All-Patron Reward, June : What I WON'T Write #2

Last month I described The Juggernaut. In a sense, this one is sort of related, as the one started with an all-out war between East and West, and this story would have taken place in the aftermath of such a war...

 

The Liberator

Origin/Description

I first came up with the idea for this story in about 1980 and wrote parts of it off and on for a few years. Its inspiration… well, it's probably obvious as we go along.

Chakata is a lone wanderer, traveling through abandoned ruins in a suit that conceals his face. The buildings that surround him are decaying, decades or perhaps a century or two old. But sometimes they have valuables hidden within, which makes them worth exploring… if you're willing to take a risk. And for his mission, Chakata is willing to take many risks.

He finds many things in one old house, a huge mansion that must have been owned by someone wealthy and powerful before the Disaster – there is food, preserved by a long-lost process; clothing; power cells; and even a powerful energy weapon in a display case, a weapon that still functions.

The mansion providing a decent shelter, Chakata decides to stay there this evening, and exits his defensive armor. In a series of offhanded references, it becomes clear that Chakata is not human, though he is bipedal; he is, in fact, something very ratlike. 

Chakata's mission is not explicitly described immediately, but it is clear it has something to do with his people, and others like them, and the way in which they are treated by human beings. Despite the apparent oppression, Chakata himself has no inherent hostility to humans, as he and some of his tribe were rescued from disaster by a human who risked his own life to save them, including helpless children, from a sudden fire (which may or may not have been accidental), and then watched over his little tribe until they were in a place of safety. 

Humans do provide his worst enemies – aside from some of the things that exist in this devastated land – in the form of the League of the Pure, humans who believe all other non-human intelligences are abominations. Chakata has several dangerous encounters with them and other threats, surviving partly with carefully-maintained ancient weaponry and partly with guile, luck, and the particular advantages his rodent physique gives him, as he journeys towards the strongholds of humanity and the inhuman creatures they keep as servants, slaves, or fodder for arenas.

He will rescue them, as he has rescued others and as another once rescued him, because he has sworn to be the Liberator.

Why I'm Not Doing It (And What I'll Steal From It)

As it probably obvious to any gamer from that era, at least part of the inspiration for the Liberator was the TSR games Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World, with no little influence from Mad Max. 

Partly I stopped working on The Liberator because I was having a hard time working out the adversaries in a way that wouldn't just make them the punchcard villains that were the obvious and easy approach. In addition, I hadn't quite adjusted in those days to the idea that "ideas are cheap"; the fact that *I* knew I had taken a lot of stuff from a given game made me unsure whether I could publish it at all. 

I was also really unsure as to how readers would empathize with what was basically a bipedal giant rat; I happen to like rats – we had ten white rats as pets over the years when I was a kid – but I knew a lot of people have an inherently negative reaction to them. 

Then the Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War ended, and it seemed to me that even the weak justification for assuming a nuclear apocalypse was pretty much gone. I had also started to realize that the whole "nuclear mutated monsters" schtick was already old, old stuff and had no real justification. 

And today, of course, Fallout has already done pretty much everything I was thinking of doing with the Liberator's world, with the exception of allowing me to have a viewpoint character that's a mutant animal of some sort. Maybe they'll do that sometime.

There is very little, if anything, I can keep in specific from the old Liberator stories. Not only are the original manuscripts lost, but also there wasn't much in them that was terribly unique and useful. What I have retained from the story is a strong sympathy for the nonhuman character which I think became most clear in the Balanced Sword trilogy. While Poplock's "voice" is not much at all like Chakata's, the "get into a different species' head" technique I used was very similar. And building Chakata's world taught me several lessons in what works, and what doesn't, that I've applied since.

And – naturally – I did get to have a talking rat as one protagonist, or I will – when Princess Holy Aura is released!