It was all a fiction, of course, based on hearsay and rumor, but it had the ring of truth to it, and that was enough. It promised to be the most popular opera of the day. In time, perhaps, art would outlive history, and fiction would supplant fact. Perhaps, one day, audiences would never guess that the two people who gave their names to the piece had actually lived. Would never guess that there had ever been two such people, Iron Jaw and Hummingbird.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I’M THE KIND OF PERSON WHO WON’T BUY A DVD IF THE only special features are trailers for other movies, and who always feels a little cheated when the last words in a book are The End. I always like a little extra material to dig into after I finish a story, a peek behind the scenes.
With that in mind, I offer the following notes.
ON THE CELESTIAL EMPIRE
The world in which Iron Jaw and Hummingbird takes place is one in which I’ve set many stories and novels. Called the Celestial Empire, it is an alternate history in which China rose to world domination in the fifteenth century.
Iron Jaw and Hummingbird begins in what our calendar calls the year 2515 in the twenty-sixth century, and which the calendars of the Celestial Empire alternatively refer to as the year 5152, the fifty-second year of the Tianbian Emperor, or the 254th Fire Star year.
ON FIRE STAR GEOGRAPHY
The red planet Fire Star is, of course, Mars. Five centuries before Gamine and Huang were born, the spaceships of the Dragon Throne first touched down on its red sands. (The Aztecs were already there, but that’s another story entirely.) The spaceships brought colonists, who with a process known as terraforming began the slow transformation of the red planet into a habitable world.
All the places to which Gamine’s and Huang’s journeys take them can be found on any map of Mars, like the one available at www.google.com/mars. The Tianfei Valley is the Valles Marineris, Bao Shan is Olympus Mons, the Three Sovereigns mountain range is the Tharsis Montes, the Forking Paths is the Noctis Labyrinthus, the Great Yu Canyon is Echus Chasma, and so on.
ON UNITS OF MEASURE
Some of the units of measure employed on Fire Star are roughly equivalent to those used on Earth today. For instance, a day on Mars—the time it takes for the planet to make a complete rotation and for the sun to return to the same point in the sky—is about half an hour longer than a day on Earth. Whenever reference is made to a “day” in this novel, then, it could as easily be a day on Earth or on Mars. The same is true of hours, weeks, and months.
Seasons and years, on the other hand, are a little more complicated. A year, in general terms, is defined as the time needed for a planet to make a complete rotation around the sun. On Earth, this is a little more than 365 days. Mars, however, is farther away from the sun, and takes more than 668 Martian days to make a complete rotation. As a result, the Martian year is almost twice as long as an Earth year (it’s 1.881 Earth years long, to be precise). And the seasons are correspondingly longer as well, with spring lasting for some 194 days on Mars, as opposed to 93 days of spring on Earth.
In the interest of avoiding confusion, dates and ages in Iron Jaw and Hummingbird have been converted from Martian years to Earth years. It just seemed too confusing to say that Huang Fei was nine and a half years old when his parents sent him off to join the Green Standard Army, but that those nine and a half years were equivalent to eighteen years on another planet entirely.
(Anyone bothered by this can always convert them back. Simply divide the number of years in question by 1.881, and the resulting sum will be the number of Martian years.)
ON INFLUENCES AND INSPIRATIONS
The story of Gamine and Huang is inspired in large part by the historical Boxer Rebellion, an uprising that took place in China at the turn of the twentieth century. Names like “the Society of Righteous Harmony” and “the Harmonious Fists” are shamelessly stolen from the pages of history, as is the idea of bandits and religious ecstatics colliding to start a revolution.
Likewise, the story of Gamine and Temujin on the Grand Trunk is an homage to (or stolen from, depending on how charitable one is) Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. I had the great good fortune to finish work on this book while staying at Kipling’s house in Vermont, Naulakha, where the author lived for four years in the 1890s. It was while living there that Kipling started work on Kim (and there that he wrote The Jungle Book for which, because of Disney’s adaptations of the Mowgli stories, he is probably best known today). It seemed somehow fitting that I should end work on Gamine’s story in the same house. And I got to sleep in Kipling’s room and use his toilet. How cool is that?
Chris Roberson
Austin, Texas
CHRIS ROBERSON’s novels include Here, There & Everywhere; The Voyage of Night Shining White; Paragaea: A Planetary Romance; X-Men: The Return; Set the Seas on Fire; The Dragon’s Nine Sons; and the forthcoming End of the Century and Three Unbroken. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as Asimov’s, Interzone, Postscripts, and Subterranean, and in anthologies such as Firebirds Soaring, Live Without a Net, FutureShocks, and Forbidden Planets. Along with his business partner and spouse, Allison Baker, he is the publisher of MonkeyBrain Books, an independent publishing house specializing in genre fiction and nonfiction genre studies, and he is the editor of the anthology Adventure, Vol. 1. He has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award three times—once each for writing, publishing, and editing—twice a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and twice for the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Short Form (winning in 2004 with his story “O One”).
Chris and Allison live in Austin, Texas, with their daughter, Georgia. Chris is online at www.chrisroberson.net.
BOOKS BY CHRIS ROBERSON
Set the Seas on Fire
Here, There & Everywhere
Paragaea: A Planetary Romance
The Voyage of Night Shining White
X-Men: The Return
The Dragon’s Nine Sons
End of the Century
Three Unbroken
Iron Jaw and Hummingbird
Iron Jaw and Hummingbird Page 27