I'd never heard of the 'Lord of the Rings', actually. So I went to the bookstore and there it was, three shelves of books about Tolkien and Middle-earth, and I was like, 'Holy cow, what else am I missing out on?'
I read a lot of fantasy as a kid. I read 'The Hobbit' and all of the 'Lord of the Rings' books, but I also read a lot of realism like 'The Outsiders.'
Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment.
We've been told the same story for so long. We've seen literally 1,000 'Lord of the Rings' movies.
I first read 'The Lord of the Rings' as an adolescent. It's a dense novel, a sprawling, complex monster of a book populated with a prolific number of characters caught up in a narrative structure that, frankly, does not lend itself to conventional storytelling.
Although it is a fantasy film, it's as real as it can be. You have to imagine that an audience will buy their ticket to a cinema and get on a first-class flight and journey to Middle Earth.
I'd always had a hankering to write some old-school sword and sorcery. And there certainly are advantages to that particular form - for one thing, you're able to go all-out on the imaginative front, with a lot less concern for the usual unities of time and space and character.
I think 'The Lord of the Rings' holds perhaps a deeper place in people's hearts than 'The Hobbit' the book does.
I read 'The Hobbit' when I was twenty and first reading modern science fiction and fantasy. I followed it up with 'The Lord of the Rings,' which I still reread from time to time, but of the lot of it, I prefer 'The Hobbit.'
I have to say that after some initial resistance, I'm now a complete 'Game of Thrones' addict.
The approach of 'Game of Thrones' is similar to 'The Lord of the Rings' in that it treats its source material almost like history, and it focuses as much on the human drama as it does on anything fantastical.
'Lord of the Rings' was a set of books in which the world had been conceived before the characters were placed within that context.
If you go back to the Conan the Barbarian series, I really liked that.
'Lord of the Rings' was going on; like, my college years were the years of 'Lord of the Rings,' an awesome time to be in film school.
I like to say 'Reign' is the '24' of the pre-Renaissance. I think we're going to take a lot of liberties with history, as well as extend it over a longer period of time.
I love George R.R. Martin's 'Game of Thrones' series.
'The Sword of Shannara' is about two brothers who find themselves on an epic quest to save humanity. It borrows from 'Lord of the Rings' but is still original in its own right. I read it in three days, then reread it, then went out and found every single book Terry Brooks ever wrote, and read all those.
