lucky303

  I love stories about an underdog. Stories about a small group of plucky rebels, fighting against a monstrous superpower that has more tentacles than an Old One from Lovecraftian mythology. A dominating, strangling, dictatorship, with spies listening at every door, and overzealous soldiers watching everyone closely, for even the slightest infraction of the rules. It probably started a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, when I was a young boy growing up on Star Wars. Luke, Leia, Han, Chewy, R2-D2 and C3PO : a weird group of misfits, oddballs, naïve dreamers, double-crossing scoundrels, and anally retentive sticklers for the rules, who love protocol. It was only fairly recently - quite a while after I’d written The Judas Blossom in fact - that I began to see parallels between the novel and Star Wars . In Star Wars , there’s the Galactic Empire, a fascist dictatorship ruled with an iron fist by Emperor Palpatine . In The Judas Blossom , there’s the Mongol Empir e, a sprawli...