A Dystopian Fantasy Novel. When Civilisation Collapses - Magic Returns 

I begin the dystopian fantasy novel I’m currently working on with a quote:

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Ephesians 6:12 KJV

This sets the scene for the novel I’m writing; it also conveys the essence of the series of semi-standalone novels.

The greater story is of a transition. It begins in the dystopian present where truth has been rejected, and good has become evil, and evil good.

An AI-assisted administration does not deliver, in fact, it makes it worse.

This will be followed (book two) by an apocalyptic collapse and re-enchantment. We return to a world of magic; to a land of sword and sorcery and epic fantasy (book three and beyond—if there’s any interest). 

Many of my ideas come from our dystopian present. Yes, I know it’s not all bad, but many parts are not so shining. One of the biggest problems is that truth is often perverted or rejected. At the very least, it’s frequently debated. We live in a world of many truths. 

Perhaps fundamental is the death of belief in the West, which has created a vacuum ready to be filled.

The quote from Ephesians describes an aspect of this.

Many writers have written about the collapse of beliefs and their effects, and many have inspired me. The most poetic was Heinrich Heine in his book Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1834). I hope you don’t mind me quoting him here, but his prescience amazed me when I first came across it:

"Christianity – and this is its greatest merit – has somewhat mitigated the brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which the Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame.

“Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.”

He foresaw the rise of the Nazis almost a hundred years later. Not surprisingly, they hated him and tried to erase his work from history. In 1933, they held public book burnings of his work. Ironically, he wrote these lines in his 1821 play Almansor: ”Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people”

Almost a hundred years later, Solzhenitsyn spoke on the same theme in his 1983 Templeton Prize Lecture, "Men Have Forgotten God,” which I recommend reading. He believed that the loss of faith was the cause of the revolution and its aftermath in Russia that killed millions of people.

I don’t compare myself to the above writers. I write science fantasy and fantasy, not philosophy, but I want my stories to have themes with depth. The backdrop will be harsh, the stakes real, but at their heart these are adventure tales about characters fighting to overcome great difficulty.

Although not very religious myself, I've always been interested in how belief systems shape individuals and societies. My stories remain adventures, but as the heroes battle evil, they're not immune from the world around them—a world I believe that will return to religion and spirituality for answers.

I plan to release the first novel of my new series later this year.

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