TW: rape, transphobia.
Aaand this is why I don’t read books that haven’t been recommended to me one way or another.
James Lovegrove’s Age of Godpunk (and, really, I only picked it up because of the title) is a collection of three novellas, each putting a sort of twist on an old god. Age of Anansi is about a man possessed by the spider-god Anansi who participates in a competition for trickster gods; Age of Satan is about a man who performs a Satanic rite in his childhood and becomes convinced that he’s being stalked by Satan; and Age of Gaia is about yet another man, the hotshot CEO of an oil company, who goes out with an environmental journalist and then Weird (and Sexist) Shit happens.
Here is a (brief, partial) list of things you will find in Age of Godpunk.
- A trans woman who uses her feminine wiles to “trick” men into sleeping with her, as a way of humiliating them.
- A woman who commits suicide because her boyfriend hasn’t talked to her for two days.
- A graphically-described rape whose female victim subsequently gives up her individuality to facilitate her partner’s political ambitions.
- A Chinese man crawling round like a monkey.
- A man who becomes a hollow shell of a person because his girlfriend is dominating him in bed.
Do I really need to point out that all of these are damaging, toxic tropes? How the hell did this book ever get published?
This isn’t a question of interpretation, of reading between the lines: these are things in black-and-white, on the page. I haven’t hated a book this much since Ready Player One. In fact, I think this is actually worse than Ready Player One: it doesn’t make even a pretence at tolerance. It’s just really fucking vile.
What’s more, I don’t even know what the point is of these stories, taken on their own (dubious) terms. Neil Gaiman’s done amoral trickster gods better than Age of Anansi does. Pretty much everyone on this earth has done atheism better than Age of Satan does. I don’t have a fucking clue what Age of Gaia thinks it’s doing, but whatever it is it’s doing it wrong.
I was going to go into more detail about each of the three novellas, but, actually, it’s late, I’ve got a busy week at work ahead of me, and practically anything I could be doing right now is better than writing about Age of Godpunk. Do not touch with a bargepole.
(ETA: So this appears to be published by Rebellion Publishing, the same publisher as Europe in Autumn and Ninefox Gambit, the publisher who had a stall at Nine Worlds? What the hell, Rebellion?)
The English Student 