Author’s Reflection: On the Ghost Cryptography, Bowham, and the Larva Steel Ship in the Year 1403
When I began writing Woken Laurate and Casley and the Bleary Beady Eyed Ship, I intentionally set these stories in a time long before machines were ever conceived—specifically in the early 15th century, around the year 1403. It is an era without metal engines, electric light, or even printing presses. And yet, into this ancient world, I introduced things that seem impossibly out of place: a shocking, sparking larva-like steel ship, and the presence of ghost cryptography—a spirit’s capacity to decode, analyse, and correct language in silence.
I did this not to distort history, but to unveil a deeper, more spiritual layer of human experience—one that I believe transcends time itself.
The Path to Bowham
Bowham, as imagined in one if the stories, is not merely a peaceful village—it is a threshold of eternity, a place between life and what lies beyond. Everyone in Bowham has a past; some remember it clearly, others only when prompted. It is a world unbounded by linear time: here, people from the 1800s live beside those from the year 2390. Such paradox is deliberate, and Bowham becomes a kind of timeless afterlife, where forgotten lives find closure and reconciliation. It is where memory becomes geography.
The Larva Steel Ship: A Temporal Stranger
Perhaps the most arresting element in these tales is the shocking larva steel ship—a creature-like machine that appears in 1403 as if summoned by moral imbalance. This ship is not built, but willed into existence. It sparks, hovers, vanishes, and reappears, carrying the dead, avenging the wronged, and moving through space and consequence with godlike precision.
Why It Happened
This convergence of ghost thought, spiritual space, and mechanical mystery exists because, in the world I’ve written, memory and justice cannot wait for invention. Sometimes, when human systems fail—when law, loyalty, and language fall short—what rises in their place is something beyond explanation:
The ghost corrects what’s broken in thought.
And in Woken Laurate story we would learn about Mr Gibson and Mr Bakerson who owns a tale place in Dulfert and Mr Gibson's in Montgomery.
In the ancient time, where machines do not belong, there appeared such ghost mechanisms —which were symbols of what watches quietly from beyond.
— Eboh Solomon Ogbonnaya
