Here is the deleted afterword to Scout's Honor. I thought about including it in the book but reconsidered at the last minute. It gives a little insight into the creation of the planet Sidoria and its characters.
AFTERWORD
Scout's
Honor is the first book in a planned pentalogy that includes The
Creature of the Baradoons, The Shepherd of Evil, Marauders’ Glory,
and The Havoc Bringers. Each story is self-contained, though
characters and events will cross over from book to book, linking the
series together as a whole. We will also delve deeper into Sidoria’s
history as we move along, exploring its regions, species,
civilizations, and so forth.
I
began work on the Deadlands Saga in 1999, though Sidoria’s origins
can be traced back to a camcorder movie I shot with my friends in the
summer of 1994. I was big into westerns in those days and decided to
tell a story about gunfighters battling over two halves of a treasure
map. Original, I know, but cut me some slack; I was still green
behind the ears at the time.
The
movie quickly descended into the usual amateurish, poorly shot,
horribly acted claptrap that kids with too much imagination and not
enough experience or technical know-how produce. It became clear from
the first shot that this would not be a western in the traditional
sense. We tried to film in isolated locations but still managed to
get the occasional car or modern building in the background.
I
wasn‘t sure how I was going to fix the problem. A friend suggested
that it could be a western with electricity like in the old Roy
Rogers films, or maybe even a post-apocalyptic world. I wasn’t big
on either suggestion, deciding instead to set the story on another
planet; perhaps somewhere in the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy. Let’s
call the planet ‘Sidoria’. Yes, that has a nice ring to it. But
why are there humans on this alien world? Well, obviously Sidoria was
terraformed and colonized during the dying days of earth and then
forgotten as the space race continued to adapt terrestrial life forms
on other planets.
Those
left behind were forced to adapt to their surroundings or die. Eons
passed and mankind endured. The old ways were forgotten. New races
were born, and with them new languages, new gods, and new ways of
waging war on one another.
A
rather complex explanation because you could see a BMW in the
background of my little camcorder movie, but it planted the seeds of
an epic story in my young mind that I would revisit often in the
years to come. First I attempted to turn it into a screenplay, but I
found this to be too limited a medium to tell my tale. I wanted to
explore the geography of my planet, visit its indigenous species, and
uncover its history. The best way to achieve this would be to create
a series of adventures following a group of characters across
Sidoria’s rugged and dangerous terrain.
You
hold in your hands the end result of all those years of labor and
love. Scout’s Honor takes place roughly thirty years before the
other books. It introduces characters that will return in subsequent
stories and sets the tone of the books as a whole. Each story is told
from a character’s point of view, be it a journal entry, a
transcribed confession, or, as here, a memoir. The idea behind this
is that at some point the planet was rediscovered and all of these
first-hand accounts of life in Sidoria’s Deadlands were collected
into a series of books.
I
hope you had fun reading Scout’s Honor, and that you will return
to further explore the Deadlands and its colorful and morally
ambiguous characters. We’ll be waiting for you.
—Jeremy
Lee Riley
Indianapolis, IN
2011
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