I’ve been an ardent fan of works by Francesca Forrest ever since she published Pen Pal , a standout novel with a brush of magical realism set in contemporary times. That novel is built around letters between a little girl living precariously in a houseboat off the Gulf Coast and a political prisoner suspended above a volcano in a Southeast Asian country. Pen Pal was my favorite book of 2013.

In that novel, and in her other work, Francesca Forrest seems to be drawn to the liminal spaces in our world, whether geographically, culturally, or philosophically.

The first novella in this storyverse, The Inconvenient God, introduced Decommissioner Thirty-Seven, nicknamed Sweeting. She works for the government of the Polity, her task to decommission, through arcane rites, gods no longer worshipped or otherwise relevant.

The story, so deceptively light and gleaming with humor, went unexpected places, accelerating as it dove into questions of divinity, religion, culture, and how humans deal with the big questions.

In this new novella, we learn more about Decommissioner Thirty-Seven’s background, which is anything but conventional. Apparently one of her recent decommissionings went awry. Laloran-morna, former god of warm ocean waves, hasn’t quite been reduced to being merely human in that he spurts saltwater when upset. Sweeting, who visits the gods she has decommissioned and becomes their friend, wants to help him, especially when suspicion falls on him when seawater floods a new development project in Laloran-morna’s old territory.

But in the course of investigating, questions of sabotage arise, putting Sweeting up against the enforcer arm of the Polity, and with these questions come more questions about Sweeting’s past.

Once again, the pacing accelerates as Sweeting tries to do what’s right—and all the other characters also try to do what’s right. One of the strengths of the writing here is that no one is Villain McVillainface, evil for the sake of evil. Everybody is doing what he or she believes is best for the individuals, for the Polity. Which raises questions like, is the good of the Polity the same as the good of the people? What about individual people?

I’ve read this story three times, once in draft. Each time I fell right into it, absorbed and delighted; the story seamlessly blends a vivid setting and divine magic as Sweeting finds herself plunged deeper into big questions . . . and the eye of Order is upon her.

I’m usually wary of fantasies that deal with religion, after far too many decades of Evil Priests in Red, who exist mainly to assure the reader that yes, All Religion Is Bad, or at the other end of the spectrum, fantasies that are really religious allegory, hammeings the reader over the head with the One True Dogma.

Francesca Forrest deals with religion without the narrative telling the reader what to think, evoking the questions I find interesting: that liminal borderline between faith and rationality, the liminal world of miracles (magic) and reality, and the consequences of both. Especially when, as in life, people perceive events differently.

So I approached her for an interview, asking a couple of questions.

ME: After many years of reading fantasy, I have never read one in which deities are decommissioned. How did that idea come to you--and how does it work in that world? Do gods cooperate, and if they do, why?

FF: I got the idea from a 2013 blog post by Sonya Taaffe. She was talking about the Roman term exauguratio, which refers to the removal of a god from its temple or other sacred ground. She described a legend of two ancient gods who refused to be displaced and had to be accommodated—so in that case, no, the gods didn’t cooperate! I built on that notion in a pretty straightforward fashion in The Inconvenient God.

Until recently, the Polity was home to many, many different deities of different types—apotheoses, tutelary deities, and gods and goddesses related to the natural phenomena or human activity. People—and communities—had relationships with lots of different deities. But sometimes the relationships faded—like partners in a marriage drifting apart. In that case, a decommissioning is just a formal recognition of what’s already happened: A person who was a spouse becomes, when divorced, just another person. When a god is decommissioned, he’s no longer a god—at least not as far as the Polity is concerned. In Lagoonfire, we meet decommissioned gods who have become human beings, but that’s not the only thing a decommissioned god can become (a fact that’s relevant in the story).

Decommissionings are more dicey and more ominous when they involve the Polity trying to exert its political will in a way that doesn’t match the reality—say, by trying to decommission a deity that still has a strong following. We don’t see that explicitly in Lagoonfire, but it’s referred to. Then it comes down to a power struggle. Who is more powerful, the Polity as a whole, or the deity and its followers? In our own world, we’ve seen plenty of polities attempt to decommission various deities, with differing degrees of success.

A more effective way of gaining more control is to direct people’s attention away from instantiated deities—ones with personalities, awareness, etc.—and toward Abstractions, and that’s been the Polity’s focus more recently.

ME: Talk more about Abstractions! Are the Polity bureaucrats trying to control these, politicize these, direct these in some way?


FF: I don’t want to say too much, because I’m working on their implications for the next story, but basically, by switching people’s devotional focus to Abstractions, the Polity can remove personal relationship from the equation. You can be very devoted to the principle of justice or the notion of love, but you can’t be intimate with them. You can’t appeal to them in your need or desperation the way you can a deity with a unique personality. That in itself gives the Polity more control over people, because by moving from deities to Abstractions, the Polity is removing people's recourse to aid outside the state. As for directing them, yes: an abstraction can’t really argue with you over how it’s defined (or can it? food for thought for the next story), whereas a deity can. So from the Polity’s perspective, Abstractions both help with controlling the populace and are themselves more controllable.

Intriguing!

You can find the new story, Lagoonfire, here: and its predecessor,
The Inconvenient God, here: