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

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