How apt and fitting. Many philosophers and modern-day psychologists have theorized that our gods are the creation of the human mind, an attempt to impose order and justice on a seemingly indifferent universe. Turn the concept full circle and we have human descendants from the distant future creating the human race itself. The gods that people worship have always seemed to have the same foibles and vanities that you and I have. The patriarchal God of the Old Testament appears to me very much like a spoiled, petulant nine-year-old boy. Perhaps that is because the gods are just as human as we.
All it takes is time travel.
Thus we have Orion, a human being purposely built by such a Creator to serve and obey, a hunter who was created to find and kill the enemies of his Creator. In time he begins to realize that the so-called gods are as human and fallible as he is himself. In time he begins to learn how to be a god himself. Or tries to.
Orion, then, is humankind’s representative, attempting to understand what the gods demand of him. Each step forward in his understanding brings him a step closer to godhood—a progress that some of the “gods” approve of, while others do not.
So much for the underlying tensions that drive the saga of Orion. Now for the particulars of this novel.
Among the myths that every human culture seems to share there is the myth of supernatural beings who are entirely evil: devils, demons, the Satan and Beelzebub that Dante and Milton wrote of. Their descriptions have always seemed decidedly reptilian to me.
To create a satanic reptile for this novel meant that I had to deal with the possibility of a species of reptile that is fully as intelligent as H. sapiens. No, actually my Set—to give him his ancient Egyptian name—would have to be as intelligent as my fictitious Creators, the godlike human descendants from our future.
For years I have been intrigued by the possibility of reptilian intelligence. Intelligent lizards are an old standby of science fiction, including my very first published novel of thirty years ago. Yet it always seemed unlikely to me that reptiles could be intelligent, regardless of their utility as “alien” creatures for science-fiction tales.
In the past decade several paleontologists have suggested that if the dinosaurs had not been extinguished in the great wave of extinctions that swept the earth some sixty-five million years ago, they might ultimately have given rise to an intelligent species. Dale A. Russell, of the Canadian National Museum of Natural Sciences at Ottawa, is the leading champion of this idea. He proposes that a small Cretaceous bipedal carnosaur, Stenonychosaurus inequalus, might have evolved into a big-brained, erect-walking intelligent reptile, given time.
Yet it seemed to me that time and brain size were not the only requirements for the development of intelligence. Intelligence requires interaction among individuals, communication. Had Albert Einstein been left in a wilderness at birth and never met another human being, he would never have developed the ability to speak, let alone do physics.
Most modem reptile species lay their eggs and never return to them, leaving the hatchlings to fend for themselves. So did most of the dinosaurs, although at least one species of duckbilled dinosaurs apparently cared for their young. For this novel I proposed that the reptilians that evolved on the fictitious planet Shaydan orbiting the equally fictitious star Sheol evolved intelligence through motherly care and a form of telepathy.
The telepathy is something of a cheat, I admit. But think of your own childhood experiences. Did not your mother have moments of startling telepathic powers?
The astronomical setting for this novel is accurate—up to a point. It is entirely possible to “rebuild” the solar system with a small unstable dwarf star at the same distance from the sun that the planet Jupiter is now. The gravitational perturbations on the earth and the other inner planets of our solar system would be negligible. The sun’s companion star could have one or more planets orbiting around it, just as the planet Jupiter now possesses sixteen or more moons.
Ask any astronomer, though, and he or she will tell you that there is no way Jupiter could be the remnant of a star that exploded. No natural way, is what they implicitly are saying. For the novelist, however, it is possible to use deliberate changes caused by forces other than blind nature. In this novel the dwarf star Sheol evolves into our familiar planet Jupiter through the determined efforts of Orion and the Creators.