The Hand of the Sun King

"I’m on a discord with a bunch of other authors and Jeremy is one of them. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking when you read a book by someone that you know, because there’s a risk that it’s bad! But luckily, it was brilliant. The Hand of the Sun King is about Wen Alder, a young man caught between two worlds. His grandmother comes from a pagan black magic clan in the hills, and his uncle led a rebellion against the empire; so he comes from this rebellious province, and there are lots of occupying forces trying to keep it all on the level. At the same time, he is tutored in the imperial arts. His father is a merchant, an aspirational upper-middle-class merchant, in a very socially stratified society. He hires a tutor for Wen, for what is essentially a college entrance exam – if you can afford it and you’re intelligent enough, you take this test in logic and reasoning and mathematics and philosophy and poetry. It’s a bit like PPE at Oxford, that kind of idea – the medieval Chinese equivalent. And if you pass it, depending how well you do, it puts you in a certain stratum within the imperial civil service. The civil servants have magical powers. They’re like very powerful mages, essentially. So, on the one hand, Wen’s grandmother teaches him this black magic, a kind of rustic sorcery, that’s very much a secret. And on the other hand, he’s being tutored in imperial arts, and he takes the exam and does extremely well, and gets admitted. He’s the first from this rebellious province to be admitted, so there are lots of people who are quite leery about it – “These are the barbarians, and you’re going to let one of them in?” So he’s very, very powerful – and he basically then screws it all up. One of the things I really liked was that Jeremy made Alder very fallible. He acts exactly how you’d expect an adolescent boy to act – an adolescent boy who’s imbued with an incredible amount of magical power as well. Long story short, he ends up leading a rebellion. It’s like – I leave you alone for five minutes, and you’re leading a rebellion ? It’s a character study as much as anything else. A lot of fantasy novels of the ’80s and ’90s were focused on the hero and the hero’s journey, and you would get these Mary-Sue characters who are perfect. They were immediately good at everything, very virtuous, very morally black and white, and there was no problem that they couldn’t solve. Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth is an excellent example of that. But Alder is just slouching from one catastrophe to the next and inevitably making everything worse. He wants to do good, but he has a teenage boy’s arrogance as well. If he’s angry, he’ll think, “I’m feeling righteous, I’m going to kill this person”; and he’ll kill that person, and not think about the butterfly effect of that death, how it closes doors, how it angers people. I read the sequel this year, The Garden of Empire , which was also very good. It broadened out – massive elemental gods come out of the woodwork. It’s a brilliant series. When I started writing The Justice of Kings I had the kernel of an idea. I was a litigator in London and I just had this thought one day: what if there were fantasy lawyers? I had read Imperium by Robert Harris , which is brilliant, about the life of Cicero. It covers Cicero when he was still a lawyer in ancient Rome – solving a case, orating, doing a bit of oration in court. And then as the trilogy progresses, the stakes become a bit more empire-ending – or rather republic-ending. Initially, I had this idea of ‘legomancy’, using magical words and arguments in court. That never made the cut, but the seed was planted. The Justice of Kings is based on the idea of a traveling magistrate: they’re a judge, jury, executioner, and also an investigator – and a bit of a wizard, all wrapped into one itinerant mage-policeman. They go from village to town to village to town to city, often beyond the official infrastructure of the Sovan state – we’re in the Sovan Empire, a late medieval or early renaissance-style empire. They have very firm beliefs in the rule of law: they’ve conquered all these territories, they’ve imposed a legal system on them, and they send down these judges. The judges can speak to the dead, which is very useful if you’re trying to solve a murder. And they have the power of ‘the Emperor’s voice’, which is the ability to extract a confession from somebody. I love being as reductive as possible about the book because it amuses me: the first book is essentially a maritime insurance fraud investigation. Well – it’s a murder mystery, which is tangentially related to insurance fraud, which is the inciting incident. And as it goes on, it’s revealed that it’s part of a much larger conspiracy, a much larger conflict between the church and state. To explain that conflict… As I said, the judges have magical powers, called ‘the arcana’. In the Empire of the Wolf trilogy, the afterlife is a real place, where our souls or our life essences go after we die; and it’s a weird and frightening place. There are very real entities – we taxonomize them in the book as angels and demons, but the jury is out on what exactly the precise nature of them is. In the centuries before the events of the first book, the arcana used to be the preserve of the church, who worshipped these entities and practiced the arts of seance and necromancy, and drew energies from the afterlife to perform certain rites. Then the Sovans came along and said, “No, we’re taking all that away from you and we’re going to give it to the judiciary instead. We’re going to use these magics to enforce the secular common law.” And in so doing, they created a rift between the church and state. The main antagonist in the Empire of the Wolf has the inherited grievance of two centuries of churchmen complaining about having the arcana stolen from them, and his stated aim is to repatriate the magic back to the church. This church-state conflict is the core of the overarching storyline in the trilogy. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As for how I approached that politics… One of the things I don’t like in fantasy is when we deal with quite monolithic entities. The good guys and the bad guys, and the good guys are these people, and the bad guys are these people, and they hate each other for whatever reason. And there’s no factionalism. You look at any given organization today, or a political party, or a church… It’s not like we have the one Christian church. There are a hundred denominations, probably more, and none of them can agree on the precise interpretation of any given thing. You look at a political party: you have your moderates and your extremists. So it was really important to me that within every faction, there were sub -factions. That fleshes the world out. It makes it feel more real, more lived in. Everybody’s looking out for their own interests. In the second book, they go to the Senate and they watch a debate in progress. I wanted to make sure that I had, within that debate, different factions. Some of them were for the Emperor, some of them were for the church, some of them were intermediaries. To make it realistic, I just drew on modern shabby political practice – specifically, saying increasingly offensive rubbish. You know, the problem with that – well, there’s a great many problems with it – but one of the problems is that even if it’s total nonsense, even if it’s a complete lie, a total confection, even if you then subsequently retract it! – it catches on. Say a hundred people heard the initial lie, and then you retract it: fifty people who saw the lie thought, that’s obviously a lie. And of the remaining fifty, twenty of them saw the retraction and so now know it’s a lie. You’ve still got thirty who believe it. And so in saying the lie, in saying lots of lies, you incrementally shift public opinion – in political studies we have the idea of the Overton window, the politically acceptable discourse at a given time, and incrementally you shift it. What was too politically incorrect to talk about has suddenly become acceptable dinner-time conversation. And that’s what I find most galling and frustrating: it feels like we’ve backslid a little bit the last five or ten years on what it’s okay to talk about now, which before was correctly taboo. I vented my spleen a little bit over the course of the trilogy. I think, when I was younger, I never really wanted to make any sort of statement. The older I’ve got, the more I actually think in many ways it’s incumbent on you as a writer to say something. I feel like I’ve got a platform and I’ve got a readership, and I’m going to subtly fight back: I’m going to shift the window back to the left, so help me! So the verisimilitude comes from just lifting this stuff wholesale from what you read in the newspaper, ultimately."