Arsalan the Magnificent follows a professional wizard who is a magical architect who, after having a building collapse, is exiled and goes on a journey leading to redemption. What was the inspiration that drove the development of the world the characters live in?

It all stemmed from the main character. I once saw a video of an older man playing a stringed instrument while sitting outside a cabin on a mountain with cats walking around him. I believe the video was from Turkey. I imagined that that old man must have had an interesting former life he was retired from. Perhaps he was once a hitman, a general, or even a wizard. I kept this idea in the back of my mind for a good while. When I finally decided to write a fantasy story, I started from this idea of a mysterious, mountain-dwelling retiree, and I decided to make him a wizard character. Since I wanted to write a fantasy story that was unlike most others, I decided to make it historical fantasy fiction—in a world that was our own or adjacent to it—and use characters, circumstances, tropes, themes, and settings that are the inverse of the typical fantasy story of sword-wielding, dragon-riding warriors.

One thing that stands out to me the most in this novel is that instead of magic being used as a weapon, it is used to create and enrich lives. How did you balance magic and its use throughout the story to keep it believable?

I took cues from the way magic was handled in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. If you notice, the use of magic in those stories is really subdued. Magic is used in the background by wizards of great power, but it is rarely utilized in the presence of the main characters to solve their largest and most pressing problems. This is because the wizards are present only for council and wisdom and are prohibited from using magic to combat Sauron directly; otherwise, the free peoples of Middle-Earth would rely on the wizards to defeat Sauron instead of finding the strength to oppose their common enemy as a unified people. There have been countless authors who were inspired by Tolkien to write fantasy fiction, but I don’t think many of them understood this aspect of Tolkien’s philosophy. I felt they tended to add magic to everything like too much ketchup, confusing the rules of the world and diluting the stakes of the story. Tolkien was actually a deep lover of peace, goodwill, common sense, and simplicity. If his benevolent magical characters didn’t need to use magic, they wouldn’t, and if they did, they would use it subtly.

In the same vein, I gave the magic in my story very physical, sober, and workaday characteristics, like electricity or magnetism, which behave according to strict physical laws and are routinely harnessed for everyday purposes. I made the magic in Arsalan the Magnificent a type of universally accessible energy that only a few gifted individuals could effectively channel into a straightforward type of telekinesis, and I wanted the wizards to be able to imbue inanimate objects with magical properties that last a finite amount of time before degrading. On top of that, I gave the wizards in my story the wisdom to foresee the possible devastating outcomes of the use of magic for war and to vow to reserve magic only for constructive purposes. Since magical architects were so few and so powerful, they knew they had the leverage and unity to oppose governmental militarization of magic and to direct their abilities towards ends that would enrich society, in the process also making magical architects wealthy.

After all, regardless of whether a society chooses to use magic for military purposes, what society wouldn’t use magic to produce large public works? It’s a sensible, adult use of magic and would surely be a lot safer and more efficient.

What was one scene in the novel that you felt captured the morals and message you were trying to deliver to readers?

That would be the scenes involving Arsalan dealing with his exile on the mountaintop. There is a powerful and deeply internal transformation happening there. He is forced to confront himself and all the choices he has made in his life, in the process growing into the wiser and more resilient Arsalan we see toward the end of the story. I would say those chapters are the most important part of the book for this reason.

What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?

I have a work of philosophical fiction written that needs to be edited for publishing. It’s called The Sport, and it involves the efforts of a scholar to research the complicated rules to an obscure athletic game. I hope to have this out either at the end of 2024 or the beginning of 2025. Of course, if Arsalan the Magnificent proves successful, I plan a sequel that will involve the adventures of Arsalan’s offspring.

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