Mannigan – A Speck of Light follows a young man full of rage at the tyrannical government who joins a group called the Legion, whose mission is to fight back against the darkness taking over their world. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Watching how the world and the people in it have been changing, particularly in the last ten years, it would be hard to deny that discontentment, resentment, and anger at the multitude of injustices is growing rapidly and further dividing an already divided world. At its current rate, I can only imagine that it is a matter of time before humanity repeats the same mistakes once again. I believe that beyond the call for social, political, and societal changes there is a need for something else to start the healing of the sickness in our society. And that is for people to forgive. Through the lens of a dystopian world not much different than our own, this book is about how life can indeed be hard and unjust and cruel, but there is hope–for beyond what meets the eye there is more.

I find the world you created in this novel brimming with possibilities. Where did the inspiration for the setting come from and how did it change as you were writing?

I have spent most of my adult life on construction sites as a tradesman and engineer so I have a great interest in the built environment and did a lot of research into what a rebuilt post apocalyptic society in a decimated world would look like. In a wasteland, a planet dotted by self-contained and self-sustaining cities such as ‘The Line’ currently being built in Saudi Arabia would likely be the only practical option, so the world in my book is my vision of what it would look like. As I began exploring the world for myself, questions presented themselves about the details of how certain things would be or should be. This in turn prompted me to research a huge amount of subjects, from physics to biology, history to geography, and as I learned the world came into its own.

What were some of the trials that you felt were important to highlight the character’s development?

Developing Will’s character started with examining what the world I had created would look like to him in a way that mirrors how our world looks to us. Starting from where he grew up, he has many preconceived good and bad notions about life outside his bubble that were built on stories and half truths. As he begins seeing for himself how other people live with his own eyes and shares in their laughter and pain, his notions of what exactly is right and wrong and indeed the concept of justice is shaken. Morality afterall, by human standards, is based only on the standard of the average human in a particular place in a particular moment in time; a person convinced to be a good person when they stay equal with, or higher than, the average human, and a bad person when they dip below. This rationale is what made slave owners not so very long ago believe that the owning of slaves was not bad. The exploration of this is core to the story and to Will’s growth, allowing him and the reader to ask, ‘is there a better standard than mankind?’ So seeing such innocence in the traumatized little boy who he rescues in the airport shines light on the limitations of his own innocence, and seeing the depth of depravity in the Palace of Wish giving a new benchmark for what he considers to be bad opens the door for him to push the limitations of what he would have once considered wrong.

Will this novel be the start of a series or are you working on a different story?

While this is the first of a series that I aim to complete over several years and I have the story for the second book plotted out, I am currently working on another book, and released another one again just before the new year. It is very different from ‘Mannigan’, but if you are interested it is titled ‘City of Mann’ and is as weird as it is wonderful.

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