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Bryan Clair is a professor of mathematics at Saint Louis University. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.
Further Reading
A comprehensive steganography website is F. Petitcolas’ page, which has history and current research. To get a copy of S-Tools, or other shareware steganography programs, the best place to look is StegoArchive.Com.
The comprehensive history of cryptography reference is D. Kahn’s The Codebreakers. An article from the journal Cryptologia has some interesting 16th and 17th century history.
For more on document marking by altering line spacing, look at the “Copyright Protection for the Electronic Distribution of Text Documents” paper on N. Maxemchuk’s page. For more on DNA based steganography, try this article by Ivars Peterson.
Divining Neil Gaiman: An Exegesis of American Gods
By Bryan A. Hollerbach
I
Regarding American Gods, Neil Gaiman’s new novel, two fanciful scenarios instantly present themselves:
In the first, a devout secularist notes the title in a bookstore window, scowls at its evident conjunction of church and state, and that evening, intent on purging the shelves of such reactionary trash, composes complaints not only to the store’s owner but also to his city’s mayor, various and sundry congresspeople, and, for good measure, Abigail Van Buren.
In the second, a staunch fundamentalist spies the same title, flies into a rage over what appears to be pagan nonsense—by an English expatriate, no less!—and that night skulks back to torch the bookstore’s window display with a Molotov cocktail (which, thankfully, does little damage because its creator saved the good stuff for herself).
All whimsy aside, American Gods should by rights attract attention across a vast spectrum of readers: during the past dozen or so years, Gaiman has enjoyed a career of stunning diversity, and this book feels almost self-consciously summational, a novelistic milestone set with pardonable pride and no little fanfare along the literary freeway of one of our most promising young fantasists.
II
That said, it seems conceivable (if unlikely) that a reader here and there may have little or no knowledge of Gaiman’s career. Thus, some background:
In the beginning—no pun intended—Gaiman worked as a journalist, writing and conducting interviews for the British editions of Penthouse, Knave, and other publications (an example of this work appears in Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden, edited by Stephen Jones).
In the late ‘80s, he turned his talents to comic books, memorably in Sandman (now and again d.b.a. The Sandman, reflecting a disdain for exactitude common to many comics’ colophons); even though that 75-issue series concluded more than half a decade ago, its publisher, DC, has faithfully kept it in print in ten collections, in both hardback and trade paperback. Even more memorably, Gaiman collaborated with artist Dave McKean on several non-genre works, including the unnerving Mr. Punch (1994) and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (1997), a splendid treatise on the dangers of barter.
In non-illustrated prose, Gaiman has also been busy. With Terry Pratchett, he wrote Good Omens, a mirthful 1990 novel about the end of the world. (Its copyright page warns, “Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home.”)
Then, in 1996, through BBC Books, he published his first solo novel, the urban fantasy Neverwhere, which was based on a BBC2 television series scripted by Gaiman and was de-Anglicized by him for Avon Books the next year. Avon likewise released his Smoke and Mirrors, a 1998 collection of short stories that enlarged upon the small-press Angels and Visitations, an exquisite miscellany from five years prior.
Through Avon’s short-lived Spike imprint, Gaiman next proffered Stardust, the 1999 expansion of a tale originally illustrated by the Arthur Rackham-ish Charles Vess in 1997 and 1998 for a four-issue miniseries from DC’s Vertigo imprint, which directly collected it in a handsome, outsized hardcover.
Otherwise, he’s written the BBC radio adaptation of Signal to Noise, an early Gaiman-McKean “graphic novel”; a teleplay for J. Michael Straczynski’s acclaimed Babylon 5; and the English language script for Princess Mononoke, the Japanese animated tour de force released in U.S. cinemas in 1999. Other Hollywood work, it almost goes without saying, has beckoned.
In short, diverse may not adequately describe Gaiman’s career. “I’m not a novelist any more than I was a comics writer or a TV writer,” Gaiman once noted in Locus. “I’m a storyteller.”
III
Coincidentally, the story of the work now under discussion bears a bit of telling. Gaiman, in an essay for Powells.com entitled “Books Have Sexes,” traced the initial inspiration for American Gods to the spring of 1997. After Neverwhere, he had planned to work on a novel with the “working title of Time in the Smoke…about the nature of time in the city of London.” More than a year later, though, after various false starts, the earlier inspiration sharpened:
“[W]hen I was in Iceland on my way to a sort of micro Scandinavian tour of Norway, Denmark, and Finland, wandering around Reykjavik in a very sleep-deprived state in summer when the sun never sets, all of a sudden the American novel came into focus.”
He acted on that focus fast: “I wrote a letter to my publisher telling them that my next book wouldn’t be a historical fantasy set in restoration London after all, but a contemporary American phantasmagoria.”
Easier said than done. In his introduction to Smoke and Mirrors, Gaiman observed, “Most of the stories in this volume have that much in common: The place they arrived at in the end was not the place I was expecting them to go when I set out.” Similar circumstances apparently pertained to American Gods. Although the novel had been scheduled for British publication as early as September 2000, Gaiman didn’t finish writing it till January 2001. “The book turned out to be twice as long as I had expected,” he stated in the Powells.com essay. “The plot I thought I was writing twisted and snaked and I slowly realised it wasn’t the plot at all.”
Moreover, Gaiman told interviewer Paula Guran, “At its longest American Gods was about 200,000 words: I trimmed that back to about 185,000 words for the final draft.” To her he also confessed, “If I’d known how big [the novel would be] I might not have dared to start.”
Given the historical record, one can only presume Gaiman deadpanned that confession: his ambition has long equaled his considerable talent. (A fellow British writer once admiringly denigrated him as “a Southern yuppie shark.”) In the introduction to Angels and Visitations, for instance, Gaiman confided, “I sent the first story I ever wrote to Punch [the venerated British humor magazine]….” Moreover, in an interview published almost five years past, he declared:
“You were asking earlier about my novels….I do know they’re going to be all over the place. When I finish writing them, it’s going to be bloody hard to rack them, because they aren’t going to slide neatly into the horror or the humor or the fantasy or science fiction or the mystery or the main stream sections of the book shelf.”
American Gods embodies that declaration.
IV
The novel focuses on the improbably christened Shadow Moon, a peripatetic 32-year-old imprisoned for assault and battery. On the eve of his release, Shadow receives numbing news: his wife Laura has died in an auto accident.
On the plane trip to Indiana to bury her, he encounters Mr. Wednesday, a lupine rogue who knows things about Shadow that he shouldn’t and couldn’t. Directly, even though he neither trusts nor likes the older man, Shadow accepts an offer to serve as Wednesday’s bodyguard/dogsbody.
Then comes the uncanny.
Shadow’s wife refuses to stay interred, for instance; smelling faintly “of rot, of flowers and preservatives,” she visits him in an Indiana motel. Further, strange dreams plague him, dreams involving a bison-headed man and portents of a coming storm that seems more than merely meteorological. Wednesday, meantime, slowly reveals himself to be something beyond a grifter and roué.
How much beyond, astute readers will have deduced from his odd introduction aboard their storm-tossed plane: “[S]eeing that today certainly is my day—why don’t you call me Wednesday? Mister Wednesday. Although given the weather, it might as well be Thursday, eh?” (Such readers, to be sure, oughtn’t congratulate themselves overmuch, in light of the novel’s title and the name of a character mentioned on its very first page.)
More specifically, after a few nicks with Occam’s razor, Shadow recognizes Wednesday as an American incarnation—avatar likely wouldn’t fit Shadow’s personal lexicon—of the Norse god variously known as Odin, Votan, and the All-Father (deities seemingly being as fond of aliases as the average petty criminal). Moreover, Shadow’s new employer is plotting a divine duel to the death, a celestial showdown.
Why? Economics. “[T]here are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief,” Wednesday notes at one point, “gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon.” Unfortunately, worship, be it active or passive, appears to be a zero-sum game, a game being won rather handily by the nouveau divin.