The History of Eileanan

I've always been fascinated with the idea that there may be other worlds out there. Ever since I was a child, I've been tapping on the back of wardrobes or peering down wells or climbing to the very top of tall trees, all in the hope I would somehow find the gateway to a magical land.

When I first sat down and began to create my own magical land, I decided I wanted to include all the things I love most about fantasy fiction - the beautiful 'high' language, the sense of enchantment, the swashbuckling action, the grappling with serious ontological questions ... and what I'd throw out included all the things that bothered me - the helpless half-clad female, the testosterone-overloaded hero, the simplistic moralities, and of course, the quasi-feudal setting. I had just got so tired of all these fantasies that sounded like Britain in the Dark Ages, looked like Britain in the Dark Ages, but somehow didn't smell like Britain in the Dark Ages.

So I began to cast around for some way of rooting my story in the real. One night I was channel-surfing when I flicked on to a documentary on the witch-hunts of the sixteenth century.

At that time, Europe was in a state of turmoil. The Age of Reason had not yet dawned, and the impact of the Renaissance was still being assimilated. It was a time of dramatic changes, both for the better and for the worse - religious, political, economic and cultural. For the first time the people of the day were realising how huge their world was, thanks to the discoveries of the explorers. Even more frightening, they were realising how vast and mysterious was the universe.

Galileo had developed a telescope powerful enough to scan the night sky. He discovered the satellites of Jupiter, observed spots on the Sun, and followed the phases of Venus. When he asserted that the earth revolved around the sun, he was put on trial by the Inquisition and imprisoned for the rest of his life.

The Inquisition was just one of the darker aspects of an age known for its brutality. Empowered to hunt out those thought guilty of heresy or sorcery, it used torture of the most horrific kind to force confessions.

The hunger for burning witches and heretics was brought to Britain in the late 16th century by King James VI of Scotland, who would become James I, the first British king. At the time there had been only a few witch-trials in England, Good Queen Bess having a general dislike for them, perhaps because her mother had been accused of being one.

James VI of Scotland had become engaged to a Danish-Norwegian princess after long negotiations over her dowry. At last all was settled and Anne of Denmark and her retinue set out to sail to Scotland in a fleet of twelve ships, many of which were carrying her gold and jewels. The fleet sailed into a storm of such immense proportions that many of the ships were lost, along with the princess's dowry. The ship carrying her royal highness was at last forced to turn back to Oslo, fifty-two days after setting out on a journey that should have taken less than a week. In the meantime, James had grown so anxious about the welfare of his bride-to-be that he had set sail in search of her and, ludicrously, reached Oslo before she did.

Despite the loss of the gold, James and Anne were married straightaway. Being pious Catholics, the hurricane could not be called an act of God so satanic forces were blamed instead. There was a roundup of 'witches' in Oslo, many of whom were tortured and burnt to death. James watched with great interest and, after battling more terrible storms on the way home, sent out the witch-hunters in Scotland to find who had raised the storms against him. In the end, nearly 70 men and women were accused of witchcraft and treason against the king. Most were cruelly tortured and many died on the death-pyre. (Read an extract from that time)

When I saw this documentary, everything just fell into place in my mind. It was my favourite period of history and one that I had studied closely over the years. My family background is Scottish and I had been brought up on tales of loch-serpents, ghostly pipers, fugitive princes in the heather, family curses and clan warfare. There is, of course, a strong tradition of paganism and occult lore in Scotland - just think of Macbeth and the witches. It's a long accepted truth that if you have the gift of the second sight, there'll be a Scottish grandmother in the background somewhere - and I happened to have two.

So I wove my world around the idea that a coven of witches fled James VI's savage witch-hunts, enacting a spell that took them to another world where they could practise magic and worship their pantheist, pagan religion in freedom, much as the Puritans did a hundred years later. Of course, they went to a different planet, as opposed to merely crossing the oceans to a new continent. Consequently, I tried to imagine how this history would shape the new society - its language, political structure, religion, and morality.

In the same way that the finches of the different Galapagos Islands evolved in different ways - giving Charles Darwin his proof that "species are not immutable" - so I imagined that the people of Eileanan would evolve in slightly different ways than those they had left behind on Earth. Their extrasensory powers, being trained and celebrated, would evolve into powers beyond those we know. They would respond to the gravitational pull of two moons and the different density of a smaller planet by adapting their physical makeup. Inbreeding with the native inhabitants of their new planet would result in even more dramatic developments. Much knowledge of science and technology would be lost, and new theories and inventions developed. Many words, gestures, superstitions and folktales would endure, and many new ones would be invented. So the culture of Eileanan was born and, I hope, gained intense and vivid life.

A thousand years has passed in Eileanan since the First Crossing, and only four hundred years in ours. Even given that Eileanan is found on a different planet in a different solar system, it is nonetheless set in the future, a future that perhaps we may have shared if our history had been different.