Are there particular historical eras that influence your stories?
Well, to give you an example of the way these things work… the Aiel. They have some bits of Japanese in them. Also some bits of the Zulu, the Berbers, the Bedouin, the Northern Cheyenne, the Apache, and some things that I added in myself. They are in no way a copy of any of these cultures, because what I do is say, “If A is true, what else has to be true about this culture? If B is true, what else has to be true?” And so forth.
In this way I begin to construct a logic tree, and I begin to get out of this first set of maybe 10, maybe 30 things that I want to be true about this culture. I begin to get around an image of this culture, out of just this set of things, because these other things have to be true. Then you reach the interesting part, because this thing right here has to be true, because of these things up here. But, this thing right here has to be false, because of those things up there. Now, which way does it go, and why? You’ve just gotten one of the interesting things about the culture, one of the really interesting little quirks.
To me, that in itself is a fascinating thing—the design of a culture. So that’s how the Aiel came about. There are no cultures that are a simple lift of Renaissance Italy or 9th-century Persia or anything else. All of them are constructs.
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