I thought I wrote it specifically for the 1998 anthology Fantastic Worlds (edited by Paul Collins), but when I checked the copyright date for ‘From the Lighthouse,’ I found it was 1996, and all the other stories were 1998. Which suggests the story appeared somewhere else first, and I do have a faint niggling memory that it did see print somewhere obscure before being collected in Fantastic Worlds. This completely destroys my explanation of the origins of the story. When I thought it first appeared in Fantastic Worlds, I was going to say that I must have started with landscape because of the anthology title, with the idea of an island in the ice, protected by a Summer Field. I’m pretty certain that the setting came first, and some of the details of the place and its people, but it can’t have been sparked by the anthology title. This is one of my notionally science fiction stories, in that it features technology and some vague explanation of that technology, but it still has the feel of fantasy.
What do You think about Old Kingdom 04: Across The Wall?
