Anson Joaquin is joining us today to talk about his novel, Infernal Age: Demon Gate. Here’s the publisher’s description:
The end of technology and maybe of humanity itself. Demons (and magic) unleashed upon the Earth.
The Mist meets a gritty prequel to The Elfstones of Shannara, The Infernal Age is a nail-biting take on the death of the modern world and the birth of something darker.
Gabriel, an ex-soldier-turned-project-manager with anger issues, is sent to a small town in New Mexico and charged with keeping a failed government experiment secret and stable. There he meets Tam, an oddly philosophical scientist, but as they settle into a bantering friendship, things go catastrophically wrong.
As the containment fails, the truth is revealed – the experiment has punched a hole through to another reality allowing demon-like aliens to pass through, bringing their realm’s laws of physics with them. The creatures rampage as all technology fails and many people begin to sicken and die. The duo meets the traumatized but resilient Ripley and together they embark on a quest to get vital data to the experiment’s authors. As they travel together, battle demons, give aid to some survivors and fight others, each of them realizes that they are manifesting unsettling powers which, while helping them, also threaten to estrange them from their humanity.
An apocalyptic blend of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, The Infernal Age – Demon Gate is book one of a debut series by author Anson Joaquín. Join Gabriel, Tam, and Ripley as they are confronted by the end of the world they knew and start their quest to set things right, or failing that, at least to stay alive… and stay human.
What’s Anson’s favorite bit?
This all began with a scary, cool dream about a man on fire wielding an axe against a hellscape of demons. So scary, so cool, it woke me up and I immediately wanted to write this book. But when I sat down the next day to get started on writing, what came out onto the page had almost nothing to do with the dream. Instead, it was ten single-spaced pages of world building and I only stopped there since I was relatively certain that a book needs characters and action and arcs and whatnot.
This is so easy! I thought. It was intoxicating to think up and write down idea after idea after idea about my world that I was creating and figuring out. And there was SO much to think about. The very first thing I needed to explain about “Mr. Let’s Catch on Fire and Kill Demons” was that demons break through into our world and bring their Laws of Physics with them, and that one of those alien Laws of Physics was that the Venn diagram overlap of Willpower, Belief, and Desire is a necessary and powerful characteristic of reality. That basic yet huge idea and its ramifications continue to be my favorite bit of the book and series.
Why do I love it so? Let me count the ways. Firstly, it’s an idea that appeals to me in real life. It seems right that when you really want something, it happens more often. (Were Nietszche, Schopenhauer, William James, the transcendentalists, and the lady who wrote The Secret all onto something? Maybe. Who am I to say?) We’ve all seen it, when there is something that everyone knows and believes, and somehow it becomes more real than something that everyone doubts, even when the empirical evidence suggests the opposite. I love the idea of this belief manifesting reality, even if ironically I don’t believe it’s true. I want it to be. How many times at my weekly poker game have I envisioned turning the next card into the one I wanted by power of desire? Many, many times. Weekly. Many times Weekly is the answer. We all know someone who seems to get their way by force of Will more often than others do – they apparently have a different inherent capacity for this real-life magic. Perhaps their Midichlorian count is higher? And in terms of characteristics that I admire, grit is near the top of the list, and already seems like a magic power itself. Rewarding that characteristic/choice in my made-up world feels good to me.
So, that concept immediately stuck with me, and it became my magic system as well as the central theme of my world building – what would our world change into if Belief were necessary for things to work? If all life had some capacity for ordering the matter and energy around them through Willpower? If the bell curves of reality itself could be skewed by Determination?
The whole series explores this. Not only would this Belief enable strange action at a distance (Magic! Wizards! Fireballs!), it might also prevent the normal function of bodies, machinery, and chemical reactions. Humanity’s capacity, a la Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, to intentionally wrestle with being and meaning might put each individual at a disadvantage to simpler, more certain forms of life – embodied by the demons in this book, invading from their universe along with their laws of physics.
For human society, religion would no doubt have or make up answers, and under a system that rewarded true belief with concrete results, those answers could be very powerful. Existing churches, particularly ones where the levels of faith and identity are high, such as Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and Mormons, among others, may enjoy protection from the demons and stabilization of their communities. Missionaries and priests might start wielding protective, restorative, and retributional powers. Start-up sects fronted by charismatic leaders would spring up, distrusting outsiders and seeing non-believers as evil to be cast down.
Beliefs and superstitions that have persisted in the real world might suddenly actually become real. Dowsing for water would be a very practical skill without working municipal water systems, especially in the American Southwest! People might cling to such things in desperation, and they might work, or even just appear to work, and then suddenly be reinforced with belief. I think the humanity that remained would transition to a magic-wielding society thoroughly and relatively quickly, just as quickly as “single minded” nature would reclaim and re-wild much of the world.
I came up with hundreds of other potential results, but I should keep some of it as a surprise! I hope people check out the book and feel the same way I do about how our world would change if simply believing something hard enough made it so (and are we sure it’s not already like this, at least for some???)
LINKS:
BIO:
Anson Joaquin is a husband, father of four, investment executive, and author. A lifelong lover of science fiction and fantasy, he lives with his family, a fluffy dog, a borrowed bird, and 70-odd fish in Roanoke, Virginia, which is still simmering, years later, over Stephen King making fun of it on whatever Twitter is now called.
