Neil Gaiman and Ed Kramer

PREFACE Frank McConnell How do gods die? And when they do, what becomes of them then? You might as well ask, how do gods get born? All three questions are, really, the same question. And they all have a common assumption: that humankind can no more live without gods than you can kill yourself by holding your breath. We need gods - Thor or Zeus or Krishna or Jesus or, well, God - not so much to worship or sacrifice to, but because they satisfy our need - distinctive from that of all the other animals - to imagine a meaning, a sense to our lives, to satisfy our hunger to believe that the muck and chaos of daily existence does, after all, tend somewhere. It's the origin of religion, and also of storytelling - or aren't they both the same thing? As Voltaire said of God: if he did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him. "There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters." Titania, Queen of Faerie, The Books of Magic, Neil Gaiman To be conscious at all is to be conscious of time, and of time's arrow: of destiny. And to know that is to know that time must have a stop: to imagine death. Faced with the certainty of death, we dream, imagine paradises where it might not be so: "Death is the mother of beauty," wrote Wallace Stevens. And all dreams, all myths, all the structures we throw up between ourselves and chaos, just because they are built things, must inevitably be destroyed. And we turn, desperate in our loss, to the perishable but delicious joy of the moment: we desire. All desire is, of course, the hope for a fullfillment impossible in the very nature of things, a boundless delight; so to desire is always already to despair, to realize that the wished-for delight is only, after all, the delirium of our mortal self-delusion that the world is large enough to fit the mind. And so we return to new stories - to dreams. "In the beginning God made man?" Quite - and quite precisely - the reverse. MASQUERADE AND HIGH WATER Colin Greeland "People pursue things," says Morpheus. "As soon as they have them they run away from them. But what they run away from stays with them, dragging along behind them like an every-lengthening cloak." "No story is exactly the same twice," observes a figment with paper lips. "Even written down and printed in a book." "Everything is the same as itself," says another in a dry, whiskery voice. "That's the way it is, man." "It's not the same story because you're not the same peron," says the first figment. "I'm the same person, man," the second asserts. "I used to be in another dream," it recalls. "It was better than this one. It was all about flying and chocolate." "You're not the same person beccause it's not the same dream." CHAIN HOME, LOW John M. Ford After all, we each of us begin in desire, and we all end in death. "Sometimes you have the best team, and the right wind, and the prettiest girls cheering you from the stands, everything on your side, but there's this chap at the other end of the field; maybe he's not as nice as you or your mates, but he knows what he's out there for, and he's there when you don't expect him. The best scheme in the world can't get past a man like that." T here were good wizards, like Merlin, ane evil ones, like - well, the rest of them. "I have come to think it a great sin to lack hope, but I may say I have little expectation that we shall ever uinderstand this phenomenon. I believe (and I believe also that Freud would forgive me for sounding like Jung) that we have seen only the surface ripples of something very deep... a rustling, if you li,e of the Great Chain of Being. "The Lord does not jest, but I wish I better took his meaning." STRONGER THAN DESIRE John M. Ford It is said that nowadays Desire rarely takes a human lover. For Desire, who is male and female, fair and dark, old and young, anything and everything you have ever wished for, or coveted, or needed, is irresistible. And so what would be the point, after all? Love is not a game to Desire, as it is to so many mortals, or if it is, it is a game with a foregone conclusion: Desire always wins. And Desire hates more than anything to be bored. "Who are you?" Raimon said. "I am not what you think." "No. No, that is quite clear. You are no mortal, I see that now. Who are you?" Desire laughed. "I am the most powerful being, man or woman, that you will ever meet. I am the most important thing in the world." "You are no God," Raimon said. "And God is the mostimportant things in the world." "I am even stronger than your God. I am one of the Endless. I am Desire." "I have won the wager," Raimon said. "Love is stronger than desire." But Desire shook her head. "They are the same thing," she said. No one knows how the concepts of romantic love began in western Europe. There are those who say that the Crusaders brought back Arabic songs and poetry from the East; those who argue, more prosaically, that the invention of the chimney allowed for more privacy and so created an atmosphere in which love could flourish. What is true is that before this time men and women were given in marriage by their families, and for reasons that had nothing to do with love: territory, titles, money. It was Aimeric who changed everything; after he sang nothing could be the same again. Love became the fashion: men and women vied with each other to create songs like Aimeric's, extolling the virtues and graces of their loved ones. To keep the structure of their civilization intact, their love had to be adulterous, to have as its object someone not chosen by the family but by the lover, and therefore almost always unconsummated. They lived in a world of incredible tension. Love never faded because it went unresolved for years, sometimes even for life. The tales grew longer, more elaborate. Every story of love in the Western world was called into being by the wager of Desire and her lover: Tristan and Iseult, Romeo and Juliet, Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty, Hollywood tearjerkers and Gothic novels. Lives were ennobled, and lives were ruined because people tried to live up to an ideal that was invented hundreds of years before they were born. And for all this, too, Desire must bear the credit, or the blame. Forty years after he met Desire in the forest Raimon lay dying. His vassals gathered around the bed he once shared with Desire, "He should have married and had children," one of them said softly. "They say now that the castle and lands will go to a son of Count Bertran." "No," Raimon said weakly. His men looked at him in surprise; they had not thought that he could hear them, or that he was alert enough to speak. "What is it, my lord?" "I could not have married. I stayed faithful to her all my life, even if she was not faithful to me. Love is the strongest thing in the world. You see," he said, closing his eye, "I won the wager." EACH DAMP THING Barbara Hambly It is true that the King of Dreams invents nightmares. But it is also true that he was put in charge of the Dreaming to control the nightmares that arises into being from human minds, nightmw=ares so powerful that should thry drink of the souls of their creators, and the souls of those with whom those creators share them, they would grow until they devoured the world. They say that King Morpheus is overconscientious, a workaholic, sacrificing all things to the proper performance of his duty. He has to be. SEVEN NIGHTS IN SLUMBERLAND George Alec Effinger Yearning may lead to unhappiness. A wise person knows when to stop searching. "What is that great book you're reading, eh?" "It is a book that contains everything that ever happened, and everything that will ever happen." "Does it tell how the world was made?" "Yes it does." He turned to a page about a quarter of the way from the beginning. "Here it is, in this chapter." "If this is when the world was made, what is in all those pages that come before it?" "Things that happened before there was a world," the man said. "If there wasn't a world, where did they happen?" "You may read it if you wish." ... trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but non-believers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit had happened to them. It could be more difficult for a person of faith to get to his feet precisely, because he had to reconcile God's love and care with the stupid, brutal fact that something irreversibly terrible had happened. Faith is supposed to be a comfort, Father! How could God let this happen? All those prayers, all that hope - it was just howling into the wind! So fucking what? My kid is dead and she's not coming back in three days, and I don't give a shit about the ressurection at the end of the goddamn world because I want her back now. God's got a lot to answer for. That's all I can tell you, Father. God's got a lot to answer for. I would kill or die for you. Sometimes there's no choice. Sometimes the choices aren't thought of. It's cowardice to meet a challenger with more than the opponent brings to the field. Religion - the wishful thinking of an ape that talks. Random shit happens, and we turn it into stories and call it sacred scripture. Choose your enemies wisely, for you will become them. If anything could prove the existence of a soul, it is the utter emptiness of a corpse. Maybe Abraham was psychotic and schizophrenia ran in his family. Maybe Jesus was just another crazy Jew who heard voices. Or maybe God is real, but He's evil or stupid, and that's why so much seems so insane and unfair!. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. I don't really give a damn about God anymore. There is a passage in Deutoronomy - God tells Moses, "No one can see My face but I will protect you with My hand until I have passed by you, and then I will remove My hand and you will see My back." Well I always thought this was a physical metaphor, but you know - I wonder now if it isn't really about time. Maybe that was God's way of telling us that we can never know his intentions, but as time goes on...we'll understand. We'll see where He was: we'll see His back. God's got a lot of explaining to do. Of course, God never explains. When life breaks your heart, you're just supposed to pick up the pieces and start all over, I guess. Note: The quotes are taken from "Children of God" by Mary Doria Russell, which is a sequel to her first novel "The Sparrow". Most of the quotes have been taken out of context and the readers' perceived meanings of the quotes might not be accurate.