Fantasy writers in the United States are often raised on a steady diet of Tolkien and Lewis and Carroll and Nesbit and Cooper and so on. We are haunted by England. This is probably annoying to both of us, English and American, but it can’t be helped. Maybe we long for a history older than two hundred years, the kind of history that boatfuls of puritans tried to sev
er when they sailed westwards—the kind that they tried to destroy after landing on the other side.
I didn’t want to be haunted by England, despite my love for those authors and the cadences of their language. I refused to write about either once or future kings. But London still influenced my fictional city in Goblin Secrets.
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| Old London Bridge |
Zombay City is two separate places, Northside and Southside, stitched together by a single bridge called the Fiddleway. The northern half is more powerful, more orderly, and more monied. The southern half is messier, more theatrical, and refuses to move in straight lines. The two do not get along, and the Fiddleway Bridge is the only way to travel between them. That narrow causeway is practically a town unto itself, presided over by an intricate clock tower and covered with houses, shops, and musicians.
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| This is the original cover art for Goblin Secrets. Credit goes to the artist Alexander Jansson. It is, as far as I know, the only illustration of the Fiddleway Bridge |
The Fiddleway was partly inspired by the musician-covered Charles Bridge in Prague (along with Prague’s gorgeous clock), and partly by the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, but mostly by stories of the old London Bridge: It was a town unto itself, one that combined two contradictory halves of a huge city, that somehow remained separate from either yet central to both—an impossible, beautiful, precarious place.
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| Ponte Veccio |
I’m still haunted by London Bridge, so I had to put it in a book. I really couldn’t help it.
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Thank you William, I absolutely loved Fiddleway Bridge in the book and these images are beautiful! I love that English fiction influenced you in some way and reading Goblin Secrets I saw that a lot.
Goblin Secrets was published on July 18th and you can read my review here.
