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Chapter 104.5: Author's Note
🕑 Added 2023-10-25 15:52:39 +0000 UTCI am, for better or worse, a relative newbie as fiction is concerned.
A while back, Dotblue came to me and said, “Hey, have you ever thought about taking a try at fiction?” At that time, I really hadn’t. I had a few short stories under my belt, at most, and I wasn’t sure I had much (or any) talent for telling stories. I told him so.
For whatever reason, Dotblue wouldn’t have it. He told me that we were going to try to do some fiction, that he’d fill in the gaps in my skill with editing, and that we were taking a big substantial bet on our financial well-being to do fiction, and that I was going first. So we started on a story that took place in another world, one where the main character immediately experienced a large loss and ended up in a hostile world.
That was not this story. It was another one we were doing to warm up. It went terribly.
Undeterred, Dotblue said, “Well, that wasn’t really the story you wanted to write, anyway. Write the one you have banging around in your head.” That story is this story, and it’s going really well. We might actually end up able to do this for a living long-term, which is insane to both of us.
This story, as I see it, has two practical upshots:
- Dotblue is rad
- I’m basically as new to writing fiction as most of you are - that is, I’ve sort of banged around with it for a few months, and I’m learning a lot about it.
I’ve always liked the little stories and anecdotes that leak out over time from other authors describing how they came up with some characters, or how they approach writing. When I finished book 1, I released a long, rambling document explaining how the story came about and why each character did what they did. A lot of people liked that, and I like the concept of it a lot, so we are doing that again.
I release these authors notes unedited, in pure flow-of-consciousness format. I have at least one writer friend who doesn’t love that, and who has advised me to edit them to perfection. The reason I don’t is twofold: One, I don’t want Dotblue to have to do that much extra work. But the second reason is even more important to me, which is that I want to give you as exact a version of my thoughts on this as I can, and editing is almost necessarily a departure from those thoughts.
So here, in all its unedited glory, is the author’s note for this book.
The General Story
When Matt arrived on Gaia in book 1, everything was wrong and dangerous. When he first lands on Gaia, he doesn’t have water or food, so he immediately begins starving to death. He can’t fight, so he immediately almost gets killed by a pack of low-level mooks. He doesn’t have friends, so he’s immediately alone.
Beyond his immediate Maslows-Hierarchy-of-Needs requirements, everything is also wrong in a deeper way. He was promised redemption and repayment for dying of cancer, and it turned out to be a lie. He was promised a good place to exist in, and instead got death. He was promised, in all ways, good. And now he has, in all ways, the wrong thing.
If you summarize the first book, it’s about people learning how things are wrong, and then learning how to survive them. Not to thrive, or do well. Just to survive.
Not everybody survives, actually. More on that later.
The second book had to be a little different. Matt survived book 1 and all the events in it. He, in fact, got pretty good at surviving by the end of everything. If all I did with the book 2 was for him to survive some more, I think nearly all of the readership would have abandoned us by now. There’s only so much “Matt went to a dungeon, barely lived, and only got a little stronger” that the story can tolerate. It’s the kind of thing that’s only exciting for a while.
So book 2 ended up about being something different from surviving. It ended up being about learning to thrive. But more importantly, it ended up being about surviving despite what other people want you to do. It’s about Matt realizing what he’s good at, taking back some of the power and life he was promised but never got, and forcing things to go better.
If book 1 was going to be called Surviving the Dead World, then book 2 is probably going to be called something like Terraforming the Dead World.
I’m telling you this first because as I talk about setting, characters, etc., that’s the backdrop for all of this. This book is about how, despite the fact that surviving is good, it’s never actually enough. Trying to do better - to learn how to thrive - is necessary for anyone, even when it doesn’t work out. It’s part of living. The alternative - giving up and staying stagnant - is part of dying. It’s a slow, boring part of dying. But it’s part of it.
Gaia
As always, Gaia is dead in an indistinct way. In my head, the deal has always been something like “The Scourge ate all the good, useful things, and it’s been more or less frozen in time since then.”
But we also, even in book 1, saw ways that isn’t absolutely true. The dungeons, for instance, are recharging, and it seems like that’s happening because of the sun. The system instance is getting the power it needs to run its own operations and to give Matt rewards from somewhere, probably some down-chain mana from the same process.
In other words, Gaia has been dead for a very, very long time before Matt shows up. But even it was starting to recover.
As the book goes on, we find that at least some of what Gaia is recovering from isn’t entirely Scourge-caused. The Gaians, it seems, pursued a really aggressive treatment plan for the Scourge. The reason the sun doesn’t work right is because they were trying to starve it out. The reason Gaia is frozen and cut off from the rest of the universe is because they were hurt and lost their ability to trust, and put up a shield between them and it to keep themselves from being hurt and betrayed again.
The Gaians
The Gaians are the most direct example of being stuck in the surviving rut. But, notably, it’s not from lack of trying. They are good at thriving. They tried hard to survive to the point where they could try again. But sometimes, the world beats you down to a point where you are now in a long-term survival patterns whether you want it or not, and you have fallen in a way you can’t recover from unless a friend comes along and lifts you up.
They needed someone to save them. Over a very long period of story, that ends up being Matt. He shows up at their house, tries to cheer them up, explains he’s their friend, and then immediately starts helping. He can’t clean the whole house, but he opens up the windows and lets light in.
Then he goes out and helps them deal with the last, lingering remnants of the betrayal and hurt that drove them in there in the first place, comes back, holds out his hand, and escorts them into the sunlight.
But the neat way that friendship works is that even him helping them is also them helping him. As he gives them hope and lifts them out of their rut, them being around for him to help does the same thing for him. At the end of book 2, most of that kind of energy is still coming from Matt. But even an unhealthy friend is still a friend, and Matt sees the benefits of that.
Eventually, the Gaians will be strong again in the ways that they have traditionally been strong, and they will help him more. But even now, they are helping by just being Matt's friends, or even by simply being available for Matt to help.
Asadel/Derek
Sometimes commenters will talk about how Asadel survived. This is true in a sense, but it’s mostly wrong. Asadel died. He tried to thrive without doing all the pesky work related to it, and as a result got beat to death with a shovel.
Derek is much more interesting to me. Derek survived. And, in book 2, Derek is sort of the first person we see start to work towards thriving in a big, noticeable way. He almost immediately turns his life around in productive ways that feel better to him than all the things he was trying (or not trying) before.
His story is really compressed, but for a while, this just means plugging away and trying. Isekai is fantasy, so he doesn’t have to do this very long before he finds a new path and a new way to live that suits him much better. In real life, this often takes a really long time. But the plugging away has a value of its own, and even though Derek doesn’t get where he needs to be right away, he’s almost immediately happier. He hadn’t even realized that he had given up a long time ago when he decided to try to thrive without doing the work, and deviating from that dark pattern almost immediately puts him in a better place.
Lucy
Lucy has it the hardest of almost anybody on Gaia. She is in the unenviable position of knowing exactly what she’s supposed to be doing, but not having any of the tools to do it with. She has a couple of handbooks from the system and a few things she’s able to learn during her travels with Matt, but that’s it.
Worse, Matt isn’t doing anything the way he’s supposed to. Survivors are a professional class - they help adventurers get where they need to be, mostly. First, Matt misuses the hell out of that class in ways she can’t help much with, and then gets an entirely new class where there’s basically no documentation for. She’s a living information kiosk with no information to give out.
At the same time, she didn’t exactly choose that for herself. She’s fine with the job, but she still doesn’t know who she is, or why she would have chosen it.
For Lucy, a big part of book 2 is chasing after those missing pieces. She’s given up on ever getting any information from the system, so she’s watching Matt closer and learning how he fights independently of anyone or anything else. By the end of book 2, she’s a full partner in how he plans and a full, real-time coach during battles.
She’s also defied the system on multiple occasions just to push forward. The most obvious way this works is with Matt’s authority, which she can’t easily talk about. But she also moves forward when she tries her best to save Leel’s amulet and gladly interacts with its clearly damaged occupant to learn new things about herself.
What she ends up learning, subtly, is that who she is isn’t perfectly connected with who she was. She has choices, and her past doesn’t absolutely dictate her future. Does she still want to know more about how she got where she is? Hell yes. But she’s also working really hard to make sure that who she is right now is someone she likes. She’s taken back the control of where she’s going and what she does, past be damned.
Leel
Leel is an asshole. He’s actually, for the record, a really big racist. We don’t see that much because there aren’t any races around (besides Lucy, sort of) for him to look down on. But he’s a superior, smug, awful piece of shit. Nobody likes him.
Leel is a little like Asadel in that he walks into Gaia thinking it’s going to be a cake-walk trip and that he’s going to have a fantastic time, only to later have a rude awakening. He fucks around and finds out, basically, and things turn out really poorly for him.
Where he differs from Asadel, though, is that this isn’t because he’s flat out dumb. Leel is smart. And it isn’t because he’s lazy - that was Asadel’s problem. If Asadel was an avatar of sloth, Leel is the personification of arrogance. When he plays around with Matt, it’s because he honestly can’t imagine a scenario where Matt poses a threat to him. He’s completely in control until he isn’t, and then he almost immediately panics.
Unlike every other character, Leel has always thrived in his terrible, racist, oligarch ways, but he’s always been living his best life as he himself (terribly) defines it. But his arrogance means he thinks he did that all by himself. We see that when he talks about being the fourth adoptive son of Ammai. He wears it like a title he earned, rather than a bunch of resources he got without having to work for them.
He’s worked, and he’s worked hard, but since he doesn’t acknowledge that he’s also been in incredibly lucky, he’s unable to ever imagine himself as anything but a perfect genius who will almost certainly triumph with just a little bit of elbow grease. So he breaks rules, turns off safety features, and pushes forward in dangerous directions with almost no thought.
When he gets eaten by the Scourge, everyone sees it coming.
The System Instance
The system thrives off of other people’s work, in a very literal sense. When it has a lot of energy, it’s because some adventurer somewhere did some amazing thing. When it does work, it does it with that energy, not really its own.
It's been starving and alone for a long time, waiting for access to energy again. It sort of has that with Matt, but not nearly as much as it wants. What it does get, it has to almost immediately use trying to kill Matt. It has to work for its own happiness, and it doesn’t like it.
When I was in my late teens, I knew a trust fund kid. His grandparents had set aside a bunch of money for him, but didn’t want it to ruin his life, so they set a clause that he wasn’t going to get it until he was in his 30’s, hoping that he’d learn a trade or a profession, become who he was going to be, and then have the money as a sort of cushion to make things easier.
It ruined him. Being able to look forward to that money meant he never really tried as hard as he should have. He bounced from job to job, doing bad work and getting fired for entirely justified reasons. He got a useless degree he never intended on using. Stuff like that.
Where that guy looked forward to money, The system instance looks forward to the wall the Gaians put between him and the main System falling. Once that happens, his trust fund will pay out, and it will be easy street again.
The only complication in his way is Matt. In ways that are becoming more distinct, Matt stands as a sort of barrier between him and the happiness he thinks he deserves, both because of his authority and because he’s preserving the story of what the system did to the Gaians. Having gone a little insane over the intervening centuries between the two comings of the Scourge, he’s willing to do literally anything to keep Matt from screwing it up.
Being mostly immortal, he can’t help but survive. But he also represents the most intense failure to do any work to thrive in the entire book.
The system instance is also important because he and others like him are oligarchs. They enforce survival on others, trapping their planets in eternal cycles of just barely getting by. And they do this on a societal level, making sure that all the better things that people’s work should produce are siphoned off.
What the system is doing is telling people “Hey, work, develop your talents, and you will thrive” with their boons. But on the other side, the system has also set in place a literal system that withholds paychecks strategically to make sure nobody ever thrives enough to challenge the system and stop the payments.
Barry
Barry is one of my favorite characters in the book, but he has one of the least interesting arcs. For the most part, Barry represents a normal, healthy person growing up in normal, healthy ways. He’s putting in work, and that work is paying off, both in terms of what he can do and who he is becoming. He’s making friends, and he’s growing. Through that growth, he’s learning to help people better.
He takes constant risks in pursuit of that, but the kinds of risks he takes are the kind I hope everyone has access to. They are risks that accomplish real things and push him and other people forward in really beneficial ways, but when he loses the dice roll on them only hurt him in the sense that they are temporary setbacks.
Barry thrives in a relatively safe, productive way that helps other people. It’s what I wish for everyone.
The Ra’Zorian Crew
We don’t hear much from non-Derek Ra’Zorians, and what we do see is mostly set up for book 3. But in terms of how they are relevant to book 2, I think it’s important to note that both Brennan and Artemis seem aware that Ra’Zor, as a whole, is being pushed into mere survival by the system. They are working to find ways out of that.
We don’t know the details of that yet, but the impression I tried to give is that they don’t really know a great deal beyond that yet. What they need, they know, is someone to come in from the outside, and to use that fresh blood to rock the boat.
Spoiler alert: I’m starting book 3 tomorrow, and you might have noticed most things are pretty neatly buttoned up for the time being on Gaia. What might Matt get up to that's relevant to Ra'Zor?
The Amulet Guardian
I hated writing this character because he represents a really horrible reality. Some people have a ton of power, and use it to hurt people. They make scenarios and cycles that keep people down. I’m not just talking about work. I’m also talking about abusive people, people who break promises and use other people. The Amulet Guardian got trapped in a hell made entirely by and out of those kinds of people, and he’s been there for centuries.
Worse, by the time anyone gets to him, it’s too late.
But he’s also the biggest hero in the book because while he suffered he also did whatever he could, even if his efforts were going to pay out for other people. At some point, he had to have known it was too late for him, and that he wouldn’t get anything out of his work. But he clung to sanity just long enough to drop a single piece of information on Matt and Lucy, one that will be very important in the future.
He was incredibly sad to write, but if there’s one person you respect in this book, it should be him.
Mechanics
I didn’t introduce a lot of new mechanics into this book, but where I did, they probably could stand some explaining.
Mana Starvation and the Scourge
The basic premise behind how mana works in this universe is that it’s everywhere. Where you find a place where there’s no mana, something has gone terribly wrong. That’s true of living things as well. They all produce it. It’s also true of non-living things, like dirt. It’s supposed to have mana in it.
And where there isn’t mana, things go wrong. Gaian dirt is shitty, red dust. Without Mana, Matt’s skills don’t work. His stats go away. Eventually, although there was no way to show this without him dying, he himself would fall apart. The only reason he hadn’t had problems with it up to book 2 is that Eat Anything! amplifies what he gets out of food, including mana content. But without it, his life starts to go badly.
The reason this happens is because the system assumes that any time someone buys vegetables from the estate, they are going to plant them in a normal, mana-rich environment and the seeds or plants will be able to jump-start their own mana production with environmental mana. Being lazy and greedy, it sees no downside to this. It saves on mana costs, and people get the plants they were promised. It’s a win-win except in Matt’s exact situation, where he’s now growing mana-zombie plants that can’t get that spark of life they need to be healthy.
Meanwhile, things that eat other things can’t do well on them. Matt produces most of the mana he needs, but eating mana-deficient plants dilutes his ability to do that over time. Where a magic-user would draw in environmental mana to push their spells, humans can’t actually use that kind of mana to supplement their natural processes. It just doesn’t work that way. So eventually, he is starving, despite getting his calories and nutrients.
The reason the honey fixes is this is it’s working of Gaian seeds, not system-produced but harvested and saved in the museum. They already have that spark of mana in them, so when they start growing, they are able to jump-start the mana cycle in their local area. The ape-bees probably aren’t aware that this is why they prefer those plants to others, but they begin to preferentially harvest that pollen first, essentially making a kind of condensed mana-food. At first, this is just food. Later, as the bees get access to more and more Gaian plants specifically selected for their superior mana production, it turns into something like a mana potion.
Eventually, the Gaian plants and the bees will fix the other plants on Matt’s farm, too. This isn’t that big of a stretch – it honestly never would have taken much. The mana generator, which never actually gets bought, would have done the same thing just fine.
The Scourge is sort of an anti-plant in that it breaks this entire cycle. It eats mana, then lives forever and protects itself, so none of that mana is ever released. Instead of circulating life, it destroys it and encapsulates the potential for it, eventually trapping everything in itself. When it dies, it doesn’t just release that mana. It destabilizes it and releases it in a useless, disorganized form that rapidly decays.
This is because, as you probably picked up on, the Scourge is a great big metaphor for cancer. It’s a form of life, but also a mockery of it, a perversion of how life is supposed to work. It grows too fast, acts too selfishly, and destroys everything around it to accomplish exactly nothing but its own growth. The most aggressive treatments the Gaians figure out for it end up being harmful not just for the Scourge, but for themselves as well. At some point during the fight, they literally inject themselves with a kind of poison as a last-ditch effort to kill it.
As with real cancer, this doesn’t always work. But the Gaians keep fighting, and as sometimes (too seldom) is also true of cancer, they eventually emerge victorious. Beaten up and injured, but victorious and ready to recover.
The Mana Economy
I mentioned a kind of flow of mana above, a sort of mana-based food web that starts with sunlight or some other form of energy and ends with a planet teeming with life. System instances work by taking advantage of this economy and feeding off it.
Not everyone does well during a good economy, but virtually everyone does better than they would during a bad one. This is true of the system instances as well. It seems they need human (or other sentient life) activity to keep the mana on a planet churning and moving. System instances thus keep a big network of dungeons running on some planets, or a global war going on others. They issue rewards and spend mana giving people strength, but it’s always and forever in pursuit of making sure the mana circulates.
There are probably more direct ways to do this, but the system’s rules don’t seem to allow it. Why the system operates under those rules is still unclear (yet at least), but from what Matt and Lucy have seen and learned from the Amulet Guardian, it’s following those rules (more or less) on every planet they’ve been able to learn about.
Guardian-binding
The system’s rules seem to force it to ask Guardians if they even want to do that work, but like all rules, they can be bent. The system can’t (except under extreme circumstances) force a Guardian to work in ways they don’t want to, even after they agree to take the job in the first place. It can keep them from doing something like deserting their post if it’s absolutely necessary, but it can’t draft them, at least that we’ve seen.
That said, it seems it turns a very intentionally blind eye when humans break this rule. Asadel doesn’t show up to Gaia with a guardian, and when he returns to Ra’Zor, he returns to his guardian plinth for guidance and to learn about new classes. Brennan never mentions his guardian, and seems to find the plinths to be normal. Something is going on there, and probably something neither of them know about.
Leel comes from what appears to be a pretty evil planet, and they know all about guardians, having made the enslaving of them a generational art.
The implication of what we see on both planets is pretty dark. We don’t know how common the binding of Guardians is, but even just on those two planets there’s potentially thousands of enslaved, trapped guardians.
Matt and Lucy have seen how terrible this is first-hand, and probably nobody on any planet needs and likes his guardian more than Matt does. They are highly, highly motivated to do what they can to fix this problem.
Last Thoughts
Of the three books we have planned, this was always going to be the hardest book to write. The concept of redemption/recovery/growth-after-things-go-wrong is pretty subtle, and not beating you over the head with “HE’S DOING BETTER NOW, SEE?!” was always going to be a challenge for me.
But it’s also going to end up being my favorite of the three, I think, at least in some ways. Because by the end of the book, Matt has taken a broken promise and made it real.
And while he made compromises on what that dream was and the scope of how happy he’d immediately be, he managed to end up in a good place without making many compromises. He’s a hero now, and not because of the system, but despite it getting in the way at every turn. He made some pretty brutal tactical mistakes from a dry, what-path-does-the-math-indicate perspective and took a lot of hits because of that, but he’s also who he wants to be on his own terms.
A story: There’s a video where Matt Damon talks about winning an Oscar. I think this was for Good Will Hunting, so it would have been pretty early in his career. He says he took it home and looked at it as the adrenaline wore off, and suddenly realized something: It was just a little statue. It didn’t mean anything.
But he had been in Hollywood long enough to know that some people spent their entire lives doing almost anything to get one of those little, meaningless statues. They hurt people. They cheated. They lied. They ruined relationships and eventually ended up as bad people who maybe also had a gold statue to put on a shelf and then forget about.
He says he wept over the thought because he was so glad he was learning that then, and not after he spent his whole career doing damage.
Matt (Perison, not Damon) stands at the end of the book having taken big risks that might have ended up with himself dying, but he didn’t say, “I don’t care if that Guardian dies.” He didn’t beat a defenseless man (Leel) to death with a shovel. Does the cold, hard math say he should have? Absolutely. But he took a risk, a really big one, to actually grab at something better. His own humanity. His own desire to be a hero. Now he is a hero in a way he can enjoy and live with.
I like that.
Thank you again for reading - as always, I appreciate it more than you could possibly imagine. Tomorrow, I get started on book 3. I’ll see you then!
