Brianna the Bibliophile asked Scott Hawkins:

Let me start off by saying, I have to give you praise for this book. As a librarian, I read a lot of books and this one moved to the top of my list of books to recommend to patrons. I loved it so much I bought numerous copies to give out as gifts, and one to donate to my library - since they don't have a copy of it. What was your biggest inspiration for writing this book? Also, Karl Urban as David would be amazing.

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[Hey Brianna,

Thanks! I absolutely love it that actual librarians dig this book so much. Some of the best parts of my childhood were spent in libraries, so the idea of some twelve year old me-like nerd sneaking into the adult section and stumbling on Mount Char is especially tasty to me.

Anyway, as far as inspiration: it's a weirdly tough question. There are like a zillion little things rather than any one big one, if that makes sense.

One of the bigger and earlier pieces was this guy who lived a couple houses down the street from me when I was a kid in the 80s. He had a fairly vast collection of paperback SF from the 1950s and 60s, when he was a kid, and he would let me borrow on an as-needed basis. I devoured that stuff for years.

The thing was, it was all twenty years out of date. So when I went away to school and found like minded SF/F nerds to talk books with, it was like I was some time traveler from a forgotten age. I'd never heard of most of the modern writers. All my reading came out of a 1960s time capsule. When people my age talked books I was like "William Gibson? Who's that?" At the same time I could go for hours with people of my parents generation because we had read all the same stuff as kids.

Anyway, it occurred to me that you could generalize this idea of kids transplanted to an earlier era via library. The original conception was that Father had, as a child, spoken some sort of now-forgotten language that made it a lot easier for the people who thought in that language to do magic. He took in a bunch of modern kids and raised them to speak the old language. As a result, they grow up knowing how to do the stuff Father did.

The flip side was that this earlier language is absolute crap for thinking about things like physics. So, like, when they go out into the world and run into things like cell phones, the only way they can think of them is in terms of "the great spirit of the sky carries your words on the wind" or whatever.

An equally important starting point that's harder to express was that I was trying to capture a mood. I liked the idea that Carolyn (or whoever; it didn't have to be her) had driven herself so hard for so long that she lost track of some essential component of self. Remember that first night Steve came up from watching TV in the library and saw her floating a hundred feet up in the air, laughing and/or crying? I'm not sure how well this came across in the text, but for me that was the emotional core of the book. YMMV.

Anyway, thanks for the question, and MUCH thanks for pushing mount char! It's tough to get a first novel noticed, so I really do appreciate the help.

Best,

Scott (hide spoiler)]

flag