Raymond E. Feist

jealousy, all of that.

It's human nature.

If you look at our history, you know, we've been walking upright with opposable thumbs for what, you know, half a million years, a million years, depending on what you ask.

We've had civilization for about 12,000.

And that's going back to the early dynasties of Egypt, Sumeria, the Hittites.

And people forget, you know, Egypt was around for thousands of years before the Romans showed up.

Cleopatra was born closer to the iPhone than she was to the great pyramids of Shops or Khufu, depending on how you describe them.

We've had functional democracies in the modern sense for about 250 years.

So yeah, it's authoritarian.

And even today, look at modern politics.

There's people who still are drawn to authoritarianism and somebody telling them everything's going to be okay.

And if you do what we tell you,

You know, God will reward you or you'll go to heaven or whatever.

The social experiment that's America is in a crisis right now, as anybody who reads the news can understand, because we're defining ourselves after 240 years.

And this is a social experiment.

The idea of writing a fantasy that's not monarchical tends to fall into the category of urban fantasy, for example.

Let's talk about people like Neil Gaiman's brilliant Constantine character and all the other characters that arose out of his Sandman series or the stuff he's written beyond that, which is very contemporary.

Elsewhere in those books.

And the books of Terry Pratchett and the wonderful –

series of books.