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42. While leaders make best efforts to prevent any insurrection during their reign, it’s considered bad manners not to tailor your architecture at least slightly to accommodate good drama. For the same reason, prisons are often located very near refuse chutes leading into dangerous areas of the undercity.
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43. With that said, much of the city’s more gargantuan statuary, too big to be moved, is now modular, so heads, insignia and the like can be swapped out for new kit with the speed of a motorsports pit stop.
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44. At the very back of the garden I saw the most peculiar statue. It seemed far more ancient than any of the others, and while I’m sure it was just a trick of the ivy growing over it, I could have sworn it had antlers. I didn’t like that statue much at all.
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45. On one classic occasion a particularly hated regime was collapsed by four rebellions simultaneously. Their leaders, equally charismatic, and all seemingly fated for power, couldn’t work out what to do. After hours of arguments, they agreed – somewhat sheepishly – to fight each other in the very format of televised deathmatch they had all set out to abolish.
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AFTERWORD,
by Nate Crowley
When it comes to metaphors for fiction, one of the oldest of all old chestnuts is the idea that books are like gateways to other worlds; that reading is, in fact, a kind of travel. It figures, therefore, that with a bit of jiggling to make the edges fit, it should be possible to write a book that lays into both the conventions of fantasy world-building and the conventions of travel writing at the same time. Notes from Small Planets is my attempt to do just that.
The connecting factor that most stands out to me is cognitive dissonance. In both travel and reading genre fiction, we (and when I say we, understand that this is with an awkward glance towards all the other white men reading this) tend to celebrate the worlds we love without thinking too hard about some of their less pleasant details or implications. Just as a British tourist can enjoy a wildlife trip to southern Africa and decide not to think too hard about the profound, spiteful damage of colonial imperialism, it’s all too easy to read Tolkien and brush aside the fact that the concept of Orcs might in fact be pretty racist, or that women don’t really get to do very much in his work.
If this was an article online, there would already be comments springing up beneath it, angrily defending Tolkien and saying that if I looked closely enough or knew enough context, I’d find it’s not racist or sexist at all. But this isn’t the point: it should be possible to enjoy a work while still recognising the assumptions and conventions – some of them fairly grim – that it sits amidst.
As such, this book isn’t an attempt to cancel anything – I love every genre tackled as much as I love travelling. Indeed, as well as pointing out dodgy foundational issues in genre, this book spends a lot of time just looking at what’s straightforwardly, harmlessly silly about the archetypes we’re familiar with and the clichés we wouldn’t change for the world.
And Floyd? Floyd is the guy I try my hardest not to be, both as a reader and as a traveller. He’s an extremely comfortable white bloke who likes the sound of his own voice and sees the world as something put there for his consumption. Floyd most definitely thinks he’s an enlightened, progressive fellow who enriches the places he visits by his very presence, and he doesn’t stop to think too long about anything that benefits him. While I’ve tried throughout to laugh at Floyd rather than with him, if I’ve ended up tripping over my own ignorance at any point and emulated him myself, I apologise without reservation.
Eliza, meanwhile, is the sort of reader I’d like to be. She loves these worlds as much as Floyd does (even if she’s having to look at them over his authorial shoulder), but she can spot bullshit a mile off and isn’t afraid to point it out. I hope that, between them, they’ve taken you on a good trip.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’ve certainly had something of an odyssey. At various points in its life, this book was a first-person travel narrative, a first-person travel narrative with a ludicrously overcomplex SF metanarrative, and a parody guidebook with way too long a section about Barbarians. Now, at last, it’s the book it always wanted to be, and for that I can thank Vicky Leech and Natasha Bardon, my endlessly patient and extremely wise editors at Harper Voyager.
Sincere thanks to Terence Caven and to Holly MacDonald for the (literally and figuratively) out-of-this-world design work – getting the first proofs was like a surprise extra Christmas
I also owe a huge debt of thanks to my agent, Jamie Cowen. He’s been there more than a few times when I’ve lost the figurative and literal plot during this project, and been a great friend as I’ve had to deal with deaths, births, illnesses and wild changes in circumstance. Alongside Jamie, I want to thank Chris Farnell for his companionship and bright ideas, Andrew Skinner for being the brother I never knew I had in Joburg, Philip Ellis for soldiering through many a day at ‘the office’ with me, and Josh Fortune for his endless enthusiasm and confidence in me.
Thalassa, my thanks to you are wasted since you are a baby, but by the time you get round to reading this, I want you to know how many times you made me smile while I was writing. Mum and Dad, you’re a bit too dead
