Visiting Scotland for Seeker

Seeker starts in Scotland, with the four main characters on a remote estate that has remained mostly the same for hundreds of years.

Seeker takes place in the near future, and the world has progressed from where it is today. There are aircars and tall buildings in big cities are much taller and more slender than they are today, because technologies have gotten better. But I always felt that Scotland wouldn’t see much of these changes. I imagined that Scotland would remain pretty much as it is today. Scotland has many bustling, modern cities, but once you get outside these populated areas, the countryside feels a lot like it must have felt hundreds of years ago. And I think it will still feel that way hundreds of years in the future.

So I wrote the Scottish estate exactly as it would be today, or 40 years ago, or 40 years in the future. It remains its own world.

Walking down a tree-covered lane like this one, it was easy to imagine the strange contrasts in Quin’s and Shinobu’s lives. They were raised to use outlandish, seemingly high-tech weapons, while growing up in completely peaceful surroundings. From early on, they must have felt a strange separateness to their families

Did you know that there are more sheep than people in Scotland? So the truth is, Quin didn’t know much about other people or the world outside the estate until she took her oath. She believed what her parents told her and her imagination filled in the rest, which can happen very easily in such a calm and pretty place

(All photos courtesy of and (c) Jennifer Anderson)