Death's Bright Day: Prologue

    AUTHOR’S NOTE

    As always in this series, Cinnabar weights and measures are given in English units while those of the Alliance are metric. I use them merely to hint at the variation I expect would occur in a future in which humans have spread across the stars.

    Despite my saying this, I will probably get a note from someone telling me that the metric system is much better. For scientific purposes I agree, but logic isn’t going to rule our distant descendents any more than it does us. (And for weather information, Fahrenheit beats Celsius all hollow.)

    The historical incidents on which I based Death’s Bright Day come largely from the Greek world at the close of the 3rd century BC. The empire of Alexander the Great had broken into three parts within a few years of his death in 323 BC. Now the large fragments were shrinking or crumbling. There were new players — Sparta, the Kingdom of Pergamum, and, overwhelmingly, Rome — and a world of opportunists at the edges and in the spaces between.

    People at that time made short-term decisions based on short-term urges, among which pride, greed, and envy were prominent. And also fear; fear was a big one.

    Perhaps this is the only way things ever happen in human societies. Current events seem to me to support that view. It’s a milieu which creates many backgrounds for action-adventure. (I used only a few of these. My original plot had nearly twice the number of incidents, some of them quite dramatic, but I trimmed it for length.)

    Speaking as a writer, this is a wonderful milieu. Viewing it as a member of humanity, though, I often wish that we were better as a species at taking a long view. The Greek world of 200 BC wasn’t a safe place for anyone or a happy place for most, and things very rapidly became worse.

    I would prefer that the reality my son and grandson will face were a better one, but my field is history. I don’t find much hope there.

    Dave Drake

    david-drake.com