The Spire #3

[laughing_tree]

Technologies, inhuman races, even the architecture of the city itself: they all play very prominent roles in the story or its subtext, and they’ve all been built by [artist Jeff Stokely] from scratch, rather than described by me. That was a scary relinquishment of responsibility, at first, but for one thing I never doubted Jeff could deliver, and for another it’s a weirdly honest application of fantasy thought. Real people don’t live in worlds which have been perfectly designed to accommodate them and their stories, after all. People don’t spend their time walking around, blurting exposition about how their TVs or cellphones work, what their moral code is based upon, why they’ve chosen to wear that hat instead of that one, etc. Genre stories – especially sci-fi and fantasy – are frequently guilty of all the above, when in fact I suspect readers get a lot more involved in stories where things aren’t laboriously explained. Hence it felt right to be inventing a world where half of it – the stuff coming out of Jeff’s brain – was a mystery to me. -- Si Spurrier