Ely has been cited as one of the prime inspirations for a world created by award-winning fantasy author — and one-time Ely resident — M T McGuire.
McGuire, who lived on Waterside for 15 years, writes humorous sci-fi fantasy books in a similar vein to Pratchett or Adams. They are set in a parallel version of Earth and the main character is a young lad who becomes one of the nation’s longest surviving outlaws because, as a self-confessed coward, he is very good at running away.
She wrote her first book while living in Ely and confesses she honed her skills with help and feedback from a writers’ group she attended there which met once a month.
Now on the brink of publishing her 12th book and her 7th full-length novel. Her stories are a humorous fantasy with some sci-fi aspects. The setting is a near future, parallel version of Earth, parts of which are very reminiscent of our version, and in many instances, drawn from the city of Ely.
According to McGuire, the similarities between are K’Barth (pronounced Kerbarth) and real places is deliberate.
‘K’Barth is a place where evolution went in a slightly different direction! There is more than one sentient species and they come in many shapes and sizes. ‘If I’m going to make the inhabitants a little different, or give everyone flying cars with laser guns (because who doesn’t love a car chase) there has to be something totally solid and believable to hang it all onto,’ she explains.
That’s why, despite the fact that not everyone in her version of Earth is strictly human, McGuire ensures that their surroundings are very much like earth, specifically, the UK.
Likewise, the characters are very human in the way they bicker with one another, love, live, hope and do normal things we all like to do, such as eating pie, or having a drink at a pub. McGuire says she drew a lot of inspiration from Ely when she created the area of the in which most of the action is set, Turnadot Street, in K’Barth’s sprawling capital city, Ning Dang Po.
‘I used to write sitting at a window looking out into the street and I confess that Turnadot Street is heavily based on Waterside. My main character is often chased and in a lot of cases ends up fleeing across the roofs, those roofs are strongly influenced by the view from our top floor windows.
Not only that but, in my head, The Parrot and Screwdriver pub, where many of the characters drink and interact, looks uncannily one of the houses that was across the road from mine.’
McGuire says that since moving to Bury St Edmunds, she has also amalgamated some of the more medieval-looking parts of her new home town into later books but that the inspiration from the city of Ely is still strong.
‘My last book featured three women who lived on a barge. Their home was based on one of the boats I used to walk past, daily, on the River Ouse in Ely.’
In order to get the details right, she took photos of the barges and narrow boats moored along the river.
In her present book, she once again drew inspiration from Ely when she was writing descriptions of the dockside area where much of the action takes place, along with historic accounts describing the Babylon area of Waterside in previous centuries.
If you want to learn more about M T McGuire’s books details are available on her website at www.hamgee.co.uk. You can also order them from bookshops or buy them direct from her website at www.hamgee.co.uk/books.
