From South Africa to Six Worlds

The Personal Is Political Is Fictional

Every writer brings their world into their work. Mine is South Africa — a country that has lived through one of history’s greatest injustices and one of history’s most extraordinary transformations. You cannot grow up here and not think about power, oppression, resistance, and what comes after.

Genesis of Darkness is not about South Africa. But it is from South Africa in every way that matters.

The Rainbow Nation and the Six Worlds

South Africa is called the Rainbow Nation — a society of extraordinary diversity attempting to coexist. Eleven official languages. Dozens of cultures. A history of violent separation and a present of cautious, imperfect unity.

The six worlds of Genesis of Darkness reflect this. Knovereah, Karai, Setar, APP017, the Silver Void, Deep Space — each with its own culture, its own values, its own blind spots. None of them are wholly good or wholly evil. All of them believe they are the centre of the universe.

This is what diversity looks like when it is honest. Not a comfortable mosaic but a volatile, beautiful, dangerous collision of worldviews.

Military and Civilian

I served in the military. I know what institutional discipline feels like from the inside — the comfort of structure, the seduction of hierarchy, the way it can reshape your identity until you cannot remember who you were before.

Planet Karai is drawn from this experience. Not literally — I was not living in a fascist dystopia — but the psychology is real. The way a uniform changes how you see yourself. The way orders simplify moral complexity. The way leaving that structure can feel like falling off a cliff.

Vespera’s journey out of the Karain military is, in some ways, a version of my own journey from soldier to writer. The skills are surprisingly transferable. Discipline. Observation. The ability to function under pressure. And the knowledge that the system you served was never as clean as it claimed.

The Motoring Journalist Detour

Before I wrote epic fantasy, I wrote about cars. For years. This seems absurd in retrospect, but it taught me something invaluable: how to make technical complexity accessible and exciting.

Describing the engineering of a supercar and describing the sorcery of an ancient elf are not as different as you might think. Both require you to translate something intricate into something felt. The reader does not need to understand the mechanics. They need to feel the speed.

Language and Voice

South African English is its own creature. It borrows from Afrikaans, Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa, and a dozen other languages. It is muscular and lyrical and profane and tender, often in the same sentence.

I did not try to write in “neutral” English. The voice of Genesis of Darkness is South African — in its rhythm, its directness, its refusal to be polite when the situation demands bluntness. When characters swear, they swear like South Africans. When they philosophise, they philosophise like people who have seen utopian promises broken and rebuilt.

Why Fantasy

People ask why I write fantasy rather than literary fiction set in South Africa. The answer is simple: fantasy lets me tell the truth more clearly.

When I write about a military empire that believes its brutality is justified, the reader does not need to take a political position. They can see it for what it is. When I write about an immortal sorceress exiled to a void between dimensions, the reader understands exile in a way that no realistic novel about immigration could achieve as immediately.

Fantasy is not escapism. It is a lens that makes reality clearer by removing the noise of the familiar.

What I Hope

I hope that readers in Johannesburg and readers in Jakarta and readers in Jacksonville all find something true in these pages. The specifics are invented. The feelings are real. The questions — about power, identity, resistance, love, and what it means to be alive in a universe that does not explain itself — those questions belong to everyone.

That is what South Africa taught me. The personal is universal. You just have to dig deep enough.