Carpathia (34 page)

 

 

 

 

 

Before I set down to write
Carpathia
, I had the honor of working with songsmith John Anealio on the song "Angry Robot," which you might recall is the name of the publisher of this book. John had created a short version of the song as the theme song for the Angry Robot podcast hosted by Mur Lafferty, but he wanted to add some verses to make it complete.

  John and I had met at the World Fantasy Convention in 2010, and we'd hit it off. Since I was an Angry Robot author, he contacted me to see if I'd be interested in helping him out with the lyric. I grabbed that chance by the throat and throttled it good before John had a chance to change his mind, and in short order we had made a great little song even better.

  Then Marc Gascoigne – our esteemed publisher – had the idea of offering up the separated tracks of the song for a remix contest. The prize would be a role in
Carpathia
as a character to meet a grisly death.

  The entries were so good we had a hard time choosing a winner, but in the end we settled on Dale Chase's excellent rap-laden entry. Denis Cherryman took second place, and David Ritter claimed third.

  While we'd only promised prizes for the top three winners, we were so taken with the many of the other entries that we decided to toss their creators' names into the book too. They included Justin Achilli, Raleigh Blum, Mike Crooker, David Griffiths, Trevor McPherson, and Chooch Shubert.

  For fun, you might want to go back through the book and figure out their individual fates.

  If you'd like to hear the songs entered in the contest, John assembled them all into an album you can download for free.

  
http://bit.ly/iMroft

  And you can get the original on his site too.

  
http://johnanealio.com/track/angry-robot

 

A Note About Our Winner

I had the hardest time working our first-place winner into the book for one reason. Dale is African-American, and according to history there weren't any African-Americans on the
Titanic
. There was a single Haitian family on which I could have modeled Dale's character in the book, but I decided I wanted to be truer to him than that.

  
Carpathia
is fiction, sure, but it's historical fiction. The horrific elements in the book work that much better because they're grounded in the historical reality. So I decided to come up with a plausible story for how an AfricanAmerican musician could have wound up on the ship.

  In my research, I stumbled across a popular song from the African-American toast tradition, called "Shine and the
Titanic
." It's about an African-American stoker who tries to warn the captain about the disaster and then swims all the way back to New York to save himself from the sinking ship.

  Of course, things don't work out well for the fictional Dale Chase in
Carpathia
, but I'd promised the real man a momentous death for his character. I hope he enjoys the terrifying end I delivered.

ANGRY ROBOT
 

A member of the Osprey Group

 

Lace Market House,
54-56 High Pavement,
Nottingham,
NG1 1HW, UK

 

www.angryrobotbooks.com
 

Icy dead people

 

Text © Matt Forbeck, 2012.

Original concept by Matt Forbeck and Marc Gascoigne. 

Cover art by Nick Castle.

 

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

 

All rights reserved.

 

Angry Robot is a registered trademark and the Angry Robot icon a trademark of Angry Robot Ltd.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold and destroyed" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

 

ISBN 978 0 85766 202 6

EBook ISBN 978 0 85766 203 3

 

Printed in the United States of America

 

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