Book Review: Atomic

Title: Atomic 

Author: C. Gockel

Date: 2016

Publisher: C. Gockel

Length: 36 e-pages

Quote: "Concentrating, she sends a magical apparition beyond the fiery ring."

Atomic is one of the short stories, spun off from the author's I Bring the Fire series, that have been published as separate e-books. The series contains several stories, from magazine feature length, like this one, to full-length novels, about characters from Norse and related mythology whose basic conflict is about whether the powers of their monarchy need to be limited by a constitution. 

Norse mythology featured a "god" called Loki, a magical trickster, at first loved by the other ancestor-"gods" as an entertainer but eventually cast out when his pranks go too far. Loki is the central figure in this series. He and his species, one of several humanoid species who inhabit worlds linked by an interdimensional "tree," don't think of themselves as "gods" so much as people who have been called gods and worshipped, but they have long lives and magical powers. 

In the original myths Loki's love life may have been made of poetic symbolism. He was married to Sigyn, "victory," but lost her--he stopped winning out in the stories about him. He was then married to Angrboda,  which is usually considered to mean what it sounds like in English, his new role as a cause of anger...but then again, if that name had originally been Anganboda, it might have been a woman's name meaning "foreboding of joy." He ends up living alone in a dungeon. In these modern stories, of course, his adventures are different and could end differently.

This part of the overall saga is about Sigyn's reaction to the detonation of atomic bombs in 1945. It could be read by ittself, but it was meant to arouse interest in the rest of the series.