Is this what you wanted to do when you were a kid?
I wanted to be a writer.
Why fantasy?
I’ll tell you. I learned to read at a very early age.
How old were you?
Four. I never read children’s books. The first book I read by myself, the second half of it, at least, was White Fang . My older brother would read it to me when he was stuck babysitting and somehow or other I began making the connection between what was coming out of his mouth and the words on the page.
And I do remember. It must have a weekend, because it was the day and my parents came back and my brother put the book on the shelf and took off. He always read to me what he wanted to read, usually not children’s books. And I wanted to know the rest of it, so I got the book back down and worked my way through it. I didn’t get all of the words, but I got enough to do the story.
And I remember a particular incident when I was five, which is when I realized that I really wanted to be a writer. I had finished reading From the Earth to the Moon and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn . I put those three books on the table, standing up on end, and I sat in a chair with my feet on the chair and my chin on my knees and I looked at those books and said, “I’m going to do that one day. I’m going to write one day, make stories like that.”
How did you get from there to the world of fantasy?
Well, the short version is that in fantasy you can write about things that you can’t write about in mainstream fiction, or even in some other genres and still keep a straight face today. Right and wrong are taken to be simply two faces of one coin. It’s simply a matter of looking in the same mirror, but you’re standing at two different points, that there’s no difference. And I believe that there is a difference.
You mean in fiction today?
Yes, yes. In so much fiction it is a great effort to show just how many flaws the good guys have and just how many extenuating circumstances the bad guys had. They had terrible childhoods and were abused children and suddenly you find yourself feeling almost sympathetic toward someone who is out and out evil. I don’t like that.
I know too many people who had miserable childhoods—grew up in the slums and a ghetto and they did okay. They didn’t come out bent. They didn’t come out twisted, so I don’t like that very much.
I think it’s hard to tell the difference between right and wrong. Sometimes a situation comes along and the only choice you have is between bad and worse. But I believe it’s necessary to make the effort to try and find a difference. The other way it becomes very sloppy and it’s very easy to just make your decision on the spur of the moment, without any thought about what you are doing. You never think that it’s right or wrong, or you never even think about whether you are choosing between bad and worse. You’re simply doing something for your own advantage.
That attitude, however, is very much a reflection of society.
That is a reflection of society, and it is part of society that I reject. I believe that you have to make that choice. I’m not going to tell anybody what to think, I’m not going to tell anybody what to do or what wrong is, but I think you have to try to make that decision yourself. And it goes beyond simply what’s good for me today.
I don’t preach in my books. I just have my characters face some hard choices and have difficulty making their decisions. It’s not always easy. It’s not always cut and dry, and when somebody does something that is just for their own temporary advantage, to get a quick payoff, it doesn’t always turn out the way they like it.
Do you manage to get this philosophy into your work?
Well, I try to. I try to. Again, what I am doing basically is telling stories. But I like to have my characters in what amounts to real life situations. That is, making hard decisions and finding out that the easy answer is quite often the wrong one, and that very often the right thing to do is the hardest thing to do. It’s just a matter of fitting it into the story. I’m not preaching. I just try to reflect these situations and these things in the story.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.