My work in progress is a distant prequel to my fantasy novel The Shard. It is tentatively called The Immortality Game and is a near-future sci-fi thriller set in Moscow in the year 2138. Many things are not as advanced as one might expect, because some catastrophic things have happened between now and then that caused a mini-'dark ages'. In other words, most of the world regressed dramatically for a few decades before new governments were able to restore the veneer of civilization. America, for instance, has been broken up into several smaller countries. One of my characters comes from Western America (I'm trying to think up a more appropriate name for the western part of America breaking off into its own country, so any suggestions are appreciated).
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| by Christian Hecker |
I am having trouble in my current chapter, because the main character is fleeing into the old metro station at Kolomenskaya in Moscow. The entire metro system has long been abandoned, but has been taken over as living space for the many homeless. Since they live in the darkness underground, people refer to the metro dwellers as Trogs (short for Troglodytes).
My memory is betraying me here. I visited Kolomenskaya many times when I lived in Moscow. The park there (a refugee camp in my story) was a place I loved to visit for walks. I simply cannot remember whether the Kolomenskaya metro station had an escalator or just stairs. Most metro stations in Moscow have escalators, many of them quite long, but there are a few that are closer to the surface and have only stairs. I
think that this station was one of the latter. Getting a detail like this right is important for a story. I have Googled the station, but the images I get show only the interior. One image looked promising, but it turned out to be for a different station.
*Sigh* This is part of the reason it is great to write fantasy. You don't have to worry about getting real-world details wrong!
