Setting
The series is set many years into the future, where the world has been ravaged by a great nuclear holocaust known as the Great White. The few people left have formed a new way of living, led by a body called the Council.
The Council realized that they had not escaped the effects of the Great White completely unscathed, and began burning any humans or animals born with deformities. The Council appointed a fledgling religious order called the Herder Faction to oversee these rituals. The Herders believed that Lud, their name for God, sent the Great White as punishment for a materialistic society. As a result, they destroyed all artifacts of the old world known as the Beforetime.
Those who spoke out against the Herders, or researched the period before the nuclear holocaust or its technology, were declared Seditioners (from the word sedition) and were burnt alive. Council law and the Herder Faction gradually fused, and came to depend on each other. If the two governing bodies did not burn the dissidents, they sent them to work on Councilfarms. Orphan homes were set up to house those children of Seditioners not claimed by relatives.
It later became clear that mutations of the mind could develop which were not visible at birth. The Council and Herder Faction decided that those few people affected by mental mutations, called Misfits, would be sent to the Councilfarms. They sent the more afflicted Misfits to the remote mountain estate of Obernewtyn to be treated, and to be isolated from normal people.
Read more about this topic: Obernewtyn Chronicles
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“The doctrine of those who have denied that certainty could be attained at all, has some agreement with my way of proceeding at the first setting out; but they end in being infinitely separated and opposed. For the holders of that doctrine assert simply that nothing can be known; I also assert that not much can be known in nature by the way which is now in use. But then they go on to destroy the authority of the senses and understanding; whereas I proceed to devise helps for the same.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)
“The supreme, the merciless, the destroyer of opposition, the exalted King, the shepherd, the protector of the quarters of the world, the King the word of whose mouth destroys mountains and seas, who by his lordly attack has forced mighty and merciless Kings from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same to acknowledge one supremacy.”
—Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–59 B.C.)
“Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man’s will and his environment: in a word, of problem.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)