Pushing on

There have been a few changes at Chez Holloway since I last posted something here. Some of it’s writing related, and some of it’s been life related.

The main, and most obvious change is that I’m now based with the family up in Alaska (which led to a partially successful foray into genre writing within the Ice Age world giving more depth to the world of the USA and the Seattle Cultists that I’m going to enjoy editing into the main series at some point).

The secondary change associated with this has been the need to get a new life up and running, which, mostly, is now done. Job(s), home, driving license, credit and all the trappings of modern life are in place (we have one more jump to make before the end of next year but that’ll be relatively easy. Just getting cats here from the UK – delightful experience…)

Now I have time to think once again I’ve been pondering where exactly the characters in the Ice Age series sit on the standard archetypes from fiction, and for some of them I’m having a little difficulty.

Case in point, Mr. Johnson Pole. Chronologically he starts the series as a no nonsense good guy who’s working with a relatively large team to defeat a variety of challenges in the immediate post-catastrophe world, and then moves through time sorting out problems, being a decent and honorable guy, and working out how what happened happened, with the intention of putting the world back to how it was.

But over time of course a whole new world has arisen and the people he worked with at the start die off, one by one, generally off screen (with a couple of exceptions in Belle). So from a team player working to solve a problem he gradually transitions into a well intentioned extremist – though one who would never do anything ‘evil’ even to advance the cause for which he fights – and the last pillar of a dead world which he is laser focussed on bringing back. In part to honor the memories of those members of the Calais Team who died to make that happen.

Which leads to him arguably being the villain of the last of the main series books. If he succeeds, the world will revert to how it was, but now the denizens of the world as it is today will be wiped out as they have acclimatized and adapted and about the only person who has not is poor old Mr. Johnson Pole.

He still does good things, and helps those around him and his aims are noble and pure but… they’re also no longer appropriate to reality.

Contrast to the Seattle cultists who throughout the series are the instigators of most of the most horrible things that happen throughout the series. Whether that’s their progenitors in the Goat faction of the MDR at the start of the series, the lure of the Tower to kill off the best and brightest of the Union in that book, or the attacks on Albie and his friends in Master.

But their end game is the successful flowering of humanity throughout the scoured (by no fault of theirs) Cosmos and fits in with solving the fundamental point of the Ice Age, which is that something horrible was always going to happen to Humanity if it stayed on its original planet of Vampires, Fae and Monsters.

Canonically something was coming that would end everything, and although they don’t know it (there are precisely two people who do know, and one of them has forgotten), by pursuing the route they are taking, they are saving humanity (for some time) from that horrible end.

There are wheels within wheels and good results may be unintentional (see Albie and his habit of killing off competitors within the Vampire hierarchy – which he does instinctively by the time we meet him, but which had a good reason originally before he forgot what it was), whilst often the bad results can be equally unintentional (see the Vampire Masters once they’d got rid of the burden on their backs, and their botched plan to save Humanity as an honestly benevolent set of overlords).

Anyway. Enjoying writing again. So lots more to come. Belle first, and the clash between the Vampire remnants finding their way again in the ruins of Paris, the over-extended Union with its attempt to maintain the status quo, and the people who’ve survived the near twenty years since the end just wanting to live their lives without pain.

Toodle Pip.