Chapter 1: What foundational texts influence fantasy fiction?
All right, this is going to be good, isn't it? I loved this book. Put that effing book down. You know, the Iliad and the Odyssey would, if published today, be classified as fantasy.
I'm reading it and reading it and I'm going, oh no.
The book actually put a hex on me.
It's taken up half my heart, you know.
Do you read genre fiction, fantasy in particular? Well, this is for you. Actually, if you don't usually read fantasy, keep listening anyway, because Raymond E. Feist has been writing for a long time and he has plenty to say. His books include The Magician and the whole Riftworld series and so very many others since then that I can't even list them all.
But he's broadly in the field you might call epic fantasy, full of world building and sweeping series. His latest is called Queen of Storms. And I should say too that I'm Kate Evans and this is a podcast extra edition of The Bookshelf. It's a bit different from some of the other interviews in this series. I recorded this one with our monthly book club in mind and the recent fantasy edition.
For that, I asked a number of writers about the foundational books in their particular genre, as well as asking them about the books that shaped them in particular. I did the same with crime writers and will roll all of those interviews out as part of this pod extra series. But where was I, readers? Raymond E. Feist, fantasy writer. Let's hear what he has to say.
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.
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Chapter 2: How does Raymond E. Feist define fantasy?
But first of all, you got to know Shakespeare. You don't have to be an expert. You just got to be familiar because for one thing, I think he's the best writer in the history of the human race. It's 400 years after he's dead and we're still paying money to see his stuff. Not a lot of writers from the late 16th and early 17th century that were still paying bucks to go see their stuff.
And then the Greeks, the Russians, Jane Austen and Mark Twain and all of the traditional storytellers. In terms of fantasy, you can go back to the Eddas and all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Through the Greeks... And all that. Modern fantasy, more or less, you're talking about Lord Dunsinane. And then the man who is responsible for what we look at now as fantasy, Tolkien.
Now, Tolkien was an Oxford don, like my father, who was taught by 19th century scholars. And he was a linguist. He tried to build Lord of the Rings on the basis of language. You know, and there's a whole bunch of stuff about that. But the point is, he was influential as heck. And in the 60s, when I discovered Tolkien, he just started that wave of popularity in college.
He was my generation's Harry Potter, you know, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter stuff. Because Lord of the Rings was the only books that like jocks would talk to nerds about at lunch in college. You know, that was the one thing they shared in common. You know, it was everybody was reading Lord of the Rings. That was about 66, 67. Since then, the floodgates opened.
You had Terry Brooks and Stephen Donaldson's stuff published by Del Rey here in America. I don't know who published it overseas. And then I came along, along with Jim Rigney, who published under the name Robert Jordan. In fact, I met him at both of our first ever World Fantasy Convention in Chicago in 84. And I think that the spin that we see in broadening the entire field is a cross-pollination.
It's like the reason Marvel movies are so successful is because the 50- and 60-year-old guys who were making those movies were reading those comic books when they were kids. You know, they love that stuff. The people who are writing now, God help them, are referring to me at times as an influence.
I'm also in denial because intellectually and emotionally, I'm 13, so I really can't be old enough to be anybody's influence. But I think that, you know, there's a... intersection. You have to be well read in a general sense to understand what good writing is. You know, I've had many, many people say, Hey, I sat down and write this book. How do you do it?
Well, if everybody did it, I wouldn't get paid. You know? Um, and then beyond that, you have to understand how to do it in a specific sense for what your desires are as a creative person. I tell anybody, I can't teach anyone how to write. Nobody can teach you how to write.
People can help you learn to write because anybody who's not suffering a learning disability can learn to write a coherent English sentence or coherent German sentence or Japanese, depending on where you are. Nobody can teach you how to fabricate a story. And that's what makes the difference. You know, if you're, you're either a storyteller or you're not.
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