It was, or so she told me, her favorite of all of my books.
I can still remember the evening my wife settled in next to me in bed, her tablet in hand, immersed in the short manuscript that I had sent her just a few hours before.
"Still going?" I asked.
"Sssh," she said. "I'm reading."
She stayed up until the wee hours, and finished THE DESTROYER OF THE GODS that night, after which she pronounced it her favorite.
It's a tight little sci fi novel, too long for a novella, too short to be one of those great sprawling epics that publishers seem to prefer these days, as if the value of a tale is measured in word count.
I'd initially conceptualized it as a story about four beings on an alien world ruled by a pantheon of powerful machine intelligences, each of them the priest in service of a different Deity. One of those priests, though, worshipped a God that did nothing, a God that had no obvious powers other than to call faithful adherents to both action and compassion. Each of the primary characters was to be a nod to an archetypal AD&D party, meaning a fighter, a magic user, a cleric, and a thief. When their gods are consumed by a hegemonic AI, the one whose deity was less obviously part of the material world suddenly becomes more relevant. That was the original idea, at least.
In the writing, it became set a distant future earth, with the writing intended to be more YA-friendly. I stuck with the balanced role-playing party as a schtick, because it was entertaining to write it that way. The novel got both darker and more playful, and it was a complete hoot to write. It became an exploration of our manipulation and infantilisation by the very technologies that make life easier for us, and about the fundamental value of our messy complex human natures.
The title is both apropos and stolen, borrowed from a book by theologian Larry Hurtado about an epithet thrown at Christians in Roman times. Back then, Jesus people were viewed as threats to the religion of Rome, as "destroyers of the gods," and as atheists.
My wife loved it. And then my agent really liked it, too, and sent it on to the publisher that had acquired my Amish novel.
There, the editor who so wonderfully refined my postapocalyptic Amish novel resonated with it, and pitched it to the editorial committee that made the final call on publication.
That committee chose not to pick it up. It was science fiction, after all, not literary fiction, and that was outside of their area of expertise and interest. A near miss.
After that rejection and at the recommendation of the committee, my editor sent it with blessings over to a brand spankin' new sci fi imprint being created by the conglomerate that owned their imprint.
But once again, the result was rejection, because...this being eight years ago...that imprint was being created exclusively for queer authors writing LGBTQIA+ sci fi. Ah well. So it goes.
I still enjoy THE DESTROYER OF THE GODS, for a whole variety of reasons. It was my wife's favorite. It got tantalizingly close to publication.
And the spirit of the protagonist, a smart and fierce young woman named Beki? She was in part inspired by a smart and fierce young woman who grew up in my congregation, one who was years later taken from all of us far too soon in a tragic car accident.
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