In the bone season series, did big historical events involving Britain still occur, like world war 1 and 2? And if they did was Britain’s part in it still the same or did they occur without Britain being involved?
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I started this series when I was a teenager, and I will be frank: I bit off a lot more than I could chew when it came to the worldbuilding outside Scion. In hindsight, I now recognise that it would take a massive amount of studying and political knowledge – that or hiring an expert historian – to work out how Europe could have ended up, and which events would have either have played out differently or not happened at all, if Britain had suddenly ousted its monarchy after Queen Victoria and declared that its overriding aim was now to hunt clairvoyants. Even when I started revising the series in 2023, I recognised that the sheer magnitude of that task would overspill my time constraints and probably require a degree – multiple degrees – to pull off in a way that seemed genuinely convincing.
Although I don't usually shy away from worldbuilding challenges, I decided the best choice overall was to not specify whether certain events happened or not, and to leave the world map hazy; I would leave it up to the reader to imagine. Paige herself has very little knowledge of the outside world, so it works for her first-person perspective.
If I ever write an official guide to the series, I would consider going into this in more detail, but I definitely would want to call in experts to help me.