Sine qua non: Gillian Conahan, Jennifer Jackson, Will Hinton.
The following provided comprehensive and timely feedback on early drafts of the story: Maya Chhabra, Caitlin Starling, Neal Hebert, Sloane Leong, Django Wexler, Tom Crayford, Ursula Whitcher, John Chu, and Kalya Nedungadi. I am especially indebted to those readers whose people have experienced, or are still experiencing, the same tragedies that Baru glimpsed on Taranoke and Kyprananoke. All errors, misrepresentations, and mistakes are my own, and do not reflect on the expertise or preferences of these readers.
I owe continued thanks to Rachel Swirsky, Ann Leckie, Kameron Hurley, Max Gladstone, Yoon Ha Lee, Brooke Bolander, Mia Serrano, Alyssa Wong, Amal El-Mohtar, Caitlin Starling, and C. A. Higgins for their personal support. My personal thanks also to everyone who has taken the time to write or express support online—it never goes unnoticed.
Baru’s world (hopefully) evokes the same curiosity in the reader as it does in Baru herself: is this magic, or is it unknown science? Those intrigued by the Cancrioth immortata may find interest in the canine transmissible venereal tumor, a single clonal organism which has passed from dog to dog by transmission of live cells for the past several thousand years. Like the immortata, CTVT does no significant harm to the host and strongly prefers a specific part of the body. No equivalent human cell line has been discovered … yet (though see the acknowledgments to The Monster Baru Cormorant for further discussion).
The Cancrioth’s extensive use of radioluminescence depends on the ecology of the hot lands, where many organisms have evolved phosphors for mating displays, predation, and even metabolism. The sensitivity of the frogs used for signaling is exquisite, and given the relatively short range of most radiation, perhaps implausible; but evolution is ingenious.
The megatsunami at Kyprananoke is echoed in the real world by events in Lituya Bay, Alaska, and the Vajant Dam in Italy.
The economic power of Baru’s notional trade concern is hardly exaggerated. Nor is the possibility of the near-total destruction of an imperial economy by mismanagement on the part of a powerful few: interested readers may look into John Law’s time in France and the neighboring South Sea bubble in England.
Baru’s own neural peculiarities exist in the real world, although I have taken significant liberties in the specific symptoms of hemineglect. (Nor have I gone to the lengths of actually taking drugs like vidhara and datura—by all accounts datura is to be strictly avoided.) The antidepressant effects of some hallucinogens are, probably, real. Her poor brain’s resilience to repeated trauma, including mechanical penetration by steel needles, is true to the real world, where human brains have survived and adapted to all manner of physical traumas. The case of Phineas Gage, whose frontal lobe was impaled by a railroad spike, is often cited as proof that insult to the brain can also destroy the personality. But much less known is the fact that Gage, through hard work and therapy, made an essentially complete recovery, holding down a complex and cognitively demanding job as as stagecoach driver for several years. Of course, Gage ultimately died of seizure, so Baru’s safety and complete recovery are not necessarily assured.
Those who find the Masquerade’s programs of sterilization, economic intrigue, colonial adventure, and psychosurgery outlandish or unbelievably malicious (“too overtly evil,” in the words of a very smart friend) should familiarize themselves with the history of America in the twentieth century. Sterilization of Native American women (among other populations, including black women and immigrants) continued until the 1970s. In 1927 the Supreme Court upheld the mandatory sterilization of eighteen-year-old mother Carrie Buck on the grounds that she was “feeble-minded and promiscuous” and a “genetic threat to society.” In the 8–1 decision, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Carrie had been raped by a relative and institutionalized, perhaps to hide the scandal of her pregnancy, and the highest court in the land could not give her justice. So the instruments of state power are used and upheld. The order to sterilize Carrie may have been intended largely as a test of the laws permitting eugenic intervention by those eager to widen the practice. The Supreme Court has never overturned the decision.
In the acknowledgments to the last book I cautioned the reader that stranger ways of life than the Cancrioth’s exist in Baru’s world. We have now received a small glimpse into one of those strange ways. As ever, I leave the question of supernatural power versus scientific unknown in your hands. But I admit I am particularly proud of this one: it gives me special delight to invent things which probably could happen on Earth, had things gone a different, stranger way.
I hope you enjoyed the book. I cannot promise exactly when the next and final one will be ready. These books are deeply draining to write, and, increasingly, they feel like a negative-sum process, an engine that accepts labor and produces self-doubt, loneliness, and the harshest internal criticism. I feel that if I lose all the joy of writing, the result will be equally joyless. I want to do justice to the end of Baru’s story. I may need some time to step back and find a fresh, powerful, concise voice for that end—a voice that is as gripping, clear, and compulsive as Baru’s own rediscovered sense of purpose. Still, the story is ready, the plan is clear, the ending is set. We have only to help her reach it. And I want to do a good job of helping her; I want to do it right.