The Zemlya Confederacy – Easter Egg Edition
In the past, I have written Easter Egg editions for Katawa Shoujo and for The Zemlya Conspiracy.
Now that The Zemlya Confederacy has been released for a few weeks now, I wanted to do the same for this novel.
Thankfully, I actually kept notes as I was writing, so I hope that I won’t miss anything!
Of course, there are spoilers ahead. You have been warned!
The Dorm Manager
I think I’ve mentioned before that I went to a military university. Because we were technically serving in the armed forces, we had a few more responsibilities than usual uni students. One of these was being the “Duty Cadet,” effectively a person that was confined to the barracks for a week and the point contact for anything that happened. It was usually a boring-as-hell week when your turn was up, as you were responsible for doing the roll calls etc, and you weren’t supposed to drink. But, of course, everyone did anyway, and so there were many bleary-eyed mornings where you would run to the duty office and pretend that everyone was there – even If you didn’t check.
The difference between civilians and the military
Whislt I was writing TZC2, I read The Dead Hand; which is an interesting look into Cold War Russia and the way they treated their military scientists. There are a number of passages in there that describe the shock that military officers would receive when they found out how civilians were living. I wanted to weave this into the world of Zemlya, which is why there were stark differences between Dani, Hugh and Emma’s living quarters, and why Hugh was so surprised at all of them.
The Enemy Within
I did a lot of research for this book in terms of old speeches from times of chaos, like Cold War Russia (as per above), works by Karl Marx (see below) and also the era of McCarthyism in the US. The Enemy Within speech that Wingett makes is a reference to McCarthy’s “red under the bed” speech, which was used to raise fear about communism in the US. He declared that communists had infiltrated the US government and that no-one could be trusted. Given the climate at the time of writing TZC2, what with Brexit, Trump and Fake News, I thought it was an appropriate reference.
The Purges and Food Control
Another source of inspiration for both of the Zemlya books has been a trip to the Killing Fields in Phenom Pehn in Cambodia. Tens of thousands of people were murdered by the Khmer Rouge during the 80’s and I’ve spoken about this on my blog before. But I wanted to capture a bit of that mania in TZC2. Essentially, it boils down to a manic fear in the population. You are always on edge in these environments, and sometimes the best way to avoid being “purged” is to be a good citizen and report your neighbours first. If you’ve reported a dozen of your neighbours for sedition, then you’re seen as a true patriot.
To me, you can see a bit of this returning in the “if you see something, say something” messages of today. A true patriot will report anything “suspicious” – even if the suspicious activity is having brown skin… Terrorism is a great political tool for getting your citizens to fall into line, and I wanted to get this on paper somehow!
Also, both Stalin and Pol Pot used the control of food, and the concept of forced agriculture, to control their countries. Of course, this is why both ultimately failed, however it was good enough to keep both of them in power for quite longer than you’d expect.
Opening the Gates
The act of a large warship forcibly opening the gates to Zemlya is a partial reference to Admiral Perry, who sailed warships into Japanese harbours and forced them to open themselves to trade. This was a pivotal moment in Japanese history, and I thought that it echoed the “opening of an isolated country” that was required in Zemlya.
Sewerage
During the writing of TZC2, I forced myself to think long an hard about how a city-state could remain isolated from the rest of the world. I think that there are examples like North Korea that show that zealots can effectively keep their country isolated, so that didn’t seem too implausible to me. However, there are things like food and supplies that need to be considered.
One of the things that I needed up calculating was the sewage flow in Zemyla. Just counting faeces, we’re looking at about 2,000 L/s (500 Gallons per second) of poo being flushed in Zemlya (or any similarly-sized city, like Tokyo or Beijing).
That’s a lot of waste to get processed. If I were really bothered I could have used this to work out the actual size of Zemlya, but I’m not really into that!
The Shtorm
The original Shtorm was a Russian ship from the early 20th century and was the biggest aircraft carrier ever built. However, it was never really used.
Farm 2754
This is the postcode from the small town in Australia where I grew up.
Floor 42
As with any other “42” in any fiction these days, this is a top of the hat to Douglas Adams.
The “Agent Field”
The magical field that stops Kate in Wingett’s apartment is a revival of something from the original script from TZC1. Kate was being interviewed by the Intel department and was frozen in place by the same field. However, at the time it made it a little hard to swallow to think that Intel could freeze her at any time, and yet still let her act as she did in TZC1.
However, it would make sense that Wingett would have something like this as a personal protection system, especially given that almost all of his Agents that he sent undercover went rogue…!
As a second part of this, a couple of people asked why I didn’t fire the Chekov’s Gun about the microfibres shredding muscles in TZC1, so I made sure that we saw a bit of that in the various fights that Kate got herself into this time around.
Utility for all
Towards the end, where Wingett is going off the deep end, he starts acting like Stalin. His obsession with Utility is straight from Marx, and I imagine that Stalin would have agreed with a lot of his points.
“It is with a heavy heart…”
Idla’s letter to the public is a copy of the opening of the speech that LBJ gave to the US Congress to report the death of JFK.
Luck and Bravado
Back in the days when I used to play games, I was part of a Counterstrike clan called “Luck and Bravado”. A guy called Torias and I came up with a whole system of shorthand codes that we could type faster than voicechat. Most of the time we just did Desert Eagle charges and took people by surprise – thus winning by Luck and Bravado.
It wasn’t a very successful clan.
Eurasia
The Eurasian continent and the concept of large-scale wars are from 1984.
How much Rice do you need?
Another fun thing that I looked into was how much rice would be required for Zemlya for a period of time.
Looking into dietary habits, you would need about 100 grams of rice per day to keep yourself relatively alive. For about 10 million people this translates to 10 kilotons.
The next question, of course, was is this a reasonable amount of food for a ship to carry?
The biggest cargo ships in 2017 could carry about 19,000 shipping containers, each with 30 tonnes of rice. So 10 kT is nothing. As for the cost, on Alibaba you can buy a tonne of rice for US$300; so that amount of rice would cost about US$3M – a fair trade for a plot of land I would say!
Lastly, looking at how much food a military ship could spare, I looked up the amount of food the ISS Geroge Washington (which I think is the largest US Aircraft Carrier) holds. I couldn’t get a full number, however they do cook about 1.5 tonnes of chicken wings at a time, so it is safe to say that they have a few thousand tonnes of food on board. An initial shipment of 4kT wouldn’t break the ship’s food stores, although they might need to go back to port a few weeks earlier than expected.
Starting a new job
Hugh’s feelings about moving up the ranks in the city mirror some of my feelings about the same thing in my company. Once you are past a certain point, you stop receiving orders and are simply expected to “make things happen”. What things, you ask? Well, you’ve got to work that out as well. I’ve been in this position for over three years, and I’m only now getting the hang of it, and I wanted to give Hugh some of that angst as well.
The Pace of Zemyla
Living in Tokyo, you notice that the crowds tend to move in an orderly fashion – and almost always at the same pace. When you get off the train at peak hour, you join what feels like the end of a line of ants. It’s a constant flow of bodies, all moving at the pace of the slowest link in the chain.
Since the majority of people use the metro system in Tokyo, the pace is generally set by the escalators that move people up and down from street level to those systems.
I call this the “Pace of Tokyo” – and if you’ve every gone into central Tokyo at peak hour, you know what I mean.
“Leave the Bottle”
Emma ordering the bartender to leave the bottle of whiskey is something that happened to me in Korea. Our Korean host ordered “A Whiskey”. The bartender brought over a bottle, opened it, and poured us all a glass, then tried to take the bottle back. They Korean man then grabbed the bottle and told them to leave it. He wrote his name on it, and since we didn’t finish it, it is now waiting for us in the same bar…
The couch
This is a bit of a silly one, but the couch in Emma’s apartment is similar to my own couch. My wife spent an inordinate amount of time to buy her perfect couch – but she never sits on it. Instead, she sits on the floor and leans on the couch.
I don’t understand some people.
The Aircraft Carrier
I’m aware that Russian (and likely futuristic) aircraft carriers are likely to have their own textures and colours, however as most readers will be American I stuck with the more familiar materials.
Square Enix
My office in Tokyo is across the road from the Square Enix building in Shinjuku. I used that building as a descriptive basis for the temporary office facility that Kate and Hugh use when staging their attack to free Emma.
And yes, it does have a temporary office centre in there as well.
Gurkhas
I’m not sure how popular this is in the US, but I know that in the Commonwealth one of the most feared Special Forces in the world are the Gerkhas. These are Nepalese soldiers that use a boomerang-shaped knife that is just as good for smashing as it is for cutting throats. If you want to scare a Delta Forces or SAS-R soldier, you pit them against a Gerkha. I think that they have fallen out of history, but I wanted to give them at least some credit.
Warehouse on Wheels
The Logistics part of Zemlya is also something that already happens in real life. The Warehouse on Wheels concept is something that a lot of vertically-integrated supermarkets are doing now.
I always see Zemlya as an experiment that started in about 2050, but then was forgotten for 300 years – or 10 generations to a Zemlyan. So a lot of their workflows can be explained by things that we do today. Also, if you think “that’s not too much time, surely they must remember everything from 300 years ago,” I would like to point out that people who fought in WWII are still alive today, and yet a lot of people still seem to think that calling themselves a “Nazi” is a cool thing to say.
Society can forget a lot in 2 generations – so imagine what you can forget in 10.
SO that’s about it. That’s all the little references and Easter eggs that I put into TZC2 – or at least the ones that I wrote down! Did you find something else that you thought was a reference, or have a useless trivia fact to add? Then please, jump into the comments below. I look forward to it!
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