Raymond E. Feist

I'm reading it and reading it and I'm going, oh no.

It's taken up half my heart, you know.

Fantasy's tough in certain respects.

At the broadest level, all fiction by definition is fantasy.

And probably the closest to reality would maybe be really good historical fiction, that kind of stuff.

Thomas Cobb Stane used to write and Mary Renault and Rosemary Sutcliffe and people like that, who I ate that stuff up when I was a kid.

And then, uh, you know, Sir Walter Scott wrote good historical fiction and Robert Louis Stevenson.

So that to me, Hughes closely to fact, but you know, detective fiction, uh, mysteries, Westerns, romance novels, anything that's contemporary or historical,

is in that large area of fiction that very few people ever think of as fantasy.

The second you put fantastic elements in there, whether it's dragons and magicians or spaceships or aliens or horrible monsters that lurk beneath the earth, that's when you get into what most people would consider fantasy.

And I believe that for me, the reason I love fantasy was I grew up as a kid reading what they called Boy's Adventure, which was Robert Louis Stevenson and some of the other writers I've mentioned before and historical novelists both.

It was always other places far away, other times.

But as we became more mediated and, you know, the newsreel in the theater showing you deepest, darkest Africa became, you know, high definition television where you could actually see real National Geographic's kind of stories.

The mystery, if you will, the sense of faraway became much closer.

Fantasy, you know, you're talking other worlds, other dimensions, other realities.

So it's always magical in the largest sense of the term.

It's always wonderfully different.

And you get to see how people might function in those environments.

And at heart, I think all writers pretty much like to ask the question, why are people doing some of the damn fool things they're doing?

And by putting them in a fantasy environment, you really can crank up the pressure and get acts of heroism and acts of villainy.