K.A. Applegate had a YA series called Everworld that featured the gods in a parallel universe of sorts. As an Animorphs fan as a kid, I devoured Everworld as well. Sadly, there were only twelve books, and it ended very abruptly.
Battle toads!
I don’t know what Ellison’s story was, but it reminds me of Asimov’s “The Little Man on the Subway”. There are no old gods in it, but there is a new god who’s trying to build up power by amassing worshipers.
I think it was The Exiles’ Club (1915), by Lord Dunsany that had all the old Greco-Roman gods living quietly in a very private London Gentlemans’ Club… He also wrote a similar story with all the great poets living in an exclusive country club.
I can’t remember if the gods in that story relied on belief in them to keep going, but he wrote another story called Chu-bu and Sheemish in 1912 which definitely used the ‘fading away without believers’ idea.
Fredric Brown did this in THE NEW ONE back in the '40s, where the old deities are still around, but much weaker – surviving not so much because anybody still worships them, but because folks like Thor made their reputation back when (“boy, you should have heard him in a ruckus, only a few centuries ago”) and so can pretty much coast on sheer agnostic inertia now.
“Now, you take some of the older lads like Ammon-Ra and Bel-Marduk – they’re kind of weak and puny these days because they haven’t any real followers. They used to be big guns around here, kid … Look at him today – walks with a cane.”
Incorrect. The Greek/Roman gods can’t be killed in the series because their mythology doesn’t allow for it, just like Coyote can’t be killed (permanently, at any rate). Doesn’t have anything to do with the level of awareness.
This is a fun, light series, I enjoyed it.
As to the OP, Robert Holdstock’s “Mythago Wood” trilogy features a similar idea. Magic has shrunk to a few isolated old-growth forests, and humanity’s cultural memory gives rise to mythical legends and creatures which are confined to the forests. The books center around Rhyope Wood in England, which is only a couple square miles from the outside, but once penetrated seem to go on forever.
I can’t recommend this series enough, especially the first two, which focus on nebulous old European myths like Jack the Giant Killer and the Green Man. The third book loses a little of the mystery when it starts to focus on more specific epic stories like Jason and the Argonauts, but it’s still fun and twists the stories in interesting ways.
Huh, I stand corrected:
Harsh, AB, harsh.
I think of Scalzi like I once heard a DJ describe The Black Crowes: Not all that original but still pretty satisfying.
As for Steve Miller, hey, hands off. The sonofabitch can play. He digs the whole jazz/blues genre and plays that guitar as well as almost anybody in the territory.
It’s not too much to say that a great deal of Gaiman’s work is founded on this premise. More than in just The Wake, all of the ‘gods’ in the Sandman universe derive their power/existence from the belief mortals have in them.
Makes one wonder about how Gaiman meant for the One God to be handled. Sure, he makes an appearance in Lucifer, but that’s not written by Gaiman (though it IS great).
I thought that *Redshirts *was, in addition to a mystery, a pointed criticism about hack writers who fell back on the same gimmicks over and over again. Such writers don’t respect the genre or the fans. I think that Scalzi was railing against sloppy, lazy writing.
Yes, a lot of Scalzi’s stories have a classic SF feel. That’s part of the reason that I like them.
And back to the OP…I’ve recently been introduced to Jim C. Hines. I’d read his short story, “Blade of the Bunny”, in one of the Writers of the Future anthologies, and enjoyed it, but didn’t remember his name. My daughter and I swap books, and she recently sent me the Jig the Goblin trilogy. In this series, a group of gods has been erased from the memories of sentient beings, and Jig learns of one of these gods, and becomes the god’s first new worshipper. I love Jig, he’s a weakling who is nearly blind, but he does the best he can with what he’s got.
Amateur Barbarian wrote: "Turtledove’s Case of the Toxic Spell Dump exists in a world that relies on all religions, prior gods etc. for its tech and engineering. The plot revolves around clashing religions and god-sets and the artificial preservation of things like the Cult of Apollo.
It also ruthlessly Anglicises all place-names in the Southwestern US to absolutely devastatingly funny effect. Highly recommended."
Oddly, perhaps; I loved Thessalonica, but hated Toxic Spell Dump from pretty well the first page of the latter. For my taste, TSD was a thing of endless, facetious, lead-heavy close parallels drawn, between things magical multi-religious in that universe, and “otherwise” in our modern world – which I found not funny or entertaining, just mechanistic. I struggled to perhaps two-thirds of the way through; the last straw for me was Henry Legion, the CIA-type “spook” who is a literal, spectral spook. At that, I shut the book – end-of. Also – when Harry goes berserk with the puns, as he does in TSD, that is a cue for me to head for the hills.
Very many Turtledove fans have a great love for TSD; this occasionally makes me wonder whether there’s something wrong with me. However – no accounting for tastes, and this is a thing in which nobody is correct or incorrect: and more power to those who revel in the book.
The idea is explored from several different angles throughout Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series (and the spinoffs in the same universe).
I can’t help but wonder how Thor’s psychic energy levels are at the moment. Loki as well, now i think of it. Judging from the levels of female affection for Tom Hiddelston, there’s probably enough sympathetic overflow for Loki to snap his chains and feed that serpent it’s own venom.
While in both those cases, the “gods” are humans who have taken upon themselves the mantles of ancient deities, “Creatures of Light and Darkness” also features the Thing that Cries in the Night, an immensely powerful being found on a blasted planet at the end of the universe, that may be an actual god, or possibly God.
Fred Saberhagen touches on this in his Book of Swords series.
The idea is, the Greco-Roman gods decide to toy with mortals by having Vulcan forge a dozen enchanted swords – at which point the game will play out as foolish humans inflict entertaining woe on each other with their newfound weapons.
The problem is, the deity-crafted blades can affect the gods themselves: Hermes dies upon getting stabbed in the back by the Sword of Vengeance; Mars later gets dispatched by the same Sword, with a see-it-coming stab to the chest; Vulcan, weakened by another Sword, gets tackled to the ground and beaten nearly to death by ordinary people; Aphrodite tries to spellbind the wielder of yet another other Sword, and pathetically falls in love with him when her magic gets reflected; and before long, a whole bunch of the remaining deities are enslaved by the mind-control Sword.
You’d think that last bit there would be a big deal – but it’s not, because, again, stories keep spreading about how the gods are really just folks who can be mesmerized or smacked around or murdered in cold blood. “Queen Yambu thought: and is the world now to belong to us humans, after all? If we can overthrow the gods, and kill them – possibly.”
Brin’s “The Loom of Thessaly” (recommended, and available here on Brin’s web site David Brin's Official Web Site: "The Loom of Thessaly" (novella)) comes at this from a slightly different angle. Some of the godlike beings from the classical era are still around, and are very powerful (and dangerous to know), but they are relatively weaker than they were, due to the increased power (and numbers) of humans. See also Brin’s “Thor vs. Captain America.”
Has anyone mentioned Pratchett’s “Small Gods” yet?
Dammit! Thats the one I came in here to mention!
I first read it in a collection of stories based around alternate histories of the Second World War, with that title I wasn’t expecting much but to my surprise I loved it, one of the few times I’ve ever felt like genuinely cheering at the end of a story.
A golden flash warned him. Chris whirled and ducked, siezing Odin’s spear with a sudden snatch.
“Coward,” he whispered at the hot-faced “father of the gods.”
It can be read legitimately on the authors website.
Edited: removed the link, it was giving some odd pop-ups.
As I recall, this concept is the focus of the main plot in The Rose Sea, by S. M. Stirling and Holly Lisle. It’s been a long time since I read it, but one relevant bit sticks with me.
The protagonist was led by a spirit through a temple of sorts that housed statues of every god the world had ever known, organized by the number of worshipers they had. Deep in the temple was the chamber of the forgotten gods, who had not only lost all their followers, but had their names forgotten by mortals. The protagonist woke the one the spirit guided him to by becoming his sole worshiper, because he needed divine aid. When he did, the god’s statue vanished…having been upgraded to a spot in the chamber of extremely obscure gods.
The god in question happened to be a god of lust (among other things), by the way. There followed a digression in which the newly awakened god tried to persuade the protagonist to ask for penis enlargement as his blessing, instead of the key to the McGuffin. He also nagged the guy to have kids and to call him sometimes.
“Hitler Victorious” an anthology edited by Greg Benford.
Were you aware that Brin expanded this story into a graphic novel called “The Life Eaters”?