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The City in the Ice
Deep below the southern frost, beyond the equatorial tundra and the frozen jungles, there is a city.
Its final hour is perfectly preserved in the ice. Clocks sit at 19:30, their hands never to move again. Homes, unlooted and unburnt, lie waiting for archaeologists to shatter their brittle locks. Workers lie at their stations and children lie in their beds.
Even in the modern era, expeditions past the icewall are undertaken at great peril, and so few explorers have seen the city’s remains. But those who have seen it and returned tell grand tales. They speak of its shining towers and its heroic people, of its science and industry and sudden demise. They speak of its leader, the noble landstjóra Olfaur, last to bear the title. Several plays have been written about him.
But none of those explorers speak of the little building in the city’s third ring, with the blue brick front and the drooping shutters. The door is not locked, but none of them have bothered to check. The building’s only adornment is a small sign to the door’s left, preserved under a dusting of white frost.
“Office of Propaganda.”
No archaeologist knows it, but it is the five people who once worked in that building who penned the stories the world now tells. Four of them are entombed inside it, sitting at the work desks and printing presses from which they wrote the greatest fiction of their lives.
The last days of Equa Ventura.
The names of the five propagandists were Agnar, Hakon, Helena, Viktor, and Tomas. They met for the first time four years before to the end.
In the middle of Equa Ventura’s twenty-second summer, when the temperature was barely below freezing and housewifes cut the wax seals from their windows, a child died. At the age of eight, she worked in the chemical plant, scrubbing the pipes that were too large for an adult to crawl into. The foreman forgot to check that the pipes were clear before restoring power. Her death was neither quick nor painless.
The slums rose in uproar. A mob of a dozen people gathered outside the foreman’s house and threw rocks at his wife. A larger crowd gathered outside the labor office. The landstjóra had ordered many fourteen hour shifts in the month before the disaster. The people, already disgruntled by the long hours, felt that the cause of the disaster was obvious—a man exhausted and overworked had made a mistake, and a child had paid the price.
In reality, the man had slept for nine hours the night before, and the blame lay with his personal resistance to following proper safety procedure. But the mob had already made up its mind before the facts were known, and the landstjóra was ultimately forced to bow to their wishes and reduce hours in the steelworks and chemical plant.
The incident frustrated him. An angry mob could spread news around the city in minutes, but the government’s position often took days to materialize. He decided that it was important for the government’s side of events to be more clearly heard.
Nobody knew what it took to be a good propagandist. The settlement expedition had no such persons in its number, nor great familiarity with the craft. But it seemed that the position would best be staffed by a lettered man, and so the landstjóra took out a small advertisement in Equa Ventura’s only newspaper.
“Seeking storyteller for employment as government functionary. Must be literate, single, and civic-minded. Pay 2kr/day. Apply at labor office.”
After a week, he hired four men and one woman. At first they were quartered over the labor office, drawing posters by hand and listening to the foremen allocate shifts below. When the town paper later went out of business, they asked if they might have its printing press and the use of its offices. There was no money for such a thing, but the creditor who had taken the paper’s assets -- also the owner of the little brick building in the third ring -- was a patriot. He was happy to see them go to good use.
And so, from the little blue brick building in the third ring, the five did their work.
They restarted the paper, and published it every day instead of twice a week. The quality of the reporting improved significantly, for it was important that the government’s position be seen to be strictly accurate, lest readers come to the misapprehension that it was somehow distinct from the truth.
They walked to visit the poorest families in the most dejected neighborhoods, and paid their children a full quarter-krona a day to deliver the papers. Every morning at 4:00, children eleven to fourteen would don parkas and their boots and trudge through the snow to the propaganda office. The money ensured that their families would eat, and teenagers could make a little extra by putting up posters in the evenings after their regular work shifts were done. The children were under strict orders not to gossip about it, which ensured that everyone knew.
When the northern coal bunker exploded and sixteen men were killed, they were ruthless in their examination of the facts. The paper made sure that everyone knew precisely who was to blame.
In short, they were liked, as all good propagandists are. They did their job well.
It was in their fourth year on the job that the end came. Equa Ventura had two sister cities: New Lagos and Frosthold. It was Frosthold that first sighted the equatorial vortex, when an observation balloon high in the atmosphere spotted a storm that stretched across the whole of the horizon.
By coded telegraph, the message arrived in Equa Ventura. It said that temperatures in the storm would drop as low as -100C, and high winds would persist at that temperature for up to a full month. Frosthold had nine days until it was struck. Lagos had twelve. Equa Ventura had fifteen.
The homes of Equa Ventura were well insulated, but at the time, no building could protect its occupants against such temperatures for so long. The only hope of survival was in the underground storage chambers beneath the city. The city’s master engineer calculated that if the chambers were dug out with all speed, and ventilation added so that they could sustain life, they could hold perhaps five thousand people in the most horrifying conditions imaginable. The city’s population was ten times that.
The landstjóra entrusted this information only to his most loyal officers; the men and women he could trust to do what was right for the city, even if it would cost them their own lives. In total, less than a dozen people knew the truth. His five propagandists were among that number.
He summoned them to his office, and explained the situation. If word reached the masses, the population would panic and attempt to rush the shelter, and all would perish. It was better that five thousand survive than none. For the survival of the city, he told them, the truth must be concealed.
This is the basis of all great stories of Equa Ventura. Modern playwrights and storytellers have made great use of the alleged ignorance of the city to its doom. Political commentators have used it as a metaphor, imagining the people oblivious to the coming disaster even as they could see the storm clouds on the horizon.
The landstjóra hoped his five propagandists would keep the secret for fourteen days. They kept it forever.
The oldest propagandist was named Agnar. Hired at the age of forty-four, he was a lifelong bachelor, with weathered skin and a tan that marked him as part of the original settlement expedition. Many thought he had once been a soldier, for his hands were weathered and his manner disciplined. But before he was a propagandist he’d been a bookkeeper. The scar on his face was from shaving, not a near miss from one of the Huns’ rifles.
When the landstjóra had asked him what he had done for his neighborhood, he spoke about his many fine friends. He said that to give a man a ham is to imply he cannot feed his family, and therefore to do him great injustice. But he felt no insult in feeding a guest; there wasn’t a night that Agnar’s home wasn’t filled with his friends from the slums.
He acted like a rich man. Many people assumed he was, for a working man could hardly expect to eat ham more than once per year. But two krona a day did not make a man rich. By night, Agnar entertained his guests, but by day he went to the soup kitchens, and sat side by side with the laboring classes.
To him went the most difficult task: concealing the selection of those who would be placed in the storage chambers. It was considered critical that those five thousand be healthy enough to survive the squalid conditions, fit enough to rebuild the city after the storm, and skilled enough that the city would not lose the trades vital to long-term survival. The selection process was therefore far from random, and if not disguised, the pattern would soon be noticed by the masses.
It went without saying that neither Agnar nor his four friends would be on the list. Their skills were vital prior to the disaster, but would not be needed afterwards.
To hide the movement of a tenth of the city’s total population was impossible, and so the move would have to be hidden in plain sight. The first night after getting the news, Agnar stayed in the office clear through to morning, staring at his blotter and thinking of what he would say. He had not cried or raged when he got the news. He felt nothing. And yet somehow found he couldn’t focus.
“Save on heating oil?” he wrote on the blotter, just past 1:00. “Chambers better insulated?” Then he scratched it out. That might have raised questions as to if the city was short on heating oil.
“Emergency drill?” he wrote just past 3:00. “Acknowledge emergency planning but say it isn’t real.” That too he scratched out. While he thought it might work, the illusion would be easily destroyed if anyone got a hint the emergency was real.
At 5:00, the clock on his desk let out a soft chime, signaling that the children would arrive soon. Agnar lifted himself from his desk as though bearing a great weight and trudged down to the front step. His boots crunched through the soot-stained snow, and for a time he watched the city in silence.
The sun was not yet up, but electrical lights blazed across the city as the workers of the morning shift departed for work. The landstjóra had pledged a lightbulb in every home and a phonograph on every street, and he had delivered.
In the distance, he could hear the steady thumping of the steelworks, whose wheels had not stopped turning since the city was founded. Clouds of smoke and ash rose into the air from the generators and the forges. A shrill whistle marked the end of the third shift at the coal pits. The streets before him were made from steel grating, tossed over the snow.
Suddenly, the grating clattered with the motion of many little feet, and the horde of children appeared. They were always happy to see him. One of the teenage girls had spent her quarter-krona on a bag of diamonds, and sewed them into a necklace with string. Diamonds were a peasant stone, considered more suitable for the manufacture of drills than jewelry, but he told her she’d attract a fine husband one day.
Then he asked her a question: “What do you know about the storage chambers under the city?”
She said that she did not know much, except that that was where old things were kept. Agnar asked if any of the children knew what was kept there.
“Isn’t that where the old vehicles are parked?” one of the boys asked. “From the settlement?” Several others agreed that it was so. It was not. The original settlement vehicles had long since been disassembled for parts. The children did not know that however. Nor did the next group.
And so Agnar rushed back to the printing press. He sent a runner down to the school and labor yards, to get the children excused early to deliver a special edition.
“BY ORDER OF THE LABOR OFFICE: EMERGENCY REPAIR CREWS NEEDED TO STAY WITH VEHICLES DURING STORMS,” the flyer read. “Must be willing to stay in underground shelters with heavy vehicles during any inclement weather events. Responsibilities include use of vehicles and other heavy equipment to repair downed power lines and other damage during blizzards.
“5000 will be recruited. 500 chosen at random each storm to stay in shelter. Pay of quarter-kr/day to be on reserve, plus 5kr if activated during storm. Women paid 3kr per activation to mend cold weather gear. Food, heat, childcare provided for families of men sent on long expeditions.
“All positions MUST be filled. Volunteers gets 5kr enlistment bonus. Conscripts do not!”
It was an expensive commitment, but as Agnar reflected upon it, he realized it was not as if the government would ever have occasion to spend the funds again.
For the next fourteen days, Agnar ran a recruitment campaign for jobs that did not exist. He filled out application forms that nobody would ever read, and asked after credentials that would never be considered.
The masterstroke was the raffle spinner. He made it himself, from chicken wire and an old mechanical eggbeater, and used walnuts with numbers carved into them as balls. His penmanship was exquisite, and so he took great care to make the numbers illegible. He was a naturally efficient man, and so worked to his utmost to make the selection paperwork labyrinthine and incomprehensible.
A man could look directly over the recruitment officer’s shoulder the whole time, and still honestly believe the walnut that rolled out of the spinner mattered in the slightest to which name he read aloud.
He stayed with the recruitment officers on that last day. They were not among the landstjóra’s most trusted men, and so understood that the selection was rigged, but not why. They began at 4 AM, randomly selecting fifty men from the steelworks night shift. By 4:30, they had sprinted to the coal pits, and by 5:00 to the chemical plant.
Each group of 500 was told they were the only 500. Agnar knew that by the time the men realized the oversubscription, it would be too late to spread gossip.
They finished just before sunset, and as the last of their grumbling conscripts rounded up their families and walked towards the shelter entrance, Agnar embraced the two officers with him. He invited them to join him for dinner. Then he emptied the safe inside the labor office, and marched into the slums.
In the city’s twelfth year, when starvation had afflicted the slums and two working men had died of malnourishment at their stations, the landstjóra had issued a decree: let the masses eat soup. He proclaimed that man in the city who worked a full shift was entitled to three bowls of sustaining soup a day, and any grocer found to sell food for a profit before the soup kitchens were fully supplied would be publicly whipped.
The soup kitchens became a fact of life in the following decade. In halls that sat hundreds, the poor crammed shoulder to shoulder, and leaned out of the line to peek if there was hope they might get bread as well.
The aristocratic classes and the learned men of Oxbridge never set foot in one if it could be avoided, and generally treated the locations like they were diseased. But to the peasants, the laborers, and the petty merchants, they were the hub of social life. Peasant girls wore their diamonds in the hope of attracting a smile. Merchant girls wore emeralds, and turned their noses at their inferiors. Men wore their good jackets, in case the landstjóra was eating in their kitchen that evening.
Agnar picked his favorite, the kitchen in the fifth ring by the steelworks, where the high curved ceiling captured so much steam it formed clouds and the tables sat five hundred. There he hired children to run to the grocers, and there to purchase everything that was to be had: ham, rich bread, the good sherry, jam, and caramel where it was available.
For one meal, the cooks of the soup kitchens had the chance to prove they were indeed fine cooks, and the working classes by whose sweat and blood the city had been built got to enjoy it’s finer things. Many of the children had never had jam before.
The storm arrived in the early evening. It rattled the windows and shook the roofs. Frost began to form on the walls. Some of his guests ran home, when they realized the worst of it.
But the party did not truly end until 20:40. That was when the pipes from the steelworks central boiler could take no more, and exploded. The thunderclap echoed across the city, and moments later, the electrical lights went out.
As the guests panicked and fled back to their homes, Agnar made his way to the propaganda building. He pulled the bottle of vodka from the first floor cabinet, and sat in his chair in front of the blotter with the scribbled out ideas.
His body is still there, head slumped forward.
When explorers and historians speak of the spectacular luck of the emergency crews who survived the initial disaster, it is Agnar’s lie they tell.
Hakon was the second most senior of the group. The son of two coal miners, he had a grubbish look about him, with a stooped posture, bad teeth, and a lifelong cough from inhaling the mine dust as a child. He was also barely literate, and the landstjóra nearly rejected him out of hand. But one could not speak with Hakon for a full ten minutes and not realize there was something to him. The man’s hands shook, not with the nerves, but with manic energy. All he did, he did with his entire soul.
When the landstjóra had asked him what he had done for his neighborhood, he spoke about his work in the soup kitchens. He was not an exceptional chef, and like many kitchens, his served only the thinnest soup to meet the needs of the working poor. But he sang when he worked. Sometimes the other chef and patrons sang along, and for just a little while, the working men didn’t resent their need to be there.
When he got the news of the impending disaster, he stalked back to the office. He stared at his desk, and the paper and pens thereon. He curled his hand into a fist. Then he screamed. He smashed the desk drawers in with a foot, threw his past work to the floor, and with a great heave of the shoulders, pitched his desk clear out the window and onto the street.
Then he stalked from the building, grabbing his coat as he brushed past the others.
His task was to conceal the transportation of food into the underground chambers. The city had adequate reserves for five thousand to weather the predicted length of the storm, but moving it would take the collective efforts of hundreds of men. Questions would be asked about why the city stores were being moved, and why the move was occurring with such urgency.
Hakon didn’t plan or plot. While Agnar sat at his blotter and considered the best approach, Hakon stormed across the city. He found his way into watch station in the seventh ring, and told the officer in command to raise a dozen men and come with him. In the second ring, they found the tasteful home of the man who managed the city’s food warehouses. The watch officer kicked it in, and men dragged the administrator’s wife and daughters out into the street.
“A man deserves his dignity!” he proclaimed, with all the conviction of a revolutionary. The look in his eyes demanded attention. Men were afraid to turn away, like they were turning their back on a hungry wolf.
“The landstjóra put his faith in these men! He trusted them to do what was best for the city! And now,” a finger pointed past the administrator and to the gallows, “we see the shape of their treachery!”
Most of the men who would move the food stocks were old. “Social climbers! Men who don’t know what it is to put in your time. To work for a decade to build something for your children!”
Most of the men who would move the food stocks were poor. “The idle rich. The snobs who think that they put the food on your table! Who haven’t eaten soup a day in their lives!”
Equa Ventura had no army, though many of the original settlers were veterans of the great war with the Hun, and spoke of the honor of the army in terms only nostalgia can conjure. “We’ve seen their types before. The quartermasters who ended the war rich, while their men marched through the snow without boots!”
The warehouse administrator was hanged from the neck until dead. The supplies were moved to the storage chambers, for the stated reason that the chambers were a more secure location, where it would be easier for the true patriots of the city to keep an eye on them.
Men worked extra shifts to get it done. They worked for free. And they had their wives dye little little blue patches, to be sewn into the shoulders of their parkas.
Many of the men of Equa Ventura were veterans of the war. They still had their pride. Two days from the disaster, the men of the steelworks’ third shift united with the men of the coal pit’s first and second shift. They put their shovels and wrenches where their rifles had once been, put their right feet forward, and marched up main-street.
Equa Ventura was not a city where a great deal happened. It concerned itself with coal mining, and steel refining, and with the details of greenhouses and machine shops and steam production. It was a city where people looked down at the ground when they walked lest they slip, and focused on the necessities of life. In the more than two decades since its founding, they had never once had a parade.
A modern city dweller would have found the procession more strange than remarkable. Two lines of twenty old men each, marching in step up main street, boots crunching through coal dust speckled snow while the song that a handful of people half-remembered was the city’s anthem followed them. But to the townsfolk, this was an occasion. The strange sound of marching feet on steel drew people for blocks. Some waved, some stared, some laughed.
They marched all the way to the first ring, and to the wealthiest part of town. They picked up the landlords and the professors of Oxbridge, and their wives and their sons and daughters, and without inflicting so much as a scratch, carried them all the way across town and sat them in the nearest soup kitchen.
When they were just outside the kitchen doors, an artist ran out in front of the procession, an easel in hand, and made the outrageous demand that they stop so he could sketch them. The repair crew laughed, but Hakon saw an opportunity.
“Sketch fast!” he called, for the artist in the crowd was known to him, and was moderately famous for being very fast indeed with his pencil. “You’ve got thirty seconds before the anthem is over!”
The artist did indeed sketch quickly, providing a detailed image of the rich being carried along the shoulders of the poor. Hakon turned it into a series of posters, put up all over town: “RICH AND POOR UNITE FOR EQUA VENTURA!” Between the posters and the paper, thirty thousand copies of the image ran.
On the day of the storm, Hakon lingered in the outer rings. He walked through the filthy snow, between the rows of blue brick, and beneath the crystal overhangs meant to trap the heat. He watched the shift change. He even watched Agnar’s party start from across the street. But he never joined the celebration.
Instead, he returned to the office, and sat outside on the second floor balcony. He looked down at the street where his parade had marched so recently, and the gallows in the distance. His posters lined the walk, encouraging people to good spirits. They were still barely visible in the lamplight.
Wrapped head to toe in furs and cloth, he thought he might sit out the storm for awhile, but when it hit, he might as well have been naked. The cold cut through the fabric like a knife, chilling him to the bone. Frost formed on his eyelashes and lids in seconds. He feared that if he shut his eyes, they might freeze that way.
His hands shook as he pulled his revolver from inside his jacket. On the first pull of the trigger, nothing happened, the cold too much for the round to ignite. The second did no better. It was only on the third pull that the weapon discharged. He shot himself through the temples, a man of manic energy to the last.
Historians who speak of the city talk about its egalitarian culture and the honor of its people. They remark upon the fact that the city’s culture was so devoted to civic good, that an official abusing his position even in so trivial a manner as stealing butter was cause for mass outrage.
It was never true. But Hakon would prefer it to be remembered that way. His corpse sits covered in snow, on a balcony that will one day collapse. A revolver lies by its side.
Helena was the only woman in the group. It would not be inaccurate to say she faced opposition for this reason, both from the landstjóra and from her peers.
It was a difficult road she had to walk. Agnar criticized her articles in the paper for being too feminine, and speaking of trivial matters like housework or men mistreating their wives. Hakon criticized them for being too aggressive, and said that when she lectured men on practical matters, she came across as “bitchy.”
Six months into her term as the city’s only female propagandist, Viktor asked her if her articles always had to be so emotional. She asked him who he wanted writing the household column, “a woman or a man with tits?”
He said that at least a man with tits could communicate clearly. She agreed. Then she grabbed him by the collar, and with her other fist, broke his nose.
It was not her first incident of violence. When she first interviewed for the position and the landstjóra asked what she had done for her neighborhood, she spoke of a baker who had diluted his flour with chalk, and of the children who had gotten very sick as a result. The police could prove nothing, but the mob of angry women who beat him within an inch of his life were not so devoted to due process.
Viktor wanted her fired, but the landstjóra’s wife loved her writing, and so she stayed.
She was eight months pregnant, when the news of the storm arrived. The landstjóra offered her a place in the shelter, as it was unfair to ask her to make the same sacrifice the others did. She gave her place to her sister, who already had two children, and a third on the way. When the landstjóra asked if he was sure, she asked if he was too stupid to compare the numbers four and two, or if he merely thought she was.
She cried later, but only after she was sure no one could see.
Her responsibility was to obfuscate the removal of insulation from non-vital buildings throughout the city. Insulation would be required to line the inside of the storage chambers, and the city had not enough in reserve to do the job entirely from stock. Some of the buildings in the city would have to brave the storm naked.
At first, the notion was raised of selecting buildings at random, but Helena rejected the notion firmly. If the meteorologists were wrong, it was possible some insulated structures might survive. Pragmatism therefore demanded that the sacrifice offered be those buildings whose immobile equipment or inhabitants were least valuable.
In practical terms, “pragmatism” therefore demanded the sacrifice of the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh rings. It took twenty years to train an Oxbridge professor or a senior engineer, but any man could lift a shovel. By her logic, the workplaces of the labor class were the least valuable buildings in the city. Their homes were the second-least valuable.
Such a problem required all her means. What she was was a skilled propagandist, and what society insisted on seeing her as was a pregnant woman. And so she wielded both weapons available to her. She invented a disease, the rasp lung, and had the city’s most trusted doctor generate a few cases with an inhaler full of carbolic acid.
According to the town paper, the rasp lung was caused by inhaling fungus and fibers from improperly packed insulation. It was mildly harmful to adults, but could be fatal in children, particularly young children. The city’s poorest and worst-maintained buildings therefore had to be overhauled immediately, for the safety of the youth. Three children had contracted rasp lung just in the last week, and were coughing up blood and bits of lung.
When those three were not persuasive, more cases were arranged. Rasp lung destroyed the ability of the children to speak, which was fortunate for Helena’s purposes. She was careful that the victims also could not read or write.
With the kindling thus prepared, she took to the streets to set the slums afire. She screamed. She glowered. She marched through knee-deep snow to publicly berate landlords for their imagined negligence. She wrote editorials excoriating specific doctors for their failure to detect disease in healthy children. When a crew boss refused to work overtime to get all the buildings done, she stood toe to toe with a 100 kilogram man and poked him in the chest.
With her eyes, she dared him to hit her. He didn’t have the guts. The work got done.
When she was with other mothers, she cried with fear for her child to be. They were not real tears. Her real tears she had shed alone, hiding in the utility closet on the office’s second floor. But they did the job. They made sure that those women pressured their husbands, more effectively than she ever could.
Places of business had to cover the costs of the “dangerous” insulation’s removal. But when the time came to pull the insulation from the soup kitchens, the landstjóra, ever a man of the people, paid for the entire cost of the overhaul. It was his gift to the lower classes.
The evening before the storm hit, the work finally finished. Helena took the rest of her time to herself. Her house did not have a proper stove, and so she moved to the little blue brick building instead. All morning, she worked to add two extra layers of insulation to her office, to fill it with coal and heating oil, and to prepare enough canned or rationed food to last for months. By the early afternoon, she had finished, and lay down on her cot to get some much overdue sleep.
The wailing of the storm woke her. Her eyes flew open, and she listened as the storm rattled the building. A distant thunderclap marked the explosion of the steam pipes, and her offer was plunged into darkness.
She had just finished lighting her oil heater when there was a knock at the door. Viktor, the fourth of their number, was outside.
Eight months ago, at a drunken celebration, they’d found their way into the utility closet and had their way with each other. When he learned the news, he did “the honorable thing,” and got down on one knee to ask her hand in marriage. She refused, as she thought it was better to deal with the stigma of being a single mother than to be married to him for the rest of her life.
But when he asked if he could join her, she said yes. He lay down next to her on her cot, and they embraced for warmth as the chill soaked through the insulation. Frost formed on every surface. The oil fire spluttered, and no amount of fuel they added would keep it alive. It was unable to retain even the minimum level of heat to continue burning.
In the dark, long after Agnar had drunk himself into a stupor and Hakon had shot himself, Helena heard sniffling in the dark, and realized that Viktor was crying. The cold was making her flesh burn. They both knew they didn’t have long.
“Viktor?” she said gently. “Thank you for being here. I wish…” She laughed. “I wish I’d married you.” Then she kissed him, full on the lips.
When storytellers speak of the pathos and tragic ignorance of Equa Ventura, to be ripping the insulation from their homes mere days before the disaster, it is Helena’s lie they are repeating. It is that lie that is her legacy.
But that was not the last lie she ever told. The last was spoken to a man dying of hypothermia. Her body remains beside his still.
Viktor was not a much beloved man. If he smiled and stood up straight many would have considered him quite handsome, but his slouched posture and perpetual glare often ruined the effect. At the age of twenty, he was certain that he was destined to be a failure in life, cheated of any possible accomplishment by the inequities of world around him. He could name the people whose cruelty or incompetence he felt was the cause of his injustice, though the list of names seemed to shift daily. He had never eaten in the soup kitchens, and often said so.
But even his sharpest detractors agreed that his writing was beautiful. He could paint with his words. When the landstjóra asked him what he had done for his neighborhood, he pointed to the eulogy he had written for the death of Jonas, one of the city watchmen. Everyone who knew Jonas hated the man, but the good of the city required that he die a hero. After hearing Viktor’s eulogy read, people who had personally held the man to stop him from beating his wife swore he was a saint.
Viktor spent most of his days confined to the office, where his communications with the outside world would be limited to writing. He preferred it that way. When the news came of the storm, he seemed to take it as a stoic. No shift in expression could be seen.
He did cry, but only after he was sure no one could see.
His responsibility was to see to the telegraph. The city would first lose communication with Frosthold, then with New Lagos, and then with each of the outposts and repair stations along the way. If communications were to go down a station at a time, it would be easy for anyone with a map to see the pattern, and in any case, not all of the telegraph crews could be trusted with the news.
The landstjóra wanted Viktor to generate a plausible excuse for the telegraph lines being down for the full period until the storm, but Viktor informed him that was: “The most pig-headed diarrheic shit of a plan I’ve ever heard. You think people are going to see the giant storm on the horizon and not think to wonder what happened to their cousins in Lagos? The ones they haven’t heard from in nigh-on two weeks?”
No, he explained, if this lie was to be told, it would be told right. Communications with Frosthold and New Lagos must continue, not only to the moment of impact, but after the storms enveloped both cities.
“After all”—he gestured as he spoke—“a man who gets a telegram from his sister in Lagos saying that everything is fine knows that the storm must not be that bad.”
And so it was arranged that nine of the twelve telegraph cables would snap, that non-emergency traffic would be rationed “until repairs are complete”, and that the price of a private telegram would rise to a staggering twentieth-kr per letter. That provided an excuse for all messages to be exceedingly brief, and for some messages to be delayed in sending.
Viktor then had a telegraph line routed into the propaganda office. He sat at his desk, with an enormous box of carbon-copied messages beside him, sorted by sender and recipient. The population did not know that the office kept copies of all their messages on file.
Plucking files from the box at random, he began to tap away on the telegraph. One file showed an exchange between a local warehouser and a businessman in Frosthold, concerned with the import of spices from the north. It took only a moment to grasp the character of the dead man’s writing.
“STORM RATIONS UNGOOD STOP,” he tapped away. “PEOPLE WNT REAL MEAT STOP DEMD SALT AND MEAT SAUCE AFT STORM VRY HIGH STOP HAHA STOP.”
The man always ended his telegrams with “HAHA.” Viktor didn’t know why, nor did he care. He tossed the file back into the box and drew out another. The new file was was a series of exchanges between a woman and her sister in New Lagos. In the latest telegram, sent just that morning, the woman begged her sister for a loan, saying she didn’t have two krona to rub together.
Reading quickly through their past words, Viktor quickly garnered that the sister in New Lagos was the more successful of the two, and not ashamed to rub that in her younger sibling’s face. A sneer appeared on his face.
“BUT HAVE MONEY FOR TELEGRAM STOP VERY STRANGE STOP.” That would do. He put the file away and drew another.
For two weeks he continued that way, sleeping and eating at his desk, drinking heavily and smoking like a coal fire, reading people’s past messages and working away on the telegraph. He pretended to be grandparents asking after their grandchildren, friends swapping in-jokes that nobody else could know, and businessman trying to go about the details of their trade in light of a “WORSE THAN AVERG BUT OKAY” blizzard.
Two days before the disaster, just past 15:00, his telegraph began to tap without the proper prelude for a telegram. Quickly, Viktor jotted down the message: “EQUA VENTURA OPERATOR STATION THREE CALLING NEW LAGOS OPERATOR STATION FIVE REPLY STOP.”
He checked his table. According to his paperwork, the current station three shift operator was named Aron, and he was on the list of trusted officers. Aron should in theory have known that New Lagos Station Five no longer existed.
“STATION FIVE HERE IS THIS ARON STOP”
“THIS IS JON STOP AZI IS THAT YOU STOP”
Viktor had to check his records. He flipped through the files as quickly as he could. The telegraph key continued to clatter during the delay: “REPLY STOP”
He found a file. Azi was the name of one of the New Lagos telegraph operators. Spilling the file open across his desk, it hurriedly leafed through the papers. He tapped with his other hand. “AZI HERE STOP WIND VERY BAD STOP.”
“ARE YOU OKAY STOP.”
The records didn’t have the information Viktor needed. There were transcriptions of interactions between Azi and other station operators, but none between Azi and Jon. He didn’t know how these two spoke with each other. “YES WE ARE OKAY STOP.”
The reply came instantly: “WHATS WRONG”
Viktor bit his lip. He waited for the STOP signal, but it never came. He kept his finger off the key for a moment, and flipped through the file. There were records of Azi speaking with every other operator, but it seemed that Azi and Jon never spoke. There wasn’t a single transcription of their conversations.
“WHATS WRONG,” the telegraph typed, “ARE YOU THERE.” There was a noticeable pause before it added, “STOP.”
Viktor considered the matter carefully. He lifted his finger to the switch.
“ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT ME STOP,” he typed.
“YES STOP.”
“I SHOULD VISIT YOU SOON STOP.”
“YOU CANT STOP.”
Viktor laughed: “BECAUSE ITS A CRIME QUESTIONMARK STOP.”
For more than fifteen full seconds, the telegraph line sat dead. Eventually, Viktor typed out one more message: “I LOVE YOU STOP.”
When he lifted his finger from the key, it tapped of its own accord: “I LOVE YOU TOO.”
Homosexuality was illegal in Equa Ventura, and a crime which Viktor found personally repugnant, but his position demanded a certain degree of ethical flexibility. And so with his best efforts as a writer, and the assistance of some deviant literature the watch had seized, he spent the next half hour flirting with a telegraph operator across town.
It was a great effort, but when people came to the telegraph office concerned about their relatives, the operator assured them that the stations in New Lagos and Frosthold were fine. It was only the lines that were down.
Viktor remained at his post until the telegraph office closed for the evening on the last day. He didn’t join Angar’s party, though he did drink heavily. He pulled a revolver out of his desk drawer, but couldn’t do anything except stare at the barrel. He was still looking at it when a gunshot rang out from the balcony.
Eventually the steam pipes exploded and the electrical lights went out. In the dark, he could see there was light under Helena’s door. He knocked, and asked to stay with her.
Curled up with Helena by the dying oil fire, he put his hand on her belly, and in that moment, wished more than anything that he’d been an actual husband to her, instead of a drunken night of regret. He told her her loved her.
She didn’t believe him. But the telegraph operator’s diary now sits framed in a museum, the entire exchange captured word for word. Its story has spread far, a tragic tale of love at the end of the world.
Tomas was the youngest of the five. When he was hired, he was only fourteen. When the landstjóra asked him how he served his neighborhood, he could only answer that he hoped to serve his neighborhood by working a good job and helping his mother pay rent.
So he ran errands. He operated the printing press. He sketched drafts of propaganda posters. He manned the building when no one else was around.
His father was a highly skilled engineer, and so was on the list to enter the underground shelters. By extension, so were his mother, sisters, and younger brothers. He declined his spot.
He was the only one who cried where the others could see, but their insistences did not change his answer. Family spots were for children. He was a young man.
For those fourteen days, he continued to do as he had. He helped Agnar conduct interviews and ran messages to the different departments. He printed Hakon’s posters. He helped generate more cases of the rasp lung when Helena needed to be seen as having a strong alibi. He brought Viktor food and changes of clothes.
As evening fell, he walked his family to the shelter entrance, and hugged them each goodbye. They knew nothing, and would not be told until after the doors were shut. They teased him for being emotional about his first night away from the family on his own.
After the doors to the shelter were shut and locked, Tomas ran back to the office. He met Hakon on the way to the balcony and they shook hands, lamenting that there was not enough time. Then Tomas gathered a large bag full of posters, along with a brush and a wrench, and he sprinted back to the shelter entrance.
Through the streets he ran. Under the overhangs of the ruined buildings. Through the slums and the soup kitchens and the merchant quarter and the industrial yards. The snow was black with soot. In the distance, he could see the coal fields, and the steelworks, and the pipeline that brought heating oil. The last of the people were ducking inside, ready for a warm night with family waiting out the blizzard. Only a few beggars remained, too outcast from society to find shelter in even the poorhouse.
When he reached the first ring and the street directly outside the shelter entrance, he took the wrench in hand and opened the steam valve outside one of the Oxbridge buildings. The chill in the air made water as good as glue. He could dab the corners of a poster with the hot and damp brush, and soon it would be stuck fast to the wall behind it.
From his back, he unslung the bag full of posters. Four years of propaganda, showing the city as it never was.
He had posters that showed shining towers, without a trace of coal soot to be seen; posters that showed a proud and industrious people; posters that showed worker and lord hand in hand working to build a better future; posters that sang the praise of the landstjóra and his officers.
It grew colder as Tomas worked. His hands shook. He squinted into the frost around his eyes, and struggled to hold the brush. Eventually, he heard the distant thunder of the steam-pipes exploding. The repetitive thumping of the steelworks came to a stop, and one by one, the electrical lights went out. The city was plunged into darkness.
From his bag, Tomas pulled forth a welder’s torch. It took several strikes to light it, but in the end, it did produce a sickly blue flame. He scorched a message into the wood of a government building directly opposite the shelter entrance, arranged it such that when the doors finally opened and they emerged, they would see all the posters, and read his words.
“FROM THE PAST, TO THE FUTURE. GOOD LUCK. MAKE IT ALL WORTH IT.”
Tomas tried to find his way back to the office, but became disoriented in the dark, and died in a gutter. He is the only one of the five whose final resting place is not the little blue brick building in the third ring.
The meteorologists of Frosthold were wrong. The equatorial vortex was not a freak anomaly, but a symptom of a permanent realignment of the planet’s atmosphere. The winds and the cold would last not for a month, but for more than fifty years.
In the end, all those in the shelter perished as well. The door never opened.
Today, very little is known of the real Equa Ventura, but the story of its last days is told far and wide. With images from beautiful posters, with love letters from dead men, with tales of impossible ignorance, with heroic marches and swells, and with the pathos of engineers who won the lottery, only to find that winners and losers would perish alike.
It’s just as well. If people knew the true story, they would only be disappointed.
Its final hour is perfectly preserved in the ice. Clocks sit at 19:30, their hands never to move again. Homes, unlooted and unburnt, lie waiting for archaeologists to shatter their brittle locks. Workers lie at their stations and children lie in their beds.
Even in the modern era, expeditions past the icewall are undertaken at great peril, and so few explorers have seen the city’s remains. But those who have seen it and returned tell grand tales. They speak of its shining towers and its heroic people, of its science and industry and sudden demise. They speak of its leader, the noble landstjóra Olfaur, last to bear the title. Several plays have been written about him.
But none of those explorers speak of the little building in the city’s third ring, with the blue brick front and the drooping shutters. The door is not locked, but none of them have bothered to check. The building’s only adornment is a small sign to the door’s left, preserved under a dusting of white frost.
“Office of Propaganda.”
No archaeologist knows it, but it is the five people who once worked in that building who penned the stories the world now tells. Four of them are entombed inside it, sitting at the work desks and printing presses from which they wrote the greatest fiction of their lives.
The last days of Equa Ventura.
The names of the five propagandists were Agnar, Hakon, Helena, Viktor, and Tomas. They met for the first time four years before to the end.
In the middle of Equa Ventura’s twenty-second summer, when the temperature was barely below freezing and housewifes cut the wax seals from their windows, a child died. At the age of eight, she worked in the chemical plant, scrubbing the pipes that were too large for an adult to crawl into. The foreman forgot to check that the pipes were clear before restoring power. Her death was neither quick nor painless.
The slums rose in uproar. A mob of a dozen people gathered outside the foreman’s house and threw rocks at his wife. A larger crowd gathered outside the labor office. The landstjóra had ordered many fourteen hour shifts in the month before the disaster. The people, already disgruntled by the long hours, felt that the cause of the disaster was obvious—a man exhausted and overworked had made a mistake, and a child had paid the price.
In reality, the man had slept for nine hours the night before, and the blame lay with his personal resistance to following proper safety procedure. But the mob had already made up its mind before the facts were known, and the landstjóra was ultimately forced to bow to their wishes and reduce hours in the steelworks and chemical plant.
The incident frustrated him. An angry mob could spread news around the city in minutes, but the government’s position often took days to materialize. He decided that it was important for the government’s side of events to be more clearly heard.
Nobody knew what it took to be a good propagandist. The settlement expedition had no such persons in its number, nor great familiarity with the craft. But it seemed that the position would best be staffed by a lettered man, and so the landstjóra took out a small advertisement in Equa Ventura’s only newspaper.
“Seeking storyteller for employment as government functionary. Must be literate, single, and civic-minded. Pay 2kr/day. Apply at labor office.”
After a week, he hired four men and one woman. At first they were quartered over the labor office, drawing posters by hand and listening to the foremen allocate shifts below. When the town paper later went out of business, they asked if they might have its printing press and the use of its offices. There was no money for such a thing, but the creditor who had taken the paper’s assets -- also the owner of the little brick building in the third ring -- was a patriot. He was happy to see them go to good use.
And so, from the little blue brick building in the third ring, the five did their work.
They restarted the paper, and published it every day instead of twice a week. The quality of the reporting improved significantly, for it was important that the government’s position be seen to be strictly accurate, lest readers come to the misapprehension that it was somehow distinct from the truth.
They walked to visit the poorest families in the most dejected neighborhoods, and paid their children a full quarter-krona a day to deliver the papers. Every morning at 4:00, children eleven to fourteen would don parkas and their boots and trudge through the snow to the propaganda office. The money ensured that their families would eat, and teenagers could make a little extra by putting up posters in the evenings after their regular work shifts were done. The children were under strict orders not to gossip about it, which ensured that everyone knew.
When the northern coal bunker exploded and sixteen men were killed, they were ruthless in their examination of the facts. The paper made sure that everyone knew precisely who was to blame.
In short, they were liked, as all good propagandists are. They did their job well.
It was in their fourth year on the job that the end came. Equa Ventura had two sister cities: New Lagos and Frosthold. It was Frosthold that first sighted the equatorial vortex, when an observation balloon high in the atmosphere spotted a storm that stretched across the whole of the horizon.
By coded telegraph, the message arrived in Equa Ventura. It said that temperatures in the storm would drop as low as -100C, and high winds would persist at that temperature for up to a full month. Frosthold had nine days until it was struck. Lagos had twelve. Equa Ventura had fifteen.
The homes of Equa Ventura were well insulated, but at the time, no building could protect its occupants against such temperatures for so long. The only hope of survival was in the underground storage chambers beneath the city. The city’s master engineer calculated that if the chambers were dug out with all speed, and ventilation added so that they could sustain life, they could hold perhaps five thousand people in the most horrifying conditions imaginable. The city’s population was ten times that.
The landstjóra entrusted this information only to his most loyal officers; the men and women he could trust to do what was right for the city, even if it would cost them their own lives. In total, less than a dozen people knew the truth. His five propagandists were among that number.
He summoned them to his office, and explained the situation. If word reached the masses, the population would panic and attempt to rush the shelter, and all would perish. It was better that five thousand survive than none. For the survival of the city, he told them, the truth must be concealed.
This is the basis of all great stories of Equa Ventura. Modern playwrights and storytellers have made great use of the alleged ignorance of the city to its doom. Political commentators have used it as a metaphor, imagining the people oblivious to the coming disaster even as they could see the storm clouds on the horizon.
The landstjóra hoped his five propagandists would keep the secret for fourteen days. They kept it forever.
The oldest propagandist was named Agnar. Hired at the age of forty-four, he was a lifelong bachelor, with weathered skin and a tan that marked him as part of the original settlement expedition. Many thought he had once been a soldier, for his hands were weathered and his manner disciplined. But before he was a propagandist he’d been a bookkeeper. The scar on his face was from shaving, not a near miss from one of the Huns’ rifles.
When the landstjóra had asked him what he had done for his neighborhood, he spoke about his many fine friends. He said that to give a man a ham is to imply he cannot feed his family, and therefore to do him great injustice. But he felt no insult in feeding a guest; there wasn’t a night that Agnar’s home wasn’t filled with his friends from the slums.
He acted like a rich man. Many people assumed he was, for a working man could hardly expect to eat ham more than once per year. But two krona a day did not make a man rich. By night, Agnar entertained his guests, but by day he went to the soup kitchens, and sat side by side with the laboring classes.
To him went the most difficult task: concealing the selection of those who would be placed in the storage chambers. It was considered critical that those five thousand be healthy enough to survive the squalid conditions, fit enough to rebuild the city after the storm, and skilled enough that the city would not lose the trades vital to long-term survival. The selection process was therefore far from random, and if not disguised, the pattern would soon be noticed by the masses.
It went without saying that neither Agnar nor his four friends would be on the list. Their skills were vital prior to the disaster, but would not be needed afterwards.
To hide the movement of a tenth of the city’s total population was impossible, and so the move would have to be hidden in plain sight. The first night after getting the news, Agnar stayed in the office clear through to morning, staring at his blotter and thinking of what he would say. He had not cried or raged when he got the news. He felt nothing. And yet somehow found he couldn’t focus.
“Save on heating oil?” he wrote on the blotter, just past 1:00. “Chambers better insulated?” Then he scratched it out. That might have raised questions as to if the city was short on heating oil.
“Emergency drill?” he wrote just past 3:00. “Acknowledge emergency planning but say it isn’t real.” That too he scratched out. While he thought it might work, the illusion would be easily destroyed if anyone got a hint the emergency was real.
At 5:00, the clock on his desk let out a soft chime, signaling that the children would arrive soon. Agnar lifted himself from his desk as though bearing a great weight and trudged down to the front step. His boots crunched through the soot-stained snow, and for a time he watched the city in silence.
The sun was not yet up, but electrical lights blazed across the city as the workers of the morning shift departed for work. The landstjóra had pledged a lightbulb in every home and a phonograph on every street, and he had delivered.
In the distance, he could hear the steady thumping of the steelworks, whose wheels had not stopped turning since the city was founded. Clouds of smoke and ash rose into the air from the generators and the forges. A shrill whistle marked the end of the third shift at the coal pits. The streets before him were made from steel grating, tossed over the snow.
Suddenly, the grating clattered with the motion of many little feet, and the horde of children appeared. They were always happy to see him. One of the teenage girls had spent her quarter-krona on a bag of diamonds, and sewed them into a necklace with string. Diamonds were a peasant stone, considered more suitable for the manufacture of drills than jewelry, but he told her she’d attract a fine husband one day.
Then he asked her a question: “What do you know about the storage chambers under the city?”
She said that she did not know much, except that that was where old things were kept. Agnar asked if any of the children knew what was kept there.
“Isn’t that where the old vehicles are parked?” one of the boys asked. “From the settlement?” Several others agreed that it was so. It was not. The original settlement vehicles had long since been disassembled for parts. The children did not know that however. Nor did the next group.
And so Agnar rushed back to the printing press. He sent a runner down to the school and labor yards, to get the children excused early to deliver a special edition.
“BY ORDER OF THE LABOR OFFICE: EMERGENCY REPAIR CREWS NEEDED TO STAY WITH VEHICLES DURING STORMS,” the flyer read. “Must be willing to stay in underground shelters with heavy vehicles during any inclement weather events. Responsibilities include use of vehicles and other heavy equipment to repair downed power lines and other damage during blizzards.
“5000 will be recruited. 500 chosen at random each storm to stay in shelter. Pay of quarter-kr/day to be on reserve, plus 5kr if activated during storm. Women paid 3kr per activation to mend cold weather gear. Food, heat, childcare provided for families of men sent on long expeditions.
“All positions MUST be filled. Volunteers gets 5kr enlistment bonus. Conscripts do not!”
It was an expensive commitment, but as Agnar reflected upon it, he realized it was not as if the government would ever have occasion to spend the funds again.
For the next fourteen days, Agnar ran a recruitment campaign for jobs that did not exist. He filled out application forms that nobody would ever read, and asked after credentials that would never be considered.
The masterstroke was the raffle spinner. He made it himself, from chicken wire and an old mechanical eggbeater, and used walnuts with numbers carved into them as balls. His penmanship was exquisite, and so he took great care to make the numbers illegible. He was a naturally efficient man, and so worked to his utmost to make the selection paperwork labyrinthine and incomprehensible.
A man could look directly over the recruitment officer’s shoulder the whole time, and still honestly believe the walnut that rolled out of the spinner mattered in the slightest to which name he read aloud.
He stayed with the recruitment officers on that last day. They were not among the landstjóra’s most trusted men, and so understood that the selection was rigged, but not why. They began at 4 AM, randomly selecting fifty men from the steelworks night shift. By 4:30, they had sprinted to the coal pits, and by 5:00 to the chemical plant.
Each group of 500 was told they were the only 500. Agnar knew that by the time the men realized the oversubscription, it would be too late to spread gossip.
They finished just before sunset, and as the last of their grumbling conscripts rounded up their families and walked towards the shelter entrance, Agnar embraced the two officers with him. He invited them to join him for dinner. Then he emptied the safe inside the labor office, and marched into the slums.
In the city’s twelfth year, when starvation had afflicted the slums and two working men had died of malnourishment at their stations, the landstjóra had issued a decree: let the masses eat soup. He proclaimed that man in the city who worked a full shift was entitled to three bowls of sustaining soup a day, and any grocer found to sell food for a profit before the soup kitchens were fully supplied would be publicly whipped.
The soup kitchens became a fact of life in the following decade. In halls that sat hundreds, the poor crammed shoulder to shoulder, and leaned out of the line to peek if there was hope they might get bread as well.
The aristocratic classes and the learned men of Oxbridge never set foot in one if it could be avoided, and generally treated the locations like they were diseased. But to the peasants, the laborers, and the petty merchants, they were the hub of social life. Peasant girls wore their diamonds in the hope of attracting a smile. Merchant girls wore emeralds, and turned their noses at their inferiors. Men wore their good jackets, in case the landstjóra was eating in their kitchen that evening.
Agnar picked his favorite, the kitchen in the fifth ring by the steelworks, where the high curved ceiling captured so much steam it formed clouds and the tables sat five hundred. There he hired children to run to the grocers, and there to purchase everything that was to be had: ham, rich bread, the good sherry, jam, and caramel where it was available.
For one meal, the cooks of the soup kitchens had the chance to prove they were indeed fine cooks, and the working classes by whose sweat and blood the city had been built got to enjoy it’s finer things. Many of the children had never had jam before.
The storm arrived in the early evening. It rattled the windows and shook the roofs. Frost began to form on the walls. Some of his guests ran home, when they realized the worst of it.
But the party did not truly end until 20:40. That was when the pipes from the steelworks central boiler could take no more, and exploded. The thunderclap echoed across the city, and moments later, the electrical lights went out.
As the guests panicked and fled back to their homes, Agnar made his way to the propaganda building. He pulled the bottle of vodka from the first floor cabinet, and sat in his chair in front of the blotter with the scribbled out ideas.
His body is still there, head slumped forward.
When explorers and historians speak of the spectacular luck of the emergency crews who survived the initial disaster, it is Agnar’s lie they tell.
Hakon was the second most senior of the group. The son of two coal miners, he had a grubbish look about him, with a stooped posture, bad teeth, and a lifelong cough from inhaling the mine dust as a child. He was also barely literate, and the landstjóra nearly rejected him out of hand. But one could not speak with Hakon for a full ten minutes and not realize there was something to him. The man’s hands shook, not with the nerves, but with manic energy. All he did, he did with his entire soul.
When the landstjóra had asked him what he had done for his neighborhood, he spoke about his work in the soup kitchens. He was not an exceptional chef, and like many kitchens, his served only the thinnest soup to meet the needs of the working poor. But he sang when he worked. Sometimes the other chef and patrons sang along, and for just a little while, the working men didn’t resent their need to be there.
When he got the news of the impending disaster, he stalked back to the office. He stared at his desk, and the paper and pens thereon. He curled his hand into a fist. Then he screamed. He smashed the desk drawers in with a foot, threw his past work to the floor, and with a great heave of the shoulders, pitched his desk clear out the window and onto the street.
Then he stalked from the building, grabbing his coat as he brushed past the others.
His task was to conceal the transportation of food into the underground chambers. The city had adequate reserves for five thousand to weather the predicted length of the storm, but moving it would take the collective efforts of hundreds of men. Questions would be asked about why the city stores were being moved, and why the move was occurring with such urgency.
Hakon didn’t plan or plot. While Agnar sat at his blotter and considered the best approach, Hakon stormed across the city. He found his way into watch station in the seventh ring, and told the officer in command to raise a dozen men and come with him. In the second ring, they found the tasteful home of the man who managed the city’s food warehouses. The watch officer kicked it in, and men dragged the administrator’s wife and daughters out into the street.
“A man deserves his dignity!” he proclaimed, with all the conviction of a revolutionary. The look in his eyes demanded attention. Men were afraid to turn away, like they were turning their back on a hungry wolf.
“The landstjóra put his faith in these men! He trusted them to do what was best for the city! And now,” a finger pointed past the administrator and to the gallows, “we see the shape of their treachery!”
Most of the men who would move the food stocks were old. “Social climbers! Men who don’t know what it is to put in your time. To work for a decade to build something for your children!”
Most of the men who would move the food stocks were poor. “The idle rich. The snobs who think that they put the food on your table! Who haven’t eaten soup a day in their lives!”
Equa Ventura had no army, though many of the original settlers were veterans of the great war with the Hun, and spoke of the honor of the army in terms only nostalgia can conjure. “We’ve seen their types before. The quartermasters who ended the war rich, while their men marched through the snow without boots!”
The warehouse administrator was hanged from the neck until dead. The supplies were moved to the storage chambers, for the stated reason that the chambers were a more secure location, where it would be easier for the true patriots of the city to keep an eye on them.
Men worked extra shifts to get it done. They worked for free. And they had their wives dye little little blue patches, to be sewn into the shoulders of their parkas.
Many of the men of Equa Ventura were veterans of the war. They still had their pride. Two days from the disaster, the men of the steelworks’ third shift united with the men of the coal pit’s first and second shift. They put their shovels and wrenches where their rifles had once been, put their right feet forward, and marched up main-street.
Equa Ventura was not a city where a great deal happened. It concerned itself with coal mining, and steel refining, and with the details of greenhouses and machine shops and steam production. It was a city where people looked down at the ground when they walked lest they slip, and focused on the necessities of life. In the more than two decades since its founding, they had never once had a parade.
A modern city dweller would have found the procession more strange than remarkable. Two lines of twenty old men each, marching in step up main street, boots crunching through coal dust speckled snow while the song that a handful of people half-remembered was the city’s anthem followed them. But to the townsfolk, this was an occasion. The strange sound of marching feet on steel drew people for blocks. Some waved, some stared, some laughed.
They marched all the way to the first ring, and to the wealthiest part of town. They picked up the landlords and the professors of Oxbridge, and their wives and their sons and daughters, and without inflicting so much as a scratch, carried them all the way across town and sat them in the nearest soup kitchen.
When they were just outside the kitchen doors, an artist ran out in front of the procession, an easel in hand, and made the outrageous demand that they stop so he could sketch them. The repair crew laughed, but Hakon saw an opportunity.
“Sketch fast!” he called, for the artist in the crowd was known to him, and was moderately famous for being very fast indeed with his pencil. “You’ve got thirty seconds before the anthem is over!”
The artist did indeed sketch quickly, providing a detailed image of the rich being carried along the shoulders of the poor. Hakon turned it into a series of posters, put up all over town: “RICH AND POOR UNITE FOR EQUA VENTURA!” Between the posters and the paper, thirty thousand copies of the image ran.
On the day of the storm, Hakon lingered in the outer rings. He walked through the filthy snow, between the rows of blue brick, and beneath the crystal overhangs meant to trap the heat. He watched the shift change. He even watched Agnar’s party start from across the street. But he never joined the celebration.
Instead, he returned to the office, and sat outside on the second floor balcony. He looked down at the street where his parade had marched so recently, and the gallows in the distance. His posters lined the walk, encouraging people to good spirits. They were still barely visible in the lamplight.
Wrapped head to toe in furs and cloth, he thought he might sit out the storm for awhile, but when it hit, he might as well have been naked. The cold cut through the fabric like a knife, chilling him to the bone. Frost formed on his eyelashes and lids in seconds. He feared that if he shut his eyes, they might freeze that way.
His hands shook as he pulled his revolver from inside his jacket. On the first pull of the trigger, nothing happened, the cold too much for the round to ignite. The second did no better. It was only on the third pull that the weapon discharged. He shot himself through the temples, a man of manic energy to the last.
Historians who speak of the city talk about its egalitarian culture and the honor of its people. They remark upon the fact that the city’s culture was so devoted to civic good, that an official abusing his position even in so trivial a manner as stealing butter was cause for mass outrage.
It was never true. But Hakon would prefer it to be remembered that way. His corpse sits covered in snow, on a balcony that will one day collapse. A revolver lies by its side.
Helena was the only woman in the group. It would not be inaccurate to say she faced opposition for this reason, both from the landstjóra and from her peers.
It was a difficult road she had to walk. Agnar criticized her articles in the paper for being too feminine, and speaking of trivial matters like housework or men mistreating their wives. Hakon criticized them for being too aggressive, and said that when she lectured men on practical matters, she came across as “bitchy.”
Six months into her term as the city’s only female propagandist, Viktor asked her if her articles always had to be so emotional. She asked him who he wanted writing the household column, “a woman or a man with tits?”
He said that at least a man with tits could communicate clearly. She agreed. Then she grabbed him by the collar, and with her other fist, broke his nose.
It was not her first incident of violence. When she first interviewed for the position and the landstjóra asked what she had done for her neighborhood, she spoke of a baker who had diluted his flour with chalk, and of the children who had gotten very sick as a result. The police could prove nothing, but the mob of angry women who beat him within an inch of his life were not so devoted to due process.
Viktor wanted her fired, but the landstjóra’s wife loved her writing, and so she stayed.
She was eight months pregnant, when the news of the storm arrived. The landstjóra offered her a place in the shelter, as it was unfair to ask her to make the same sacrifice the others did. She gave her place to her sister, who already had two children, and a third on the way. When the landstjóra asked if he was sure, she asked if he was too stupid to compare the numbers four and two, or if he merely thought she was.
She cried later, but only after she was sure no one could see.
Her responsibility was to obfuscate the removal of insulation from non-vital buildings throughout the city. Insulation would be required to line the inside of the storage chambers, and the city had not enough in reserve to do the job entirely from stock. Some of the buildings in the city would have to brave the storm naked.
At first, the notion was raised of selecting buildings at random, but Helena rejected the notion firmly. If the meteorologists were wrong, it was possible some insulated structures might survive. Pragmatism therefore demanded that the sacrifice offered be those buildings whose immobile equipment or inhabitants were least valuable.
In practical terms, “pragmatism” therefore demanded the sacrifice of the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh rings. It took twenty years to train an Oxbridge professor or a senior engineer, but any man could lift a shovel. By her logic, the workplaces of the labor class were the least valuable buildings in the city. Their homes were the second-least valuable.
Such a problem required all her means. What she was was a skilled propagandist, and what society insisted on seeing her as was a pregnant woman. And so she wielded both weapons available to her. She invented a disease, the rasp lung, and had the city’s most trusted doctor generate a few cases with an inhaler full of carbolic acid.
According to the town paper, the rasp lung was caused by inhaling fungus and fibers from improperly packed insulation. It was mildly harmful to adults, but could be fatal in children, particularly young children. The city’s poorest and worst-maintained buildings therefore had to be overhauled immediately, for the safety of the youth. Three children had contracted rasp lung just in the last week, and were coughing up blood and bits of lung.
When those three were not persuasive, more cases were arranged. Rasp lung destroyed the ability of the children to speak, which was fortunate for Helena’s purposes. She was careful that the victims also could not read or write.
With the kindling thus prepared, she took to the streets to set the slums afire. She screamed. She glowered. She marched through knee-deep snow to publicly berate landlords for their imagined negligence. She wrote editorials excoriating specific doctors for their failure to detect disease in healthy children. When a crew boss refused to work overtime to get all the buildings done, she stood toe to toe with a 100 kilogram man and poked him in the chest.
With her eyes, she dared him to hit her. He didn’t have the guts. The work got done.
When she was with other mothers, she cried with fear for her child to be. They were not real tears. Her real tears she had shed alone, hiding in the utility closet on the office’s second floor. But they did the job. They made sure that those women pressured their husbands, more effectively than she ever could.
Places of business had to cover the costs of the “dangerous” insulation’s removal. But when the time came to pull the insulation from the soup kitchens, the landstjóra, ever a man of the people, paid for the entire cost of the overhaul. It was his gift to the lower classes.
The evening before the storm hit, the work finally finished. Helena took the rest of her time to herself. Her house did not have a proper stove, and so she moved to the little blue brick building instead. All morning, she worked to add two extra layers of insulation to her office, to fill it with coal and heating oil, and to prepare enough canned or rationed food to last for months. By the early afternoon, she had finished, and lay down on her cot to get some much overdue sleep.
The wailing of the storm woke her. Her eyes flew open, and she listened as the storm rattled the building. A distant thunderclap marked the explosion of the steam pipes, and her offer was plunged into darkness.
She had just finished lighting her oil heater when there was a knock at the door. Viktor, the fourth of their number, was outside.
Eight months ago, at a drunken celebration, they’d found their way into the utility closet and had their way with each other. When he learned the news, he did “the honorable thing,” and got down on one knee to ask her hand in marriage. She refused, as she thought it was better to deal with the stigma of being a single mother than to be married to him for the rest of her life.
But when he asked if he could join her, she said yes. He lay down next to her on her cot, and they embraced for warmth as the chill soaked through the insulation. Frost formed on every surface. The oil fire spluttered, and no amount of fuel they added would keep it alive. It was unable to retain even the minimum level of heat to continue burning.
In the dark, long after Agnar had drunk himself into a stupor and Hakon had shot himself, Helena heard sniffling in the dark, and realized that Viktor was crying. The cold was making her flesh burn. They both knew they didn’t have long.
“Viktor?” she said gently. “Thank you for being here. I wish…” She laughed. “I wish I’d married you.” Then she kissed him, full on the lips.
When storytellers speak of the pathos and tragic ignorance of Equa Ventura, to be ripping the insulation from their homes mere days before the disaster, it is Helena’s lie they are repeating. It is that lie that is her legacy.
But that was not the last lie she ever told. The last was spoken to a man dying of hypothermia. Her body remains beside his still.
Viktor was not a much beloved man. If he smiled and stood up straight many would have considered him quite handsome, but his slouched posture and perpetual glare often ruined the effect. At the age of twenty, he was certain that he was destined to be a failure in life, cheated of any possible accomplishment by the inequities of world around him. He could name the people whose cruelty or incompetence he felt was the cause of his injustice, though the list of names seemed to shift daily. He had never eaten in the soup kitchens, and often said so.
But even his sharpest detractors agreed that his writing was beautiful. He could paint with his words. When the landstjóra asked him what he had done for his neighborhood, he pointed to the eulogy he had written for the death of Jonas, one of the city watchmen. Everyone who knew Jonas hated the man, but the good of the city required that he die a hero. After hearing Viktor’s eulogy read, people who had personally held the man to stop him from beating his wife swore he was a saint.
Viktor spent most of his days confined to the office, where his communications with the outside world would be limited to writing. He preferred it that way. When the news came of the storm, he seemed to take it as a stoic. No shift in expression could be seen.
He did cry, but only after he was sure no one could see.
His responsibility was to see to the telegraph. The city would first lose communication with Frosthold, then with New Lagos, and then with each of the outposts and repair stations along the way. If communications were to go down a station at a time, it would be easy for anyone with a map to see the pattern, and in any case, not all of the telegraph crews could be trusted with the news.
The landstjóra wanted Viktor to generate a plausible excuse for the telegraph lines being down for the full period until the storm, but Viktor informed him that was: “The most pig-headed diarrheic shit of a plan I’ve ever heard. You think people are going to see the giant storm on the horizon and not think to wonder what happened to their cousins in Lagos? The ones they haven’t heard from in nigh-on two weeks?”
No, he explained, if this lie was to be told, it would be told right. Communications with Frosthold and New Lagos must continue, not only to the moment of impact, but after the storms enveloped both cities.
“After all”—he gestured as he spoke—“a man who gets a telegram from his sister in Lagos saying that everything is fine knows that the storm must not be that bad.”
And so it was arranged that nine of the twelve telegraph cables would snap, that non-emergency traffic would be rationed “until repairs are complete”, and that the price of a private telegram would rise to a staggering twentieth-kr per letter. That provided an excuse for all messages to be exceedingly brief, and for some messages to be delayed in sending.
Viktor then had a telegraph line routed into the propaganda office. He sat at his desk, with an enormous box of carbon-copied messages beside him, sorted by sender and recipient. The population did not know that the office kept copies of all their messages on file.
Plucking files from the box at random, he began to tap away on the telegraph. One file showed an exchange between a local warehouser and a businessman in Frosthold, concerned with the import of spices from the north. It took only a moment to grasp the character of the dead man’s writing.
“STORM RATIONS UNGOOD STOP,” he tapped away. “PEOPLE WNT REAL MEAT STOP DEMD SALT AND MEAT SAUCE AFT STORM VRY HIGH STOP HAHA STOP.”
The man always ended his telegrams with “HAHA.” Viktor didn’t know why, nor did he care. He tossed the file back into the box and drew out another. The new file was was a series of exchanges between a woman and her sister in New Lagos. In the latest telegram, sent just that morning, the woman begged her sister for a loan, saying she didn’t have two krona to rub together.
Reading quickly through their past words, Viktor quickly garnered that the sister in New Lagos was the more successful of the two, and not ashamed to rub that in her younger sibling’s face. A sneer appeared on his face.
“BUT HAVE MONEY FOR TELEGRAM STOP VERY STRANGE STOP.” That would do. He put the file away and drew another.
For two weeks he continued that way, sleeping and eating at his desk, drinking heavily and smoking like a coal fire, reading people’s past messages and working away on the telegraph. He pretended to be grandparents asking after their grandchildren, friends swapping in-jokes that nobody else could know, and businessman trying to go about the details of their trade in light of a “WORSE THAN AVERG BUT OKAY” blizzard.
Two days before the disaster, just past 15:00, his telegraph began to tap without the proper prelude for a telegram. Quickly, Viktor jotted down the message: “EQUA VENTURA OPERATOR STATION THREE CALLING NEW LAGOS OPERATOR STATION FIVE REPLY STOP.”
He checked his table. According to his paperwork, the current station three shift operator was named Aron, and he was on the list of trusted officers. Aron should in theory have known that New Lagos Station Five no longer existed.
“STATION FIVE HERE IS THIS ARON STOP”
“THIS IS JON STOP AZI IS THAT YOU STOP”
Viktor had to check his records. He flipped through the files as quickly as he could. The telegraph key continued to clatter during the delay: “REPLY STOP”
He found a file. Azi was the name of one of the New Lagos telegraph operators. Spilling the file open across his desk, it hurriedly leafed through the papers. He tapped with his other hand. “AZI HERE STOP WIND VERY BAD STOP.”
“ARE YOU OKAY STOP.”
The records didn’t have the information Viktor needed. There were transcriptions of interactions between Azi and other station operators, but none between Azi and Jon. He didn’t know how these two spoke with each other. “YES WE ARE OKAY STOP.”
The reply came instantly: “WHATS WRONG”
Viktor bit his lip. He waited for the STOP signal, but it never came. He kept his finger off the key for a moment, and flipped through the file. There were records of Azi speaking with every other operator, but it seemed that Azi and Jon never spoke. There wasn’t a single transcription of their conversations.
“WHATS WRONG,” the telegraph typed, “ARE YOU THERE.” There was a noticeable pause before it added, “STOP.”
Viktor considered the matter carefully. He lifted his finger to the switch.
“ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT ME STOP,” he typed.
“YES STOP.”
“I SHOULD VISIT YOU SOON STOP.”
“YOU CANT STOP.”
Viktor laughed: “BECAUSE ITS A CRIME QUESTIONMARK STOP.”
For more than fifteen full seconds, the telegraph line sat dead. Eventually, Viktor typed out one more message: “I LOVE YOU STOP.”
When he lifted his finger from the key, it tapped of its own accord: “I LOVE YOU TOO.”
Homosexuality was illegal in Equa Ventura, and a crime which Viktor found personally repugnant, but his position demanded a certain degree of ethical flexibility. And so with his best efforts as a writer, and the assistance of some deviant literature the watch had seized, he spent the next half hour flirting with a telegraph operator across town.
It was a great effort, but when people came to the telegraph office concerned about their relatives, the operator assured them that the stations in New Lagos and Frosthold were fine. It was only the lines that were down.
Viktor remained at his post until the telegraph office closed for the evening on the last day. He didn’t join Angar’s party, though he did drink heavily. He pulled a revolver out of his desk drawer, but couldn’t do anything except stare at the barrel. He was still looking at it when a gunshot rang out from the balcony.
Eventually the steam pipes exploded and the electrical lights went out. In the dark, he could see there was light under Helena’s door. He knocked, and asked to stay with her.
Curled up with Helena by the dying oil fire, he put his hand on her belly, and in that moment, wished more than anything that he’d been an actual husband to her, instead of a drunken night of regret. He told her her loved her.
She didn’t believe him. But the telegraph operator’s diary now sits framed in a museum, the entire exchange captured word for word. Its story has spread far, a tragic tale of love at the end of the world.
Tomas was the youngest of the five. When he was hired, he was only fourteen. When the landstjóra asked him how he served his neighborhood, he could only answer that he hoped to serve his neighborhood by working a good job and helping his mother pay rent.
So he ran errands. He operated the printing press. He sketched drafts of propaganda posters. He manned the building when no one else was around.
His father was a highly skilled engineer, and so was on the list to enter the underground shelters. By extension, so were his mother, sisters, and younger brothers. He declined his spot.
He was the only one who cried where the others could see, but their insistences did not change his answer. Family spots were for children. He was a young man.
For those fourteen days, he continued to do as he had. He helped Agnar conduct interviews and ran messages to the different departments. He printed Hakon’s posters. He helped generate more cases of the rasp lung when Helena needed to be seen as having a strong alibi. He brought Viktor food and changes of clothes.
As evening fell, he walked his family to the shelter entrance, and hugged them each goodbye. They knew nothing, and would not be told until after the doors were shut. They teased him for being emotional about his first night away from the family on his own.
After the doors to the shelter were shut and locked, Tomas ran back to the office. He met Hakon on the way to the balcony and they shook hands, lamenting that there was not enough time. Then Tomas gathered a large bag full of posters, along with a brush and a wrench, and he sprinted back to the shelter entrance.
Through the streets he ran. Under the overhangs of the ruined buildings. Through the slums and the soup kitchens and the merchant quarter and the industrial yards. The snow was black with soot. In the distance, he could see the coal fields, and the steelworks, and the pipeline that brought heating oil. The last of the people were ducking inside, ready for a warm night with family waiting out the blizzard. Only a few beggars remained, too outcast from society to find shelter in even the poorhouse.
When he reached the first ring and the street directly outside the shelter entrance, he took the wrench in hand and opened the steam valve outside one of the Oxbridge buildings. The chill in the air made water as good as glue. He could dab the corners of a poster with the hot and damp brush, and soon it would be stuck fast to the wall behind it.
From his back, he unslung the bag full of posters. Four years of propaganda, showing the city as it never was.
He had posters that showed shining towers, without a trace of coal soot to be seen; posters that showed a proud and industrious people; posters that showed worker and lord hand in hand working to build a better future; posters that sang the praise of the landstjóra and his officers.
It grew colder as Tomas worked. His hands shook. He squinted into the frost around his eyes, and struggled to hold the brush. Eventually, he heard the distant thunder of the steam-pipes exploding. The repetitive thumping of the steelworks came to a stop, and one by one, the electrical lights went out. The city was plunged into darkness.
From his bag, Tomas pulled forth a welder’s torch. It took several strikes to light it, but in the end, it did produce a sickly blue flame. He scorched a message into the wood of a government building directly opposite the shelter entrance, arranged it such that when the doors finally opened and they emerged, they would see all the posters, and read his words.
“FROM THE PAST, TO THE FUTURE. GOOD LUCK. MAKE IT ALL WORTH IT.”
Tomas tried to find his way back to the office, but became disoriented in the dark, and died in a gutter. He is the only one of the five whose final resting place is not the little blue brick building in the third ring.
The meteorologists of Frosthold were wrong. The equatorial vortex was not a freak anomaly, but a symptom of a permanent realignment of the planet’s atmosphere. The winds and the cold would last not for a month, but for more than fifty years.
In the end, all those in the shelter perished as well. The door never opened.
Today, very little is known of the real Equa Ventura, but the story of its last days is told far and wide. With images from beautiful posters, with love letters from dead men, with tales of impossible ignorance, with heroic marches and swells, and with the pathos of engineers who won the lottery, only to find that winners and losers would perish alike.
It’s just as well. If people knew the true story, they would only be disappointed.
Might as well bring everything up to 1 review! And while I feel obligated to provide a deep critique as the first person to speak up on the story, the truth is that I'd be struggling to nitpick in order to do so, because I've read all 15 stories and this is solidly on the top of my slate. Great job, author.
This does a very big thing right: it takes a large tragedy and makes it concrete and personal. The premise is a fabulous way to explore different angles of the incident. Some of the stories directly intertwine, some simply make use of repeated elements which reinforce the setting, but everything builds together into a coherent whole.
In terms of actual critique, a few thoughts:
Spice up your opening. It tells us nothing about the story except for a bare minimum about the setting — we don't even learn until a paragraph later that the city's a ruin. Even just changing "city" to "dead city" would be an improvement, but I think this could go significantly farther toward setting a hook with the meat of the premise.
That last sentence rubbed me the wrong way — implying as it does that knowing the true cause of the accident would have negated the mob's grievances. We're directly told that they were disgruntled over forced 14-hour days and willing to riot over 14-hour days and were calmed down when the 14-hour days stopped, and yet we're getting a narrative judgment that those complaints are junk and only the death mattered. It's unnecessary editorializing, and at odds with the repeated portrayal of the landstjóra as an enlightened ruler who genuinely tried to make things better for the lower classes (via the soup kitchens, etc).
"QUERY" would be the question-mark indicator, most punctuation wouldn't be spelled out unless needed, and you certainly wouldn't say QUERY STOP because that would mean "?."
And finally:
You liar. You just told me the true story, and I wasn't disappointed at all. :-p
Tier: Top Contender
This does a very big thing right: it takes a large tragedy and makes it concrete and personal. The premise is a fabulous way to explore different angles of the incident. Some of the stories directly intertwine, some simply make use of repeated elements which reinforce the setting, but everything builds together into a coherent whole.
In terms of actual critique, a few thoughts:
Deep below the southern frost, beyond the equatorial tundra and the frozen jungles, there is a city.
Spice up your opening. It tells us nothing about the story except for a bare minimum about the setting — we don't even learn until a paragraph later that the city's a ruin. Even just changing "city" to "dead city" would be an improvement, but I think this could go significantly farther toward setting a hook with the meat of the premise.
The landstjóra had ordered many fourteen hour shifts in the month before the disaster. The people, already disgruntled by the long hours, felt that the cause of the disaster was obvious—a man exhausted and overworked had made a mistake, and a child had paid the price.
In reality, the man had slept for nine hours the night before, and the blame lay with his personal resistance to following proper safety procedure. But the mob had already made up its mind before the facts were known …
That last sentence rubbed me the wrong way — implying as it does that knowing the true cause of the accident would have negated the mob's grievances. We're directly told that they were disgruntled over forced 14-hour days and willing to riot over 14-hour days and were calmed down when the 14-hour days stopped, and yet we're getting a narrative judgment that those complaints are junk and only the death mattered. It's unnecessary editorializing, and at odds with the repeated portrayal of the landstjóra as an enlightened ruler who genuinely tried to make things better for the lower classes (via the soup kitchens, etc).
Viktor laughed: “BECAUSE ITS A CRIME QUESTIONMARK STOP.”
"QUERY" would be the question-mark indicator, most punctuation wouldn't be spelled out unless needed, and you certainly wouldn't say QUERY STOP because that would mean "?."
Officials felt that the vital orders of the Government must be definite and clear cut, and they therefore used not only the word "stop," to indicate a period, but also adopted the practice of spelling out "comma," "colon," and "semi-colon." The word "query" often was used to indicate a question mark. Of all these, however, "stop" has come into most widespread use, and vaudeville artists and columnists have employed it with humorous effect, certain that the public would understand the allusion in connection with telegrams. It is interesting to note, too, that although the word is obviously English it has come into general use In all languages that are used in telegraphing or cabling. [source]
And finally:
It’s just as well. If people knew the true story, they would only be disappointed.
You liar. You just told me the true story, and I wasn't disappointed at all. :-p
Tier: Top Contender
Another:
Omniscient POV, but this one worked a lot better for me. If I had to guess why, I'd say it's because the narrator here seems more like a character in the story, To my mind, this is a story in which an unnamed character tells me the secret history of Equa Ventura. In "City of Cards," the narration doesn't come across as something delivered by a character but as a bunch of words the author typed.
This has a distancing effect on me. In "City of Cards," the author is trying to sell me on the existence of these characters: the omniscient POV constantly reminds me that this is fiction, constantly kicks me out of the story by reminding me that it's just words on a screen, constantly interrupts my attempts at immersion. Here, the author creates a character, and that character then tells me a story.
For another example of this, take a look at the actual book of The Three Musketeers. Dumas starts off with a first-person narrator--ostensibly the author himself--telling us about his researches into the life of D'Artagnan. This first-person narrator then becomes the omniscient narrator of the story and even pops in every once in a while throughout the rest of the book to remind us that he exists. Dickens does the same thing in "A Christmas Carol," creating an author surrogate who then tells us the story.
I have no idea why adding another layer makes the whole thing seem less distancing to me, but it does. I'd apparently rather listen to a fictional character tell me a story than watch an author's obvious attempts to do the same.
I also agree with >>horizon about the last line. After everything we've been through, we need something with a little more heft. Still, yeah, top of the ticket so far.
Mike
Omniscient POV, but this one worked a lot better for me. If I had to guess why, I'd say it's because the narrator here seems more like a character in the story, To my mind, this is a story in which an unnamed character tells me the secret history of Equa Ventura. In "City of Cards," the narration doesn't come across as something delivered by a character but as a bunch of words the author typed.
This has a distancing effect on me. In "City of Cards," the author is trying to sell me on the existence of these characters: the omniscient POV constantly reminds me that this is fiction, constantly kicks me out of the story by reminding me that it's just words on a screen, constantly interrupts my attempts at immersion. Here, the author creates a character, and that character then tells me a story.
For another example of this, take a look at the actual book of The Three Musketeers. Dumas starts off with a first-person narrator--ostensibly the author himself--telling us about his researches into the life of D'Artagnan. This first-person narrator then becomes the omniscient narrator of the story and even pops in every once in a while throughout the rest of the book to remind us that he exists. Dickens does the same thing in "A Christmas Carol," creating an author surrogate who then tells us the story.
I have no idea why adding another layer makes the whole thing seem less distancing to me, but it does. I'd apparently rather listen to a fictional character tell me a story than watch an author's obvious attempts to do the same.
I also agree with >>horizon about the last line. After everything we've been through, we need something with a little more heft. Still, yeah, top of the ticket so far.
Mike
>>horizon
Sometimes I look at comments to decide if I want to read additional stories. This comment makes me want to read this story. But first, I have to disagree with your first critique.
This line is amazing. It does not need to specify that the city is dead. "Equatorial tundra." Permafrost at the equator. The warmest part of the planet has dirt that is permanently frozen. Beyond that are jungles that have frozen solid. There used to be tropical jungles located at mid-latitudes, but they are frozen now. There has been an apocalypse of snow. And farther south than even the formerly-tropical jungles that were frozen over, there is a city, beneath the ice.
I didn't read beyond your critique of this one quote, because spoilers.
I'll have to read this.
Sometimes I look at comments to decide if I want to read additional stories. This comment makes me want to read this story. But first, I have to disagree with your first critique.
Deep below the southern frost, beyond the equatorial tundra and the frozen jungles, there is a city.
This line is amazing. It does not need to specify that the city is dead. "Equatorial tundra." Permafrost at the equator. The warmest part of the planet has dirt that is permanently frozen. Beyond that are jungles that have frozen solid. There used to be tropical jungles located at mid-latitudes, but they are frozen now. There has been an apocalypse of snow. And farther south than even the formerly-tropical jungles that were frozen over, there is a city, beneath the ice.
I didn't read beyond your critique of this one quote, because spoilers.
I'll have to read this.
>>Hap
... wow. Despite multiple rereadings and writing a critique about it, I literally did not notice what you pointed out about the opening line until now. My brain interpreted it as: "Deep below the southern frost, SCENERY OPENING SCENERY OPENING SCENERY OPENING there is a city."
On further reflection, you're right and I'm wrong. Still, author, take the observation above as you will.
... wow. Despite multiple rereadings and writing a critique about it, I literally did not notice what you pointed out about the opening line until now. My brain interpreted it as: "Deep below the southern frost, SCENERY OPENING SCENERY OPENING SCENERY OPENING there is a city."
On further reflection, you're right and I'm wrong. Still, author, take the observation above as you will.
>>horizon
There is definitely a fine line there.
The opening line is the single most important line of your story. It's what draws the reader in. It sets the tone for the entire piece.
You want it to be as powerful as possible, and say as much as it can in as few words as it can. But the danger is that if the reader overlooks one word, it can rob that very important opening of all its power. When that line is too meaning-dense, readers may not realize they should be paying attention to it. In this case, Horizon missed the conflict between the two words in the phrase "equatorial permafrost," and in "frozen jungles."
There is no perfect solution. If you make things too obvious, it will be uninteresting. If you make things too dense, some readers will miss it. You must find your happy balance - and it will never work for all readers.
There is definitely a fine line there.
The opening line is the single most important line of your story. It's what draws the reader in. It sets the tone for the entire piece.
You want it to be as powerful as possible, and say as much as it can in as few words as it can. But the danger is that if the reader overlooks one word, it can rob that very important opening of all its power. When that line is too meaning-dense, readers may not realize they should be paying attention to it. In this case, Horizon missed the conflict between the two words in the phrase "equatorial permafrost," and in "frozen jungles."
There is no perfect solution. If you make things too obvious, it will be uninteresting. If you make things too dense, some readers will miss it. You must find your happy balance - and it will never work for all readers.
>>horizon
>>Hap
I've read this story, and if I have some spare time, I'll write a full review, but I did want to inject myself into this opening line discussion. I believe I can bridge the gap in opinion between >>Hap and >>horizon here, and explain why the line is comes across as a mixed bag. I think >>horizon's first lackluster impression of the line is generally on the money, but agree with >>Hap that it does half of its job in establishing some interesting imagery.
The main problem is format of presentation. What I mean by format is the sentence structuring and overall composition of the opener. The "equatorial permafrost" and "frozen jungles", which in their own right are interesting imagery, are details buried beneath the overall focal point of the opening sentence, which simply is "there is a city (in a place)." The cool imagery details, which arguably should be the focus of the opening, are brushed aside for establishing basic information. As >>horizon describes, his eyes glazed over important details despite reading the sentence several times, and this is because the "flavor" of the imagery is sandwiched between two very standard clauses: "Deep beneath the southern frost" and "there is a city."
Essentially, this is the equivalent opening a story on "Long ago in a distant land, I, Aku, the shapeshifting master of darkness unleashed an unspeakable evil." Or if you don't get that reference, "Once upon a time, there was..."
It gives the opener a certain simplicity and colors your impression of the story as something either knowingly invoking children's fantasy picturebook-style phrasing (ala Samurai Jack) or pulling from cliche. There is an inevitable clash in tone when pairing this sort of style with complex, multi-syllabic $10 words like "equatorial." So not only do I find that the opener buries the lead, but also the way it does so undercuts the mood of the information being buried, as well as the story as a whole. The story itself is oozing with cynicism, whereas the first line (for me) implies something more fantastical and picturesque.
I would disagree with >>Hap that frozen jungles and equatorial permafrost do enough in the service of implying a post-disaster state. Of course, reading the next paragraph immediately clues you into that information, but personally, the inference I immediately drew was that the city was simply a fantastical and odd city located somewhere "beyond the frozen jungles" that operated beneath the snow via either magic or sci fi—alternatively, a city with buildings made from ice.
And this is with me entering the story knowing full well that this would be a "Lost Cities"-style story. So to be honest, the opening successfully undermined my already-correct assumption about the state of the city with its current phrasing and direction.
Additionally, there is some ambiguity as how to combine "beyond" with "below" in the current phrasing. Is the city "beyond" the frozen jungles and equatorial permafrost, in that it is located somewhere else, or is the reader meant to infer that "beyond" in this scenario means that the frozen jungles and equatorial permafrost is "beyond" the southern frozen and therefore beneath it, creating a layered burrito of Southern Frost > Frozen Jungles + Equatorial Permafrost > City. I get the meaning that the city is most likely intended to be beneath all of these things, but the fact that I have to stop and think about this layering minutia that is ultimately irrelevant to the story—in the opening sentence of all things—really points to how much in need of a redraft this sentence is.
As >>Hap rightly points out, the imagery and idea of what is going on here is cool. I say the sentence is a mixed bag because the concept that it is playing with is legitimately interesting and easily suits evocative imagery; it's just not contained in a sentence that complements that strength.
Tl;Dr horizon was right all along and is an infallible god even when he fails to read things—reality will simply shift to a timeline where he is correct if he ever is in error.
>>Hap
I've read this story, and if I have some spare time, I'll write a full review, but I did want to inject myself into this opening line discussion. I believe I can bridge the gap in opinion between >>Hap and >>horizon here, and explain why the line is comes across as a mixed bag. I think >>horizon's first lackluster impression of the line is generally on the money, but agree with >>Hap that it does half of its job in establishing some interesting imagery.
The main problem is format of presentation. What I mean by format is the sentence structuring and overall composition of the opener. The "equatorial permafrost" and "frozen jungles", which in their own right are interesting imagery, are details buried beneath the overall focal point of the opening sentence, which simply is "there is a city (in a place)." The cool imagery details, which arguably should be the focus of the opening, are brushed aside for establishing basic information. As >>horizon describes, his eyes glazed over important details despite reading the sentence several times, and this is because the "flavor" of the imagery is sandwiched between two very standard clauses: "Deep beneath the southern frost" and "there is a city."
Essentially, this is the equivalent opening a story on "Long ago in a distant land, I, Aku, the shapeshifting master of darkness unleashed an unspeakable evil." Or if you don't get that reference, "Once upon a time, there was..."
It gives the opener a certain simplicity and colors your impression of the story as something either knowingly invoking children's fantasy picturebook-style phrasing (ala Samurai Jack) or pulling from cliche. There is an inevitable clash in tone when pairing this sort of style with complex, multi-syllabic $10 words like "equatorial." So not only do I find that the opener buries the lead, but also the way it does so undercuts the mood of the information being buried, as well as the story as a whole. The story itself is oozing with cynicism, whereas the first line (for me) implies something more fantastical and picturesque.
I would disagree with >>Hap that frozen jungles and equatorial permafrost do enough in the service of implying a post-disaster state. Of course, reading the next paragraph immediately clues you into that information, but personally, the inference I immediately drew was that the city was simply a fantastical and odd city located somewhere "beyond the frozen jungles" that operated beneath the snow via either magic or sci fi—alternatively, a city with buildings made from ice.
And this is with me entering the story knowing full well that this would be a "Lost Cities"-style story. So to be honest, the opening successfully undermined my already-correct assumption about the state of the city with its current phrasing and direction.
Additionally, there is some ambiguity as how to combine "beyond" with "below" in the current phrasing. Is the city "beyond" the frozen jungles and equatorial permafrost, in that it is located somewhere else, or is the reader meant to infer that "beyond" in this scenario means that the frozen jungles and equatorial permafrost is "beyond" the southern frozen and therefore beneath it, creating a layered burrito of Southern Frost > Frozen Jungles + Equatorial Permafrost > City. I get the meaning that the city is most likely intended to be beneath all of these things, but the fact that I have to stop and think about this layering minutia that is ultimately irrelevant to the story—in the opening sentence of all things—really points to how much in need of a redraft this sentence is.
As >>Hap rightly points out, the imagery and idea of what is going on here is cool. I say the sentence is a mixed bag because the concept that it is playing with is legitimately interesting and easily suits evocative imagery; it's just not contained in a sentence that complements that strength.
Tl;Dr horizon was right all along and is an infallible god even when he fails to read things—reality will simply shift to a timeline where he is correct if he ever is in error.
>>Cassius
Fair enough, and that is something I hadn't considered. The structure of the sentence itself causing even a well-read, careful reader like Horizon to overlook the most important information in the sentence?
That's something I never would have considered in a million years. I learn something new every day from you people.
Fair enough, and that is something I hadn't considered. The structure of the sentence itself causing even a well-read, careful reader like Horizon to overlook the most important information in the sentence?
That's something I never would have considered in a million years. I learn something new every day from you people.
This is undoubtedly an “epic” story, as Oblomov would put it, and there are several gems within it, but they are like diamonds in the rough: you have to mine hard to find them.
I find the narrative technique you used quite unpalatable. It’s like reading a history book – despite your telling of personal stories, it comes across to me as very impersonal and remote. It looks like a list of facts you quote one after the other, like names in a list, and I really failed to connect emotionally with any of the characters depicted, because your narrative style kept them at arm’s length.
That being said, I acknowledge the richness of the setup and the very clever way in which the fates of all protagonists are interwoven.
Several other things made me wince somewhat.
Olafur, probably, not Olfaur. (with -ur being a nominative in Old Norse/Icelandic)
First of all, a shift in the axis of rotation of a planet would be immediately recognizable by astronomes (even without any instrument) and would probably result in telluric activity (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions) well before climatic disruption. Such a phenomenon is thought to have caused the desertification of the Sahara, but that process extended well over millennia.
It’s unlikely, in the case of a cold storm, that all clocks stop at the same time. Unless they all were electric, of course, but this is not realistic in your setup. Mechanical clocks would probably carry on operating even under extreme cold, provided that shrinkage of metallic pieces do not interfere with their function.
Equa Ventura, the “oncoming mare”. Is this a pony round?
The cold was making her flesh burn. Doesn’t cold numb you when it is applied gradually and gently? I agree if you pour or grasp a very cold thing like a bottle of liquid helium, it’ll burn you. But as far as I remember, from testimonies of alpinists, deep atmospheric cold doesn’t do that. It’s more like a numbness that suffuses and invades you as you fall into hypothermia.
You tell us that In the middle of Equa Ventura’s twenty-second summer, when the temperature was barely below freezing… which to me means the city is set in a place which is icy all year round. How could such a place be even remotely inhabitable, I have no idea. It’s like trying to found a city in Antartica.
The use of the Huns, a historical folk, is somewhat jarring, too, because it tends to moor the story into our world, which it clearly does not belong to.
EDIT: also Cassius mentioned me a line where it is said rounds cannot be fired because of the cold. Does that even make sense?
But first and foremost, independently of your choice of an omniscient narrator, you tell us that very few people have been exploring the city, very few artefacts have been dug and recovered, and yet… modern day legends tell all about what the five penned during the last days. How is this even remotely possible? How could legends even been born with no survivors, nor any elements to substantiate them? That’s a mystery to me.
So, all in all, I bow before your imagination and writing skill, which are far ahead of mine. The story in itself was good, but I couldn’t get really engaged.
I find the narrative technique you used quite unpalatable. It’s like reading a history book – despite your telling of personal stories, it comes across to me as very impersonal and remote. It looks like a list of facts you quote one after the other, like names in a list, and I really failed to connect emotionally with any of the characters depicted, because your narrative style kept them at arm’s length.
That being said, I acknowledge the richness of the setup and the very clever way in which the fates of all protagonists are interwoven.
Several other things made me wince somewhat.
Olafur, probably, not Olfaur. (with -ur being a nominative in Old Norse/Icelandic)
First of all, a shift in the axis of rotation of a planet would be immediately recognizable by astronomes (even without any instrument) and would probably result in telluric activity (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions) well before climatic disruption. Such a phenomenon is thought to have caused the desertification of the Sahara, but that process extended well over millennia.
It’s unlikely, in the case of a cold storm, that all clocks stop at the same time. Unless they all were electric, of course, but this is not realistic in your setup. Mechanical clocks would probably carry on operating even under extreme cold, provided that shrinkage of metallic pieces do not interfere with their function.
Equa Ventura, the “oncoming mare”. Is this a pony round?
The cold was making her flesh burn. Doesn’t cold numb you when it is applied gradually and gently? I agree if you pour or grasp a very cold thing like a bottle of liquid helium, it’ll burn you. But as far as I remember, from testimonies of alpinists, deep atmospheric cold doesn’t do that. It’s more like a numbness that suffuses and invades you as you fall into hypothermia.
You tell us that In the middle of Equa Ventura’s twenty-second summer, when the temperature was barely below freezing… which to me means the city is set in a place which is icy all year round. How could such a place be even remotely inhabitable, I have no idea. It’s like trying to found a city in Antartica.
The use of the Huns, a historical folk, is somewhat jarring, too, because it tends to moor the story into our world, which it clearly does not belong to.
EDIT: also Cassius mentioned me a line where it is said rounds cannot be fired because of the cold. Does that even make sense?
But first and foremost, independently of your choice of an omniscient narrator, you tell us that very few people have been exploring the city, very few artefacts have been dug and recovered, and yet… modern day legends tell all about what the five penned during the last days. How is this even remotely possible? How could legends even been born with no survivors, nor any elements to substantiate them? That’s a mystery to me.
So, all in all, I bow before your imagination and writing skill, which are far ahead of mine. The story in itself was good, but I couldn’t get really engaged.
>>Cassius
I totally agree with Cassius here that the wealth of information carried out in the opening sentence is buried by its structure, and given in a sort of en passant way which strips them from any significance. It’s like: hey, there’s important info here, but you’re allowed to gloss over it because, you know, I put it between commas.
Also, the conjured up imagery is somewhat dissonant. “Southern frost” clearly evokes Earth and especially Antartica, but that’s a perfectly standard situation. “Frozen jungles” is more evocative of a sudden catastrophe, because only a very rapid icing process could actually have frozen out trees and vegetation and preserve them in ice: it must be done within days, maybe a month tops. “Equatorial permafrost” is probably meant by the author as being oxymoronic (and thus suggestive of a unusual situation), but if you think really hard about it, it could simply refer to a cold planet in which about every land is frozen but the equator, where temperature rises enough to allow for a permafrost to exist.
Also, this is not such an exotic setup, since modern studies seem to prove that our Earth has undergone two long periods of total frost, in which all the planet, equator included, was covered in ice — but for the volcanoes, and that’s because of a strong greenhouse effect caused by volcanoes’ massive emission of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that the Earth was able to break free from the ice (an icy Earth reflects about all the energy it gets from the Sun, thereby being locked in a perpetual ice age. But if all the Earth is covered in ice, carbon dioxide cannot be dissolved in water anymore).
I totally agree with Cassius here that the wealth of information carried out in the opening sentence is buried by its structure, and given in a sort of en passant way which strips them from any significance. It’s like: hey, there’s important info here, but you’re allowed to gloss over it because, you know, I put it between commas.
Also, the conjured up imagery is somewhat dissonant. “Southern frost” clearly evokes Earth and especially Antartica, but that’s a perfectly standard situation. “Frozen jungles” is more evocative of a sudden catastrophe, because only a very rapid icing process could actually have frozen out trees and vegetation and preserve them in ice: it must be done within days, maybe a month tops. “Equatorial permafrost” is probably meant by the author as being oxymoronic (and thus suggestive of a unusual situation), but if you think really hard about it, it could simply refer to a cold planet in which about every land is frozen but the equator, where temperature rises enough to allow for a permafrost to exist.
Also, this is not such an exotic setup, since modern studies seem to prove that our Earth has undergone two long periods of total frost, in which all the planet, equator included, was covered in ice — but for the volcanoes, and that’s because of a strong greenhouse effect caused by volcanoes’ massive emission of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that the Earth was able to break free from the ice (an icy Earth reflects about all the energy it gets from the Sun, thereby being locked in a perpetual ice age. But if all the Earth is covered in ice, carbon dioxide cannot be dissolved in water anymore).
>>Monokeras
It can happen, depending on the composition of the primer compound (mercury fulminate vs lead styphnate vs whatever crush or friction sensitive explosive they use on this planet) and the primer construction (is it a modern primer where the compound is crushed between the firing pin and the anvil? Is it a firing pin that penetrates through the primer and ignites the compound by friction?), how old the cartridge is and how it was stored, and what type of powder it is and, again, how it was stored.
I've used guns in temperatures where most gun oils gel up sufficiently to slow down a firing pin and prevent ignition. That's another possibility.
Long story short, it's a reasonable thing to happen. When I read that bit, I paused for a second, thought about how cold that would have to be for the various failure modes, nodded, and moved on.
The author may have just made a guess, gone with something that sounded reasonable without questioning it, or may actually have enough technical knowledge that an accurately described event seems unrealistic to someone unfamiliar with the field. The latter has bitten me before.
*shrug*
EDIT: also Cassius mentioned me a line where it is said rounds cannot be fired because of the cold. Does that even make sense?
It can happen, depending on the composition of the primer compound (mercury fulminate vs lead styphnate vs whatever crush or friction sensitive explosive they use on this planet) and the primer construction (is it a modern primer where the compound is crushed between the firing pin and the anvil? Is it a firing pin that penetrates through the primer and ignites the compound by friction?), how old the cartridge is and how it was stored, and what type of powder it is and, again, how it was stored.
I've used guns in temperatures where most gun oils gel up sufficiently to slow down a firing pin and prevent ignition. That's another possibility.
Long story short, it's a reasonable thing to happen. When I read that bit, I paused for a second, thought about how cold that would have to be for the various failure modes, nodded, and moved on.
The author may have just made a guess, gone with something that sounded reasonable without questioning it, or may actually have enough technical knowledge that an accurately described event seems unrealistic to someone unfamiliar with the field. The latter has bitten me before.
*shrug*
When I read this, I realised I'd need a few days to organise my thoughts. Now it's been a few days, am I'm no closer to understanding how I reacted to this story. But something is better than nothing, so have some inchoate thoughts instead.
Suffice to say, I found it a slog to get through, it didn't arouse any emotions in me -- and right now I kind of want to put it at the top of my slate.
The technical skill on display here is undeniable. The structure is everything I can ask for. It's novel, but complete. Everything weaves together in a coherent whole. The theme of noble lies, gets its variations from the grand to the miniscule. Repetition is used as it should. The ending – a farce with a Chekhovian inversion – underlines it perfectly.
So why didn't I like it?
I have no idea.
Perhaps it's because the story claims wisdom – it seems in love with its own portentiousness – and yet seems to lack it. There are many offhand observations here, the sort of gently ironic jabs at human foibles that can work so well. And yet none of them do anything for me. In fact, most of them seem, if not cliches, then on the border of becoming so. The main thrust of the story, we all its utilitarian pulpit-thumping, certainly is. Then there's the feminist showing strength by socking a sexist.
Perhaps its because that for a story driven by questions of humanity, there's not much humanity on display. Most of it feels like it's told at a remove. I don't want to say unemotional prose is bad – used effectively, it can be incredibly heart-wrenching. Indeed, my favourite author writes like this pretty much all the time. But here, for whatever reason, it isn't effective. There are a couple of moments of genuine tenderness – Victor's telegram, and Helena's last moments with him.
But everything else feels like a grim slog through duties. That doesn't arouse much melancholy in me.
The end result: Most of the time, my reaction to events wasn't “this is sad”, but “oh look, the sotry is trying to make me feel sad”. And that's no fun at all.
What else can I say to a story that seems to be doing everything it should, but is failing at its most important task: Making my feel something? After some dithering between putting this at the top of my slate and the abstain box, I think I may have to opt for the latter.
Suffice to say, I found it a slog to get through, it didn't arouse any emotions in me -- and right now I kind of want to put it at the top of my slate.
The technical skill on display here is undeniable. The structure is everything I can ask for. It's novel, but complete. Everything weaves together in a coherent whole. The theme of noble lies, gets its variations from the grand to the miniscule. Repetition is used as it should. The ending – a farce with a Chekhovian inversion – underlines it perfectly.
So why didn't I like it?
I have no idea.
Perhaps it's because the story claims wisdom – it seems in love with its own portentiousness – and yet seems to lack it. There are many offhand observations here, the sort of gently ironic jabs at human foibles that can work so well. And yet none of them do anything for me. In fact, most of them seem, if not cliches, then on the border of becoming so. The main thrust of the story, we all its utilitarian pulpit-thumping, certainly is. Then there's the feminist showing strength by socking a sexist.
Perhaps its because that for a story driven by questions of humanity, there's not much humanity on display. Most of it feels like it's told at a remove. I don't want to say unemotional prose is bad – used effectively, it can be incredibly heart-wrenching. Indeed, my favourite author writes like this pretty much all the time. But here, for whatever reason, it isn't effective. There are a couple of moments of genuine tenderness – Victor's telegram, and Helena's last moments with him.
But everything else feels like a grim slog through duties. That doesn't arouse much melancholy in me.
The end result: Most of the time, my reaction to events wasn't “this is sad”, but “oh look, the sotry is trying to make me feel sad”. And that's no fun at all.
What else can I say to a story that seems to be doing everything it should, but is failing at its most important task: Making my feel something? After some dithering between putting this at the top of my slate and the abstain box, I think I may have to opt for the latter.
This is (admittedly engaging and poignant) Frostpunk fanfiction.
I dithered a bit on whether or not to call this out, Writer, but a significant amount of this story - the setting of a near-frozen city arranged in concentric circles, local industry comprised entirely of coal mining, steel manufacturing, and hothouses, the approaching doom of an unfathomably cold storm, details like decrees for diluted soup to help ration food and a propaganda center that allows a maximum of five workers - is lifted straight from the game.
Let me be clear, though - I think this story holds up on its own, as illustrated by the comments from other readers above, and I like the story quite a bit. The five characters you’ve created and the stories you’ve woven together of their final days in service to the city allow for a very zoomed in and specific view of this place, something the game tries to do at times but not nearly as well. This scenario certainly lends itself to the Lost Cities style, of which I’m a fan.
However, I’m also a fan of Frostpunk, and… yeah. I think the minor tweaks you’ve added, like having the nomenclature be Norwegian instead of English, are interesting touches, but at the end of the day, this is a Frostpunk story.
I dithered a bit on whether or not to call this out, Writer, but a significant amount of this story - the setting of a near-frozen city arranged in concentric circles, local industry comprised entirely of coal mining, steel manufacturing, and hothouses, the approaching doom of an unfathomably cold storm, details like decrees for diluted soup to help ration food and a propaganda center that allows a maximum of five workers - is lifted straight from the game.
Let me be clear, though - I think this story holds up on its own, as illustrated by the comments from other readers above, and I like the story quite a bit. The five characters you’ve created and the stories you’ve woven together of their final days in service to the city allow for a very zoomed in and specific view of this place, something the game tries to do at times but not nearly as well. This scenario certainly lends itself to the Lost Cities style, of which I’m a fan.
However, I’m also a fan of Frostpunk, and… yeah. I think the minor tweaks you’ve added, like having the nomenclature be Norwegian instead of English, are interesting touches, but at the end of the day, this is a Frostpunk story.
It could be that this story was too hyped before I had a chance to get to it, but it didn't land with me as well as some of the other entries. It's certainly good, but I wasn't blown away, which is admittedly a classic sign of overhype. But at the same time I did see some dissenting opinions as well, so I'd like to think I went in with an open mind.
I think my main concern was that I got thrown off the ride a couple times by having to re-read sentences and paragraphs. The pacing felt rushed despite its length, with a lot of important details of the city itself glossed over really quickly for the sake of the wordcount constraint, such that I had trouble getting a full picture. I'd point to Hakon's portion as being the worst offender. I can follow up to the food guy being pulled out of his home with his family, but then Hakon disappears, and there's a parade? (Fuck, you know what it is? You said "the watch brought the food guy out", followed by "he" proclaimed something. I didn't realize it was Hakon speaking. I thought it was the food guy demanding he be shown his dignity, but then as it continued I thought it might be a member of the watch under orders. Partially because of the "he" not being specific enough, but also because the propagandists so far have been presented as not wanting to draw any attention to themselves.)
And I can't help but disagree with >>Baal Bunny that the omniscient narrator feels like a character in this story as opposed to City of Cards. I agree it's written better, which may lessen the strange detachment of the narration, but both stories still gave me the same effect: like a writer is speaking to me as opposed to anyone with any stake in the matter. It's still better than Cards, but I think it's still... not a problem, but something that could be changed to improve on the story. If "what does the narrator know and when did they know it" is going to play into your story, then I think it's more fun to discover this stuff along with them, or be told how they discovered it as they go along, or something like that.
I mulled over what to say about this story on my drive home from work, and in that time >>Icenrose left their comment, and I got more disappointed. I haven't played Frostpunk, but if everything there is true, then I can't help but feel that the small changes to the universe, such as the core language, are meant to conceal where the inspiration is from, as opposed to providing a desired impact on the story. I'm not interested in arguing about how this stands against the rules of the writeoff—I imagine it's just fine—but suffice it to say it loses spots on my slate for not being as original as other entries.
But take nothing away from the prose itself or the characterization, which I understand was all your doing. But still. You know? But still.
I think my main concern was that I got thrown off the ride a couple times by having to re-read sentences and paragraphs. The pacing felt rushed despite its length, with a lot of important details of the city itself glossed over really quickly for the sake of the wordcount constraint, such that I had trouble getting a full picture. I'd point to Hakon's portion as being the worst offender. I can follow up to the food guy being pulled out of his home with his family, but then Hakon disappears, and there's a parade? (Fuck, you know what it is? You said "the watch brought the food guy out", followed by "he" proclaimed something. I didn't realize it was Hakon speaking. I thought it was the food guy demanding he be shown his dignity, but then as it continued I thought it might be a member of the watch under orders. Partially because of the "he" not being specific enough, but also because the propagandists so far have been presented as not wanting to draw any attention to themselves.)
And I can't help but disagree with >>Baal Bunny that the omniscient narrator feels like a character in this story as opposed to City of Cards. I agree it's written better, which may lessen the strange detachment of the narration, but both stories still gave me the same effect: like a writer is speaking to me as opposed to anyone with any stake in the matter. It's still better than Cards, but I think it's still... not a problem, but something that could be changed to improve on the story. If "what does the narrator know and when did they know it" is going to play into your story, then I think it's more fun to discover this stuff along with them, or be told how they discovered it as they go along, or something like that.
I mulled over what to say about this story on my drive home from work, and in that time >>Icenrose left their comment, and I got more disappointed. I haven't played Frostpunk, but if everything there is true, then I can't help but feel that the small changes to the universe, such as the core language, are meant to conceal where the inspiration is from, as opposed to providing a desired impact on the story. I'm not interested in arguing about how this stands against the rules of the writeoff—I imagine it's just fine—but suffice it to say it loses spots on my slate for not being as original as other entries.
But take nothing away from the prose itself or the characterization, which I understand was all your doing. But still. You know? But still.
>>horizon
Thank you! I am much glad you enjoyed it! And your detailed feedback is helpful.
Yeah. I did it this way because I wanted to evoke the feel of Lost Cities, but the more I look at it (and your exchange with Hap below) the more I feel it's not right for the story. It really buried the lead.
I learned something today!
I've never actually seen a telegram. I got the "STOP" bit from old vaudeville plays that used "DON'T START STOP" as a recurring slapstick joke.
Thank you! I am much glad you enjoyed it! And your detailed feedback is helpful.
Spice up your opening. It tells us nothing about the story except for a bare minimum about the setting — we don't even learn until a paragraph later that the city's a ruin. Even just changing "city" to "dead city" would be an improvement, but I think this could go significantly farther toward setting a hook with the meat of the premise.
Yeah. I did it this way because I wanted to evoke the feel of Lost Cities, but the more I look at it (and your exchange with Hap below) the more I feel it's not right for the story. It really buried the lead.
"QUERY" would be the question-mark indicator, most punctuation wouldn't be spelled out unless needed, and you certainly wouldn't say QUERY STOP because that would mean "?."
I learned something today!
I've never actually seen a telegram. I got the "STOP" bit from old vaudeville plays that used "DON'T START STOP" as a recurring slapstick joke.
>>Baal Bunny
The narrator tone is an interesting side effect of the revision process. It started as a highly characterized narrator -- the narrator was a historian talking about the city. But as I wrote it, more questions started to pop up about how a historian knows all of these personal details. I revised it to be an omniscient narrator, but a lot of the characterization lingered after the revision.
I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of a characterized omniscient narrator, but I'm glad it worked here.
The narrator tone is an interesting side effect of the revision process. It started as a highly characterized narrator -- the narrator was a historian talking about the city. But as I wrote it, more questions started to pop up about how a historian knows all of these personal details. I revised it to be an omniscient narrator, but a lot of the characterization lingered after the revision.
I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of a characterized omniscient narrator, but I'm glad it worked here.
>>Cassius
I write stories!
More seriously, that's hilarious -- and totally unintentional. I guess my writing style is a little predictable! Well done on calling that out.
I write stories!
More seriously, that's hilarious -- and totally unintentional. I guess my writing style is a little predictable! Well done on calling that out.
>>Cassius
>>Hap
>>horizon
This entire exchange on the opening was fantastic. I feel like i learned more about story openers from reading this than I did from some of my books on writing.
And of course, Cassius is right. The opening was an homage to Lost Cities, a series that has a very faerie tale feel, while this story is brutally cynical. I thought it would be a harmless nod, but it actually really changed the tone of the opening, and in a way that didn't match with the rest of the story.
Now it all makes sense!
>>Hap
>>horizon
This entire exchange on the opening was fantastic. I feel like i learned more about story openers from reading this than I did from some of my books on writing.
And of course, Cassius is right. The opening was an homage to Lost Cities, a series that has a very faerie tale feel, while this story is brutally cynical. I thought it would be a harmless nod, but it actually really changed the tone of the opening, and in a way that didn't match with the rest of the story.
Tl;Dr horizon was right all along and is an infallible god even when he fails to read things—reality will simply shift to a timeline where he is correct if he ever is in error.
Now it all makes sense!
>>Scramblers and Shadows
>>Monokeras
I think these are two sides of the same problem: I didn't have five people's worth of things to say. Three propagandists instead of five would have driven this story much better, and allowed me to go into more detail on each one to avoid the "history book" tone.
Thanks for the detailed feedback as well. This was really helpful to figuring out why the story didn't click as well as it could have.
>>Monokeras
I think these are two sides of the same problem: I didn't have five people's worth of things to say. Three propagandists instead of five would have driven this story much better, and allowed me to go into more detail on each one to avoid the "history book" tone.
Thanks for the detailed feedback as well. This was really helpful to figuring out why the story didn't click as well as it could have.
>>Icenrose
Snowponies!
More seriously, while you're right on all of the above points, I would describe it as an homage rather than inspiration. While it borrows a lot of superficial elements (rings, the name "Oxbridge", etc) all the characters and the details of Equa Ventura are original.
I guess you could call it transformative fiction, and if you feel that's not appropriate for the writeoff, that's a fair discussion to have. But I thought it was original enough to stand on its own merits.
Still, I'm glad you liked it. :)
landstjóra means "Land Captain." Had to get in one last stealth reference!
This is (admittedly engaging and poignant) Frostpunk fanfiction.
Snowponies!
More seriously, while you're right on all of the above points, I would describe it as an homage rather than inspiration. While it borrows a lot of superficial elements (rings, the name "Oxbridge", etc) all the characters and the details of Equa Ventura are original.
I guess you could call it transformative fiction, and if you feel that's not appropriate for the writeoff, that's a fair discussion to have. But I thought it was original enough to stand on its own merits.
Still, I'm glad you liked it. :)
However, I’m also a fan of Frostpunk, and… yeah. I think the minor tweaks you’ve added, like having the nomenclature be Norwegian instead of English, are interesting touches, but at the end of the day, this is a Frostpunk story.
landstjóra means "Land Captain." Had to get in one last stealth reference!