Rusty's Ghost Engine (also known as.......... Jinky Spring)
asked
Kate Elliott:
What were your inspirations for the Crossroads trilogy?
Kate Elliott
The instigation for Crossroads was an online comment made years ago by a person who stated that no polytheistic religion could be moral. Of course then I had to write one. I ended up getting interested in how justice is conceptualized, which inevitably meant that the story-line was destined to spend most of its time dealing with injustice.
Add the eagle reeves, courtesy of my spouse, a former police officer.
Toss in the nine cloaked guardians who are out-takes from my first completed (never published) novel, written when I was 19; all that is really left from the original conception is the different colored cloaks. I have no idea why I then found or still find this bit of business (cloaks of many colors) appealing.
Stir with the law code of medieval Danish king Vladimir II, in whose reign was promulgated the Jyske Lov (Jutland Code), whose first statement can be translated as “with law shall the land be built.”
Construct an Asia-Pacific inspired setting courtesy of my exposure to the Asia-Pacific culture of Hawaii, where I now live.
Place in a sub-tropical physical landscape because I didn’t want to have to write about snow.
Finally, In the largest sense Crossroads is about the stories we tell ourselves, both as individuals and as societies, to make sense of the world but also to justify the way the we think the world is and our place in it. The thread of “story”—of how the tales we tell build the architecture of any society—is built into the trilogy at all levels.
The instigation for Crossroads was an online comment made years ago by a person who stated that no polytheistic religion could be moral. Of course then I had to write one. I ended up getting interested in how justice is conceptualized, which inevitably meant that the story-line was destined to spend most of its time dealing with injustice.
Add the eagle reeves, courtesy of my spouse, a former police officer.
Toss in the nine cloaked guardians who are out-takes from my first completed (never published) novel, written when I was 19; all that is really left from the original conception is the different colored cloaks. I have no idea why I then found or still find this bit of business (cloaks of many colors) appealing.
Stir with the law code of medieval Danish king Vladimir II, in whose reign was promulgated the Jyske Lov (Jutland Code), whose first statement can be translated as “with law shall the land be built.”
Construct an Asia-Pacific inspired setting courtesy of my exposure to the Asia-Pacific culture of Hawaii, where I now live.
Place in a sub-tropical physical landscape because I didn’t want to have to write about snow.
Finally, In the largest sense Crossroads is about the stories we tell ourselves, both as individuals and as societies, to make sense of the world but also to justify the way the we think the world is and our place in it. The thread of “story”—of how the tales we tell build the architecture of any society—is built into the trilogy at all levels.
More Answered Questions
Angela
asked
Kate Elliott:
I've just began to read Bk 1 of this series and was hoping my library have the other 2! I was sad to to be told they were not published --- could you not find another publisher for the remainder of this series? Baen books or whoever? - I really like bk 1 (I'm 83 years old and SF is my favourite reading matter)
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