If Christ Had Big Guns and a Bad Attitude
Posted by Niall Harrison
17 January 2012
Lavie Tidhar counters Jonathan McCalmont's review of Red Claw to argue for the merit of Philip Palmer's novels:
Yet these are merely technique. What slowly emerges – what fascinates about these novels – are they underlying moral principles at play. Palmer brings a way of looking at the universe that is – almost obsessively – concerned with both morality and evil. And these are worth exploring.
In Palmer’s universe, there is no God. Morality does not come from above; it is a fiction, a narrative, a product of human agency. And so is evil. One can see the lasting appeal of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, for instance, not for its edifices of pulp creations (Great Old Ones; Shoggoths; Sunken cities and sleeping Cthulhu; and so on) but for its sense of humanity as an insignificant part in a larger, indifferent universe. What Palmer argues for is that morality does not come from God. It comes from us.
I can't comment, having never read Palmer (despite the temptation of the excellent covers the Orbit team have given his books).
