Welcome to a brand new series on Armed with A Book, friend! Today is the first post in Series Stories where I will be hosting authors to chat about their book series. Please welcome Zamil Akhtar to kick off this inaugural post. We are going to chat about his series, Gunmetal Gods. I first heard about this book from my friend Kota who recommended book 1 on their indie recommendations. The third book comes this week!

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Zamil Akhtar’s Gunmetal Gods

Hi Zamil! Welcome to Armed with A Book. Thank you so much for taking out time to talk to me. Please tell me and my readers a bit about yourself.

I’m a writer of mainly dark fantasy with heavy horror elements. I’ve been writing horror and fantasy for over ten years – mostly short stories — with Gunmetal Gods being my most successful novel series. I also write a progression fantasy series called Lightblade.

The Gunmetal Gods series is a dark epic fantasy. The first book came out in 2020. How did the idea for this series come to be? When did you start working on it?

I started writing it in April 2019, almost exactly four years ago. I’d been smoking hookah with a good friend and talking about Game of Thrones – which had just ended — and how we need a story similar to Game of Thrones, with its realpolitik and themes of cyclical violence, but set in the Middle East. And then I went home and started writing it.

Congratulations on the upcoming publication of book 3 in the series, Elder Epoch! Tell me about the setting of the series. 

The series is set in a fantasy world heavily influenced by the histories and cultures of the Middle East, Balkans, and South Asia. In particular, it’s based on a 16^th century period when the empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals were ascendent in their respective territories, controlling them with the use of mighty gunpowder weapons. The setting mixes technology with magic, as well as grounded historical ideas with mythological beings such as jinn and gods, with a heavy splash of eldritch horror.

From the synopsis of each of the books, I could almost see them as individual stories. Are they supposed to be read in order? How does one build on the other?

Each book builds the large-scale conflict that is taking place between the empires in the story, as well as the conflict between the gods themselves. That’s why the series doesn’t just focus on a particular character or set of characters – each human has a small part to play in what is a grand conflict that reaches cosmic scales and is unfolding across countries and eras. 

I personally love books that have gods interacting with human and magical characters. I am curious to know about religion and gods in Gunmetal Gods. 

There’s a lot of meddling from the gods in this series, and it’s almost always to the detriment of the human characters. The gods in the series are self-interested and dismissive of human importance, even the ones that demand worship from humans. The religions, however, resemble our own, and place much importance on devotion toward one god or another. 

One of the main themes in the story is that no single religion is telling the complete truth, with each of them only having a piece of the truth, and so readers have to figure out which parts are true in order to piece together what really happened in the mythology of the world.

Tell me about the magic system in this series.

There are several magic systems introduced so far in the series, and more to come. There’s elemental magic that derives from commanding jinn who control different elements, such as ice and water. There’s also blood magic, writing runic characters with people’s blood in order to make them hallucinate, or even take over their bodies. The most mysterious and epic form of magic in the series is star magic, by which characters can literally rearrange the orbits of stars to produce absolutely catastrophic and reality-altering effects.

You have a wide variety of characters – mages, warriors, sorceresses, emperors, philosophers, fighters. How do you populate a fantasy world and pick which kind of characters will get to tell their story?

This is where the fantasy genre informs my writing the most; a lot of the characters begin as fantasy archetypes, which I then combine with historical ideas. This method gives each character a sense of grounding informed by history, as well as the sense of otherworldliness that makes fantasy exciting.

Is there a character that you have enjoyed writing the most?

Cyra, the protagonist of Book 2, is the character I’ve enjoyed writing the most. She does whatever she wants, and then only later figures out how to justify it. She holds a lot of guilt, but she buries it. She contains many contradictions within herself, which I can identify with, and it makes her unpredictable.

What was the most challenging part of writing Elder Epoch? Have the challenges changed from Gunmetal Gods?

It’s more challenging to write a Book 3 than a Book 1 because you can’t just keep making stuff up. Whatever you put on the page has to be 100% consistent with the 1000 pages that came before it. It’s a new experience for me as a writer, and it was the most difficult hurdle to overcome.

Are there any historical events or your personal experiences that you brought into this series?

There’s a ton in both respects, that’s one of the fun parts in writing this series. I grew up in Saudi Arabia, so the most personal part is including small details of that experience. Things like the woody scents wafting from the incense burners, the sweet taste of the dates that used to grow in my backyard, the spicy scent of cardamom-infused Arabic coffee. I think these small details really bring the setting to life.

How do you choose the covers for your books? When I do a blog post on my favroite fantasy covers, they make the list!

I work with Miblart, who make all my covers. They do a fantastic job taking the concept in my head and turning it into such a vivid work of art.

Gunmetal Gods is available in audiobook format. What is it like to work with a narrator? What do you think of your book as an audiobook?

My audiobook publisher, Podium, handles everything on that end. The audiobook, narrated by Peter Noble, is amazing, and it was such a delight to experience it!

If there was one thing readers could take away from your latest book, what would you want it to be?

Strange to say it, but out of all my books, this is the one I want to leave the bitterest taste in the reader’s mouth. It’s bleak and dark. The characters struggle incredibly hard – against each other – and I want readers to weigh what each character gained, and whether it was worth the cost to their sense of selves and loved ones.

I have a few questions about you as a reader. Which authors and books would you say have influenced Gunmetal Gods the most?

The horror of HP Lovecraft is a massive influence, as well as other cosmic horror works such as the book Annihilation, the graphic novels of Junji Ito, and the sci-fi series Three Body Problem.

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Thanks for joining us for this interview! Connect with Zamil on his website, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Check out Kota’s recommendation of Gunmetal Gods here.

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Cover image from Unsplash.