Chris is often asked why, if the Last Dragon Chronicles is a fantasy saga, most of it is set in the real world of day-to-day life, but where magical things happen. He has two answers to that. One is that the squirrel story at the heart of the first book, The Fire Within, is necessarily set in such a world, and so everything else had to be; the other is that he was initially very wary about creating something “other,” given his then rather poor track history of attempting to write science fiction stories. His confidence has grown considerably since (read Fire World, for instance!), but the scene was set (or rather, the scenes were set) beyond any substantial change long before that point. Perhaps there is a third reason — that he simply thoroughly enjoys writing family drama–type scenarios. It’s what he relishes most of all.
Although there are many, many settings throughout the series, these can be largely separated into three distinct groupings. These are Earth (modern day and, paradoxically, in the last book in the series, in early times), Ki:mera, and Co:pern:ica. As Ki:mera, the home thought-world of the Fain, is never actually seen, it obviously cannot be described here. Co:pern:ican settings are entirely fictitious and not based on any particular places currently in existence. Many of the Earth settings, however, are recognizable as specific locations around the world. As Chris lives in England, most of them can be found there. When the Last Dragon Chronicles was published in the US, though, it seemed natural to relocate some of the settings to North America, as you will see.
Scrubbley is, as already mentioned, a thinly-disguised Bromley, in Kent, England. In the United States, Scrubbley is a fictitious town in Massachusetts, near Boston. Number 42 Wayward Crescent is a traditional 1930s house. Lucy’s room faces the road at the front of the house. David’s room is on the ground floor and faces onto the backyard, where much of the action featuring Henry Bacon, who lives in the house next door, occurs. Most of the domestic scenes within the Pennykettle household center around the kitchen and the Dragons’ Den, the studio where Liz makes her clay creations:
All around the studio, arranged on tiers of wooden shelves, were dozens and dozens of handcrafted dragons. There were big dragons, little dragons, dragons curled up in peaceful slumber, baby dragons breaking out of their eggs, dragons in spectacles, dragons in pajamas, dragons doing ballet, dragons everywhere. Only the window wall didn’t have a rack. Over there, instead, stood a large old bench. A lamp was angled over it. There were brushes and tools and jelly jars prepared, plus lumps of clay beside a potter’s wheel. The sweet smell of paint and methyl acetate hung in the air like a potpourri aroma.
The scent of potpourri also hangs in the air in Zanna’s New Age shop, The Healing Touch. She bought this property with the aid of royalties from David’s two commercially successful books after he was lost in the Arctic, presumed dead. Liz helps her with child-care duties so that Zanna can work on building the shop up from scratch. The shop layout was inspired by that of a local health-food store, though the latter is a bit smaller than Zanna’s business and has neither an upstairs open to the public nor a potions dragon to assist in making up the tinctures.
The previous owner had run the property as a small gift shop and had passed it on with all the fixtures in place. Pine shelving racks occupied the two long walls and a glass display counter faced the door. Behind it, curtained off by bamboo strips, were two utility areas that served as stock room, preparation room, and kitchen. The two rooms upstairs were bare and dusty, but over the next three years, as her turnover increased and her reputation for producing effective “lotions and potions” expanded, Zanna was able to decorate throughout and turn them into her consulting area, for clients requiring her unique brand of healing.
Tam Farrell, a journalist who is investigating David Rain’s mysterious disappearance in the Arctic, buys a clay dragon from Zanna’s shop one day and invites her to attend a poetry reading at Allandale’s bookshop in an attempt to win her trust and get her to open up to him. This bookshop is based on one called Browsers, which used to be situated in Allandale Road in Leicester, England, but is sadly now closed; Sandra, who co-owned it, became Cassandra in the books.
It was the same room, set out in just the same way, with three arcs of soft-backed chairs and a small lectern at the front. The main ceiling lights had been turned off, and the room was illuminated by filtered blue halogens built into the two walls of bookshelves. Ten or a dozen people were already randomly seated, poring over programs, but Zanna’s eye was drawn to a larger group, clustered around a table where tea and fruit juice were being served. She spotted Tam Farrell in quiet conversation with a spiky-haired woman, whom she knew to be the bookshop owner, Cassandra.
Zanna is distraught and very angry when she discovers that Tam is only befriending her because of his professional interest in David. However, when she is attacked by semi-darklings, on a place called North Walk, it is Tam who rescues her and thus becomes a trusted companion after all. In real life, North Walk is the image of a beautiful tree-lined avenue in Leicester called New Walk, which runs from the heart of the city to a lovely open park next to the university. It’s exactly as described prior to the attack scenes, even including the museum and double-mouthed mailbox — but minus semi-darklings and Tam Farrell.
New Walk in Leicester, the inspiration for North Walk
[North Walk] was a wide asphalt path that cut through the professional heart of Scrubbley. The houses that ran along one side were mostly occupied by lawyers or accountants…. Alexa preferred the other side of North Walk. There were houses and offices along here, too, and a fine museum of art. But dotted between the buildings were squares and rectangles of urban grassland, shaded by vast maple and oak trees. Lucy had once written a story for school about two squirrels that lived on the edge of such a square. The name of the story was “Bodger and Fuffle from Twenty-three Along.” The number twenty-three referred to the broken glass lantern, on the twenty-third lamppost from the top end of the Walk, where the squirrels had built their home. One of Alexa’s favorite games was to count the lampposts aloud, even though she knew exactly which one (by the double-mouthed blue mailbox just beyond the museum) was home to the legendary squirrels.
Not far from the park end of New Walk, Rutherford House (previously a lunatic asylum, in the books) is based on a slightly adapted part of Leicester University’s campus, which, incidentally, shared the same history before it became an educational establishment.
Although Caractacus the crow attacks Conker the squirrel in the garden at 42 Wayward Crescent in the Last Dragon Chronicles, the idea for this scene was implanted in Chris’s mind many years before in the graveyard adjacent to another part of the university campus — the Medical School’s parking lot. This is where Chris worked for twenty-eight years, before becoming a full-time writer. The Med School, not the parking lot, of course.
One day, he was called outside by a friend to witness (and try to capture) a gray squirrel running around in wide circles, obviously trying to escape from something but unable to move in a straight line. It transpired that a crow had made a lunge at it, for reasons unknown, and damaged one of its eyes. Despite a crazy half hour with Chris running around after it with an empty cardboard box, it did eventually manage to get itself away from both the crow and Chris, and finally disappeared under the fence and among the graves. Chris followed in hot pursuit, but never saw it again. The image and the memory stayed with him for over a decade before ultimately being written into literary history.
Conker’s sanctuary
A little farther afield, the location of the Old Gray Dragon guest house, where Lucy and Tam stay in Dark Fire, was based on a bed-and-breakfast that Chris and I stayed at in Glastonbury, England, right at the foot of the Tor. A tor is a small hill, and the one at Glastonbury is a major tourist attraction. The owners of the bed-and-breakfast were a wonderfully welcoming couple and absolutely nothing like the characters of Hannah and Clive, who own the Old Gray Dragon in the book. The back door of the guesthouse opened onto a private path that led onto the public one and thence right to the top of the Tor.
Once at the top of the Tor (called Glissington Tor in the novels), and with Tam’s help, Lucy surveys the land with the intent of raising a natural dragon that she believes has been in stasis for hundreds of years, somewhere beneath their feet. Opposite the Tor is another hill, Scuffenbury, where there is a chalk horse etched into the grass. It is alleged that when moonlight falls in a particular way on the horse’s head, the dragon will awaken, but Hannah later suggests to Lucy that there is a better and easier way to achieve that — by touching the dragon itself. To this end, Hannah guides Tam and Lucy through some tunnels under the Tor which have been professionally excavated in years gone by, abandoned, then later extended by her husband.
In real life, the horse on Scuffenbury Hill is based on the white chalk horse at Uffington, in Oxfordshire, England. Glissington Tor itself, although based mainly upon Glastonbury Tor (especially for shape and size), is further influenced by the man-made mound at Silbury, in Wiltshire, England. It is at this site that excavations were professionally made. Nothing unexpected was found there. When it came time to “move” Scuffenbury Hill to its new location for the US edition of the Chronicles, however, there was a slight snag: There are no chalk hills anywhere in the United States! Therefore one was created specially, in (very appropriately) New England. Maine, you now have a new tourist attraction….
Farther afield again, and in London now (US version: Boston), both in the books and in real life, Apple Tree Publishing (the company that publishes David’s books) is highly reminiscent of Chris’s UK publisher’s old offices….
The offices of Apple Tree Publishing were wedged between a lumberyard and a bar in a cramped and rundown area of Boston. It was hardly the castle of literary elegance that David Rain had imagined it to be. Redevelopment was everywhere. Half the road was checkered by scaffolding. Boards surrounded the knocked-out shop fronts. The smell of damp brick dust hung in the air. Taxicabs shuttled past, squirting slush onto the snow-packed sidewalks. And from every quarter there came a noise. Hammering, drilling, workers shouting, music thumping out of the bar, the steady buzz of traffic, the rumble of a bus, the sucking whistle of an overhead plane.
… and The National Endeavor newspaper offices, where Tam Farrell works, of the UK publisher’s new ones.
According to Gwendolen’s place-finding search engine, the offices of The National Endeavor were in a large glass building on Cambridge Street, half a mile’s walk from the T station. On her map, the thick green line of the highway did not appear especially intimidating, but even though Lucy was no stranger to Boston, the pace of life here in the rush hour frightened her. Cambridge Street was a busy four-lane highway, yet there was traffic congestion on one side of the road, made worse by a fire truck and a clutch of police cars, which were throwing their red lights into the rain…. She just pulled up her collar and hurried on past…. By now, if her bearings were correct, she should be right near the magazine’s offices. A truck powered by, rattling every pane of glass in sight. Then a horn blared, making her squeal in fright, driving her toward a revolving door. She saw the word Endeavor and just kept on moving, glad to let it carry her out of the noise.
Incidentally, the character of Dilys Whutton, who appears in Fire Star, is an homage to one of Chris’s previous editors, though he won’t allow me to say which one! Probably scared he’ll never be invited to “do lunch” ever again.
David’s home address, 4 Thousall Road, Blackburn, Lancashire (4 Thousall Road, Blackburn, Massachusetts, in the US editions), is another Beatles reference, from a song called “A Day in the Life,” which mentions something along the lines of there being four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.
The Arctic settings (including those mentioned in The Fire Ascending relating to the early days on Earth) are much more generalized, and not often tied to any specific real-life places. The mountainous region of Kasgerden, the Horste and Skoga forests, and the Bridge of Taan are all entirely from Chris’s imagination. The one notable exception to this is modern-day Chamberlain, which is (very loosely) based on the existence of a town named Churchill in Manitoba, Canada. This is somewhere that Chris would love to visit because, for part of the year, polar bears gather there in large numbers, waiting for the sea ice to freeze sufficiently so that they can go out to hunt seal, their staple diet. Whether he’ll be welcome there after the inhabitants read his version of life in that neck of the woods is anybody’s guess.
“Neck of the woods” isn’t a particularly appropriate phrase to use, in truth, as “woods” or even single trees are almost nonexistent in that area because the weather conditions are not temperate enough for them to survive. Here’s a passage from Fire Star that gives you a flavor of this remote Arctic setting:
[Zanna] dropped the parking brake and gunned the truck forward. Its rear wheels squealed as they bit the road. Snowflakes as large as lemons hit the screen and were quickly swept aside into a layer of slush. Zanna shifted her gaze to the east. Out toward open water, surrounded by dirt stacks and rusting junked machinery, lay the moody hulk of the grain elevator, a large white ocean liner of a building, blackened with smoke from a nearby chimney, splashed against the bleak gray Manitoba sky. For eight months of the year, when the bay was clear of ice, Chamberlain fed the north with grain. The sight of it reminded her why they’d come. “Got your list?”
David unflapped a pocket…. The romantic in him had wanted to see a bygone time of people in furs outside their igloos, chewing skins and dressing kayaks. But the latter-day reality wasn’t even close. The “igloos” were rows of painted wooden buildings, mostly squat residential cabins. The only suggestion of a native heritage was a parka-clad figure attending a dog team. The man had a cigarette hanging off his lip and two curtains of black hair sprouting shabbily from under his cap. The dogs, despite the unflagging cold, seemed as happy as a small flock of sheep in a summer field.
As they turned into the center of the town, David was reminded that one of the principal attractions of Chamberlain was its tourist industry. People came here to photograph bears. There were several gift shops testifying to it, plus an Inuit museum he’d heard Russ and Dr. Bergstrom talk about. On its wall was a sign declaring, FIVE CITIZENS FOR EVERY BEAR. He took this to mean that the town’s population was approximately one thousand, as he knew from his studies that somewhere around two hundred bears passed through Chamberlain annually. Yellow warning signs were everywhere, reminding people of it.
BE ALERT!
POLAR BEAR SEASON
October thru November
Memorize this number
The number in question was the polar bear “police.” If any bad guys lumbered in, Chamberlain, it seemed, was ready to run them out of town.
Most of the other scenes are just out on the ice, nearer or farther away from various real areas, though Chris has invented a village called Savalik, which is where Tootega, an Inuit worker at the Polar Research Station a few days’ journey away, was born and brought up.
A modern settlement of twenty or thirty large wooden houses, it mirrored Chamberlain in all but size. It was snowbound on three sides, the houses huddled in a cloistered heap like Christmas presents on a large white armchair. Tootega, when he saw it this time, was reminded of something David Rain had said about Inuit settlements looking like a room that you forgot to clean. Anything an Inuk did not need, any broken-down appliance or unused item, he would cast away — but not very far. So it was in Savalik. An incongruous mix of brightly painted roofs and overhanging wires and old oil barrels and junked bent metal and columns of steam. But it was home, and the dogs knew it, too. Their noses lifted at the first scent of seal meat warming in a pot. Their tails wagged. Their paws spent less time in contact with the ice. Orak, the lead dog, whose mapping was every bit as sensitive as his master’s, was tugging his comrades toward the colony long before the whip was up.
Tootega has come to visit his grandfather, who is very ill, in his home in the settlement. Nauja, Tootega’s sister-in-law, is looking after the old man.
Tootega went in, bowing his head. The old man, famed throughout the north as a healer and shaman, commanded great respect within the community and even more esteem at home. He gave a thin cry of joy to see his firstborn grandson and called out to Nauja, Mattak! Mattak! meaning she should bring them whale meat to chew. Tootega crossed the floor, surprised to find a woolen rug under his feet. It dismayed him every time he came to this house to see his grandfather a little more absorbed by southern culture. This room, with its wardrobes and lampshades and remote-controlled television, was a painful affliction of the disease called progress. Tootega could readily remember a time when this proud and happy man, now lying in a bed that had drawers in the mattress and propped up loosely on a cluster of pillows, would have been surrounded by furs and harpoons and a seal oil lamp, with blood and blubber stains under his feet. On the wall above the bed, slightly tilted at an angle, was a framed embroidered picture saying “Home, Sweet Home” in the Inuit language. To see it made Tootega want to empty his gut.
Progress will always happen, in the High Arctic as well as everywhere else, of course. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. However, Chris is deeply concerned about the effects of pollution, global warming, climate change, and so on, especially regarding polar bears, one of his favorite animals. So much so, that he has David, working at the research base already mentioned, write in a letter back home to Liz and Lucy:
We spend our days analyzing ice samples. Some of them date back hundreds of years. Zanna is checking for increases in toxic chemicals called PCBs, which can poison bears and other forms of wildlife, and I am melting ice cores down and making the tea — I mean, making interesting graphs to monitor the levels of something called beryllium 10. This is to do with global warming. Dr. Bergstrom thinks that changes in the levels of beryllium 10 coincide with an increase in sunspots or flares, which might be warming the Earth and making the polar ice cap melt. That’s scary, especially for bears. Every year, the ice in Hudson Bay melts earlier but takes a little longer to refreeze. This means that bears are fasting more and more and will reach a point, maybe in the next fifty years, when they will not be able to survive their time ashore and will die of starvation out on the tundra. It’s hard to believe that the natural world we take so much for granted is constantly under threat from climatic change and that creatures like polar bears could so easily become extinct. No one here wants to see that happen. So we are busy searching for long-term answers, feeding the data into our computers to try to predict how long the polar ice will last.
So how can you and I make a difference? David writes White Fire, of course, to bring these issues to the attention of the public. But Chris feels that such a grand gesture may not be necessary. He believes (and has David and Tam Farrell believe, too) that a solution to global warming can be achieved with a single sentence: Make polar bears an endangered species. Tell this to the big industrial nations. If they approve it, they will be forced to protect the beasts’ icy habitat, and in doing so, they might just save the world.