That world has had contact with a version of ours, in a multi-verse that works according to Hermeticism ... This from an interview with the author:
R: Okay, so you’ve stated that The Red Knight does not take place in our world, though there are obvious European influences – Jean de Vrailley being a French name and things such as that. But what were your main inspirations or parallels you drew from when writing this novel?
M: So Hermeticism – part of hermeticism that we still have with us today is astrology and alchemy, also the theory of the million spheres. Have you read any of Michael Moorcock?
R: Yes, I have.
M: So, Michael Moorcock played with the same meme. If you imagine that instead of living in our universe where we comfortably have rocket ships and stars, and you imagine that they were right, and you have planet-centric bubbles with maybe some star systems, and maybe no star systems – a bubble of reality, and then there’s another bubble, and another… but they’re not universes, they’re all connected in a Roger Zelazny-ish kind of way. Usually through the use of hermetical magic, but they’re the gateways.
Remember, this is how everyone thought the universe worked through about 1500, even Galileo still kind of thought there were going to be all of these connected bubbles. This [The Red Knight] is definitely not our world, but I would say that the most casual reader should understand that this world has been in contact with our world.
R: Yeah, with the European influences.
M: And if you wait long enough, a major character in book two is the Muslim character from the Arthurian tales, because this is deliberately Arthurian. In the Arthurian tales, there is a Muslin knight.
R: Yes.
[[The background noise kind of over-powered the next bit, so the next little bit isn't exactly verbatim, it's simply what I could hear/understand. Also – ignore my spelling for some of the names.]]
M: So he will be appearing, and where’s he coming from? From Ifrika — from Africa! So we’ll have Daar es Salaam and Islāmic culture, and they’ll believe just as strongly as the Christians believe in Christianity, and all their magic works too. In fact, Harmodius’ teacher is Ali Rashid – the great, in our world, philosopher who Thomas Aquinas and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides both thought of as the greatest mind of their generation.
So, sure it’s Arthurian, sure it’s influenced by all the martial arts I’ve ever done, but this book was actually born when discovering that the man who rebuilt Judaism – by the 11th century, a lot of being a Jew had become cultural and not religious. Along came a guy – he was not the last Rabbi left in the west, but he’s sometimes described that way, a lot of rabbi’s had been killed off by the Arabs of Kordogo, and it was like they had killed everyone, but left Albert Einstein alive.
He was a ruthless philosopher, and he looked into the abyss and said “We’re not really about magical spells, we’re really about thinking about how the universe would work and why there’s good and evil.” Modern Judaism is more modelled around him than Moses. He rebuilt it in a very intellectual and rational way, and he took out a whole lot of spirit worship and stuff like that, which people are delightfully rediscovering. I say all this purely as a historian, and not to offend anyone. What totally fascinated me is that he was a student of this Muslin philosopher, Ali Rashid, who is still the most-taught Islamic philosopher in Islamic universities.
I’m telling this long story because Maimonides, Ali Rashid and Thomas Aquinas lived in one generation and exchanged letters with each other. I was sitting up at my cottage, and thinking “If this were a fantasy universe, and they were all magic users, what would they discover, and where would that could?” If they’d all come honest to the beliefs in a good and evil, black and white universe, and one day through sheer intellectual prowess came to the decision that the universe was far more complicated than they’d thought, like most of us do, where would that have left the world? Not just Europe – but I had to start somewhere.
My first option was to write this from the point of view of Harmodius or Ali Rashid, since my Maimonides equivalent has been dead for twenty years when my novel starts, but that meant I would have to show everything – it’d be like having Gandalf as the main character.
R: Which would be interesting to a degree.
M: But not as much fun, and if you could get into Harmodius’ head all the time, you’d already know all five books from the start, there’d be no discovery. I think – as a reader, it’s the discovery that we like.
R: Show, don’t tell.
M: Maybe that was too long-winded, but that’s the under-pinning, and the other is that if you have a million spheres, and they all interconnect, they don’t have to interconnect in a neat way – this world [[in The Red Knight]] is a nexus world which allows many other spheres to connect through this world. So all of these things, which don’t appear to belong together like people, irks, dragons, and wyverns – if this world goes on for 6,000 more years and has modern technology, and archeologists, they’re going to be desperately confused as they won’t find Australopithecus because people did not come from here.
Neither did wyverns, what happens – because it’s a strategic nexus, generations of people try to take it over – and this has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, waves of magical armies with heroes and villains, and they roll through – and the peasants till the fields, and then it’s another wave. This is about that cycle being broken.
Serenity 
Salt-Man Z, on 31 March 2014 - 03:20 PM, said:
JPK 
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