Where do you come up with all the names for the cities? Do you just pick them out of your head?
Ahh, yeah. And I admit to making lists. I read fairly widely and…Newspapers, foreign newspapers, foreign to me, to the States. The Economist and other magazines that have stories about other countries’ news stories. And I’ll see a name that it isn’t the name that I want but I realize if I twist it and turn it inside out and tie it into a knot, it’s a name that sounds very nice. It’s the name I want. The same way names out of myth and legend that in some cases are twisted or turned or changed and others aren’t. I figure that most of you are far enough along that you read, that you know Rand al’Thor, al’Thor, yes he is an Arthur analog. He is also a Thor analog. Some of you might not have picked that one up yet. And Artur Hawkwing is also an Arthur analog. Because what I’ve tried to do is not give you any sort of retelling of myths or legends but to reverse engineer every one of them so that I can give you some version of what might have happened and then have been changed by telling and retelling and retelling and retelling into the myths and legends we have today.
On that point, the cultures from the books, would you say you’ve used cultures from today’s society as a base for the cultures from the books?
Not a great deal from today’s society, no. Not really. The Whitecloaks are based on any number of groups who knew the truth, who know the truth and they want you to believe the truth. They want you to know the truth too. And if you don’t know the truth, if you don’t believe the truth they’ll kill ya. There’s been a lot of them, all over the world. They’re the basis for the Whitecloaks. The Aiel, for instance, bits of the Bedouin, bits of the Yaqui Indians, the Apaches, bits of Zulu, bits of the Northern Cheyenne, a lot of bits of my own. Some pieces out of Japan, some bits out of China. And then structure it together how these things have all…If all these things were true, all of these bits I wanted to have, and that culture lived in the middle of the desert, a very inhospitable desert, what else has to be true about these people. And thus I get the Aiel culture.
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