Empire of the Clouds story of the R101 airship, which crashed on its maiden voyage in northern France on 5 October 1930. The song was written entirely by the band's lead vocalist, Bruce Dickinson, who initially intended it to be about "World War I fighter airplanes;" Dickinson abandoned the idea after using the same theme for the song "Death or Glory," also from "The Book of Souls". At the time of recording, Dickinson was reading "a big, sort of encyclopedic crash report" of the R101, entitled "To Ride the Storm", which gave him the idea for the song's eventual subject. Dickinson describes it as
The Lives of Things without the political context, the book is the kind of read that ensnares you, drawing you into its world and forcing you to see things a particular way—Saramago’s way--while you compulsively turn the pages." BookForum's review finds the political themes of "The Lives of Things" applicable to contemporary politics. Reviewer Michael Thomsen perceives "Things" as being the collection's centerpiece. Within the world of that story, political leaders become more rigid about enforcing a set of meaningless rules as a response to an increasingly chaotic, unreliable world. "The resonance with our own time is almost too much," Thomsen writes. Kirkus Reviews'