garcia — I forgot early Aliette de Bodard. She’s more known for mining her own heritage in both science fiction and fantasy, but her first novels were the Obsidian and Blood trilogy, detective/procedural stories set in something that memory says is Aztec mythology but could be other Meso-American and could reflect European claims/prejudices about original cultures — I am so not up on current discussions of how much of the bleakness was real rather than distorted/imagined. Various gods push or obstruct the main character’s investigations according to their own agendas. Darker than her “Dominion of the Fallen” stories, and IMO not as well-written, but definitely an interesting take on a pantheon not much seen in genre fiction.
Thinking about detectives vs pantheons also brings up Liz Williams’ books about Inspector Chen. These are not nearly as bleak, and everybody’s agenda is subject to bureaucratic interference, but it’s another set of books about an assortment of deities most of us aren’t familiar with.
Love, love, love the Inspector Chen books! And also the not-widely-known but better than American Gods novel Changer by Jane Lindskold (although I love Anansi Boys too, which also fits into this category).
I love Eddings, but that comment about blue and red rocks really made me laugh – in a good way.
In David Zindell’s debut novel, “Neverness”, Mallory Ringess eventually becomes a god. In the follow-up trilogy “A Requiem for Homo Sapiens”, where the PoV shifts to Mallory’s son Danlo, which shows what happens if the followers of a flawed god become the rulers of society. In that trilogy, Danlo finds out his father is a flawed god, indeed, which is not exactly hidden in the novel titles:
–“The Broken God”
–“The Wild”
–“War in Heaven”
What eventually becomes of the god Mallory Ringess is shown in the final novel of the trilogy. This should easily be the 6th mention of SFF novels about flawed gods, IMHO, of course.
Investiture of the Gods actually got turned into a Chinese drama and it was licensed for the US by Viki, a service that licenses a lot of Asian dramas. I made it through about 20 episodes when the subtitled material ran out, and I didn’t end up going back to it once they got more episodes finished. For a fantasy drama I was actually kind of bored by it. It sounds like the drama doesn’t really match the story that you’re describing here. There is an evil emperor and a fox spirit, but the story has more to do with a chosen one who has so much power that once he comes into it he’ll be able to overturn the order of men and gods alike.
The first science fiction or fantasy book with this theme is probably “Lord of Light” by Roger Zelazny, which won the Hugo in 1968. I remember reading it for the first time, and it was so exciting, to discover a book that broke the boundary between fantasy and science fiction. Also one that explored Eastern religion, and which treated religion with a nuanced and sophisticated approach. The book has aged well, and is still among my favorites.
I would add two books by Nicky Drayden that definitely have some flawed gods, Prey of Gods and Temper. Highly recommended!
Let’s look at earlier novels and stories. A Merritt’s The Ship of Ishtar has gods swayed by human emotions. CL Moore’s short stories deal with horrifyingly flawed deities, jealous, greedy and flawed. More recently, Robert Jackson Bennett’s City series deals with the morality of divinity and these awfully flawed gods. His more recent Foundryside and Shorefall tell the tales of self created gods (terribly human and flawed) and the amoral creation of something holy and monstrous.
also came here to point out the obvious error. But yay other people got there first.
I’m still impressed that Eddings managed to write the same story umpteen times and then used the repetition as a plot point to justify it.
But when you’re 14 and waiting for the next book in the Mallorean to come out so you can find out what happens next you really don’t care.
The god in James Morrow’s “Towing Jehovah” is a corpse drifting in the sea while a stranded salvage party harvests his meat to prepare hamburgers for their last supper. Being dead sounds like a pretty big flaw to me.
Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence deserves mention here. Gods with contractual obligations that can kill them certainly sees like a problem.
20. Eike
Fri Oct 16, 2020 6:53am Flag Favorite This
The god in James Morrow’s “Towing Jehovah” is a corpse drifting in the sea while a stranded salvage party harvests his meat to prepare hamburgers for their last supper. Being dead sounds like a pretty big flaw to me.
This made me giggle more than it should have! The second book in the series takes it to another level. I own the others but haven’t gotten around to reading them yet. Thanks for mentioning it – I was trying to find the angle, and you beat me to it ;-)
I would maybe add the Sandman Slim books by Richard Kadrey. Includes a very fractured, and very flawed, Godhead as a reoccurring catalyst.
And agree about Small Gods. Just thinking of that miserable tortoise cracks me up!
That reminds me of _The Raven Tower_, which also fits the bill.
Of course, books aren’t the only media to have flawed gods. IIRC the opening to _Hercules: the Legendary Journeys_ outright says the gods are petty and cruel, or something like that, and they aren’t any better in _Xena_.
But video games have an edge over other media when it comes to portraying flawed gods: you can actually conflict with them directly and even defeat them (although the odds are likely to be against you, to say the least!). Examples probably too many to list, from the original Game Boy to the most modern systems
How could you have neglected to mention Hugo-award-winning “Lord of Light” by Roger Zelazny? Sam is one of my all-time favorite fictional gods.
How can Jehovah have a body? That’s just bad theology. Jesus had a body, God The Father doesn’t.
I just have to mention Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality and it kinda trumps most of these other suggestions IMHO. To those not familiar, the ‘personas’ of ‘Death’, ‘Each of the Fates’, ‘Time’, ‘God’, and ‘The Devil’ ,among others, are all “titles and offices to be held” by humans each in their own turn, and they change from time to time. On a Pale Horse was a true eye opener for me when I was young and changed my whole perspective on life.
Also, I agree with the Zelazny mention above. The Chronicles of Amber was one series that I read by candlelight when my power was out.
@@@@@ 27, princessroxana:
How can Jehovah have a body? That’s just bad theology. Jesus had a body, God The Father doesn’t.
He can if he wants to. It says so right in the Book.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
[King James Bible, Genesis 3:8-9]
Relaxing in a garden in the cool of the day is odd behavior for an incorporeal spirit.
I know. Part of that of course is the whole garden of Eden story was.borrowed from Mesopotamian mythology and reworked to reflect Hebrew beliefs. It’s clear throughout the OT that the Hebrews are having a lot of trouble dealing with their immaterial God. It’s so much easier to relate to a more concrete deity.
@@@@@ 30, princessroxana
I know. Part of that of course is the whole garden of Eden story was.borrowed from Mesopotamian mythology and reworked to reflect Hebrew beliefs. It’s clear throughout the OT that the Hebrews are having a lot of trouble dealing with their immaterial God. It’s so much easier to relate to a more concrete deity.
They only got serious about monotheism as a cultural/religious marker during the Babylonian Captivity. That shift would have been as lost as the Ten Tribes, had not Kyros the Great helped them return to their homeland.
Morrow isn’t nearly the only person to build a story around an embodied God; the example that immediately comes to my mind is Dogma, in which God incarnates in New Jersey to play Skee-Ball and is beaten unconscious by minions of Hell. (Not a spoiler; this part we learn early.) Amusing side note: God is played by Bud Cort, who much earlier in his career played Brewster McCloud, a boy who is trying to learn to fly with the aid of someone who may be an angel.
@31, Monotheism was always there, struggling along, difficult to grasp and still more to practice. As you say the Babylonian Captivity changed Judaism, the various strains of tradition were organized into a coherent (mostly) narrative. Ritual observances were codefied. And beliefs defined. The Torah is what kept us from assimilation. Not that we’re not terribly grateful to Cyrus for his tolerance.
Other ancient peoples had a terrible time trying to comprehend Judaism. That’s okay, so did we.
I love the idea of flawed gods.
Tamora Pierce’s gods Tortall (the world constructed in her books) have some flaws and definitely enjoy meddling.
Also, we can look at the Greek gods for tales of gods behaving badly, Stephen Fry’s Mythos is a great example of this.