AUTHOR’S NOTE
As speculative fiction, like the prequel, Broken Angel, Flight of Shadows takes place in settings where I’ve wondered what society might be like at the extremes.
In Broken Angel, the religious theocracy of Appalachia is based on what could happen if religious extremists in America managed total political control over society. (Centuries ago, at its most successful and powerful, it was called the Inquisition.)
Flight of Shadows examines the world outside Appalachia. My speculation comes from a mishmash of ancient history and current events. My hope is that the novel’s fictional setting will remind you that the real America, with all its imperfections and infighting, is still a glorious democracy and a unique bastion of freedom, a legacy built by the women and men who have sacrificed for it over the last few centuries.
To those familiar with the sources I drew upon, it will be immediately obvious that the story is based on the city-states of ancient Greece and on the walled cities built for defense against primitive weaponry. The “Industrials” are intended to bring to mind a similar slave-based society and the correspondingly low value of life in cultures before Jesus Christ and the impact his teachings had on Western civilization.
It might seem far-fetched that in a few generations America could find itself in a city-state society like the one in Flight of Shadows, one of degraded freedoms and stability. Yet several factors indicate that the laws currently protecting human rights based on a Judeo-Christian value system are under attack. Without reform to the immigration system, we may not be far from the stratified societies so recently escaped in America and Europe. In less than fifty years, Europe’s social landscape has shifted tremendously and become increasingly polarized due to legal immigration intended to facilitate cheap labor. And in America, can illegal immigration not have far-reaching effects over the next few generations? These illegals live in secret and in fear in America, willing to trade cheap labor and their human rights for the chance at a better life for their children, while politicians accept the inconvenience and posture against such realities until jobs become scarce. I believe the religious right in America, as an organized political force, must lead the efforts to help these desperate immigrant families.
The social strata of Flight of Shadows is like that of many developing countries. A tiny percentage of extremely wealthy live as kings among the majority of extremely impoverished.
Yet even democracies can disintegrate, as in Germany, which radically changed under Nazi rule. A country once called Rhodesia, only one generation ago, was a prosperous country in the south of Africa. But political instability due to racial inequalities radically changed the way of life there. And under a dictator who slipped into power through a majority vote, Zimbabwe’s economy has now become tatters. By squandering the checks and balances of democracy that currently protect America, the Rhodesian farmers have seen their economy and average life span halved in less than twenty years. The skilled and educated have fled the country, and it is no coincidence that there, too, a small minority of the very wealthy live in comfort among the majority whose hopes of freedom are now withering in shanties. These tragedies were not far from my mind as I wrote.
Other existing conditions across the world influenced the novel. Palestinians travel for hours in darkness to wait outside checkpoints for just a chance to work inside Israel and spend hours in darkness traveling back at the end of the day to the poverty of the Gaza Strip. Like illegal immigrants in America, these men and women are driven by helplessness, working any way possible to feed their children, politically hampered by the extremists among them who turn to terrorism.
Water shortages could completely disfigure our governing system and our nation’s economy. Interstate squabbles over water rights have taken place in the southwest and southeast United States, and mass shortages are predicted over the next few decades. Wars have been fought for much less.
As for the decline of civil liberties during and after war, all we need do is examine the headlines about the many challenges to civil rights laws since the war in Iraq to see what can happen if citizens aren’t vigilant about the dangers of allowing power to be concentrated at the top.
Could we come to the point where genetic science is capable of what the novel presents? DNA manipulation has already produced insects growing legs out of their mouths and paleontologists modifying chicken embryos to hatch living dinosaurs.
As much as the novel is politically or scientifically speculative, however, my hope is that you might remember it most as a story of a father who loved his daughter, who, like each of us, was born to be free.