Writing the Silver Lining of Dark Fantasy

We live in interesting times with the Blues and Reds at each other’s throats over the heart, soul and future of an empire. As a student of history, this is another iteration of a self-destructive cycle. As an author, this is great fodder: what happens when people of the same faith or heritage turn on one another? Not as an academic exercise, but as “I’m going to burn your fracking village!”

I revealed recently that I think and plan in sixteen-book series. As soon as Strand: Retribution wraps up (shooting for June), I’m going to pivot to a new series. It will be a secondary world borrowing from a period of our history where doctrine was weaponized and loyalty was not easily switched when your very existence depended on it.

This will be a gunpowder dark fantasy, where the First Law of Murphy is a daily reality. The good guys do not always win. The institutions are corrupt or crumbling. The cost of survival is high and the cost of principle is higher. But this series will stop short of the grimdark view where virtue is naive and idealism gets you killed.

“What will you hold on to when everything costs you?” Not “why bother holding on to anything?” More like The Second Apocalypse and A Song of Ice and Fire than Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law or Bakker’s The Prince of Nothing.

Dark fantasy vilifies faith, hope, honor and courage. Rape or incest is treated like a comma. Time after time, I stop watching a show or set the book down because it sells the wrong message. What inspires me is “We’re going to give the world back their heroes” (Fifi of Mad Max) and when faith is justified despite the bleakness, not villain fuel.

For a lifetime, I’ve seen strong institutions cohere, fracture, and eat their young. It doesn’t matter if you are looking at religious, military or political history. Lessons are forgotten and leaders try to refight the last war. Ambitious leaders wrap institutions in their personal ambition then shatter them because of clay feet. Institutional conviction becomes orthodoxy, then loyalty is tested and the heretics executed. If you have watched that cycle play out in fiction and felt like the author was rooting for the collapse, you and I have the same frustration.

I’ve not found a series yet that handles these issues without being a bitter critic of the institution. I’m not a critic. Nor am I a blind apologist. Institutions fail because leaders are weak, not because the faith and ideals are wrong. That’s why I’m writing a series where faith fractures along political lines.

Company of Heretics is my upcoming secondary world, dark gunpowder fantasy. It’s set on a companion planet. When they look up into the night sky, they see another planet with continents and oceans instead of a dead moon. We’ll follow a mercenary company that threads the needle between warring factions as the world they know shatters into an archipelago of faith and reason.

My readers know I write about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

• In Postal Marines, people are inside of systems that don’t care whether they survive. Company of Heretics is in the same territory but a different genre.
• Strand asks about the sudden arrival of power when a society is near the breaking point and the corruption that naturally follows power. Company of Heretics asks what happens when institutions that hold societies together force people to take sides. Different settings. Same obsession with what people do when the institutions they trust start breaking.

Right now, I’m deep in worldbuilding and plotting the series. I’ve commissioned an artist to help draw the map. If you want to follow the process, subscribe.

I am writing the series I wanted to read and could not find. If you have been looking for it too, now you know where to find it.