The Spellbinderworld is a strange place. Though we
can understand more or less how it became that way, you may wonder what
the authors had in mind when they wrote the series. An answer to this
question comes from Mark Shirrefs. Together with John Thomson, he wrote the
Spellbinder series. So here is the concept of the Spellbinderworld.
"Spellbinder came about when we were kicking
around ideas for a new series about parallel worlds and the question was
asked, what if a modern day kid found his way into a world where the
industrial revolution never happened?
This gave us the idea for a kind of medieval world and because we had
done some work in Poland a few years back, this seemed an ideal place to
shoot because it has spectacular castles and forests. But we also wanted
a sense of mystery in this world so we came up with the idea of the
Spellbinders who kept control of their world by controlling knowledge.
We wanted them to appear like magicians but as Arthur C. Clarke the SF
writer says, "Any sufficiently advanced technology seems like
magic." Therefore we decided that the Spellbinders' powers would
come from the ability to control electromagnetism. But the Spellbinders
decision to control knowledge was because this world had almost been
destroyed hundreds of years earlier by massive experiments with
electromagnetism - like the dangers we face with nuclear power, and they
feared that if knowledge got out of control, it would happen again. Of
course, this also meant that they led privileged lives and privilege is
hard to give up."