The Moon King
‘The story of The Moon King grew out of its setting, the sea-locked city of Glassholm, which is a thinly veneered version of Glasgow, Scotland where I live. Glasgow is a city of mood swings, brilliant with sun and warm sandstone one minute and dour with overcast and rain soaked tarmac the next. Summer days are long and filled with light. The winter months pass mostly in darkness. Living here, your spirit is tied to the city’s mood. As soon as I hooked that almost bipolar sense to the idea of natural cycles, the story blossomed. In Glassholm, the moon never sets and everything, from entropy to the moods of the populace, is affected by its phasing from Full to Dark and back to Full again. I wanted to know what would life be like there, what quirks nature might throw into the mix. And what would happen if it was discovered that the cyclic euphorias and depressions were not natural after all.’
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Neil Williamson
Neil Williamson was born in Motherwell, Scotland. He is a resident of Glasgow.
His books include: The Moon King (runner-up for the BSFA award and finalist for the British Fantasy Society Robert Holdstrock award), Queen Of Clouds; short story collections, The Ephemera and Secret Language (both finalists for the British Fantasy Award); anthologies, Nova Scotia: New Scottish Speculative Fiction (finalist for the World Fantasy Award) and Thirty Years of Rain; and a novella, The Memoirist.

