Why The Initiate?
My upcoming novel The Initiate (now available for pre-order) marks a big change for me. My three previous books have all been science fiction, mostly on the "hard-SF" side of the spectrum. The Initiate is a modern-day noir fantasy, with magic and demons and a secret society of wizards in Manhattan.
Why the change?
A couple of reasons. First, blame my education. I got my degree from the University of Chicago in the History of Science, with a focus on the scientific revolution of the 17th century. For thousands of years, science and magic were close siblings ��� almost conjoined twins ��� so studying one naturally meant gaining a solid grounding in the other. I wanted the chance to use my knowledge of the occult.
My second reason is a bit more personal. Like pretty much every other literate person in the Anglosphere, I've read Rowling's Harry Potter series. And apparently unlike pretty much every other literate person in the Anglosphere, I found the Potterverse a little . . . problematic.
To me, Rowling's Potterverse shares the same problem as Stan Lee's X-Men: they are power fantasies of self-pity. If you get invited to Hogwarts or Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youth, it means two things. First, you're better than everybody else, because of your magical or mutant superpowers. And second, you're part of a secret hidden group and get to feel sorry for yourself because the Muggle majority are jealous of your specialness.
The concept of a secret self-pitying elite is kind of contemptible.
The X-Men, at least, do have a public service mission. When they're not pitying themselves for being oppressed, they do at least go out and fight other self-pitying super-powered mutants with more totalitarian tendencies.
Rowling's secret wizards are a lot less public-spirited. They fight practitioners of the "Dark Arts" ��� but mostly to protect themselves, rather than others. If the Dark Lord Voldemort hadn't kept up his Wile E. Coyote campaign against Harry Potter, it's not obvious that Harry would have done anything against Voldemort in return.
Now, one can write any number of 'blog posts about this, but I decided to take the next step. I wrote a novel about a secret society of wizards in the modern world ��� and how they're a bunch of selfish jerks and psychopaths. My "Apkallu" wizards conceal themselves from the ordinary folk they disdain as "Subur" simply for the sake of convenience, because it's easier to be parasites on normal human civilization if the normal humans don't know you exist.
If you want to find out what happens when one man turns against the Apkallu, you can read The Initiate when it comes out February 4.
