• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

The Twilight's Last Gleaming - Q&A thread

Thande

Madness
Patreon supporter
Sea Lion Press staff
Published by SLP
This is a thread for discussion of my book The Twilight's Last Gleaming, as @Agent Boot asked me to create one. As his work The Loud Blast That Tears The Skies was one of my inspirations for writing it, I could hardly say no!

I am assuming that most people who click on this thread will already have read the book, but just in case, I reproduce the synopsis and @Lord Roem 's excellent cover below.



A Victorian Armageddon

Global disaster strikes as an asteroid impact causes a megatsunami in the Indian Ocean and the eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano in the United States. The people of the world, reeling from the blow, struggle to survive.

But this is not the present day. This is the year 1886, a crucial moment in time for everything recognisable about our lives. Socialists riot in Chicago, the Irish Question topples British governments, African borders are drawn by ambitious imperialists. Inventions like the car, the electric lightbulb and even Coca-Cola are just dawning. This is an age where the rich still rule but the poor are making their voice heard, when it is still considered the birthright of the white man of Europe and America to dominate the world. Names that would score the pages of history, from Theodore Roosevelt to Mr Marks and Mr Spencer, are but young men ready to rise to a challenge.

How will that society respond to a cataclysm that threatens to plunge the world into eternal winter? Find out in The Twilight’s Last Gleaming.

442a9d_6ede07cf4f75464480a8f78373f10eed~mv2_d_1563_2500_s_2.jpg

 
Why 19th April 1886?

I've always been curious because there's nothing specific from what I can tell about that exact date. For my own bit of bollide-based fun, I aimed for / eas constrained by the same time date, give or take, as historical Tunguska. For Freedom's Rampart I knew the time period I wanted, settled on an exact year after initial research, and then tried to find a workable date range that solved more plot holes than it created.

How much was dictated by the exact set up you wanted to create, and how much of the setting developed from happy accidents and historical coincidences after you'd settled on the deluge date? Rockefeller being at Yellowstone that week was one such unplanned coincidence, IIRC.
 
Why 19th April 1886?

I've always been curious because there's nothing specific from what I can tell about that exact date. For my own bit of bollide-based fun, I aimed for / eas constrained by the same time date, give or take, as historical Tunguska. For Freedom's Rampart I knew the time period I wanted, settled on an exact year after initial research, and then tried to find a workable date range that solved more plot holes than it created.

How much was dictated by the exact set up you wanted to create, and how much of the setting developed from happy accidents and historical coincidences after you'd settled on the deluge date? Rockefeller being at Yellowstone that week was one such unplanned coincidence, IIRC.
The scenario came from an off-the-cuff idea about 'Yellowstone explodes in the Gilded Age'. I don't like disasters to happen 'just because', so I had the idea to use a concept I first read about in The Science of Discworld, concerning a theory about how the Deccan Trap eruptions in Asia might have been caused or intensified by an asteroid impact antipodal to them. Also on reading how @AndyC had used a (rather different) impactor in the same area in his Endeavour series, I was curious if he would show this happening, but instead he showed North America as being the safest place on Earth. (Which is fine - as I mentioned at the time, the antipodal theory is controversial, and whether anything happened would likely depend on the nature of the impactor). Then, of course, I wanted to justify where the asteroid came from, and that led to the idea of telling the story of America through flashbacks as the impactor moves through space towards the Earth--though that ended up being more complicated than first intended, with multiple objects involved.

I can't remember why I picked the year 1886 specifically, but after reading up on that year, April 19th seemed like a good date because there were several important events in the process of happening then--Teddy Roosevelt chasing down his boat in North Dakota, the socialist riots building in Chicago and Milwaukee, wrangling over Irish Home Rule in the UK, etc. I could find exact records on just what Cleveland was doing then, and so forth. There wasn't any reason other than that. As you say, serendipity meant I later found other remarkable events at that time, such as the Rockefellers being in Yellowstone and Barker and the Enterprise being in New York City.
 
Last edited:
That makes sense. From what I know of the period, a lot of the "starting conditions" (for want of a better phrase) of the 20th century are still very fluid at this point. Germany is yet to embark on Weltpolitik, Europe hasn't settled into its rigid alliance blocks, the English political class are still trying to determine which continental power is the main future threat, and so on. A lot of potential to roll the dice.

The Deccan Traps is an interesting one. When I was reading for my abortive Masters degree, we had a lecturer from industry whose micropalaeontological specialism (foraminifera) led him to be very much on the minority side of the K-T boundary debate (signs of a "mass extinction" at 65MA are far less clear-cut and not at all instantenous for microfauna taxa, as compared to megafauna). By leaning myself very heavily towards the 'slow burn' extinction theory favoured by the Deccan Trap camp, I somehow managed to achieve the highest mark I ever got for an academic essay. Of course, the reality is probably a case of asteroid impact providing a killer blow for megafauna, in an environment already under massive stress from decades if not centuries of continuous volcanism (which in turn is possibly intensified as per the antipodal hypothesis) - but that's not the answer pop science wants to hear.

"Why April 19th?" was probably set in my mind by seeing this front page - newspapers usually make a fuss about "hottest Easter / May Bank Holiday / October on record", to see one particular date singled out seemed odd, to the point where I started wondering where I'd seen it given major significance. I imagine this was about selective statistics - with April 18th and 20th being well within normal ranges and not at all headline worthy.

I never did thank you for your ever so generous reference in the published foreword. To be mentioned in the same breath as Conway Morris was immensely flattering, especially for a might-have-been geologist/palaeontologist.
 
That makes sense. From what I know of the period, a lot of the "starting conditions" (for want of a better phrase) of the 20th century are still very fluid at this point. Germany is yet to embark on Weltpolitik, Europe hasn't settled into its rigid alliance blocks, the English political class are still trying to determine which continental power is the main future threat, and so on. A lot of potential to roll the dice.
That's a big part of it as well, yes; as I observed during the narrative, this is still the era where the US Navy could be beaten by Brazil and they're just now thinking 'hmm, maybe we should do something about that', colonialism hasn't really penetrated into the interior of Africa (hence Obama's great-grandfather as a viewpoint character), Qing China isn't completely buggered yet, Japan hasn't completely reached its status as a world power yet, etc. Full of uncertainty and potentiality. It is a good moment for the world to suddenly take a different and unexpected turn.

I never did thank you for your ever so generous reference in the published foreword. To be mentioned in the same breath as Conway Morris was immensely flattering, especially for a might-have-been geologist/palaeontologist.
No problem. That set of Christmas Lectures was particularly influential for me, though a number of them in the 90s were excellent--sadly they mostly declined after reducing the number and going to Channel 4, though I will stick up for the chemistry ones done by my old lecturer Peter Wothers.
 
For you, what was the most difficult part of writing the novel?
I would say, coming up with a good point to end it at, because it could go on forever.

It was one of those great projects where I never got writer's block, I always knew what would come next and could write it off-the-cuff and continuously. The downside of that was that all the bricks fitted together so neatly that at the end, when someone suggested I might want to incorporate some extra viewpoints (more female characters and a follow-up in India), I couldn't get my metaphorical knife into the cracks to insert any, and in the end just gave up and let it stand.
 
That's a big part of it as well, yes; as I observed during the narrative, this is still the era where the US Navy could be beaten by Brazil and they're just now thinking 'hmm, maybe we should do something about that', colonialism hasn't really penetrated into the interior of Africa (hence Obama's great-grandfather as a viewpoint character), Qing China isn't completely buggered yet, Japan hasn't completely reached its status as a world power yet, etc. Full of uncertainty and potentiality. It is a good moment for the world to suddenly take a different and unexpected turn.

In terms of contemporary expections for the future, I have come across at least two rather striking examples of this through reading newspapers from 1891.

Firstly you have public speakers, hailed as insightful experts on military and naval matters, ranking China as a greater direct threat to the Australian colonies than either Japan or Germany, and in the same tier as France, Russia, and the United States.

Secondly the renewal of the Triple Alliance in that year is celebrated by the British press as a force for peace in Europe, and being very much in the UK's interests.

On a less pleasant note, news of H.M.Stanley and the Congo Free State is relayed with disturbing naivitee, and with only a switch of religion and ethnicity, the printed rhetoric about Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms could easily have come from a present day tabloid.

I think this may be another reason why setting a disaster novel in this particular historical period works so well - the setting is equal parts recognisably modern and distinctly not so.
 
I think this may be another reason why setting a disaster novel in this particular historical period works so well - the setting is equal parts recognisably modern and distinctly not so.
Indeed, that's a good way of putting it - I was struck by how similar Cleveland's situation was to Obama's in terms of how Congress saw him as basically illegitimate because he had dared to be elected president for the wrong party, and similarly frustrated everything he did in the most pointlessly childish of ways, despite being made up of serious men with beards who used flowery language.
 
I'm afraid my knowledge of the geological and paleontological effects of the impact is minimal at best, but I am curious - given that one of the most well-known AH novels to feature the same sort of cataclysmic event is Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers

I must admit it is one of my favourite AH novels, though my enjoyment of it has been tarnished since I joined AH.com and became aware of Stirling's dubious views, to put it mildly. But I was wondering if you were aware of it, and whether it influenced writing TTLG in any way? Or the opposite, perhaps?
 
Watch Stephen Fry's Wagner and Me, which deals with the issue of enjoying something that was credited by a dick and/or used by a dick.

Tell me about it. I've contemplated an ISOT vignette that would explore that, but it would be a difficult one.

I take the attitude that if someone like Daniel Barenboim can move past the man to celebrate the music, then I shouldn't feel uncomfortable doing the same, so long as you don't forget the fact he really was horrifically anti-Semitic.
 
Tell me about it. I've contemplated an ISOT vignette that would explore that, but it would be a difficult one.
I'd be curious to see that.

I take the attitude that if someone like Daniel Barenboim can move past the man to celebrate the music, then I shouldn't feel uncomfortable doing the same, so long as you don't forget the fact he really was horrifically anti-Semitic.
There's definitely some crossover in that about historical figures holding positions that are not accepted by society today. But that's for a thread outside this one.
 
I'm afraid my knowledge of the geological and paleontological effects of the impact is minimal at best, but I am curious - given that one of the most well-known AH novels to feature the same sort of cataclysmic event is Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers

I must admit it is one of my favourite AH novels, though my enjoyment of it has been tarnished since I joined AH.com and became aware of Stirling's dubious views, to put it mildly. But I was wondering if you were aware of it, and whether it influenced writing TTLG in any way? Or the opposite, perhaps?
I am certainly aware of it, but it was not a primary inspiration in this case because that is about the distant setting of a world long after the cataclysm and mostly involving ordinary people, rather than dealing with how governments respond to the immediate disaster.

This is also why I am wary about doing a sequel to TTLG, because it probably would be a bit too similar to The Peshawar Lancers.
 
I totally get not going back and cracking the work open once more, but I am wondering if you have any stort of broad ideas about what the direction things are going in India, East Africa and the far east?

This is something I'd love to see, but at the same time can totally understand Thande not wanting to do it - mountains on the horizon and all that.

Didn't you do a hypothetical look-forward Presidents list recently?
 
Indeed, that's a good way of putting it - I was struck by how similar Cleveland's situation was to Obama's in terms of how Congress saw him as basically illegitimate because he had dared to be elected president for the wrong party, and similarly frustrated everything he did in the most pointlessly childish of ways, despite being made up of serious men with beards who used flowery language.
Wasn't Cleveland against doing things?
 
I totally get not going back and cracking the work open once more, but I am wondering if you have any stort of broad ideas about what the direction things are going in India, East Africa and the far east?
I've not thought about it in that much detail, because if I did revisit it, it would be a '50 years later' thing where I'm Carefully Vague about how we actually got to the new global situation except in broad strokes.

Broadly speaking, I was hinting that China will generally do relatively well out of the situation (in longterm geopolitical terms, that is--still losing a lot of her people to famine of course) and India will be a slow-motion collapse into anarchy as Britain abandons more and more of it to either the princely states or is just unmotivated to put down rebellions anymore. Agent Boot mentioned The Peshawar Lancers above - this is one case where it would be almost deliberately different. (Although of course by a few decades later, India would likely have settled down into one or more stable native empires, depending on who was best-placed to take advantage of the situation, and maybe just a few British-controlled trade ports left--almost a neat reversal to the 17th century situation).
 
@Thande, so sorry to bother you, but will the major colonial powers be able to sustain some form of chilly existence in the metropoles, or will they have to migrate entirely to their possessions?
 
@Thande, so sorry to bother you, but will the major colonial powers be able to sustain some form of chilly existence in the metropoles, or will they have to migrate entirely to their possessions?
I haven't made up my mind, and I don't want to say anything in case I ever do a sequel. I want to look at Ice Age models to figure out what is reasonable, but the trouble is most stuff you can find only talks about glacial maxima, not any of the intermediate stages.
 
Back
Top