Liner Notes for A Grand Parade

 

Liner Notes for A Grand Parade

Missing from the stories so far are the animals they put in the arena. Well here they are. I’ve chosen to put a lot of extinct creatures into the mix, dire wolves, mammoths, aurochs etc. The ape-men, some sort of hominid, perhaps homo erectus, imply a lot about the situation. Given a hundred years, if they’re sufficiently trainable, they might replace a lot of the more menial servile labour, a permanent class of slave.

The city of Mora is not a good place; the economic dislocation will probably cause riots, civil war and pogroms. On the other hand if they keep sending armies through the gates they’ll probably encounter something worse soon. But that’s a liner note for another story…

Anyway, stampede! I could have written a beast hunt in the arena but frankly I’m not a fan. Gladiators mostly don’t get killed; this is like bullfighting, not without risk of death or injury but the odds are not in favour of the bull. I can give higher stakes, more dangerous situation and have the villains be the ones without a care for cruelty to animals. Win-win-win. Shades of grey is an erotic novel etc.

Anyway the larger plot is starting to kick in. The fallout from turning the fixed fight back on the fixers (in A Fixed Fight) continues. Organised crime is creating a lot of trouble and chaos. Vinculus has an objective, one beyond the cavern of the howling void, a place no living man can go. But a construct? Yes, a construct (as discussed in The Soul Of A Construct). It’s like I plan this stuff (I don’t plan it that well, as I write this in January, I’ve finished story 7; the concluding part is about six lines of notes. Still, we might get there! See what happens in December.)

And we find out something about Olianos. Is he content? Apparently so. What then for a man who finds satisfaction in plotting the perfect fight, and desires nothing more. And what for his partner, what does she want.

You know for a story that is mostly waiting around and being charged by a stampede of extinct megafauna, I’ve put a lot of questions about motivation and leadership. Something to think about there.