Hey peeps. I wrote this thinking it might be an afterward for Song of Kardu, but I decided it might make a more appropriate blog post. For those who want a small piece of where my book came from, here it is:
Song of Kardu began as a question accompanied by a Scott Joplin song on repeat. This is a strange recipe, I’m sure, but once the question arrived, I knew it was a good one, and I knew I would spend a long while of my life exploring it. The song was, edited for modern ears, “I’m Thinking of My [Younger] Days,” and the question was: How could someone really conquer a planet?
I imagined a woman sitting in a ship shaped like Lady Liberty, musing about making herself the object of worship for that world. As she speaks, mushroom plumes of death appear around the planet as the indifferent world turns on its axis as one tiny piece of a broad scheme. She knows that to grow a culture in her image, she must make herself the syncretic gardener. Temple ruins make good places for new temples. Played right, the woman will old gods and new ones all in one bundle. She’s Lady Liberty, after all.
This felt like a million dollar idea. Well, maybe not in the monetary sense, but a question worth exploring in the timeless format of prose and fiction. The concept scratched at me like a fever rash. I had to put all other ideas aside to address it.
So, fast forward a little through inertia of finishing school and finding out jobs don’t pay enough, and the idea turned into many more ideas. Characters wrote themselves into the story on the surface of the planet and the stars around it. What began as a simple: “How to conquer?” unhatched into: “Why do people fight?”
I’m not convinced any of us children of humanity understand the nature of war, though I would argue that it is the oldest piece of the human dilemma. There would be more species of us running around if it wasn’t. Floating around in our DNA is some evidence of that. Hello Neanderthals, sorry you didn’t make the cut. Civilization does not exist without war, but also cannot make sense of it.
But yeah, back to that question that question. WHY?? Why do we have to kill each other to make any cultural progress? Homo Sapiens couldn’t look at the Neanderthal and say, “Hey, I see where you’re coming from.” Instead, they said, “We’ve got the fire, and you’re a bunch of cannibals who can’t do the nutrition thing. Have fun being part of the dirt upon which we build our temples.”
That story keeps happening. I say keeps, because I don’t think humankind has grown out of it. The world is smaller now, and there’s a higher level of social compatibility written into the rules, but people get away with atrocity in the name of progress all the time. Maybe progress is just greed. I’m riding a train right now while I’m writing this. A train that’s the great-great-grandchild of some serious bloodshed. Is that you, golden spike? Someone had a reason for fighting that war, someone who didn’t see themselves as a villain.
Once, as a national guard soldier, I sat in an intelligence training, a death by PowerPoint drill weekend with two overweight army sergeants with a number of deployments in the creases of their foreheads. Most of the training is filtered out of my head now, or had parts I won’t write about, but something did stick with me. One of the sergeants wiped his leathery nose and said, “The war we went to fight in 2001 was won in just a few weeks. The enemies we’re fighting now, we made ourselves.”
For a kid who dropped out of college and was living as a guard bum with no real plan except for the hope of some patriotic adventure, the unexpected realism was a hit to the face. No one I knew in the combat arms world had talked so big-picture before.
“Dang.” I wasn’t very good at swearing.
We made these enemies ourselves.
That’s an oversimplification. Everything always is. But something that I want out of this book, stemming from my experience in the world and as a tribute to the combat veterans I look up to, is for the reader to feel the weight of war violence. I want the wars fought by Seth and Cash to not make sense. The reasons for each character’s fight are there, but in a story with no villains, all the noble causes cancel each other out. Everyone makes their own enemies.
The concept of war is universal to life as we understand it. Trees fight for sunlight, animals fight for food and mates. The struggle is beautiful when seen from afar, but grizzly when witnessed up close. You can’t see history through a child’s lenses without that child inside you growing up, growing callous.
So, I hope that by my family and peers I’m forgiven for writing this violence. I hope I’m forgiven for the rough language. My civilian family can forgive me for what I’ve included, my veteran family can forgive me for what I have not. This story can only be a slice of humanity and not the full package. But you never know, maybe with a few more sequels I can paint the fuller picture to settle the voices that cry in my soul.
When you think about Song of Kardu, I hope that you do it in the spirit of the narrative and not the science. I’ve done my best. It’s the humanity I want your heart to explore the most. If you’re versed in mythology, you’ll probably noticed a few of the dozens of references I threw into the story. I believe ancient stories carry the best of human authenticity, and my story is a celebration of them. Human nature was the same three thousand years ago, and it will keep going three thousand years into the future with all its best and worst spreading Prometheus’s fire into the universe.
What a crazy image.
Thank you for reading and taking part of this world with me. Kardu will return, and maybe a few familiar faces with it.
Regards from the valley train,
Daniel Bradley
