The day after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, Neil Gaiman's Twitter mentions lit up. "It was strange," he says. "People would quote me: 'At times like this, you do what Neil Gaiman says, you make good art.'"
Four months later, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States – and the quotes appeared again.
The messages referred to an address Gaiman gave to Philadelphia's University of the Arts in 2012, when he described how to respond when things go wrong. "Make good art," he urged. "Do what only you do best." For the liberal-minded British author, now living in the US, the insistent reminders of his own words had a strange effect. He'd told other people how to handle disappointment. Now he had to follow his own advice.
Gaiman, 56, has been making good art for a long time. The day he speaks to WIRED, it is 28 years and twenty-four hours since the debut of Sandman, the seminal comic-book series that first made his name. His distinctive dream logic - the source for everything from screenplays (Coraline, Stardust) to award-winning children's fiction (The Graveyard Book) - has infiltrated the culture. "You don't notice it's happening," he says, "and one day you turn around and it's like, oh fuck, people are using adjectives like 'Gaimanesque' and they seem to mean it." Read more: On the anniversary of the EU vote, here are eight ways Brexit has hit science, tech and design
Gaiman's work is the substrate now, the thing on which other writers build. Take the TV series Lucifer, itself adapted from another author's spin-off of Sandman. "Coraline feels like part of the landscape. American Gods as a novel is part of the landscape."
American Gods is Gaiman's coming-to-America story. Born in Hampshire, he moved in 1992 to New York, where he still lives, and he wanted to write about his adopted home. He saw a nation of immigrants: a country, as he puts it, where no one is from. But in place of the usual hopeful fables, the journey he described was dark and riven with violence. In a plot line that now feels prophetic, Gaiman imagined a pair of conmen who feed off chaos. Down on their luck, they devise their biggest con: a plan to fool a country and everyone in it.
Now, after years in development, American Gods has been adapted into a television series, airing on Amazon Prime Video in the UK this spring. Gaiman, who wrote the show with Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller, is pleased with what he's seen. "It doesn't feel dated," he says. But he doesn't enjoy the prescience of his vision. He sighs: "Even then it was weird. The first signing of the American book tour was in the Twin Towers on June 19, 2001. If anything, I feel like I was writing about stuff that was in the wind, and the wind has just been concentrating over the past 20 years."
The same foreboding, this time deliberate, runs through Gaiman's latest work. Norse Mythology, out on February 7, retells the myths of the Norse gods - including Odin and Loki, the two grifters of American Gods, who've played the role of villains in Gaiman's work since Sandman. The idea germinated eight years ago, when Gaiman was starting a relationship with the musician Amanda Palmer. She was diligently reading his back catalogue, including American Gods. "She really hadn't got it and she kept saying, 'I wish this was annotated,'" Gaiman recalls. "I thought it would be interesting just to do a retelling."
Norse Mythologyis an odd read, largely because it is so un-Gaimanesque. The tales are told straight, with little embellishment. Although at times Gaiman felt tempted to do his own thing - the absence of the female gods, he says, was especially frustrating - he wanted to "play fair", both with the myths and with his readers. He imagines a curious child coming to them from one of the Marvel films, just as he did aged seven, after reading Jack Kirby's The Mighty Thor. "It would give it depth," he says. "It would give it weirdness."
The moment Gaiman comes through most strongly in Norse Mythology is the end. The Norse gods are fated to die in the final battle of Ragnarök. As they march towards their doom, Gaiman guides the reader with delicacy and precision. "If there was anything I felt like my craft was important to, it was making Ragnarök work," he says. "Using Ragnarök as a weird set of ominous bass notes we keep returning to. And making Ragnarök pay off at the end." It's a sense he has at the moment: of things sliding out of control. "Right now there's a feeling of recognition: 'Oh yeah, I know that, that's where we're at.'"
Gaiman's gloom is grounded in personal experience. A passionate advocate for refugees, he's spent time in the camps in Jordan. He's also experienced online hate first hand, after an anti-Trump tweet attracted "noxious and nightmarish anti-Semitic stuff that I've never encountered before". Gaiman has been using social media since the days of CompuServe. "This is new. This is bad. This is weird."
Mythology helps Gaiman keep perspective. The Norse Gods faded. Today's media and tech deities will crumble much faster. "You look at things such as Facebook," he says. "You look at Google, Amazon, Tinder and you go: 'One day you will be MySpace. One day you will be one with Nineveh and Tyre.'" He's now thinking ahead, to the possibilities inherent even in disaster: "There is always what comes after Ragnarök. Stuff comes after."
It's hope, of a kind - and Gaiman is apt to be hopeful. "I want people happy," he says. If he has a political message, he slips it in sideways, the way he did in American Gods, or in Neverwhere, a novel about homelessness disguised as a magical quest. He's started working on a new novel, with the same intention: it started out "light and fluffy", he says, then, over the autumn, the tone changed. "It's going to be a lot darker. And that's OK." He's putting in his experience, his point of view, desire to create. He’s being Neil Gaiman: making art good; making good art.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
