They say a picture is worth a thousand words or in the case of ReDeus: Beyond Borders over 100,000 words. Artist Lorraine Schleter was recruited to execute the book’s cover and read the story outlines before digging into her research. What she delivered thrilled the collective and is worthy of a little worship on its own.
We asked Lorraine to talk a little about the process.
By Lorraine Schleter
I wanted to portray all the gods as abstractly as I could, rather than getting caught up in the physical details of how they would look rendered out in flesh. I tried to be very careful and respectful so as to not offend anyone, because that would make people overlook the real point of the book, which is (from what was described to me) how these deities relate to humanity and what they mean to us. I made a strong effort to design them from representations already depicted in ancient work made by the people who actually worshiped these gods. As for the face in the middle, I wanted to paint it to be as ambiguous as I could to have it represent the minds of all people, sort of the collective consciousness of the world.
ReDeus: Beyond Borders will be available in print and digital editions later this month.
My first year in college I read Karen Armstrong’s A History of God. Armstrong, a Catholic nun, wrote a book that charted the development of monotheism among the three Abramahic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It was an intriguing book for a nineteen year-old, and I came away from the book feeling more secure about my atheism than I had before. An odd reaction, that. There were things in A History of God that I hadn’t known, that hadn’t been taught in the Methodist church when I was growing up. The most remarkable, for me, was the discovery that Judaism developed from a Canaanite polytheistic religion and that the monotheistic Jewish deity was the Canaanite’s god of war. “Really?” I thought. I filed away this piece of knowledge. It wasn’t particularly useful or helpful. It was, however, something that was nifty to know.
Years passed. I read other books on religion. (Despite my absence of religious conviction, books on the topic are of great interest to me. As I write this, I’ve been reading Diarmid’s McCulloch’s massive and magnificent tome, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.) At roughly the same time that Bob Greenberger approached me about pitching stories for ReDeus: Beyond Borders, I was reading Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God. Wright covers similar ground to Armstrong, and the idea of the Abrahamic monotheistic deity as a god of war came back to the fore. Could I explore that idea? How would I explore that? In the world of ReDeus where there are gods and demigods astride the Earth, with one notable exception — the Abrahamic monotheistic deity — it almost seemed like a dangerous idea, the kind of thing that Warren Ellis would write. But how to write it? Ah, that’s the tricky part for any writer. “The Soldier and the God” explores the idea through the style of a Little Golden Book. No, really. There are two reasons why I decided to write the story of Gavriela, a disenchanted soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces, and Hadad, the Canaanite god of storms, in this style. First, it was a challenge to maintain that tone throughout, even though there are some very dark moments in the story. I imagined that I was writing a book for children of eighty or a hundred years after the Day of Return (the day that the gods returned to Earth in ReDeus: Divine Tales), and this story, and others like it, would be the way they would understand how their world of gods and men came to be and what the world without gods was like before it. Second, the narrative distance between the events the story describes and the way the story describes them due to the form provided a way of exploring one of the underpinnings of the ReDeus world without breaking the playground equipment. There’s narrative plausible deniability here; did this actually happen, if it did happen then how reliable is it, or is this simply a story that’s told to children? I leave that to you to decide. “The Soldier and the God” may be more than a little strange and not at all Warren Ellis-esque, but I had fun writing a Little Golden Book from the end of the 21st-century. You can write interesting things when you set yourself a challenge.
ReDeus: Beyond Borders will be available in print and digital formats in late May.
August, 2032. The biggest festival of the Aztec calendar is in full swing.
It’s the Day of the Dead, when the spirits of the dear-departed return to the world of the living… for real this time?
I’ve wanted to tell this story – or, at least, one like it – for over a decade. My inspiration was the computer adventure game, Grim Fandango. I don’t play a lot of computer games, but my brother introduced me to this one, and I fell in love with its depiction of the Aztec Land of the Dead and its inhabitants.
Since then, I’ve wanted to use the Mexican Day of the Dead as a backdrop to a story. I’ve just needed a story to tell – and, in the world of ReDeus, I finally found one.
So, the Aztec gods are back. They have rebuilt their pyramids and re-established their rule over the lands of South and Central America. They have returned the Day of the Dead to its rightful pre-Columbian place in the calendar, and the death goddess Mictecacihuatl herself presides over the celebrations.
So, the Land of the Dead must be a real place, right? The spirits of the dead – at least, the Aztec dead – must reside there. And they must be able to pop back home to visit every summer, because the gods wouldn’t lie to us about something like that.
They wouldn’t… would they?
My first ReDeus story is called Dia de los Muertos. It concerns a young lawyer by the name of Ruby Velez, whose newest client has an unusual tale to tell. He has been accused of murder, and the evidence against him is overwhelming. He claims, however, that someone else committed the crime: his long-dead wife.
Could such a thing be possible – even in this brave new world?
The spirits of the dead are invisible and intangible, undetectable by any conventional means. Somehow, they enjoy the offerings left for them by the living – their favourite books, music, clothes and even food – without disturbing those offerings in the process. Even so, in the Mexico of 2032, few doubt the spirits’ existence.
And belief, it seems, only makes the spirits stronger…
What if Ruby’s client is telling the truth? What if his girlfriend was murdered by a vengeful ghost? How can she hope to prove such a thing in court? And what would it mean for the whole concept of law and order if she did?
My favorite thing about ReDeus is that its world isn’t too dissimilar to our own. The gods’ return has changed some things, but others haven’t changed at all. Most people are just trying to get on with their lives, as we do today.
And even though this world has seen proof – absolute, incontrovertible proof – of the gods’ existence, some things are still a matter of faith…
ReDeus: Beyond Borders will be available in print and digital formats in late May.
One of the things that strikes any visitor to Egypt is how the ancient and the modern exist cheek by jowl. When I visited in 1997, I witnessed a phenomenon I’ve experienced myself as the resident of a historic place, in my case, New York City: after a while the wonder of that history becomes simply a part of everyday life. Daily exposure means that it’s not especially wondrous after a while; it’s just a fact, like the historic church you pass by on your way to work (I’m thinking of Trinity Church in Manhattan) or the landscape-dominating volcano on the horizon (Mt. Rainier south of Seattle, where I live now).
When Aaron Rosenberg asked me if I might like to submit a story for the ReDeus universe, the first thing I thought of was that impression I had of Egypt. People go to their jobs as plumbers, grocers, bankers, and computer engineers, and they don’t think about the history that’s in the very air they breathe. I thought about how, ten years after 9/11, though people were marked by the trauma, life went on in New York City. People lived with the change, adjusted to it, and some adapted in resilient or even opportunistic ways. I decided that I wanted to write a more personal story about living in a world where deities had returned, inflicted trauma, but many lives went on only marginally touched by the event—until they couldn’t avoid it. I wanted to write about how one woman who didn’t believe in gods found herself with a husband who did, and how she got caught up in events that she couldn’t begin to understand. For Ellie and Kamal, the two protagonists in my story “In the House of Osiris,” it all hits at once, like a train hitting a wall.
Ancient Egypt and its rather astonishing pantheon has been an interest of mine since childhood. It’s a mythology that I know at least as well if not better than the Greek and Roman stories that most Western kids are exposed to through literature and history classes. Unlike those pantheons, ancient Egyptian mythology is filled with animal-headed gods who almost never intercede into common lives; they are remote, except at death, when no one can avoid one key encounter—entry into the afterlife. But the stories in the ReDeus universe are all about godly intervention into human life. I decided that I wanted to convey the strangeness of the Egyptian gods in the most intimate way possible, a close encounter that would change one character’s perspective irrevocably. The question then became, which god or gods might suit that purpose?
I decided that though he was primary in the Egyptian hierarchy in the New Kingdom period, Amun-Ra was too remote, too big to tackle. I decided instead to focus on the triangle of Osiris, Isis, and Set. The story of Osiris and Isis is one of love, death and resurrection; Isis is kind of a bad-ass, willing and determined to save her lover at any cost. Set is a god of chaos with violent tendencies. In my story, he’s the troublemaker. He’s not especially interested in consequences; I don’t think he knows the meaning of the word, so some of the history in the background of my story is rather open-ended. In a country that was successful in throwing off a strong man who governed with an iron fist for decades, throwing off powerful gods is a different story altogether. In a country where women still fight for their independence and equality, Isis the protector, the patron of maidens and mothers, would be a powerful symbol. The ancient story of Osiris’ murder and dismemberment at the hands of Set and his rescue by Isis becomes the pattern of Ellie and Kamal’s journey—with something of a modern twist about it.
Which brings me back to my original inspiration: this idea that living in a historic place becomes common with time and exposure. In the world of ReDeus, in Ellie and Kamal’s world, people can try to live as if history is just part of the scenery, unremarkable and unremarked. The trouble is that history will come and find you. And it will make you pay attention.
ReDeus: Beyond Borders will be available in print and digital formats in late May.
One of the great things about attending conventions is creating friendships with other authors. I enjoy seeing familiar faces year after year and talking about our current projects. This past year at Shore Leave, Bob Greenberger was kind enough to trade books with me: one of my superhero novels for a copy of ReDeus: Divine Tales. Considering the authors packing those pages (and that I know a lot of them), I was eager to dive in and read, and I enjoyed my trip into this unique universe.
I was asked to contribute to Divine Tales, but was unable due to other commitments. So I was eager to jump on board when two more anthologies were announced. I love the idea of Beyond Borders. It’s an opportunity to explore how other countries and cultures outside the United States were dealing with the return of the gods.
My story, “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” centers around a Mennonite woman named Robin. She was a small child when the gods returned, and her entire town were forced to return to Germany to worship Odin and his Norse pantheon. Forced by way of homes being burned down and people killed as “examples.” One of those examples was Robin’s older brother, and she’s grown up with her faith in the One True God intact and thoughts of vengeance keeping her warm at night. She gets a chance to undermine Odin’s rule in the form of a mysterious man named Kit, who comes to her with an offer she cannot turn down.
In fleshing out this story, I knew I wanted to set the story in Germany, since a good chunk of my genetic background is German. This meant I could work with Norse mythology and play a little bit with Odin and his iron-rule over his “subjects.” He was one of the gods who demanded those of German and Scandinavian descent to return to Europe, and he didn’t care how they got there. This influx of immigrants into European countries presented me with another problem to explore in the story: where did governments put those extra people? And how did native residents feel about all of these new, foreign faces using up their resources?
I’m also an urban fantasy writer, so I couldn’t write Robin without infusing a little bit of magic into her life. I won’t spoil it too much, but I did a lot of research into the Norn for this story…
Happy reading!
ReDeus: Beyond Borders will be available in print and digital formats in late May.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words or in the case of ReDeus: Beyond Borders over 100,000 words. Artist Lorraine Schleter was recruited to execute the book’s cover and read the story outlines before digging into her research. What she delivered thrilled the collective and is worthy of a little worship on its own.
