The Death of the Wave (21 page)

COMET meets DESCARTES in the Barracks.

DESCARTES is killed by another prisoner. COMET comes into contact with BREAKER 256.

COMET contacts BLUE by writing to him under the name of DESCARTES and sending the letter to him during the prison inspection, attempting to convince him to write the message to the Camps.

COMET and BLUE remain in correspondence with each other, crafting the draft that will get sent to the Camps.

COMET reveals his true identity to BLUE in his last letter.

COMET and BLUE meet, and BLUE hands over the letter that is meant for the Camps.

BLUE comes into contact with BREAKER 256 and is killed.

BREAKER 376 is killed. BREAKER 256 is presumed to be killed.

COMET is rescued by DARWIN from the Barracks and taken back to the Palaces.

BLUE’s final letter is sent to the Camps.

DARWIN writes a message to the Camps under the pen name of AUTHOR to spur on the revolution, hoping to build a new State upon what is left after the revolution.

G.L. Adamson is a mysterious and shadowy figure who enjoys writing things down. Adamson has a wide range of works, ranging from horror and suspense fiction, to sci-fi, to urban fantasy and conservation literature. Her debut novel with Greyhart Press, “The Death of the Wave”, is a dystopian fantasy novel set in an oppressive state that satirizes standardized testing.

When she isn’t writing books, she studies wildlife management and nonprofit management at a university, interviews Maasai pastoralists about wildlife conflict, hikes strange mountains, saves murderous owls, creates plays and screenplays and builds tiny scaled models of medieval siege weaponry.

A villain always thinks himself the hero. That is the main point that drove this book, as it is told through three distinct points of view around several fictional historical events, each looking at the events from a different side. There’s several rebellions in this novel, all revolving around a character that seems to be the main protagonist, but the point of the book is that there is a tendency to think that one is in the right.

What I hoped this book to challenge, apart from ideas such as standardized testing, educational systems, wealth distribution, career biases towards the arts and the sciences and censorship, is the idea that it is harder than one things to qualify a ‘heroic’ character. There are many characters in this novel. Some do extraordinary things. All do some pretty awful things in order to further their cause, and every last one thinks that they are the hero of their own story, and in that way, they are right.

I was working on this story when I was in London and Dublin in the summer of 2012, scribbling on odds and ends of paper and spending far too much time in the hotel lobby, drinking coffee and typing until 3AM in the morning, and a lot of the story was done in a straight shot, written without stopping and without many blocks. I had seen Les Miserables in West End a week earlier and had been struck by the intensity of the idea of a multi-character plot centered around a rebellion, but I wanted to clearly deconstruct the idea in my own work that the freedom fighters are always intrinsically the ones in the right. Another major influence on this work was Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, in the idea of a freedom fighter that commits horrible acts in the quest for justice.

The title itself was influenced by a line in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, that described the decade of the sixties as a wave that ‘climbed higher and higher, and then finally broke and rolled back’ and I think that that kind of imagery was appropriate for the title of this work. The rebellions and events are like a series of waves that seem unending and invincible, only to crash in the end, petering out with ripples that echo in influence once the main event had concluded.

In general for this work, I was influenced a great deal by such authors such as George R.R. Martin, who also is known for works that deconstruct the idea of a singular protagonist or objective morality, as well as the obvious influences of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Ray Bradbury. The existential philosopher Sartre was a major influence on the novel as well. This work is considered to be a piece of dystopian fiction, and I made the choice to write it in unrhymed verse as that seemed to reflect the stark and desolate mood of the piece better than prose. All of these influences tied together and found a place in the Death of the Wave.

— G. L. Adamson, December 2013  

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