City of the Gods: The Special Edition That Could Have Been

WARNING: Spoilers for City of the Gods: The Return of Quetzalcoatl follow

To my (not always great) memory, the main differences between the early City of the Gods drafts and the final ones have to do with the Cortés prologue and the presence of a group of aliens on the Tliléctic Mixtli. In particular, I would have liked to have included the expanded prologue in some capacity in the new fifteenth anniversary edition, likely in an appendix.

You see, I had actually done quite a bit of research on Cortés at the time of writing COTG and my intention was to have more of him in the book. In particular, I had him surviving the initial Tlaloc attack only to be picked up by Velazquez's forces that had come to arrest him. We then see him in a sequence in which he has been imprisoned in Spain in a windy tower cell for many years. We are in full-on Gothic mode here and Cortés has become a semi-mad old prisoner who has been tortured by what he saw of the Nahuan attack on his people. His tower vantage point however gives him a great vantage point to witness an invasion of the Nahuans on Spanish soil with Tlaloc and an army of their gods.

I really liked this sequence and thought it gave good insight into the alt-history of the world from which the Tliléctic Mixtli and her crew originated, which Etzli later describes to Sandra. However, as you can read from the above description it was a bit long and complex for a prologue to a short-ish novel so the decision was made to cut it for faster pacing.

The only other major element that was in the older drafts and omitted closer to publication was the presence on the ship of an alien being, a representative of the mentioned Wayfarer species. It was one of these creatures (I believe his name was Far-ash) who attended to Sandra on the ship when she awoke, much to her horror and shock. 

I had some fun thinking up these aliens whose heads were big and shaped something like an ice cream scooper with a lot of negative space where their face would have been. I am a fan of alien creatures that are genuinely surprising and, well, alien (see any Alien movie or Annihilation for good examples of this.) I really wanted them to be something other than humans with latex applications or forehead ridges or something.

The Wayfarers were a race that the Nahuans had conquered and kept on the ship as slaves to maintain their advanced technology. They were cut later in the writing process that the longer prologue, probably to ease Sandra's journey of trusting the Nahuans since she was so freaked out and disturbed by these aliens. Also, their presence as slaves on the ship telegraphed a lot of how the Nahuans operated that it was becoming an impediment to the story so they got the axe.

Other than that, the story didn't go through a lot of changes during its development but these are items I had in mind as I was thinking about a prospective 15th anniversary edition.