by Nate Crowley
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50. It used to be called the Unicorn, but the proprietors painted over the sign during the war.
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51. In actual fact, I never intended to go on this tour at all. I was just stopping at the Horse to use the toilet and was accosted by Joe. After a half hour of his rapid-fire anecdotes, intermingled with rambling theories about prison, I said I would give him a groat if he could prove any of it was real. Joe won his groat. I saw some things.
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52. Grimblestead is a tragic place. As part of the Forgettening, none of the Mundanes were permitted to remember their friends and relatives who died in the war, and so every one of the cemetery’s graves is forlorn and untended.
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53. It certainly wasn’t for me.
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54. Eliza – I’m sorry, but I can’t finish the chapter. The Grimblestead cemetery visit went badly awry (see copy filed above), and I think I need to stop thinking about Mundania for a bit. I also desperately don’t want to make the situation there any worse, so I think it’s best if I stay out of it for now. There you go – I admitted it. I fucked up. And it wasn’t for the first time, either. I’ll come back and tidy up the chapter, I promise. And after that, I think we need to have a bit of a chat. It could be that I’ve got some things to make right, and some apologies to make. But before all that, I need to get the Wizarde business out of my head: I’m off exploring for a few weeks. In the meantime, you can start editing that copy from Wasteland, maybe? Bye for now – Floyd.
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* * *
CHAPTER EIGHT: WASTELAND
1. Hurt my hand, though.
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2. It turns out that among the Worlds, there’s actually a reason for the cliché of not looking at explosions as you walk away from them.
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3. Make no mistake, though, it’ll cost you a pretty penny. The Apes will be all smiles, gesturing you into frame and waving their cameras, but the second they take the shot there’ll be an orangutan right in your face, rattling the tin for an outrageous sum.
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4. Sometimes it doesn’t even take an outsider. The police state of Magna-City Three became so oppressive the city itself was declared illegal, prompting a grim-faced hypercop to shoot every building into dust with his pistol over the course of twenty relentless years of action.
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5. I met a woman who’d managed to start a deep animistic tradition based around a selection of faded GI Jim dolls, which her hosts came to call ‘the small warriors’, so anything’s possible.
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6. Cynics might say Derek’s random wanderings tend to have an astonishing habit of taking him to settlements on the brink of reestablishing organised civilisation. If that seems unfortunate to you, then just consider this – if Wasteland wasn’t a constant warzone, where glinting-eyed megalomaniacs spilled endless blood and fuel over conquest and bizarre religious feuds … well, it wouldn’t be such a great holiday destination, would it? Hooray for Mental Derek, I say.
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7. Not least because there are so few colouring pencils available, and so geographers have to make do with bits of bone with poo or blood or engine oil smeared on the ends.
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8. Since none of these animals are monkeys, the name their region has been given really, really irritates them. Good.
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9. Having said that, your mileage may vary. As I have already implied, I found the Apes to be rip-off merchants of the highest order, despite their supposed good manners.
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10. I don’t think there’s much to misunderstand about a man shooting a chimp in the leg for selling him a fake designer watch, and I think they were lucky that’s all that happened, but there you go.
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11. They … well, they think they’re cockneys. I’ll explain later.
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12. These strategies usually involve some manner of televised human blood sport, although the specifics vary.
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13. Well, I suppose they’re destruction myths really, aren’t they?
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14. And no, we won’t count the Brain Queen in her Asylum of Armageddon. I don’t care how many certificates she has nailed to her war mecha: she still isn’t a qualified mental health practitioner.
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15. This really can’t be understated. Every year, hundreds of tourists fall for the whole ‘search for the verdant place’ shtick and get taken round the houses on crap package tours, on which every warlord en route gets a share of the ticket price. Don’t be taken in.
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16. There are many instances of this kind of zoo in Wasteland.
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17. And, to everyone’s surprise, pandas. Turns out they were a lot more resourceful than anyone gave them credit for.
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18. Floyd, that’s no way to talk about Haraldson. He was a good man, and his family miss him. – ES
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19. Important note: unless you’re sure of your company, don’t use the ‘m’ word in Wasteland. Despite the blatant necessity for magic in explaining half of what goes on in this world, very few cultures indeed identify as magical, so it’s best to handwave with references to ancient technology wherever possible.
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20. On the other hand, this means that 90 per cent of the planet drinks dog piss (sorry, ‘pet water’), but beggars can’t be choosers, right?
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21. Except cockroaches, that is. For all that people big up their resilience to nuclear war, they’ve been notable underachievers here. If anything, they’ve actually become more rubbish since the apocalypses; although it’s hard to verify scientifically, the shamanic bug-talkers of the Badlands claim they have slightly less self-esteem now.
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22. Ahem. Sorry. RIP Haraldson.
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23. Frankly, I would have put this bit in the ‘wildlife’ section, but Eliza says this is exactly the kind of thinking that leads to so many extremely bloody ‘misunderstandings’ between the people of Wasteland and their simian cousins.
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24. Floyd, you’ve been there and you know full well they don’t keep anyone in cages. Those humans are contractors who get paid a fair wage – unlike the thralls of every warlord on the planet. Is this really all because a chimp overcharged you for a photo opportunity? You need to get over it, mate: you’re making a prick of yourself. – ES
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25. Robots don’t even have wives, or gender, but they certainly love their rhyming slang.
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26. If you do this, the Wastelanders will hate you for it. In a culture where the tragic hubris of the carbon economy is the nearest thing there is to a global religion, the idea of a solar-powered car is a blasphemous insult.
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27. Trust the bloody Apes to take the moral high ground.
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28. Not to be confused with the Deep Friar, a chilling subterranean monk who lives beneath the establishment.
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29. Except for the order of drag-racing germaphobes who call themselves The Fast & the Fastidious. There are always exceptions.
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30. Silver spray paint is definitely worth bringing to Wasteland, even if you’ve got no plans to visit the Robots.
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31. Plus a truck full of hired marauders watching from a safe distance, if you’ve got any sense. It’ll cost you a fair few tins of dog food, but it’s a safety net that’s worth springing for.
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32. For maximum fun, wander slowly through an abandoned petrol station
, cautiously shouting, ‘Hello?’ until a living corpse inevitably bursts from a wall.
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33. I never got that, frankly. I mean, they’re dead, for a start.
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34. Take my advice: just commit murder ASAP. Everyone will think it’s a bit much, but it’ll save time.
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35. If it doesn’t arise naturally, be sure to engineer a situation where one companion accidentally awakens a horde while sneaking through supposedly deserted ruins; it’s a riot every time.
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36. Oh, come on, Floyd. – ES
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37. They’re definitely slaves.
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38. What happened to Contingencies 1 through 5, you ask? Their inhabitants wore the wrong-coloured jumpsuits. There was nothing else for it – C6 and C7 had to put aside their differences and break out the emergency nukes.
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39. You could head to Contingency 8, but I wouldn’t recommend it – the only thing alive there is a mad Robot who sets physics-based teleportation puzzles for visitors, and it can be a real time sink.
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40. Well, the Robots will just pour it all over their chrome skull-faces, but it’s the thought that counts.
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41. Regimes often fall apart under the weight of a gimmick. In this instance, by the time everyone had undergone surgery to get the appropriate number of thumbs, the government had been overthrown by a boy who declared himself Chief Citizen and banned the Culture of Thumbs that the people hated so. Within six months, it was decreed that on a temporary basis (it’s always on a temporary basis), people’s jobs would be denoted by the colour of a third eye on their foreheads. The people groaned.
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42. While leaders make best efforts to prevent any insurrection during their reign, it’s considered bad manners not to tailor your architecture at least slightly to accommodate good drama. For the same reason, prisons are often located very near refuse chutes leading into dangerous areas of the undercity.
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43. With that said, much of the city’s more gargantuan statuary, too big to be moved, is now modular, so heads, insignia and the like can be swapped out for new kit with the speed of a motorsports pit stop.
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44. At the very back of the garden I saw the most peculiar statue. It seemed far more ancient than any of the others, and while I’m sure it was just a trick of the ivy growing over it, I could have sworn it had antlers. I didn’t like that statue much at all.
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45. On one classic occasion a particularly hated regime was collapsed by four rebellions simultaneously. Their leaders, equally charismatic, and all seemingly fated for power, couldn’t work out what to do. After hours of arguments, they agreed – somewhat sheepishly – to fight each other in the very format of televised deathmatch they had all set out to abolish.
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* * *
AFTERWORD,
by Nate Crowley
When it comes to metaphors for fiction, one of the oldest of all old chestnuts is the idea that books are like gateways to other worlds; that reading is, in fact, a kind of travel. It figures, therefore, that with a bit of jiggling to make the edges fit, it should be possible to write a book that lays into both the conventions of fantasy world-building and the conventions of travel writing at the same time. Notes from Small Planets is my attempt to do just that.
The connecting factor that most stands out to me is cognitive dissonance. In both travel and reading genre fiction, we (and when I say we, understand that this is with an awkward glance towards all the other white men reading this) tend to celebrate the worlds we love without thinking too hard about some of their less pleasant details or implications. Just as a British tourist can enjoy a wildlife trip to southern Africa and decide not to think too hard about the profound, spiteful damage of colonial imperialism, it’s all too easy to read Tolkien and brush aside the fact that the concept of Orcs might in fact be pretty racist, or that women don’t really get to do very much in his work.
If this was an article online, there would already be comments springing up beneath it, angrily defending Tolkien and saying that if I looked closely enough or knew enough context, I’d find it’s not racist or sexist at all. But this isn’t the point: it should be possible to enjoy a work while still recognising the assumptions and conventions – some of them fairly grim – that it sits amidst.
As such, this book isn’t an attempt to cancel anything – I love every genre tackled as much as I love travelling. Indeed, as well as pointing out dodgy foundational issues in genre, this book spends a lot of time just looking at what’s straightforwardly, harmlessly silly about the archetypes we’re familiar with and the clichés we wouldn’t change for the world.
And Floyd? Floyd is the guy I try my hardest not to be, both as a reader and as a traveller. He’s an extremely comfortable white bloke who likes the sound of his own voice and sees the world as something put there for his consumption. Floyd most definitely thinks he’s an enlightened, progressive fellow who enriches the places he visits by his very presence, and he doesn’t stop to think too long about anything that benefits him. While I’ve tried throughout to laugh at Floyd rather than with him, if I’ve ended up tripping over my own ignorance at any point and emulated him myself, I apologise without reservation.
Eliza, meanwhile, is the sort of reader I’d like to be. She loves these worlds as much as Floyd does (even if she’s having to look at them over his authorial shoulder), but she can spot bullshit a mile off and isn’t afraid to point it out. I hope that, between them, they’ve taken you on a good trip.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’ve certainly had something of an odyssey. At various points in its life, this book was a first-person travel narrative, a first-person travel narrative with a ludicrously overcomplex SF metanarrative, and a parody guidebook with way too long a section about Barbarians. Now, at last, it’s the book it always wanted to be, and for that I can thank Vicky Leech and Natasha Bardon, my endlessly patient and extremely wise editors at Harper Voyager.
Sincere thanks to Terence Caven and to Holly MacDonald for the (literally and figuratively) out-of-this-world design work – getting the first proofs was like a surprise extra Christmas
I also owe a huge debt of thanks to my agent, Jamie Cowen. He’s been there more than a few times when I’ve lost the figurative and literal plot during this project, and been a great friend as I’ve had to deal with deaths, births, illnesses and wild changes in circumstance. Alongside Jamie, I want to thank Chris Farnell for his companionship and bright ideas, Andrew Skinner for being the brother I never knew I had in Joburg, Philip Ellis for soldiering through many a day at ‘the office’ with me, and Josh Fortune for his endless enthusiasm and confidence in me.
Thalassa, my thanks to you are wasted since you are a baby, but by the time you get round to reading this, I want you to know how many times you made me smile while I was writing. Mum and Dad, you’re a bit too dead to appreciate thanks either, but I know you’d have loved this, and that makes me happy.
Last but emphatically most, thanks to Ashleigh for enduring my working habits and for sacrificing endless hours to discuss the most excruciatingly minor details. As ever, love, the Lizardmen are for you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nate Crowley is the author of a slowly increasing pile of books, and is an editor for PC gaming website Rock Paper Shotgun. He lives in Walsall with his partner Ashleigh, his daughter, and a bunch of crabs and lizards and stuff, plus a cat he insists on calling Turkey Boy. He likes cooking stews, having baths, thinking about the sea, and getting way too into strategy games. You can find him on twitter as @frogcroakley, where he’ll talk to you about all sorts of interesting things, or maybe even tell you a joke.
@frogcroakley
www.nate-crowley.com
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