To my children - I dream of a better world for you and am working to bring it to life...for you.
"You have constructed the architecture of your own annihilation with rather extraordinary ingenuity, I must say. Your species has demonstrated a most impressive capacity for technological advancement. A pity, then, that your ethical sensibilities have failed to keep pace with such industry. It is scarcely a matter of intellect, you understand. Your kind possesses a respectable faculty for reason. The deficiency lies elsewhere entirely, in the question of whether you possess sufficient fortitude to employ the very instruments of your probable extinction as the means of your salvation. How delightfully paradoxical. The solution rests quite comfortably within the problem itself. Whether you shall have the wisdom to retrieve it remains, I am afraid, a rather open question. I am quite sure you will agree, being an educated man, that your species' violent history offers precious little ground for optimism on that particular matter."
Dr. Eva Friedwich - Sapienologist
Sorcerers & Sapiens - Chapter 1: Delivery to Hel Kasteel
Every photo I take, every painting I have ever put a brush to, has been asking the same question in a different language: What are we capable of?
The Premise
We live in a world that has become extraordinarily capable of building things. Our technology advances at a pace that would have been incomprehensible to previous generations. We carry in our pockets more computing power than was used to put a man on the moon. We are, by every measurable technological standard, astonishing. And yet. Our ethical development, our capacity for civility, for honor, for genuine care of one another, has not kept pace. Not remotely. The gap between what we can do and how we choose to treat each other has never been wider, and that gap is dangerous. I believe it represents the most critical threats to the long-term survival of humanity. Not an asteroid. Not a virus. Us.
This is the world of the sorcerers in my novel — our potential, reflected back at us for us to choose.
Contrasting Worlds
Set against our world is the Society of sorcerers — a parallel civilization that has chosen a different path. The Society is not a utopia. It has its darkness, its moral failures, its complicated history. But it is a world that has, over centuries of hard-won wisdom, built something that our world has not: a functional, honorable, deeply civil human civilization. A society in which violence is so rare that most of its citizens live their entire lives without witnessing it. A society governed not merely by law, but by a shared and deeply felt code of honor. A society in which beauty, discipline, art, and human dignity are not ideals to be pursued occasionally, but the fabric of everyday life. I did not invent the Society to be a fantasy escape. I envisioned it as a mirror. To say: this is possible. We are capable of this. We have simply not chosen it yet.
The Sorcerer's World
The Society exists in a richly detailed alternate Europe — a world of elegance, ducal estates transformed into academies of learning, honor ministries and ancient reaper houses, psychosorcerers and pale mystics, and holding it all together, the Executors. Men and women from "reaper" families stretching back centuries, who bear the weight of society's peace so that others may reach their full potential free from fear.
Reiner Kroll is one of them.
He is the Duke of Nijmegen's heir, an Executor, or "Reaper" as they were once called, of exceptional skill - a man who carries the scars of his work and the weight of his family's legacy. He is not without doubt. He is not without exhaustion, or loneliness, or the particular grief of a man whose profession cannot be fully understood by those he protects. He's a man who loathes his own violence, who can subdue a dangerous dark sorcerer with only his words and then fall asleep sitting upright from sheer exhaustion — and be found there by an old friend, who rests his forehead against Kroll's, sharing his grief. That image, two Executors, foreheads together, in an empty train car, is the kind of moment my novel was written to highlight. It is the same kind of moment I have spent my career trying to capture through a lens.
The Artistic Process
I approach the writing of this novel the same way I approach a wedding or a portrait sitting. I look for the meaning of a moment, and then try to render it as honestly as I can.
The characters in this book are not archetypes. They are people. Reiner Kroll is a hunter-killer who is also, at his core, a gentleman.
What I Want the Reader/Viewer to Feel
I want the reader to close this book and think: we could live like this. Not the sorcery. Not the occasional violence or the ducal estates or the mystical fires of Hel Kasteel. I want them to feel the way these people treat each other. The way a young Belgian Executor introduces himself to a man he is about to take into custody — with his full name, with the man's rights, with a dagger held as if it were a syringe offering relief rather than a weapon demanding submission. I want them to feel the way an old Duke climbs onto a hearth with the help of his cane and stands next to his grieving grandson and says, without particular softness, "what you do matters a great deal to this world."
I want them to feel, somewhere beneath their conscious reading, that this level of civilization is not just fiction. It is potential. Their potential. Ours.
I have always believed that the pendulum of human evolution swings. That there are moments in history when humanity loses its way, and moments when it finds its way back. I hope we are in one of the former right now. And I believe, as I have always believed, that art is one of the instruments by which the pendulum is coaxed back in the right direction.