Past Imperative

PAST IMPERATIVE: FOREWORD TO THE 2009 EDITION

© 2009, Dave Duncan

"The Great Game” series is set during the First World War, but most of the action takes place on a world called Nextdoor, where pseudo-gods play vicious games with mortals to while away eternity. You may read into this any moral or religious message you want, but it was intended only to entertain. The title comes from Rudyard Kipling's Kim and T'Lin Dragontrader bears no small resemblance to Mahbub Ali, Kim's horse-dealer friend. Those are about the only direct references to Victorian or Edwardian stories that I recall inserting, so don't treat these as puzzle books, fictional romans à clef. Nevertheless, I wrote them partly as an experiment in nostalgia.

No, I am not old enough to remember the First World War, but I do remember the Second and the years of shortage that followed it. Books were hard to come by in Britain during my childhood and much of what I read then was already very old—works by Jules Verne, H G Wells, R M Ballantyne, Kipling, Conan Doyle, and Rider Haggard. I did read some Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, but only because I was forced to. Among the “later” books I recall are Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Gods of Mars (1918) and David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus (1920). Not least among the hints I picked up from those particular stories is that there are many ways to travel to other worlds.

"The Great Game” has been out of print for about ten years, and I read it over again in anticipation of its reissue by E-Reads. I won't offer a detailed critique, because it would be vain of me to list all the good features and folly to mention the bad ones. You can find those for yourself. But I will mention two aspects that took me by surprise. First, I admired the extent to which the plot is driven by the magic, which I regard as a mark of good fantasy. Magic can never be described as believable, but it must be consistent, and it should meld reasonably with the politics and religion of the world. In this case the nodes and “charisma” fit well together. (Charisma is probably the closest we come to genuine magic in this mundane world of ours—how else can you explain the way a psychopathic runt like Adolf Hitler could cow a room full of Prussian generals?) In the final book, there are hints that nodes have been created by human worship, which I probably did not suggest sooner in case it gave away too much of the magic too soon. Or maybe I just didn't think of it then.

There is a third strand of magic that I will return to in a moment.

Secondly, I was annoyed by the way the hero in Past Imperative was left waiting in the wings far too long before being allowed out on stage. This is normally a fault in a story, but I committed this sin because I felt modern readers would need to be prepared for a hero as perfect as Edward. If he seems too good at times, it is because heroes of that time were always too good to be true, and not only in fiction. It was youngsters of his generation who marched at the head of their men into the barbed wire and machine gun fire of the trenches. They really believed what they said about honor and duty; they lived and died for them.

The story is set on two worlds, and this is another tribute to the past. Until J R R Tolkien, fantasy worlds were normally related in some way to this, the real world. For example in the classic, The Worm Ouroboros, Eddison mentions that it is set on the planet Mercury. As both reader and writer I have a soft spot for two-world fantasies. They make the other place more credible by letting the reader see it from our terrestrial viewpoint, as when Edward decides that the Vales are almost ready for an industrial revolution.

More important in this story, though, is that Edward can be shown as an “Edwardian” hero. Yes, he would love to stay and explore this new world, as any normal youngster would, but he is driven by his imprinted sense of duty to return to Earth. An author's hardest job is to make the characters want what he or she wants them to want. It is Edward's stiff-upper-lip training that motivates him, and it is the third strand of magic that I mentioned, the “chain of prophecy” feature, that drives Zath. Their life-and-death struggle is inevitable because they are equally opposed to the Filoby Testament and it requires that one or other of them must die.

"The Great Game” required a lot more research than most fantasy does. I made the terrestrial story as accurate as I could, although sometimes I had to guess. How much did tourists really pay to visit Stonehenge in 1914? I have no idea. But just about everything else I wrote about Stonehenge is accurate, even to the style of fence around it in 1914, which I discovered in an old photograph of troops drilling on Salisbury Plain.

Finally, I must say that I am very happy to see these books back in print. I do not normally whine about editors and publishers, but this series was cursed by too many changes of both. The second and third hard covers were not the same size as the first, which you may not see as a serious problem, but it upsets collectors. The third volume was given cover art that differed in style from the first two, and then its mass market reprint (which is where the money comes from) was given a cover so totally unlike everything that had gone before that many fans failed to identify it as part of the series. Before the word could get around, a new owner pulped the warehouse stock and the books were out of print.

I think this series deserved better. I hope you will agree.

—Dave Duncan