I began writing The Looking Glass Wars in 2000 with a question I couldn’t let go of: What if Wonderland was real all along?
What began as one novel has grown into a mythology spanning novels, graphic novels, art, music, games and stories across generations, cultures and centuries. For more than twenty-five years, I’ve been uncovering the history hidden inside the story we thought we knew.
It has been my child, my lover, my father—and sometimes my ghost.
I’ve never been particularly interested in simply retelling a classic. I wanted to discover the story behind the story: the civilization that could have created the characters, places and ideas Lewis Carroll left us, and then follow that history wherever it led.
It led to Alyss Heart, Hatter Madigan and Redd, but it didn’t stop with them. I began discovering the generations that came before them, the children who would inherit their unfinished histories, the families and rival Suit Houses fighting over the future of the Queendom, and the traces of Wonderland that had been hiding in our own world all along.
The deeper I went, the larger the history became—sisters and brothers, queens and daughters, Earth and Wonderland, different cultures and different centuries, all connected by the same extraordinary force: Imagination.
After twenty-five years, I still feel as though we’re discovering it.
Welcome to my side of the Looking Glass.