Thanks are due to the staff who created the ‘Trigan Empire’ comic strip for Ranger and subsequently Look and Learn magazine, which first gave me the concept of ‘what if ’ fantasy when I was at primary school in the late 1960s. This innovative science-fiction series showed what a Roman-type civilization might have looked like if it had survived to the Space Age, particularly due to the artwork of Don Lawrence. My exploration of the scenarios took off from there.