Welcome! This year I’m creating a set of posts/blogs/whatever you want to call them about the “story-behind-the story” for my backlist. This month, the Netwalk Sequence is my featured series. It’s the first series I published and as I went through a recent update, I was surprised at how relevant it is, even though the books are over a decade old.
Housekeeping note: all related posts will be linked at the bottom on the Substack publication.
Originally, I didn’t write about the earlier political era when drafting Netwalk and Netwalker Uprising. Netwalk starts in the 2070s and the main part of the series goes from there. I just projected multiple decades of decline and chaos, abetted by the appearance of a rogue city-killing war machine that leads to significant worldwide political changes once the device is captured.
Oh, there are hints. Places called the Petroleum Autonomous Zone (which is referred to as a nuclear wasteland). The Florida War Zone. Reference to previous significant changes in North American governance. Hidden nuclear weapons controlled by a private corporation. The transfer of power not to an elected subordinate but to Sarah’s son Peter when she dies. References to chaotic fissures and a lack of unity within what once was the United States. The mysterious Freedom Army militia. Formal Assassination Contracts that could be filed with an entity called the Corporate Courts which…seemed to focus more on corporate entities than national ones. Native reservations that established themselves as strong separate centers of power within the US and Canada—bolstered by their use of protective technology to keep unwanted elements out. Tribal land acquisitions that expanded existing reservations (which, for the record, I consider to be a good thing).
I had my reasons for avoiding the “how did we get here” development. As far back as the ‘90s it was clear to anyone with political science training and political organizing experience that the 21st century was going to be a rough ride. At least it was obvious to me, if not others. I was well aware of the rising disruptive elements on both right and left and had my own concerns about how things would unfold.
But it’s one thing to suspect what’s coming and another to write about it. So I avoided writing about it, focusing instead on what a recovery might look like. And…there were big issues with parts of both Netwalk and Uprising in early drafts that needed the backstory. Even more than that, there was something missing. A unifying element to carry the story further than the initial rebellion and victory in Netwalk, and explain why things started going weird right away after the conclusion of Netwalk.
Enter the Gizmo. And…the pre-Gizmo stories that make up Life in the Shadows. Most of the Shadows stories were drafted when I was trying to figure out what the Gizmo was, and everything that happened before the Gizmo exploded onto the scene. At the same time I was working on what later became Beating the Apocalypse which—well, if you want dystopia, then there was a lot of it in Apocalypse, though it eventually ends well.
All the same, the pre-Gizmo era is rather grim. Forced relocation to urban areas. An even greater homeless population as a result (which carries over into Netwalk, where part of the story takes place in and around homeless people). Concerns about food—Diana thinks about radiological certifications during a dinner in the “Shadow Harvest” portion of Life in the Shadows. Other suggestions that life is not all peaches and cream in the Netwalk universe, pretty much no matter where someone lives (though things are most likely different on the reservations—that gets alluded to in “Shadow Harvest”).
Still, I needed a reason for the Corporate Courts to exist and have the power they do, extending into everyday lives. A city-killing war machine that attacked assorted cities worldwide, with no apparent motivation, with no apparent ties to any particular alliance, seemed to fit. And, after its capture, there needed to be an entity to take charge of it. At this point in the Netwalk universe, corporate entities were significantly more stable than political ones, so…enter the Corporate Courts, and a similar extension into space, the High Space participants.
I don’t really dig into the governance of the Netwalk world much more than that. I’ve been around legislatures and commissions enough in my life to know that writing about what really happens is full of a lot of snore-inducing stuff with brief flashes of headliners. Sarah Stephens serves as the predominant political voice in Netwalk, and that’s enough. What we see of what happens politically in Life in the Shadows is meant to give us glimpses of a future, and it’s not meant to be prescriptive. Really. Even without weird war machines.
The most political of the Netwalk books is the first one, Life in the Shadows. The rest…well, there are pieces here and there, but Shadows tells you how that world came to be.
Life in the Shadows is available for $2.99 in ebook form. Links to all major vendors, including Kindle, can be found at https://books2read.com/lifeintheshadows.
Or if you’d like to chuck a few coins in my direction, here’s my Ko-fi.
