{"id":2362,"date":"2022-01-12T22:58:21","date_gmt":"2022-01-12T22:58:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2362"},"modified":"2022-01-15T12:30:12","modified_gmt":"2022-01-15T12:30:12","slug":"when-god-sits-in-your-lap-by-ian-tregillis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2362","title":{"rendered":"When God Sits in Your Lap by Ian Tregillis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When God Sits in Your Lap<\/em><\/strong> by Ian Tregillis (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, September-October 2020) starts off in what I assume is hard-boiled\/noir detective style:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was jammed to the gills in the City of Angels the night some dumb onion started a war in heaven. And I was still piffled, a few hours later, when it ended.
I\u2019d been weighing down a stool in my favorite gin mill, chewing face with a bottle and trying not to leave a puddle. A geriatric air chiller slowly lost its fight against entropy while the happy lady fumbling with her client in the corner gave us all a case of the hot pants, so the tapster barked at them to scram. They did, but not before pausing in the open doorway to let a devil wind rifle our pockets for loose change. (It got no business from me. You\u2019d keep your cabbage in a shoe, too, if you\u2019d ever lost a sawbuck to a Cherub\u2019s grift.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It keeps this up for a handful of pages until it moderates into a more normal style (although one still peppered with the likes of the above), during which we learn (a) that the \u201cwar in heaven\u201d is an anti-satellite shooting war and (b) see the narrator, Philo Vance, approached by a man who wants him to check on his very rich mother (who seems to have cut him off after marrying a gold-digger).
The rest of the story mostly takes place at the woman\u2019s mansion. Philo visits, sees a crashed car, and eventually manages to talk to someone at the house who has blood on his cuffs. Simultaneous with these events, Philo sees messages in his cigarette smoke and in water vapour\u2014someone or something is trying to contact him.
The rest of the story is quite strange and, at one point, involves Philo departing our plane of existence to talk to something called the \u201cPower\u201d, which is concerned about something called METATRON running amok. This latter section, and previous hints, seem to suggest that Philo is an angel, although not from the sort of Heaven that we normally think of, and that the Power and METATRON are divine forces (possibly God and the Devil?).
Eventually (spoiler), and after various adventures at the bar and the mansion, we find that the mother\u2019s disappearance and the behaviour of METATRON are connected, and matters resolve in the mother\u2019s underground bunker\u2014for both Heaven and Earth.
I\u2019m not I entirely understood what was going on here, but those readers who have read Tregillis\u2019s novel Something More Than Night<\/em> (described as \u201cAngel Noir\u201d in the Asimov\u2019s<\/em> introduction) may fare better. As for the rest of us, there is probably enough sense here for it to be rated as okay. It\u2019s more style than substance though, and it becomes a bit wearying.
** (Average). 8,200 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When God Sits in Your Lap by Ian Tregillis (Asimov\u2019s SF, September-October 2020) starts off in what I assume is hard-boiled\/noir detective style: I was jammed to the gills in the City of Angels the night some dumb onion started a war in heaven. And I was still piffled, a few hours later, when it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[624],"tags":[17,296,628,4,627,625,7],"class_list":["post-2362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ian-tregillis","tag-17","tag-296","tag-angels","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-heaven","tag-ian-tregillis","tag-novelette"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2362"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2430,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362\/revisions\/2430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}