{"id":183,"date":"2002-11-17T12:25:06","date_gmt":"2002-11-17T17:25:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=183"},"modified":"2002-11-17T12:25:06","modified_gmt":"2002-11-17T17:25:06","slug":"macdonald_james_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2002\/11\/macdonald_james_1\/","title":{"rendered":"Macdonald, James D., and Debra Doyle: (01) &#8220;Stealing God&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"85684723\"><\/a> <a name=\"link_85684723\"><\/a> <\/p>\n<p>While we were out picking up the extended DVD of <cite>The Fellowship of the Ring<\/cite>, we also got a copy of <cite>Tales of the Knights Templar<\/cite>, edited by Katherine Kurtz, which has the <strong>first Peter Crossman story, &#8220;Stealing God.&#8221;<\/strong> Unlike <cite>The Apocalypse Door<\/cite>, this one is co-written by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald. (I think it was a mistake to read this story after spending several hours immersed in the extended version of <cite>FotR<\/cite> and appendices; Crossman was briefly looking like Viggo Mortensen in my head, which is particularly wrong considering that Mortensen <a href=\"http:\/\/us.imdb.com\/Title?0114194\">once played Lucifer<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>Because this is a short story, I really noticed all the allusions that made me say, &#8220;Huh?&#8221; Among the things I googled on after reading it were the Cathars and Rennes-le-Ch&#226;teau (&#8220;I was working the security leak at Rennes-le-Ch&#226;teau when the word came down. The Rennes flub was over a hundred years old, but the situation needed constant tending to keep people off the scent. That&#8217;s the thing about botches. They never go away.&#8221;). It makes me wonder what references I was missing in <cite>The Apocalypse Door<\/cite>. I also looked up the Meditation Room at the United Nations, where, according to Crossman, that big hunk of rock is actually the Grail: &#8220;We could never hide the fact that there was a Grail, or that it was holy, but for a long time we tried to get people to go looking for dinnerware. Then someone talked. Somehow, somewhere, there was a leak. And blunders, like I said, never go away.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>All the crunchy goodness of <cite>The Apocalypse Door<\/cite> is present here in smaller form: ancient secret societies, double-crosses, danger and dead people, assassin nuns (okay, just one, but that&#8217;s enough), and Crossman&#8217;s First Person Hardboiled Narration. I feel sort of guilty for not reading the rest of the anthology, but I&#8217;m just not interested in the Knights Templar as a general proposition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While we were out picking up the extended DVD of The Fellowship of the Ring, we also got a copy of Tales of the Knights Templar, edited by Katherine Kurtz, which has the first Peter Crossman story, &#8220;Stealing God.&#8221; Unlike The Apocalypse Door, this one is co-written by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald. (I &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2002\/11\/macdonald_james_1\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Macdonald, James D., and Debra Doyle: (01) &#8220;Stealing God&#8221;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,15,117],"tags":[194,300],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-peter-crossman","category-sf-and-fantasy","category-short-fiction","tag-doyle-debra","tag-macdonald-james-d"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}