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Writer's pictureChris Russell

Season 1 Episode 8 – The Lieutenant



(Transcribed from Audio)


Hello, my friends. How are we surviving this week? This is Chris, your writer and producer, talking to you live from the frozen wastes of New England. If you listen hard, you can hear the winds howling outside my office window. So today we wrapped up the fourth chapter, introducing our or friend Janet KJ, the Killer.

What do you think? Would love some feedback. As always, would love whatever support you can lend me through sharing the story with your friends or even with your enemies. And as we build our audience and our community, I'm enjoying myself, but I need your shekels, your dukats, your real, your pounds and your dinars to keep the lights on. So do us a solid and go to the Patreon page@patreon.com after the apocalypse. All one word make a donation. Keep the story going. This week, I'd like to thank my friend Jim for pitching in. Thanks, Jim. I appreciate the support.

I've always been a fan of science fiction, and writing this story has really helped me dig into that a little bit more. Think harder about the genre, because for a lot of people, science fiction is like it's comic books, right? The stuff your ten year old boy or nerdy men with no social skills do. It gets the short shrift, so to speak. But I've always been a fan.

I like the way science fiction creates a safe space to explore new ideas, sort of a sandbox for out of the box thinking. It's a place where authors can chew on what ifs and not get beat up culturally for it. And I just listened to an interesting piece by Jordan Hill on the libertarian history of science fiction, which was pretty cool, which was thought provoking. He references the hard science fiction authors from the quote unquote golden age of science fiction, like Asimov and Heinlein and all those great stories. And I can remember reading those, right, sitting down to read Dune by Frank Herbert or the foundation series by Asimov and not being able to put in and not being able to put them down, literally reading through the night until they were done.

But I'll share another foundational, no pun intended story that has influenced me, and it's a book that started as a pulp serial written by El. Ron Hubbard. Yes, that L. Ron Hubbard, but this was before he went nutty with the Dianetic stuff. It's called Final Blackout, and it was published in book form in 1948 and very much influenced by the World Wars and that generation's experience in those wars.

In those wars. It has a character named The Lieutenant that is one of the best apocalyptic characters ever written. It's a bit dated now, but it's a fine piece of writing, and I fully intend to lean on it in my apocalypse. So thank you for listening. Again, if you can contribute some to the Patreon, that would be great.

Posting the transcripts of the shows there and other things like these outros and character sketches. If you become a patron, you get access to those. Please share with your friends. We are four weeks into our official launch, and we're just pushing past 700 listeners. If I can get a couple of bucks from 100 true fans, I can keep the project going.

My friend Dave is offering to have his daughter, who's an art student, do some fan art on the characters. I love that I have a very clear sense or picture of them in my head, but I'd love to see how other people see them from the audio. That would be interesting to me. So I'll leave you with that. My fellow survivors, next show, we introduce my favorite character so far, and I know you're going to love him as much as I do.

As always, keep surviving.


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