So I’ve decided to do a series set in a magic school: the Institute Arcane.

No, it won’t be another sub-par Harry Potter ripoff, such as the market is currently awash in. Honestly, it’s more Brandon Sanderson than J.K. Rowling, in the sense that there are very specific limitations built into the magic system, and those are both creative constraints for me and also key drivers and shapers of the story. (Rowling’s magic system, like her worldbuilding generally, is loose, inconsistent, whimsical, and not always fully worked out.)

This is a university, too, not a high school; it has more kinship with the school at Roke in A Wizard of Earthsea, or for that matter with Pratchett’s Unseen University, than with Hogwarts. But you can’t escape the shadow of HP whenever you write about a magical school.

Part of the overarching story for the series is that the characters are setting out to create a Great Work. Creating a magical wonder is not a thing you see too often in fantasy; usually, you’re seeing the characters questing for (occasionally, destroying or witnessing the destruction of) a wonder from earlier, mightier times.

Western fantasy has its roots in medieval and Renaissance literature, and medieval Europe was looking back on the days of Rome, when great construction projects like the aqueducts were created. To the medieval mind, these were the works of giants, inconceivable in scope; they were able to create awe-inspiring cathedrals, true, but it sometimes took generations. I assume that’s where fantasy gets the whole “works of the ancients” trope from.

I’ve worked on projects pretty much throughout my working life. When I was a book editor back in the early-to-mid 90s, each book was a project, and it took multiple people to bring it to fruition. Since then, I’ve worked on many IT projects, large and small, usually for big manufacturing businesses or public infrastructure organisations, which (like the projects themselves) are an example of many people coming together to achieve things that nobody could achieve alone. So doing a series in which a big project is the overarching plot is something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

The Great Work itself is probably going to be a system of canals, with magical currents to push the boats along. It was canals, not railways, that initially made Britain the world’s first industrial nation, creating wealth, lowering the price of goods, and accelerating the gradual shift in the balance of power in society away from people who owned land to people who owned businesses, as well as being one of the preconditions for urbanisation and everything that went with that. There were, of course, bitter fights over most of the individual canals and over the canal system in general, nor did the building of the canals go smoothly in many cases. And, as always, unprincipled people saw the opportunity to make some easy money by selling stock for something that might or might not ever exist, and if it did exist, might not make any money. So there’s plenty of conflict baked right in.

When I was initially considering canals as the Great Work, I wondered if I should do something with more sensawunda, something less pragmatic and more exciting. But a canal system that revolutionises the economy is very on-brand for me.

The kind of work I do, and the kind of work done by the people I do that work for, is not spectacular. We’re not going to get prizes for it. Wikipedia would say that we, and our work, are of “questionable notability”.

But you would notice if we stopped.

I read a book a little while back by an (I assume) callow youth who portrayed, more or less incidentally to his plot, a society completely composed of elite geniuses. Missing from his conception of the world was the fact, known to us who have been around a bit longer and toured the concrete corridors behind the scenes, that no society can function just with an elite. The world works even as well as it does because millions of ordinary people turn up every day and do their unspectacular jobs, often with considerable devotion.

And my fiction sets out to celebrate that, in the Gryphon Clerks (not only civil servants, but engineers, doing what they do each day to make people’s lives better), and in the Auckland Allies books (underpowered magic users stepping up to defend the city because there’s nobody else).

I’ve never been poor. I’ve been short of money, but that’s different from being poor. I always had my solidly middle-class parents (both schoolteachers, plus my father made an extra income from writing sports books) to fall back on if I really needed to. My ancestors were not so prosperous; my mother’s family were all skilled tradespeople with their own small businesses in the male line, and farmers on her mother’s side, while my father’s ancestors worked as sailors, fishermen, and the like. His father drove a train, and his mother’s mother kept a boarding house near the end of the railway line (which is how they met).

So I don’t have much direct knowledge of what it’s like to be really struggling, though I do have a family background that’s relatively humble just a couple of generations back. My world is, and always has been, composed of what used to be called the “middling sort”: not wealthy, not poor. The big layer of folks in the middle of the sandwich that keep the wheels turning. And so that’s who I like to celebrate in my fiction, though I’m also planning to toss in a noblewoman in reduced circumstances and a street thief, just to mix it up.

But I’ll put them in a school for wizards, because why wouldn’t I?

Mike Reeves-McMillan

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Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.