The Fantasy Cities that Inspired Moonstone

“... Everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world.” Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

The archipelago city of Moonstone, where our characters (whether archprinces, librarians, sorceresses or bookboaters) make their home is a multiethnic place with a variety of religions, architectures, and political powers scrabbling for a place on the city’s crowded islands. When I began writing The Moonstone Covenant, I knew I wanted it to be a place where people lived on and with the water, where the river, light and stone were a part of the story, just as much as the people.

Moonstone came from my imagination, but my imagination certainly had help. Although I tried not to think about it while I was writing, Moonstone is of course based in my experience of Manhattan, which is an island on two rivers, surrounded by other islands. The city’s canals, gondolas and piers are also inspired by my time among the beauties of Venice. And, Moonstone is inspired by epic fantasy cities I have encountered as a reader, and I thought I’d tell you a bit about them.

Merovingen, from C.J. Cherryh’s Angel with the Sword and Merovingen Nights, is a class-stratified city of tall buildings sunken into the water. The poor live close to the waterline, or on boats that ply the rivers, delivering supplies and taking wealthy “uptowners” from place to place. Merovingen has a variety of religions, some more and some less accepted by society. The main character, Altair Jones, rescues an uptowner man called Mondragon from a fall into the river, and an unlikely alliance ensues. Angel with the Sword made an impression on me, and no doubt had an influence on Moonstone and its boatfolk.

The city of Ragosa, a city by a lake, appears in Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan. One character calls it “the most civilized city in the world,” and its festival of masks and sensuality, reminiscent of Venice’s Carnevale, was memorable for me. Ragosa is an Asharite (read: Muslim) city, but it has a large Kindath (read: Jewish) quarterwhere an oppressed religious minority finds shelter, functioning among larger and more dominant faiths. Kay’s treatment of the Kindath as a religious enclave within a larger society is not so different from the Sha’an’s place within Moonstone society, and Ragosa is a sister city to Moonstone, both being cities of religious and cultural diversity.

Finally, several of the places in Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea feel relevant to mention. Roke Island is home to the School of Wizardry, where the Nine Masters teach their disciples. The Isolate Tower, domain of the Master Namer, contains many books of names, as well as maps and charts, and perhaps might have some similary to Moonstone’s Library. And west of Roke are the Ninety Isles, a place with islands so small a housewife might row across a channel for tea with her neighbor, where “all roads are salt water.” Places in Moonstone like the mini-archipelago of Scattered Pearls might feel familiar to a housewife from the Ninety Isles.

Moonstone has many unique aspects—its bookboats and floating liquor parlors, its baths and houses of public concubines, its palaces and shrines, its cliffs and harbors, its orchards and silk houses, its assassins and visionaries, and its great Library. The city holds secrets and mysteries. I hope readers will explore and enjoy.

—Jill Hammer