Author's word - The Iron Cage

Mar 25, 2025

Finishing this novel is different than all the others. I’m ending a series, an entire long story, not just a book.

The series is one long journey filled with hardship and joy.

I wrote the ending first. I wrote it more than fifty years ago on a roll of toilet paper, and that was long before I knew that Jack Kerouac had used the same inspired method. I had the entire story about The Janus Clan in my head from the start.

This is the final book in the series, a series that began in the fertile mind of a twelve-year-old boy, and ended here in the even more fertile mind of an old man not feeling old at all.

The Janus Clan story is complete. All the books are written. The story I planned long ago is done to my extreme satisfaction. That doesn’t mean every little detail is included. There are missing pieces that will never be explained, except through suggestion and words between the lines. Everyone will have to figure that out by themselves.

An author once said that you should explain seventy percent of the story, and leave the rest to the reader’s imagination. I agree with that. If I become two-hundred years or close to that, I will probably write a few more books in the series. Otherwise, I will focus on other things.

I would have written about the thousand-year reign of the Phoenix. I would have filled the nineteenth-century gap in the family history. I would have told ancient human history from the fireeyes’ perspective.

No one but me, the original author, can ever do that. If another does it, it will be nothing but downright silly and embarrassing guesswork. I know the entire story, countless details and important events. A proxy doesn’t.

It’s such a strange feeling sitting here, knowing that I’ve done everything I long ago set out to do, and knowing, like I knew it would be, that there is still much left to do, that my life and art are a never-ending project. I will always have more miles to go before I sleep.

I wrote non-linear stories in the first grade. I’ve continued to do that since.

The two chapters from the British colonies in North America should not be seen as an attempt to write accurate history.

The story from Atlantis is told in the fourth book in the series, At the End of the Rainbow.

A reader wrote the following about ShadowWalk:

«SW may break all the rules of novel writing, but it works.

And it makes sense if you aren't too brainwashed to understand and experience it. I never found it jumpy or disjointed. And I believe that it flows quite nicely and seems effortlessly elegant in the way it works.

When a stream flows around rocks in a very not straight line, we still find it beautiful. It will be full of back eddies and undercurrents and twists and turns. But it is still flowing. It’s making sense within its own environment.

And just because it doesn't flow at one speed in one direction, you can't say that's wrong. What the stream does is right for the stream. What SW does is right for SW».

The entire Janus Clan is like that, really. ShadowWalk is a kind of bible, a standard for the rest of the series.

My reoccurring dream over fifty years ago started with a group of wanderers making their way across vast, ancient plains. I knew immediately that the story happened in humanity’s ancient past. Their clothing and demeanor were completely different from current humanity, and they weren’t stone age people either.

They were hunted by an unseen, malevolent force, something present in the very air surrounding them. The reoccurring dream always started like that. They crossed deserts, mountains, snow and forests, always on the move, never stopping anywhere for long. They were nomads and wanderers, both by inclination and necessity.

The story moved through human history, ever closer to modern humanity, until it reached that point, and the story made a notable turn. It slowed down there, and expanded further.

The first moment in my dream of the modern story was actually the man being dumped without memory into the British colonies in North America. That became the original starting point, but I eventually chose a different solution.

This, to me, was in spring 1973, not long after the great events of rebellion sweeping the world. The Sixties, Nixon’s dishonor, the Vietnam War and connected events were pretty much the present then. I was just as zealous a newspaper reader as Ted and the others, even as I knew even that early that everything was well-crafted lies.

I knew immediately the story’s starting point. I began writing the first chapter on my old, derelict typewriter after waking up the second night.

The main story would be set in modern times, but the prehistory would always be there, with me and the characters. The scope expanded even more the third night. I pictured three trilogies of books, each covering twenty of the next sixty years. The big scope was there from the start. Only the details of that have been added later.

The final scenes I wrote in this book, both the end of chapters sixteen and twelve, couldn’t have been written by any other than myself, no matter how much others had read the entire series in an effort to understand it. I made notes, but the essential parts remained hidden in my mind. They could never be imagined by others.

I believed erroneously that I would need to stay alive until 2041 to complete the series, because I needed six years from 2012 to 2018 to complete Lewis of Modern York, but those after that were done in eighteen months each.

This is the end of the story describing the first twenty years from 1968 to 1988. ShadowWalk (315 000 words) and Phoenix Green Earth (405 000 words), two huge bricks, already on sale, cover the rest.

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The true start 1973-04-28

The slow start 2022-08-13

The fast start 2023-10-28

The ending 2025-02-02

Printing version ready 2025-03-03

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