Someday, probably around the time that I start writing this book again, I will come up with better names for people and organisations. That obligatory disclaimer out of the way, we can move on.

Mutants have been created by genetic manipulation - an experiment into stem cell research and fixing genetic diseases that didn't go wrong - it simply changed focus when it turned out that a specific type of embryo, treated with a specific chemical process, created mutants. Some of them have great and terrifying abilities, though at least so far no one is on the overpowered level of the X-Men and the rest of the Marvel universe. Others have mental powers - I have not chosen to give everyone powers rooted in one concept, a la Wild Cards.

The postulated groups are as below.

Dawning Sun/The Project: This is both signifier and signified, in the final analysis. The Project is the term that most normal humans use for the corporation working to create - in the name of "research" and "study" - more mutants; Dawning Sun is the corporation's name for itself, and has been co-opted to be the name of the revolutionary faction within the genetically modified.

The Uns: People with no mutant powers - mutant children are only rarely born, and then only to a member of the project that has escaped the mutant reservation and passed for normal.

The Actives: Mutants with powers that act, whether telekinesis or something else - as an aside, I'm having a great deal of fun coming up with different and unusual mutant abilities, particularly for the Actives. Most of the actual fighters in Dawning Sun are Actives, but not all, by any means.

The Mentals: Mutants with powers based around the mind - clairvoyancy, oneiromancy, telepathy, that sort of thing. Where the Actives have different powers from each other, the Mentals are more likely to be different in strength - there are very few mental powers, without getting into something like Wild Cards' concept that all powers given by the virus were either telepathic or telekinetic in origin and the differences were in the expression rather than anything else.

However, none of those groups are truly the focus of the story. The central questions, instead, are around identity and ownership - I have a great fear of the fact that it is possible to copyright bacteria. Even though I know that bacteria have precisely all the thrilling experience of life of bricks, that doesn't mean that I think it's right - I have serious questions about anyone's ability to own anything that is at least fauna. Plants, no problem - animals, that I question. At the same time, it's obvious that if we as a society - and my writing is very, very definitely a product of the society I live in, never assume otherwise - have the intention of doing a lot of very stupid things to ensure that either old brains can live on in new bodies as old bodies wear out (cloning will, eventually, become as dystopian as postulated in Spares and Transmetropolitan) or that old bodies are able to live on, healthy and intact, past either a natural lifespan or the crippling events that would simply kill the person, then stem-cell research and genetic research will become more and more important to us, and the religious right's attempt to ban the process of stem-cell research will fail under the weight of business interests who see it as a chance to get money. Very few bans are, after all, permanent.

Of course, we have to get past that whole global warming thing, first, and I don't know that I think we're going to make it.

Where I'm interested in going with this story is into the nature of dystopia, whether that's created by a society that can cheerfully lock up a few hundred thousand people on a reservation in California, then fight over who has the right to control them - the corporation that created them, the courts, or the US government? Meanwhile, the wishes of the people concerned - because legally they're not people, they're intellectual property - is being ignored. And when the dispossessed are ignored for too long, the world explodes into flames and bombs and blood and pain.

Those are the real concepts of The Crow Road - dystopia, and the fact we live in one now. The urge to defeat death. The fact that corporations will do absolutely anything we let them get away with, but we believe their horseshit about being kind and gentle and green and what have you and let them get away with murder, whether it's direct murder a la Shell in Africa or indirect murder a la the destruction of the electric car by GE and other corporations - speeding up the process of global warming while we let them faff about, pretending that a hydrogen fuel cell car will come along and save us all - because it won't. Unless you want to spend a million dollars on a car that might well explode if looked at wrong.

I am what I have been made to be. I am paying attention. I have very little power, compared to the weight of humanity that thinks that we should stay the course and that we'll be saved in the end by a government that doesn't care about us and corporations that can't see past the end of their profits. I am a failure - because if I were a success, I'd be cheering on the demons that plague this world and buying Prada shoes while worrying if I really didn't want the Gucci ones more.

And it is that sense of being an outcast and watching Nero fiddle while Rome burns that The Crow Road will convey. I could tell you how it's not really about that, it's just a good old fashioned mutant romp, but it's not. More than The Dead Letters - but not more than Thieves In The Temple - The Crow Road is my hate for the willing blindness of so many people alive now.