Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview J.E. Tolbert, whose novel Arsalan the Magnificent has its debut on February 13, 2024.
Who is the eponymous hero, Arsalan the
Magnificent, and what can you tell us about him?
Arsalan the
Magnificent, or Arsalan Ozdikmen, is a wizard employed as a magical architect
of fantastic structures. He belongs to a guild of such magical architects who
travel the world constructing wonderous buildings for lavish royal commissions.
Though Arsalan is worldly, wealthy, and educated and is the best at his
profession, he has some questionable personal habits from a childhood in which he
was raised by cloth merchants who were not highly educated. Arsalan doesn’t
know how to control either his spending, his temper, or certain impulses such
as horserace betting and drinking. This leads him into the situation he meets
at the beginning of the book. Ultimately, though he has a fierce and temperamental
exterior, Arsalan harbors a soft heart and a grudging compassion for everyone
he knows. He is a complex character, one who, for example, is quick to anger
but abhors violence, one who can be impulsively emotional but retains a keen
intelligence.
What inspired you to write a fantasy novel set in an alternate, magical version of the Ottoman Empire?
Many magical fantasy novels are based in worlds that are fantasy versions of medieval northern European societies and geography, and I simply wanted a setting that was different from that. The Ottoman Empire was a good start, not only because it’s sunnier and more southerly but also because it’s closer to our real world.
Why did you choose an older man as the protagonist?
Again, many but not all fantasy novels focus on a coming-of-age theme, which means that many of their Protagonists represent adolescence in some way, and their journeys therefore represent a transition from childhood to adulthood. These are perfectly valid and oftentimes beautifully told stories, ones needed by human society to make sense of the dramatic process of psychological maturation of puberty. I, however, didn’t feel the need to add to our already voluminous library of these stories. Rather, I wanted to imagine what a post-adolescent or middle-aged fantasy novel would be like, one that does not avoid the unglamorous, ambiguous, or knotty themes and issues associated with adulthood. Yet, I wanted to write the book in a way that would be accessible to younger readers so that they would be delivered a refreshingly mature and sober perspective on life amid a story that is still exciting and hopeful.
In any case, I find older characters a bit more interesting in a way, because they are more plausibly capable of psychological resilience. They have a lot of personality and history and many unexpected reservoirs of memory and experience from which to draw resources they can use to cope with adversity. Think of Gandalf or Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings.
What do you feel are the limitations of the traditional quest or hero’s journey?
In my view, the traditional hero’s journey symbolizes the transformation into adulthood, where the hero discovers his or her own unique abilities and place in the world. Although one may be able to experience echoes of the hero’s journey many times throughout one’s life, it chiefly represents puberty. Thus, the limitation of the hero’s journey is that it represents only one small section of the continuum of life: the beginning of it, essentially. One can imagine how hero’s journeys must have described life a bit more comprehensively in the past when the human lifespan was briefer, and adolescence constituted a larger proportion of it. Now, however, that medical science has extended our lifespan to remarkable lengths, we are forced to confront the question of what happens after the hero’s journey is long since complete. What is life like after the dragon is slain, the treasure is won, and the hero becomes king or queen? Is everything perfect? Of course not. Conflicts do continue, but in ways, our traditional magical myths are too simple to describe, so it is an interesting and amusing exercise to expand the boundaries of magical fantasy and myth to describe this strange, new, protracted adult reality.
Where
did your love for fantasy begin and what authors have influenced you?
My love for fantasy began when I was ten years old, and I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I spent two years reading all four of those books and additional Tolkien material. It was a magical experience. I felt I underwent the journey with all the characters, and I was saddened when there was no way to venture further into the Fourth Age with them. Eventually, I moved on to other genres and forms of literature after that, but my affection for fantasy literature remained.
I think the feature of magical fantasy that appeals to me the most is its plasticity. In a magical fantasy novel, one can more directly access the mythological and psychological underpinnings of the story without resorting to a lot of logical contortions to explain how such things are possible. Events can just occur, and the story is allowed to unfold according to its own internal reasoning.
Why did you focus on psychokinesis and architecture as the magic in your universe?
I did this to address the problem underlying the existence of magic in any story. How much magic can there be? If there is a lot of omnipotent magic, then anything is possible, and if anything is possible, then it’s harder to care about what happens in the story. The extreme manifestation of this is the dreaded deus ex machina. This is why fantasy authors feel the need to invent systems of rules and constraints for their magic.
Thus, my constraints on the magic in Arsalan the Magnificent are heavy. I wanted the magic to be like electricity or magnetism: mundane, unmysterious, workaday, associated largely with materials and mass, and governed by well-documented principles of engineering. This ordinariness serves to put the magic in the background of the story and the characters in the foreground.
Of course, on the fringes of the story are hints of magic being used for weirder and potentially more sinister purposes, but the wizards in Arsalan the Magnificent are conservative and stick to their own everyday magic to build buildings. I liked the idea of a society that has discovered magic using it for the purposes of civil engineering. It seemed like a charmingly adult thing to do. I simply couldn’t imagine fully grown wizards using their magical powers only to shoot lightning bolts at each other. What society wouldn’t use magical telekinesis to erect buildings? That’s a lot of good to be done and wealth to be made.
You also write poetry and literary fiction. How do these different genres co-exist, and do they overlap?
I would say that poetry is the raw, natural language of the mind, and I believe that it’s from poetry that all other forms of literature have descended. The genetic imprints of poetry exist in all storytelling. I see it this way because the literature I wrote evolved from my own poetry. I see my novels as very large poems, in a way, in the same strange way that whales are very large mammals.
I see literary fiction as not really a genre but an approach to literature that exists outside of genres and many times defies them. I would say that genre literature is literary fiction that is processed into a condensed or distilled format for popular consumption. Both literary fiction and genre fiction can be excellent literature depending on the skill with which they are written, and often there is no clear distinction between them.
One good example of a novel that is both good literary fiction and genre fiction is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It is post-apocalyptic science fiction but possesses such literary qualities as to seem biblical.
What kind of fantasy or other fiction do you like to read?
I like to read surrealist, magical realist, existentialist, and modernist literary fiction. My tastes are old-fashioned, and I am particularly interested in German-language literature from the early twentieth century. I have read all the stories written by Kafka and Hesse, and I enjoyed Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. I also read Robert Walser, Leonora Carrington, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Jose Luis Borges, Dino Buzzati, Gerald Murnane, and J. A. Baker. Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite books, and Bruno Schulz is probably my favorite author.
I’ve been making a tour of the novels by Thomas Hardy, whose stories are simple but whose use of phraseology to describe natural scenes achieves an otherworldliness that is underappreciated. Next on my reading list is Beloved by Toni Morrison, who is underrated as a surrealist writer, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk.
I like to read strange or philosophical fiction because of the possibilities inherent in it. I feel there is a natural mixing point between strange literary fiction and magical fantasy fiction since they share common literary ancestors.
These days in both indie and mainstream fiction, there is an increasing overlap between genres. How do you feel about that?
I love it and applaud it. I don’t really like genres. I don’t think that genres are made for the convenience of readers and authors. I think they are made for the convenience of marketers and salespeople. It consists of elements of literature boiled down to a few rules, tropes, and formulae that prove to be saleable in one way or another. Genre novels can be written very well, but ultimately, genres can become tiresome and wanting in variation. I think this is why more authors are experimenting with genre-blending and why more readers have more of a taste for such experimentation, and this is why I find no problem with infusing elements of literary fiction into Arsalan the Magnificent.
Why
is the complexity of the central character important to you?
It is important because my novel is ultimately character-driven and internal, and complex characters are more compelling for this purpose. Sometimes a story will be more action-oriented, or it will require the Protagonist to be more of an everyman or everywoman on whom the reader can project his or her own interpretations. But I wanted Arsalan to emerge from the page as a real psychological entity, one who doesn’t seem bound within the book but whose personality can echo in the reader’s head for a while.
The Fantasy genre has changed and evolved immensely since the era of Tolkien and Lewis, and even Michael Moorcock. To what extent are you aware of these changes and the explosion of sub-genres and diversity?
Of course, I am keenly aware of how fantasy literature has evolved over the past fifty years. In the days of Tolkien, Lewis, and even Moorcock, fantasy literature was much more of a niche market and readership, at least in the United States. Tolkien and Lewis were respected because they were elite scholars who happened to write stories based on their research, but other fantasy authors did not enjoy that same degree of credibility in the eyes of the literary establishment. Fantasy literature by and large was seen as pulpy and juvenile. I remember when one simply could not talk about fantasy literature openly without fear of some sort of derision. Also, quite frankly, the readership and authorship of fantasy literature at that time were dominated by a lot of heterosexual young white males, and for this reason, the stories catered toward their tastes, which did nothing to alleviate its perception of adolescent pulpiness. This was the case all the way through the nineteen eighties.
By the nineties, though, this began to change. I believe the first generation of readers to champion the fantasy genre as respectable and vital was Generation X, followed closely by the Millennials, who embraced it even more fervently. Now the fantasy genre is so prevalently mainstream that it’s considered big business. These two generations have insisted on more racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in their fantasy stories, so there is now an increasing number of fantasy stories happening in worlds based on, say, Middle Eastern, East Asian, Indian, and sub-Saharan African culture and geography, and there’s a heavy influence from Japanese anime and manga culture. A lot of fantasy stories are now set in contemporary urban settings, and there are more fantasy stories with a female focus. Also, there is more experimentation with themes and stakes, and genre-blending. All this directly reflects the diversity and complexity of our current society, and it’s wonderful. This is probably the most interesting period in the history of fantasy literature so far, to be honest.
All the same, it seems that the largest moneymakers in the genre of fantasy continue to be those that emulate violent medieval European male warrior tropes, such as the A Song of Ice and Fire and The Witcher series. They are darker and grittier and more morally ambiguous, and they contain grim intrigue, but their central themes are fundamentally similar to those in, say, the Conan the Barbarian series. It is against these types of stories I was reacting when I wrote Arsalan the Magnificent, because I dislike violent power fantasies.
Will you be writing more about Arsalan or his world, and what are your plans for the future?
If Arsalan the Magnificent is successful, or in any case if there is enough interest in it, I do have plans for a sequel that would focus on the adventures of Arsalan’s grown children.
In any case, I have two completed novels of literary fiction that I plan to publish in the future.
Do you have a daily regime for your writing and a place where you like to work?
I don’t really have a strict daily regime for my writing. Writing is so enjoyable to me that when I have a writing task, it’s simply difficult to keep myself away from it. I must work on it at least a little every day to achieve a sense of accomplishment for that day. It becomes a type of compulsion.
I have a day job, which means that I write in the evenings and on the weekends. Sometimes I will write for as long as two hours and at other times for as little as fifteen minutes. I don’t have a targeted word count for a day. I mentally decompose the story into small sections, and my overall goal for a day or a few days is to complete just that section. Sometimes this section will be a chapter, and at other times a few paragraphs. Sometimes I will spend a week or two just to perfect a few sentences. Once I word everything to my satisfaction, I move on to the next section. It sounds excruciatingly slow, but through cumulative persistence, it’s a rather normal pace.
I tend to
think about my writing all day, such that I end up laboring over the wording of
a phrase, sentence, or paragraph in the notes on my phone. I do this so often
that when I am finally in front of my computer, that time is typically spent
transcribing the writing I had produced that day rather than trying to think of
what to write next.
Who are your readers and what do you want them to take away from the
story?
I was targeting young adult readers with Arsalan the Magnificent,
those who are fans of fantasy literature but with a hunger for a bit more,
perhaps something with a literary flair. I want the reader to take away the
lesson that heroes are not always young, beautiful, and athletic, and they
don’t always make the most correct choices. Sometimes heroes are drab, unpleasant,
impatient, and cantankerous and suffer from too many vices but nonetheless are
capable of redemption and transformation into better individuals, regardless of
their stage of life.
Amazon
About J.E. Tolbert:
J.E. Tolbert was born and raised in Maryland, where he had an early interest in pictures, words, and music. As a child, he was a fan of Tolkien’s works and eventually moved on to Asimov’s Robot Trilogy. As an adult, he became enamored with modernist and surrealist literature from the early half of the 20th century, absorbing the works of Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, and Virginia Wolf among others. While working as a graphic designer, he wrote poetry as another one of his creative outlets. These poems evolved into short stories and novels, one of which is Arsalan the Magnificent. He considers himself a poet and writer of literary fiction who sometimes writes within the fantasy genre, a cross-hybridization that he believes enriches both literary and genre fiction.
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