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The dumbed-down Sunday School version of the Biblical story of The Fall is that when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate an apple (more accurately translated as "fruit") from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they realized they were naked and covered up their private parts, by which action God knew that his edict had been violated. The shame that the first couple feel about their naked state is taken as an allegory for copulation, Eve (and by implication all of womankind) is characterized as a temptress for seducing Adam, and sex is the original sin that gets not only them, but all of humanity banished from paradise.

A more sophisticated theological interpretation holds that by eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve gained knowledge equivalent to that of God's. The attempt to become like God (i.e. to learn how the universe works) is what causes human suffering. Or, as my mother used to put it, you can be too smart for your own good.

It's perhaps not coincidental that the famous apocryphal story of how Sir Isaac Newton "discovered" gravity features a falling apple. The more humanity learns about physical principles (like, say, how to cause a nuclear reaction) the more trouble it gets itself into. One such troublemaker was Charles Darwin, whose big bite of the apple even today causes controversy in Kansas public schools. A wish to return to the garden is a wish for willful ignorance, and therein lies much of modern turmoil. Because you really can't go home again.

The myth of creation, and the resulting tensions between faith and science, is at the center of the hurricane in Ian R. MacLeod's The House of Storms. Set a hundred years hence in the same milieu of MacLeod's earlier The Light Ages with a different set of characters (and which does not require familiarity with the earlier novel), The House of Storms is a nuanced retelling of the Fall from social, psychological and mythical perspectives in which God screws up as much as any human.

The discovery of the alchemical substance aether has ushered in an alternate Industrial Revolution based on magic rather than steam power; the "Age" that follows the events of the previous novel is a sort of late Victorian period in which Victrola phonographs exist not at all incongruously side-by-side with telephone systems capable of video transmission. (Why exactly magic can soup up real technologies of the time such as the telephone but can't provide 7.1 surround sound is besides the point; like much of the so-called steampunk genre that superimposes 21st century concepts on earlier industrial developments, the contradictory juxtaposition provides a charming mood, regardless of the logic.) England is run by an oligarchy of various guilds, chief amongst which is the Telegrapher's Guild (control of information is power even in magical times). Alice Meynell, a former prostitute and successful social climber who has risen to Greatgrandmistress of the Telegrapher's Guild through the arts of marriage and magic is caring for her dying son, Ralph.

While for some reason Alice can perform magic to alter her appearance and kill off those who stand in her way, she can't save her son from a consumptive disease. Thus comes the classic bargain with the devil (though Alice herself has satanic predilections), in which the offspring of an ill-fated couple must suffer. Though, in MacLeod's version, with slightly happier results.

The book is divided into two parts, before and after the fall. The first concerns Ralph's seemingly miraculous recuperation and, not coincidentally, love affair with a fisherman's daughter, Marion Price. That the followers of Jesus were known as the "fishers of men" and the symbol of early Christians a fish (an outline of which appears frequently on car bumpers to indicate the faith of the occupants, and which is satirized by those who do not share that same faith by placing the word "Darwin" within the fish outline) is surely not coincidental. His return to health enables Ralph to more vigorously pursue his study of natural science, and what he believes is a new theory of "Habitual Adaptation." He and Marion set off to escape his mother and his pending adult responsibilities as a member of the ruling class, ostensibly to leave England and travel to the Fortunate Isles to prove his theories. But, as many an adolescent learns in the passage to adulthood, Ralph discovers that his insights are not all that original. It turns out that the publication of evolutionary theory is suppressed in the interests of the common welfare:

...our study of how the natural world functions must reflect the real needs of human society. A hothead, for example, might use your theory to argue that we humans are descended from apes. And where would that leave the unique concept of the sacred human soul, and out beloved church, and people's dearly held beliefs?

David Soyka is a former journalist and college teacher who writes the occasional short story and freelance article. He makes a living writing corporate marketing communications, which is a kind of fiction without the art.