Annotated BBWTE Cover
Woo! So what if a “cover” would technically go before the first page of a normal book? This is the internet, baby, we do what we want here.
That looks like a bit of a variation on the festival of Tectonicus, and what a great rendition of fire and dance, there! This single image of exhilaration does as much to draw the reader into the Rebellion’s shared culture as anything else we wrote or presented.
Granted, it’s not remotely carbon neutral, but oh well.
There’s probably a dwarf dancing behind the fire from our perspective.
Note the similarity between the tattoo on that troll and the designs on Penk’s breastplate. They’re not close to identical, but there’s definitely a stylistic echo.
But where did they get all of the trees?
*Does the sign of the horns* *Headbangs*
“it’s not remotely carbon neutral”
What? Burning wood is carbon neutral by definition. (OK, so technically you need to make sure new trees will grow in place of the ones you burn, but come on.)
I doubt they took the time to find some lush forest and picked some individual trees, spread over a larger area, in favour of getting whatever vegetation was able to hold on to its roots at the edge of this desert. That’s not going to regrow by next year.
Technically, most of the fossil coal and oil used to be wood at some point. Might take a few million years to regrow, but technically also carbon neutral.
Well coal was sometimes trees but more generally carboniferous swamps and tree sized ferns are not really wood more like an oversized plant stem. Oil was sea bottom muck, the decomposed remains of marine snow settling on the seabed and building thick dense layers of organic soup full of bacteria and viruses.
Sadly, in our world, the conditions for the emergence of oil and coal are no longer present.
A little thing called evolution put a spanner in the works.
I say sadly, because those would probably be pretty good forms of sequestration: Want not, waste not.
Dancy sharkboy is a lovely sight.
Joie de vivre, distilled.