Bonus: Coroner's Report
On the death of a detective
Today is a Tales from the Triverse bonus chapter! These are exclusive to the newsletter and don’t get posted elsewhere (eg on Wattpad).
If you’ve not been reading Tales from the Triverse you can start the book here:
In fact, today’s bonus contains MAJOR SPOILERS for chapter 1, so if you haven’t read that one yet please do so before going any further. Here’s a link:
Lovely. Hope that wasn’t too morbid for a Wednesday morning.
I debated about whether to include the photograph of John. I think it adds to the verisimilitude of the report, but I’m also wary of ‘overriding’ a reader’s imagination with a definitive version of a character’s likeness. I have similarly constructed photoreal depictions of some other characters in the book, and keep going back and forth over whether to share them. The cast of Tales from the Triverse is quite sprawling, and it might help the characters to embed in readers’ minds; on the other hand, it could be limiting or disrupt your normal way of reading.
In this case, given that John didn’t even last to the end of the first chapter, I figure it doesn’t matter hugely. The difficulty comes with the regulars who we’re going to get to know over the coming months.
What do you think?
Happy Wednesday. Yesterday I heard that ND Stevenson now has a Substack. This is exciting news for many reasons, not least that they’re a fantastic writer who created one of my son’s favourite TV shows (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power). Substack continues to pull in more fascinating writers.
Meanwhile. I’ll be back in your inbox on Friday with ‘The koth: Part 2’, where we’ll witness the fallout from John’s untimely demise. See you there!
I'd forgotten this little chapter and hope the convention of the occasional "sheet of paper" from the world continues. It really is evocative.
Something that should have occurred to me first time around - if nothing else, Max-Earth could have influenced "SS-London" (shitty-smoggy" to have a sane currency.
6'1" and 150-ish lbs? Skinny dude!
Oh, no, I see the creation of a Triverse kept Britain from adopting the metric system!
Next, we'll discover decimalization never happened and British currency is still utterly batshit. I forget exactly how many horsehoofs are in a tripenny, or how many hatracks are in a pound*...
Anyway, in the context of the story, the 'photo' was appropriate, but, yeah, you probably won't (and shouldn't) put up images of all your other characters.
Your worry is founded. After all, if you were to, say, look up "A Song of Ice and Fire" fan art from before 2012 or so you'd see a lovely variety of designs based on the artist interpretation of GRRM's imperfect verbal descriptions. Look up recent fan art (or "Game of Thrones") fan art and, yeah, it all looks like the TV show. Of course, Danerys being drawn as Emilia Clarke rather than her book description does help hide that, in the books, she's still only about 14/15 years old and really shouldn't have so many gratuitous nude scenes.
My mental image of Fenris from TMC was quite different from the art you created and posted. Now, fan art doesn't affect my mental image of a character, overall, but YOU are the author, so your art, to my mind, became "official," and overrode MY Fenris, who had a bald pate (under a little cap), but longer hair in the back, a pointed van dyke, and Peter-Capaldi-ish "Attack Eyebrows." I won't say your images necessarily inhibit my own imagination, but, images provided by - especially created by - the author do have a "weight of authority" beyond any cover artist.
Anyways, I didn't think of Callahan as that thin, or with a "porn 'stache." But, 1970's, I should have anticipated the 'stache.
*Yes, yes, I know, except for the pound, none of those were units of currency, but farthing, ha'penny, thruppence, sixpence, shilling, florin, half-crown, crown, guinea and groat...? We can agree that (based off the penny) having 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 and 1/6d coins, then having 12 pennies to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound was just... Y'know, I really need to look up how that system grew.