When you first came up with the Wheel of Time series, how would you describe it? Almost like a post-apocalyptic, but long time past type thing.
Well, it’s post-apocalyptic in that the world was essentially destroyed—a much more advanced civilization was essentially destroyed three thousand years ago—and there have been, in the intervening three thousand years, there have been two major wars, or actually series of wars that came so close together that they are linked in the way that the Hundred Years War is considered one…or they call it one war historically, but actually it lasted a hundred and thirteen years. It was a whole bunch of different wars in different countries, and some many keep dropping out and joining in…those two series of wars in themselves were civilization-destroying, so what you have now at three thousand years after the destruction, the higher civilization is a civilization that is about 1690 or 1700 in technological sophistication, with one difference: gunpowder is a secret held by the Illuminator’s Guild, the people who make fireworks. Nobody else knows how to make fireworks—knows how to make gunpowder—and nobody has any idea of using it as a weapon.
Which changes everything pretty much drastically. I remember the [?] in the first book, and I was like, “Oh cool!” as I read my way through it, because it had very …different than some of the other books of that ilk that I’ve read in the past, but I liked it very much.
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