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Your Questions Answered

Acknowledging our sources of inspiration

In the story “Freaks,” we see that Volcanne has designed a new monster to attack his enemies. At a book fair, some readers told us they had recognized the actual animal that inspired the beast: tardigdrades. We were surprised they had made the connection!

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But what are the stories about, really?

In the search for collaborators for this project, one of the people we met asked us to summarize what the story is about in 25 words. We thought the question was too reductionist and it actually seemed counter-productive to summarize the story in 25 words. However, since a lot of people seem to like this type of little summary, we thought about it for some time before coming up with this: Our story deals with people trying to achieve their dreams and trying to survive the dreams of others. So there it is, in under 20 words. 

Are there only bad guys in your stories?

A friend mentioned that our stories only have two categories of characters: bad guys and less-bad guys. That was nice to hear because it touches on one of the axioms we’ve preached about many times: that, for the characters’ personalities, we want to play within a continuum of grey areas. And where there’s grey, there’s sure to be darkness.

Why Isn’t Volcanne Really Dead?

Some of you rightly asked how it’s possible that Volcanne isn’t dead. After all, we stated in our own axioms that dead means dead. However, rules are made to be broken. What’s more, Volcanne is a master geneticist, so it’s natural that he would have thought to clone himself in order to prolong his own existence.

Are all of the characters going to die?

One of our readers wants to know if we are going to kill off all of our main characters. Naturally, the answer is no, but it’s important to keep in mind the context of the story. There are two secret organizations involved in a brutal clash and each one does what’s necessary to disable the other. It would be abnormal if no one died, even among the good guys.

Are We Playing with Flashbacks?

One of our readers asked about the link between Wally’s death and the story of when he arrived at the Bunker. He wanted to know if our use of the flashback technique was a nod to “Lost,” a TV series we’ve said that we admire. It’s a good question. We see one main difference between our temporal framework and the use of flashbacks by “Lost” scriptwriters. While they mainly used flashbacks to feed a given episode, we see all of our stories as part of one mosaic, which we hope to eventually reveal in its entirety. The order in which the various stories are published is not linear and, naturally, we want to keep some areas of our story shrouded in mystery.

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