Goodreads asked I.T. Lucas:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

I.T. Lucas Reflecting upon the mythologies of the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, Greeks, Romans and Norse, it struck me that their pantheons bore remarkable similarities, and it got me thinking, what if at the source of those myths were events and personalities that left an impact so profound that their echoes could be heard in the mythologies of civilizations continents and millennia apart.

The most fascinating were the original, the Sumerians, and yet they're not as well known as the others. More than seven thousand years ago, the Sumerian civilization had been more advanced – socially as well as scientifically – than those that came much later. The records found in archeological digs tell the story of an advanced society that knew all about our solar system and placed the sun in its center, with schools for children, both girls and boys, laws that protected personal property and afforded women the kind of rights they hadn't enjoyed since Sumer's decline and up until modern times.

The Sumerians accredited their gods with providing them with not only the blueprints for their civilization, and their advanced scientific knowledge, but with the creation of humankind itself – a hybrid they engineered for menial labor, combining the genetic material of a god and a less advanced creature. The abbreviated version of their creation myth isn't the only one to find its way into the bible, modified of course to fit its monotheistic agenda. Adam and Eve and the garden of eden, the garden of the gods, are there as well. Though in the Sumerian version, the snake is a sympathetic god who decides to grant them knowledge of a carnal nature (which is the way the term knowledge, or to know is used throughout the bible), giving humans the ability to procreate, which as hybrids they previously lacked. Another god, the head of the Sumerian pantheon, throws them out of the gods' garden, worried that he humans would rapidly multiply and pose a threat to the gods (implying that the gods were not as fruitful). The biblical story of the gods taking human mates, and the many children born from these unions – the near-immortals as I call them in my series – is also an abbreviated version of the Sumerian original. There are many more examples, in stories adapted for other mythologies as well as the bible, in which the Sumerian original makes much more sense, portraying the gods not as capricious and callous, but mostly as judicious and well meaning.

Still, if it wasn't for a very modern day event, these musings might've never coalesced into a story. Learning of the Stuxnet computer worm – a virus that managed to damage the Iranian nuclear program – a computer program so ingenious, it seemed like alien technology, I couldn't help but think that perhaps we were given a little help, a nudge in the right direction…
And that's how the idea for Children of the Gods was born – Ancient Sumerian mythology meets modern day computer technology.

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