Lev Grossman’s blockbuster Magicians Trilogy deconstructed Narnia and set the standard for novels that take place in magical universities (after all, Harry Potter didn’t even complete high school!). Now, in The Bright Sword (Viking, July 16), the author takes on an even more towering fantasy icon: King Arthur.

Grossman grew up with a strong connection to Britain (his mother is from London) and clearly has been thinking about the legend of Camelot for some time; he confirms that an episode of The Magicians in which the students turn into birds is an intentional echo of a section from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. He has assuredly done the reading, from the medieval renderings of the story composed by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory to the 19th-century poetry of Alfred Tennyson to the Arthurian novels of the past century, among many others.

“One of the great things about Arthur is this: There is no real canon,” Grossman says. “There are just a million different stories, each one of which is slightly different.” Speaking to Kirkusvia Zoom from Australia, he explains how he developed his own version of the Camelot legend, which begins in a most unusual place: after King Arthur and most of his knights have died in the Battle of Camlann. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why is the King Arthur legend so enduring?

Obviously, the Arthur story is about themes that are universal and transcendent, about the end of a golden age and aspiring to divine ideals that humans can’t really ever attain. But there’s something unique about the Arthur story in that it is, on the one hand, so central to Western culture. And yet it also has this strange ability to transform it. Arthur begins as a kind of Welsh resistance hero in the battle to keep out the Saxons. And then he becomes different things to different people, century by century. So it’s first this monumental story, and also strangely polymorphous. Hopefully, it has morphed again in The Bright Sword.

Is there still something more to say about Arthur? And why should you be the one to say it?

For most of my life, I thought that we had come to the end of the King Arthur story. I was very, very devoted to The Once and Future King when I was younger, and then [Marion Zimmer Bradley’s] The Mists of Avalon, which has become problematic. [Ed.:Bradley’s daughter accused her of abuse in 2014.] And then Bernard Cornwell and so many other amazing tellings of the story. But the stories I was reading still didn’t feel quite contemporary. They felt no less great, but they felt as though they belonged to the past. And it nagged me, this question of what King Arthur the 21st century needs. It occurred to me to write about the world that Arthur left behind, this kind of dark, chaotic Britain that follows his death. That was when I felt, Here’s the story. Here’s some blank space on the map that needs to be filled in.

What issues should a 21st-century King Arthur story address?

I began to think about Arthur’s Britain as a post-colonial country. Britain is a country that is trying to decolonize in the wake of the Roman occupation. People were moving from one place to another, including the Saxons moving from Saxony to Britain. And Arthur’s job from the earliest tales is to keep the Saxons out. It’s about having Britain for the British, and he wants to keep the immigrants out. That was an aspect of the story that I felt that I had to face up to, because it was very real.

Then there are other things having to do with representation. Again, you look for blank spaces on the map, for stories that haven’t been written yet. And I was very aware that there hadn’t been stories about the knights who were gay, or trans, or disabled, or neurodivergent, or having mental health issues, or who weren’t white. These are all the stories that were still left to be told, even after 1,400 years. It seemed like such a wonderful opportunity to get to tell them. And it made me think of White—whose own sexuality was far from straightforward—and yet he couldn’t write about that. All he could write about were straight romances, because of the time he lived in. But times have changed and you can write those stories now.

How did that perspective direct your choice in creating characters for The Bright Sword? These are the members of the Round Table that most readers don’t know much about.

When I started thinking about telling the story of what happened after Camlann, the first thing I did was look and see, well, who’s left? And the answer is: hardly anyone. Camlann was a total disaster, and almost everybody died. But there are a few; there’s a handful of knights. At first, I was perplexed by this. And then I realized what an opportunity this was, to write about these knights who usually aren’t placed center stage; you can take them from the margins and bring them to the center and tell their stories.

I took many liberties in pulling out the backstories of these knights. For example, there is a scene in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur where Dinadan gets dressed up as a woman by Lancelot, I think as a joke. There’s no indication that he was trans. But there were obviously gay people on the Round Table, and I’ll eat my hat if there wasn’t somebody trans as well. I picked Dinadan because he’s funny; he’s meant to be very witty. And that’s the one piece of characterization he gets in the Arthurian tradition. He’s got a sharp tongue. And I thought, Right, I want to hear that. I want to hear what he has to say.

But your protagonist, Collum of Mull, is entirely your own invention. Why was it important to have someone new observing this world?

Lots of reasons. I’ll tell you the two main ones. One, of course, is to give the point of view of somebody who’s coming into Camelot from the outside. And the other thing is that Colum is, in many ways, a shadow of Arthur. His life has the same outlines. Just like Arthur, he grew up in rural obscurity. He had a somewhat traumatic childhood and then he left that all behind him, except he could never leave it all behind him. The difference being Arthur’s story is always about Arthur’s death. Le Morte d’Arthur. It gives you the spoiler right up front: Arthur dies.

Obviously it’s one of the great stories, one of the great tragedies. And yet one of the questions I asked myself was, well, there are a lot of people who lived on after Arthur died and had to make their way in this essentially post-apocalyptic world that he left behind. I really wanted somebody who was going to live in that world and was going to have to try to figure out how to go forward without Arthur and maybe even solve some of the problems that Arthur couldn’t.

Amy Goldschlager is a writer and editor in Brooklyn.