A Forbidden Alchemy
A Forbidden Alchemy
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Stacey McEwan on A Forbidden Alchemy
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
War fiction, Peaky Blinders, and the newsThe book’s origin sits at two levels: the broad and the specific. At the broad level, she points readers straight at the headlines, refusing to pretend that a story about a corrupt government and a rebellion beneath it was invented in a vacuum.
You can pick any of the world’s current events to find what might have inspired a story about a corrupt government system and a corresponding rebellion. The more eloquent answer is that I wanted to combine my love for war fiction with a dystopian-esque fantasy. I also have a small obsession with Peaky Blinders and couldn’t resist building a world that emulated that grittiness.
The specific structural spark came from a documentary, not from fiction at all. ANZAC miners, conscripted in the First World War to dig tunnels miles into enemy territory, were waging a completely silent war underground while the visible battlefronts burned overhead. That image gave her a model for how a rebellion could survive: patient, hidden, and operating on a different plane from the conflict everyone could see.
I just found it incredibly fascinating that there was this sort of underground war being waged that was silent. And at the same time, there was battlefronts up top. And so I thought, what an interesting premise for a rebellion that’s fought underground or that is waged underground and kind of in secret and that’s how the rebellion endures. [paraphrased from audio]
The ANZAC tunnel warfare became more than atmosphere. It gave the book’s hidden rebellion its logic: endurance is possible precisely because the fight is invisible to those in power.
How she wrote it
Building from the bottom of the social orderMost fantasy worlds are built downward from power: the palace, the throne, the ruling class. She reversed the direction entirely. The Brink, the series’ term for the poorest parishes at the bottom of the world’s hierarchy, came first, and it was designed to echo a specific historical reality rather than a generic invented poverty.
I started in the Brink, actually. Those disenfranchised parishes very much mimic the 98% of the population who lived impoverished and choking amidst the British Industrial Revolution. The town of Scurry might have been Aberfan or Northumberland.
The magic system, which centres on bluff and idium, the book’s two distinct alchemical substances, grew out of Nina’s psychology rather than being designed as a self-contained structure. McEwan worked backward from what Nina’s particular power would mean socially before she worked out what the power actually did.
Creating the magic system in this world started with Nina. I wanted her to become what she’d class as the ‘pinnacle’ of elite high society, in much the way any young girl would dream of being a Queen without really considering the ramifications. But I knew those ramifications would become the true conflict of the story.
Once the concept was set, making the two substances feel genuinely different from each other required repeated revision. She talks about this not as a triumph of planning but as a problem she had to keep returning to until the constraints felt real.
Figuring out the differences and characteristics of both the bluff and the idium was a challenge. This underwent many changes before I felt truly happy with it and how it fit in with the story. I think it’s important to not only showcase what a magic system can do, but also what it can’t do, so it took a few passes to ensure I had strict differences between these two substances.
She describes herself as someone who wants romantic payoff immediately, which creates a tension with her own chosen mode. That self-diagnosis is not self-deprecating performance: it describes a real structural pull in the book, where the reader is kept waiting longer than the label ‘slow burn’ usually implies.
I always say that it’s a slow burn, when really what I mean is like, you’re gonna have to wait, like maybe two-thirds of the book and then there’ll be some kind of payoff... I write slow burns constantly, but I’m actually terrible at writing slow burns because I want in, I want gratification. Now. [paraphrased from audio]
When the manuscript stalled, her solution was deliberate removal from the problem rather than pushing through it. The two recurring obstacles she names are ones that live at opposite ends of the writing process: sentence-level pacing and structural gaps.
The usual suspects – pacing and plot holes. The two p’s from hell. I find I need time away from the manuscript when these things rear their heads. I like to step away and spend time puzzling it over. The solution always arrives if I’m patient.
The personal thread
Patrick Colson and a grandfather’s bookshelfPatrick Colson’s personality did not arrive fully formed from the Peaky Blinders fixation alone. His roots go further back, to a childhood spent reading her grandfather’s military paperbacks at an age she concedes was probably too young. That early exposure to war fiction as a genre shaped what she finds compelling in a male lead: not moral clarity, but a specific and costly kind of loyalty.
I adore Patrick Colson, and building the dynamics between him and his inner circle was so much fun. He has a certain ‘reluctant hero’ air about him, but he’ll also shoot someone in cold blood if the need arises. There’s never a dull moment with Patty.
She draws Patrick’s psychology not as simple ruthlessness but as a trap built from something genuine. The synthesis notes she sees him as a man with strong foundations of love and belonging, where that very security became its own constraint, binding him to a mission and a community in ways that replace individual moral judgment with loyalty to the few.
I like the idea of the lower classes questioning why it is that they must remain so.
That question is Patrick’s engine. He does not ask it philosophically; he builds a rebellion around it. And the fact that Nina cannot ask it in the same way, because self-preservation has always come before community, is where their conflict becomes irresolvable in book one.
On what the book is wrestling with
Two people who cannot agree on what revolution costsNina’s psychology is not presented as a character flaw McEwan wants the reader to judge. It is presented as an outcome, a direct consequence of growing up without the experience of being loved for anything other than utility. The synthesis draws a careful line between Nina’s limitations and Nina’s culpability.
I see Nina as someone suffering for severe identity crisis. From the beginning we see her trying to reshape herself, define herself. She’s quite desperate to figure herself out, and more poignantly, to find love and belonging, and I don’t mean in the romantic sense. I mean in the most basic of ways a human needs love. Like most people deprived of love and belonging, they tend to mistake dependency and possession for love. They believe being used and useful is to be loved and loveable.
Nina and Patrick occupy the same rebellion but cannot occupy the same moral position within it, and McEwan is explicit that this gap is the book’s real engine. Their difference on revolution is not a disagreement about tactics; it maps directly onto what each of them was taught to value by the conditions they survived.
Another important difference between Nina and Patrick is the way they view revolution. Patrick sees it as the only answer to oppression because he does not think of himself alone. He thinks in terms of his family, his community, and the future of it. Nina has only ever lived in a state of self-preservation. I think this creates a dramatic difference in the way they view themselves and the world.
What she wants us to sit with
No character is guaranteedShe has a precise answer when asked what emotional state she intends readers to finish in. It is not satisfaction with the romance, or hope for the rebellion, or confidence in the protagonists. She named it in two words, then added the structural mechanism behind it.
Full body dread. No character is guaranteed — and I do love a cliffhanger.