Liner Notes for Shattering Discoveries

 Liner Notes for my story Shattering Discoveries

The four worlds beyond the dimensional gates are all supposed to be primarily pulp adventure playgrounds. Novapolis has technology and strange people who will fight you are the drop of a hat, and politics and plotting. Silence is a wilderness failed with strange beasts and primitive tribes, as well as the environmental dangers of a dark cave system.

We’ll get to the Unbounded Plain.

The Shattered Realm is supposed to be the decadent place full of ruins, ancient cities overrun with wildlife, flooded, made strange and unexpected. The people living amongst them no longer with the full cultural knowledge of their ancestors – they’ve given much of it up along with the hubris of the city-builders. Still, they know more than they’re saying, they have wisdom from the past. The scholars of the Broken King have things to say that are worth listening to.
Plus swamp horses! Quicksand! Strange storms! 

The Shattered Realm is infinite in area so far as we can see so anything might come from far away. Anything at all!

It’s a pity this is the one that didn’t come together for me.

I had this idea for Gunn to come in, get caught up in a stampede, it would uncover a mystery site, they’d go and talk to the locals who would give them some insight and then they’d explore...
I’d already written 4,000 words and the locals were just arriving to chat, and I didn’t know what the mystery was or what the insight would be and who even knew what the solution to the problem I hadn’t come up with would be.

Plus Covid Lockdown happened during the first draft.

Anyway I had a pretty good plan for the next story so I cut my losses, tacked on an ending and here we are. Is this full of loose ends? Yes it is! In a standalone story that’s a problem. In a serial, much less so. A loose end becomes a plot hook for a later one in the series. And if the hook doesn’t catch anything, well so what, we’re four months down the line and I’ve got some new and better ideas to offer you.
That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

So what is there here? Firstly the idea that this is not a static environment. Gunn comes in expecting mud and water, and gets flowers and swamp horses. The locals know that things change and the weather and climate will alter the landscape and the way the plants and animals react. They have wisdom and insight into their environment as well they should after living here for dozens of generations.

I mean real people on Earth right now ought to have that too yet many times don’t so I guess this is fiction, right?

Swamp horses are basically torpedo hippopotamuses. The hippo means horse, the potam bit means river, so river horses. I didn’t have to work too hard for that bit really. The torpedo part is to make the stampede better. Not that real hippos aren’t dangerous enough. At least they are if you wander into their territory at the wrong time without due care and attention. 

Am I hyping up Apt Choler’s super-heroic tendencies? I suppose I am. She needs to be prepared, or rather you, the reader need to know she is fully up to the challenges of the middle section of this serial. Because then, when we reach the later sections and even her extraordinary feats are not enough...
Ah well, time to talk about that later in the year.

Gita Ajar was one of Gunn’s crew in the first volume of stories. She joined at the half way mark when he was ordered to take on more crew in order to pass on his wisdom, or maybe his luck. They needed more patrollers up to speed for dangerous and surprising situations. As it turned out the war came sooner than anyone expected. On the up side that made more patrollers ready for action. On the down side it chewed up a whole lot that might have done better if brought on in less of a crisis.

The aftermath of the war suggested to me that they would be looking for somewhere to stash Gunn where he wouldn’t accidently start a crusade from boredom. The staff are wrong in that – he’d find the challenge of policing an occupied planet perfectly interesting, filling his time and trying to keep the peace. They’re right though as well, as he’d be looking for clever solutions and tricks, when what’s needed is a period of calm, to build up normal relations.

In the wake of the war some of his crew ought to have found new assignments. Quintillius avoids this by taking a field promotion which was probably overdue. Office politics and class-cultural relationships. Quintillius comes from a pre-information age background, so has to pay his dues as an enlisted, getting acclimatised to the post-scarcity techno-culture of the Patrol. This is nonsense of course – three years in the academy is plenty of time, and happily takes people from wildly differing backgrounds and makes them Patrol-compatible. Still it happens.

Jack stays with Gunn because they don’t want to be anywhere else and more importantly no one else wants them. Robb is too valuable as a senior sergeant, and they really ought to have detached him from Gunn.

Rivers, Gunn’s second in command previously, has been promoted and given her own command, as well she should, though that takes her away from this story. His apprentice Ella Wright also goes away. She’s overdue for a spell in a technical school, or maybe even the officer academy. This was a problem as it took most of the female characters away, making the banter less interesting. I’m not sure how well I solved this. Charm, Prosperine, Choler, Julia Justa, they all come in but never really gel. Gunn’s not been through the war with them, so when it comes to putting his life in their hands he... doesn’t. 

Actually he has with Julia Justa. Yet coming up with excuses to take her away from the med-bay used up too much writing real estate.

Anyway, it’s all compromises at the end of the day. Except next month’s story, that’s exactly what it set out to be.