Liner Notes for Dead Numbers
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I don’t know exactly where the phrase The Dead Outnumber The Living comes from. It’s a statement of fact – the estimate of the total number of human beings who ever lived is between 60-100 billion, with 8 billion alive today, so conservatively 7 to 12 times as many dead as alive. This is just homo sapiens, there are other human species in pre-history. They’re all in the long tail of low density hunter-gatherers so are unlikely to add many more.
Obviously this has informed my thoughts on speaking and dealing with the dead in fantasy. If the dead outnumber the living by five or ten times, then for every person wanting to speak to an ancestor, many of them will wish to speak to a descendant. And for every living necromancer who talks or raises the dead, how many vivimancers are on the other side wishing to return?
Talking to the dead is a popular activity, and not just in fiction. Mediums continue to make contact with spirits, despite the denial of naturalistic materialism (or materialistic naturalism) on one flank, and prohibitions on magic on others. Advice from elders and ancestors is woven deeply into human cultures. It doesn’t usually go wrong in the manner I expound on in this story.
So talking to the dead is bad*. And how to deal with it? Some classic swords and sorcery; stick a knife in the magician’s chest. It’s just unfortunate it doesn’t work.
Andaras is a classic swords and sorcery hero, though one who has attempted to make the jump to respectability and retirement. He’s cashed in his ill-gotten gains for a cattle herd and a position in society. A rich farmer (though not landowner as that’s not what this culture does) and also a powerful warrior and leader, someone who even the elders cannot ignore. So they use him when there’s a problem. He gets respect, they get him hunting man-killing beasts and murdering bandits.
And when a ravening horde of zombies comes out of the hills, he’s the man for the job.
We begin in media res and we stop without a conclusion. This is something of an experiment, it has the form of a standard adventure story without the sense of completion. It might have been a better choice to have had a different framing. But the fact of the matter is that I was ill with covid last year, and have been behind ever since. I made a choice and rather than delay things, have stuck with it.
Some of that has bled into the fiction as a theme. Sorry about that.
* I keep coming back to this as an idea in fantasy stories, as opposed to my science fiction, where someone’s dead? Let’s bring them back. Hell, let’s bring back a hundred copies, that’s not a problem, it’s just a weird background fact.
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