Q. How The City of the Magicians trilogy explores the vulnerability of advanced civilizations.
Comfort and complacency plus an unspoken sense of superiority are corrosive agents no matter how advanced you think you are. So is a covert underground faction plotting to collaborate with your opponent, a barbarian and his forces coming in six months. Worried that the City’s high-minded pacifism and declining reputation for healing and Magic aren’t enough to dissuade this onslaught, Shoan, the Strategist on the City Council resorts to manipulations, prevarications, maneuvers and misdirections—tools that are showing signs they are compromising the very integrity he hopes to preserve.
Q. You’ve said, “We are no longer in transition — we are in rupture.” What does rupture mean in the context of your trilogy?
Transition can happen in observable stages. So can rupture but a quick eye is needed to spot the brief advantages to adapt to as rupture collapses from one condition into another. In the City, there are clear stages, yet successes and revelations are followed by reverses and delays. It is not only Shoan the Strategist who is pivoting and adapting as the transition accelerates into rupture. Four others have slipped his calculations aggravating the situation. Resistance or adapting to transition can speed rupture into irrevocable change. So what to do? If you see Humpty Dumpty is about to fall, do you bolster him, provide a pillow below the wall, run for glue and tape or learn how to make an omelet? Prepare for each scenario and be vigilant.
Q. What happens when someone finally takes a firm, unwavering stand against aggression?
It works, but timing can be everything. As are numbers, depending on the situation. And world attention. Pacifism has evolved since Mahatma Gandhi successfully threw the British out of India. During Czechoslovakia’s 1989 Velvet Revolution, 10 days of non-violent demonstrations with swelling numbers of protesters each day caused the one-party communist system, in power for over forty years, to resign. It was years in the making and did not happen overnight. A new concept has emerged: the 3.5% Rule. If 3.5 percent of the population shows up in a non-violent protest, there is a 70% chance the regime will fall. Regimes unfortunately have grown cognizant of this. When uncountable numbers of unarmed Iranians took to city streets in January, 2026 to protest the regime, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps came down hard, shut down the internet and massacred tens of thousands of its own citizens.
In the City, Sas is the representative of the non-violent faction. He and Purdu are very close but Purdu, compromised by the 5th School, wants to be recognized as a god, an outrageous act of vanity. The one person he’s desperate to acknowledge this, is Sas, but Sas can’t bring himself to do it. He confesses his inability to Purdu who is furious with him. Is it rupture?
Q. You’ve spoken about your love of reading old memoirs and historical accounts. How have those works influenced the realism and psychological depth of your world-building?
Dairies, memoirs and letters provide wonderfully vivid insights to lives lived. Even though these people may be in the thick of world events, it’s the small details they note in their daily entries or letters that bring their stories to life. The Venetian ambassador at the Henry VIII’s court writing to his masters complaining of his lack of funds required for bribes and payoffs amid the competitive jostling among the other ambassadors for audiences with the king; Madame de Sévigné’s observant witty letters to her daughter of the shenanigans at the court of France’s Louis XIV; Napoleon’s secretary, Count de Ségur’s clear-eyed memoir of Napoleon’s catastrophic Russian campaign; the pope of chefs and chef to popes, Bartolomeo Scappi’s phenomenal cookbook of 1570. More recent are: the unique The Maisky Diaries, Red Ambassador to the Court of St James 1932-1943 where Ivan Maisky, fearful of Stalin’s purges, drank with and influenced Winston Churchill’s decisions during WWII; and the new translation of Kafka’s diaries. Details and confessions on the page inspired realism in the City and depth to each character as they took stock of their lives and struggles as well as those of others.
Q. Describe the moment in Book Three when your characters finally recognize the larger pattern unfolding around them.
Sas, now Secretary to the Council and Davned, Strategist-in-training, puzzle at the extraordinary crisis that no one saw coming. In the agony of waiting for it to resolve, they review the events of the past year and piece together a strange pattern and inexplicable persistent balance despite successes and reverses during the lesser crises. It hints that functioning behind visible events a shadowy phenomenon is unfolding and edging towards maturation. It’s drawing the City to an unseen destiny that everyone has somehow had a hand in. Sas and Davned attempt to discern the shape, intent and direction of the unfolding in hopes of anticipating the next step of what’s coming. Are the underpinnings of existence, the sentience of Reality itself beginning to show?
Q. How does the trilogy challenge the assumption that freedom and stability are permanent?
Humanity has a deep and dangerous desire for certainty. They will embrace leaders, theologies and causes to avoid thinking for themselves. A cautious approach can be: Study everything; follow nothing. More reliable certainties are interior. They are built, strengthened with an inner voice that can find a ready integrity; a clarity which aids certainty. Freedom must be practiced, starting first with oneself. Integrity brings stability to one’s outlook. Freedom and stability practiced daily develop into a dynamic continuity that might be called permanent. When Sas and Davned have their discussion they recall a quote from a standard City text, “In the discernable past, after the Inaccessible became the Mysterious and when the Mysterious had given way to the Inferable . . .” It avoids the treacheries of creation myths, while quietly side-stepping the notion of objective permanency.
Q. Is it possible for a society to rediscover strength and integrity without becoming what it opposes?
Yes, but it depends how strong and reliable your or the society’s integrity is to the object or force it’s up against. Complacency is not a good indicator you’ll last long. If the opponent is charming, beguiling in a friendly, pushy sort of way, you’re in trouble. Yet crisis can awaken and reinvigorate integrity. Sas, the reluctant ambassador sent to ‘educate the barbarians’, discovers even as he warms to the man, he is repulsed by the killing device Purdu wears—a sword. Purdu initially agrees to Sas’s stipulation about devices of violence and death allowing a qualified rapprochement to exist between them. Then Purdu makes a demand of Sas that he finds impossible to submit to.
Q. When do you know a character has truly come alive—and how does that affect the direction of the story?
A character comes alive when they stand up and talk to me. The writing becomes a living, breathing companion, instantly revising what was about to be written. In book 1, Threat, Sas discovers he has been badly manipulated and is about to go up to his rooms and sulk, when out of the blue, a voice wrote itself onto the page. “Sas!” called a familiar voice from above. “Come up and have your meal in my rooms. I wish to talk to you.” It was his Aunt. I always knew she had a part to play but she inserted herself right then and there piling more expectations and responsibilities on poor Sas, making the chapter a much better read than was planned. No room for solitary sulking!
Even more startling was when the writing grabbed me by the throat and told me to write something completely different. I was sketching out the final chapter of Quickening, wrapping up loose ends: the baby is safely delivered, the wedding goes off without a hitch, everyone comes home and all is well. Rather blah. Once mapped out, my little writing voice said, “Now that you’ve got that out of your system: Write this!” I incandesced into a blaze of writing that possessed me in a ten-hour blitz of high octane creativity. I was beside myself, laughing, excited and thrilled by this extraordinary final chapter, which was nothing I had imagined. Once done it was obvious the entire manuscript had to be hauled up to the standard of the smoking chapter that had just landed on the page. The revision took five years.
Q. Do you see parallels between that awakening in your story and what’s happening in the real world today?
If you read enough history you see that it doesn’t really repeat itself, at least not predictably, but there are distinctly recurring patterns. These appear universal. They needn’t be. If humanity is to evolve away from sectarian violence, senseless wars, psychotic bullies addicted to power, basic premises must change. This is what Sas and Davned are beginning to sense in their final discussion.
If we wake to the sentient Reality that we and all existence dwells in, it clears away the need to conquer territory, demand submission of another, rapaciously claim what is already shared. A reverence for existence, the mysteries of love, the beautiful, rich dynamic of birth, life and death; these are the certainties to rely on. There’s the sense we have already made a beginning.
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