Christopher Paolini

I'm delighted to see all of the amazing stories that are coming out these days and the new types of stories that come out.

I was very fortunate to have a success with The Inheritance Cycle with Aragon.

And it's a very traditional fantasy story of a young hero setting off to defeat an evil king with a magic sword and a wise old mentor.

I can barely read that sort of a story these days because I wrote it.

And I find it fascinating and wonderful to see how people are doing new things with fantasy and science fiction.

view of what's possible because I've always thought that anything was possible in speculative fiction.

If anything, I'm just happy that we're seeing more variety because the world itself has more variety, if you will, and fiction that reflects that is probably going to be a truer vision of life itself.

Oh, that is a tough question because I've been locked up in editing for the past two years almost, it feels like.

But I would say I'm a big fan of Marie Brennan.

She wrote a series called or a book called A Natural History of Dragons.

She, I believe, is a trained anthropologist.

And I thought it was a breath of fresh air.

I thought it was a really interesting take on fantasy and speculative fiction.

So if anyone's looking for something a little different, I would definitely recommend that.

Different and very well written.

And on a completely different note, it's a little silly, but I enjoyed a book called Kings of the Wild, which is perhaps not a complete reinvention of the genre, but it's a very fun take on fantasy, which I think sometimes is missing.

There have been so many works that fall in the grimdark category.

It's nice to see something new.

Well, I think it's important to know what someone enjoys reading because saying a story is

you know there are romance novels that are science fiction there are romance novels that are fantasy there are historical novels that are fantasy or science fiction so first I would try to identify what someone enjoys reading and then I would think about how to pair them with something like that within speculative fiction one thing I do point out to people is that a lot of our classical texts are