Once I’d decided on what I wanted the Seven Sisters complex to be, I needed to find a location for it. For obvious reasons it needed to be on a river, but it also needed to be fairly flat terrain, and for the river to be big enough to generate the amount of water needed. The flood defences wouldn’t work if it took three weeks for the ground to flood!
Since the book is about the Roman Empire, it needed to be relatively close to Rome, so I spent many hours poring over large scale maps of the middle portion of Italy and looking at Google Maps which is an indispensible tool for this kind of research.
Eventually I realised it had to be the eastern coast of Italy rather than the western, for several reasons, not least among them being the relative lack of development in the area. I needed to have a large city and the surrounding fortifications where there had been only a small town or city in early Roman times. You’ll notice I was trying hard to stay within the geography, if not the history of our world.
In the end I found a location that almost fit my bill, an area just inside the suburbs of the current city of Pescara, where the river follows a lazy curve around a relatively flat area. Putting my city on the southern bank of the river made perfect sense as the main passes though the ‘spine’ of Italy from Rome debauch onto the coastal plain south of the river.
I finally had my setting, where I could build my city and surround it with the seven fortresses I was already calling the Seven Sisters. My next problem was naming the fortresses themselves, every fort or castle has a name, so I needed seven names for them. Since they were going to be the Seven Sisters they would have to be women’s names, but I wanted something slightly out of the ordinary too, to help things stick in the minds of the readers.
Then I remembered something I’d read about other Alternative History writers doing, taking a reference to a more modern event out of context, and dropping it into their books to make some readers nod their head and others pause to think. This had to be subtle but relatively recent so I started looking for memorable battles in the twentieth century which I could pillage.
I did spend a lot of time thinking about Utah, Omaha, Sword, Gold and Juno but there were several problems , not least being there were only five of them, and not exactly the required level of subtlety. In the end I started Googling famous sieges and hit the jackpot. Dien Bien Phu was an action fought in what is now Northern Vietnam, then French Indo-China in the 1950's. The French paratroopers dug themselves into the small hills surrounding a valley and gave their strongpoints women’s names like Isabelle and Gabrielle and Ann-Marie. Supposedly these were the commander’s mistresses. What’s more there were eight of them, and seven of them easily translated into recognisable English equivalents.
I had my setting.