The Scorpion God is a collection of three novellas by William Golding published in 1971. They are all set in the distant past: "The Scorpion God" in Ancient Egypt, "Clonk Clonk" in pre-historic Africa, and "Envoy Extraordinary" in Ancient Rome. A draft of "The Scorpion God" had been written but abandoned in 1964, "Clonk Clonk" was newly written for the book, and "Envoy Extraordinary" had been published before, in 1956. "Envoy Extraordinary" became a play called The Brass Butterfly which was performed first in Oxford and later in London and New York. This was Golding's first publication since The Pyramid in 1967 and his last until Darkness Visible in 1979, which he started to write in 1975 after a long period of "creative hibernation", the beginning of which is described in a journal he started at the time, under the heading 'History of a Crisis'. Themes Critical opinion differs about whether the three novellas are bound by a common theme other than their setting in the deep past. Leighton Hodson describes the first two as "taxing but contrasted works" characterised by "highly wrought spareness of expression" and the third as "lighter, though not included for entertainment purposes only." He says also that while the unity of theme between the three novellas is not straightforward, they can be thought of as "a sequence of meditations on human thinking", one about religion, one about man as a social animal, and one about "the potential dangers of the meddling intellect". Kevin McCarron sees the unifying theme as being instead to do with "the issue of progress": "The Scorpion God" concerns an outsider called the Liar challenging the established order of the kingdom he has entered; "Clonk Clonk", which is more optimistic about the potential value of innovation, considers an imagined prehistoric change in the relationship between men and women; and "Envoy Extraordinary" considers the perils of technological development. Don Crompton sees a connection between "The Scorpion God" and "Envoy Extraordinary" in their concern with the dangers of fixed world views but sees little other connection, saying "assiduous analysis can always be made to yield common ground between individual works, but these three stories are concerned with distinctive societies and draw independent lessons from them". In an interview with James R. Baker in 1981, Golding himself said "if it has a unity it is one of the accidents of history" and that that wasn't