Liner Notes for An Expedition To Antipodea
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Lost Decider is an elf, and so uses both statistical analysis and astrology to track the locus of events, calculating place and time of outbreaks of necromancy. Each one then has a star chart made and the plots are regressed mathematically, each iteration creating a more accurate approximation of the origin.
It’s hardly like my time working as a data analyst for an insurance company at all.
Anyway all four of my viewpoint characters together again. This hasn’t happened since chapter two back in January, or about seven years for the characters themselves. (I have a rough timeline that will probably make it into the final updates in December). They have officially gone to the far side of the globe as well, always nice in an age of sail series.
Thanks to the introduction this story just about works stand-alone, though the why and who and what are sketched in. Hopefully you’ve been following on and have at least a vague recollection of what’s going on here.
Antipodea. My original idea was to move New Zealand to exactly opposite on the globe from Whitland (faux-England) and see what happened. Along the way I decided that they would meet the island’s goddess. My personal preference is to give gods and goddesses as little space on the page as possible. For once show-don’t-tell is poor advice. Descriptions of divine power can work fine but in this case I thought better to just have it stated, have her make her case and then get going.
Her sister Islandia, the one from the penny, is very much a stand-in for Britannia – Corinthian helmet, robe, trident and shield with the Union Flag on it. A local British goddess, identified by the Romans as an aspect of Athena, she appeared on some of the earliest coins minted in Roman Britain. After a thousand years or so she re-appeared on the penny after the unification of the Scottish and English crowns, symbolising the single island of Britain.
The World Turned Upside Down [1] is a famous ballad from the English Civil War, lamenting the suppression of Christmas. It’s not so much that Christmas was banned, just that like all other feast and saints days it was not officially supported. In 1644 December 25th was the last Wednesday of the month, parliament had declared that the last Wednesday of every month was to be a fast day, when no meat etc. was to be eaten.
The tune The World Turned Upside Down is sung to is When The King Enjoys His Own Again[2] a royalist and later Jacobite song explaining how everything will be good when the true king is restored.
None of this fits in with how I used the term. So much research not getting in the stories. Instead I riffed off 18th century satirical cartoons. The Buffs and the Blues are the opposing political parties from the Eatenswill election in Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, itself a satirical look at politics in the early 19th century. Dickens avoids attributing any policies to the candidates or parties, which both improves his point and avoids any favouritism between Whigs and Tories. I can only apologise for hinting at them taking actual 18th Century positions.
The giant jumping mice and tiny wolves are a reference to Australia, sadly missing from this series so far.
Yes, Antipodea is literally the world turned upside down. They are greeted by a menial who is dressed in the best robes. As they go through the palace-temple-fortress they enter the massive stone halls, lightly decorated, where the bureaucrats are dressed in kilts and shirts. They rise higher to where the priests are in roughly woven smocks, in plain rooms, and finally on the roof is the driftwood shack of the goddess herself.
The most powerful only takes the bare minimum of what she needs and those who are close to her emulate that austerity. I’m just saying.
Anyway, turns out Carstairs has failed. Is he a bad ‘un or just bad at his job? I’m sure we’ll find out.
[1] The World Turned Upside Down
[2] When The King Enjoys His Own Again
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