The World of The DreamLand Saga

It was built to be the best day of your life.

DreamLand is an engineered amusement park, six themed lands wide, designed so an ordinary person could step inside a story and finally be somebody in it. Grit meets machinery. Reality bends by design.

Then the gates lock, and you find out what the park is actually for.

The six lands

Each one is ruled by its own brand of danger.

Six themed lands stretch from Medieval castles to the shadow-drenched streets of HorrorLand. Every one has its own rules, its own residents, and its own way of killing you.

Land One

The Medieval Kingdom

Castles, and the kind of law that comes with them. The far end of the park from HorrorLand in every sense, and the first thing most people picture when they imagine getting to be a hero.

Land Two

HorrorLand

Shadow-drenched streets, and the land the park stops pretending in. If the Medieval Kingdom is the fantasy people paid for, this is the one that was waiting underneath it.

Land Three

To be revealed

Four more lands stand between the castles and the dark. Their names belong in the book, not on a website.

Land Four

To be revealed

Sam has to cross every one of them, and no two work the same way.

Land Five

To be revealed

Some of them were built as attractions. Some of them became something else.

Land Six

To be revealed

The park is a proving ground. Six lands is how many trials that takes.

The Western frontier town on the paperback cover, the ferris wheel, the castle spires and the towering figure over all of it are the park as the reader first sees it.

Who is in here with you

Nothing in the park is only one thing.

Samuel Jack. A gunslinger, which was the whole point of coming. He wanted to be the man with the revolver, and DreamLand gave him exactly that, right up until the revolver stopped being part of the show.

Rutherford D. Soros. The park's creator. Enigmatic on a good day and unstable on the rest of them. He says he is shaping a new world through trials of fire and blood, and he means it literally.

The Lifebots. Lifelike robotic beings built to populate the lands and play their parts. They are still playing them. That is the problem.

Cybernetic hybrids. Further down the same road, and less interested in the script.

The other captives. Outlaws and ordinary people, some of whom see Sam as a savior and some of whom see him as a threat. Working out which is which is most of the job.

The DreamLand convention booth with the full park artwork on a backdrop banner and a second banner reading Nightmares Are Dreams Too

The park artwork at full size, as seen at Cincycon.

What it is really about

A world built to strip it away.

Underneath the gunfights, the book keeps circling the same question: how much of a person survives a place designed to assign them a role?

Sam has to decide whether to accept the part Soros picked for him or fight to keep his humanity intact. The Lifebots raise the question from the other direction, and one reader put the modern version of it better than any blurb could.

It makes you wonder if we, as a people, really know what we are getting into with robotics and AI. Karen S. Wolford, Amazon review
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