Moving cities are a fairly hoary old sci-fi trope - I seem to recall they were always cropping up on 'Doctor Who' when I was young, though I may be misremembering.

As a child I always steered clear of science fiction, but in the autumn of 1977, the bow-wave of publicity for the first 'Star Wars' movie had already reached me, so I was eager for anything science-fictional.

Everyone was losing things, leaving things behind, clinging to old memories as they rushed into the future. Everyone was a passenger on a runaway train. It was true that Zen would be going farther than most. But at least he didn’t.

That’s impossible,′ said Fever, Engineerishly.

She wanted to stop, but she was riding a wave of memory and it was carrying her backward to that night, that room, and the blood that had spattered her mother’s star charts like the map of a new constellation.

They’re only stories,” he would say, “What do stories matter?” But he wasn’t stupid. He knew as well as Myrddin that in the end stories are all that matter.

I don’t think we are cut out to be evil sorcerers, brothers,” said Fentongoose. “If we were truly evil, we would not feel such sorrow at the deaths of our friends. We would just go, ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ or something.

But the look on his face was so strange that I hadn’t the heart to take his story away from him. He believed it, see. He believed the old gods were on Arthur’s side just as he believed that winter would follow autumn and the sun would rise tomorrow. And I thought that maybe that believing would make him strong and brave and lucky when the fighting came, and maybe without it he’d be killed, or turn and run away, which was worse than being killed. So I kept quiet.

These are new worlds, Zen. We don’t have to be what we were any more. We can be anything that we want. We can be humans together. – Nova.

And isn’t that what all boys want and all men, too? Just to be taken seriously?