Words of Radiance has been really well received. Do you think that’s at all indicative of the epic fantasy genre opening up?
Opening up? I’m not sure. Yes there is—how should I say this? I love the epic fantasy genre. I grew up reading it and I absolutely love it. I want to be part of the conversation. I think there are places the genre can go. We haven’t hit what epic fantasy is really capable of doing yet, and I feel that one of my passions is to be a part of this, to bring it along. So I want to push the world building a little bit further than it’s been done before.
I think we did have a period, for whatever reason, where not a lot of epic fantasies were taking off. If you look, basically, from after Robin Hobb up to the emergence of Patrick Rothfuss, you really only had Steven Erikson. Now there’s Jim Butcher’s books, which were great, but he was really Urban Fantasy. So, I don’t know if it was just the market saying “oh, we’re saturated,” or the writers were just not going where the fans wanted, but there were a lot of great books that just didn’t take off.
I don’t know what it is, but it seems like we’re back in a place where epic fantasy is something taking off. And it’s probably a mixture of us as writers evolving and having this history of reading while adding our own spin on it mixed with the genre kind of saying “hey we want some more this. We haven’t had it in a while.”
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