DEDICATION
To Cecelia Holland, one of the two good things I found in Cambodia in 1970.
(The other was Jane Austen)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Dan Breen continues as my first reader. I make mistakes. He catches as many as he can.
Dan, Dorothy Day, and Karen Zimmerman, my webmaster, store my texts against a disaster which engulfs central North Carolina. (Well, if it gets all of central North Carolina, Dan is gone also. Which I would regret if I were around.)
Karen and Evan Ladouceur provided continuity help when I asked for it. It’s probable that I should have asked more often than I did, but my focus is always on the story and I tend to ignore other stuff. I know that there are people to whom the continuity is very important and I apologize to them, but that just isn’t what I care about.
John and Val Lambshead not only guided me to settings which I later used for scenes but also provided logistics support for the research. This became an acute problem when my business credit card was blocked (my fault) and could not be cleared while I was out of the US (very much the fault of the Bank of America).
I had various computer adventures. (Actually, I’m having another one as I type this, but thus far it’s only affecting one of my notebooks.) My son Jonathan saved me each time, among other things by converting all the machines to Win10 and recreating the local area network (which didn’t survive the upgrade).
(Come to think, one problem I fixed myself. After a week I realized that the cleaning lady had moved the wireless router to a place she thought was more attractive but which blocked the signal. During that week I used flash drives to transfer my data. I’m not very computer literate, but I’m very good at finding work-arounds.)
My wife Jo keeps house (which I’m sure is frustrating, because she knows not to move stuff, and I’m messy when I’m working…which is most of what I do), and feeds me fresh food cooked in tasty fashion. I’m in good shape for a man of my age, which is as much due to the meals I’m fed as to my daily exercise.
To them and to those whose help I’ve forgotten to mention, my sincere thanks.
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