I think people have a little wall they throw up real quick if they see swords and sorcery.
Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre.
I've been familiar with western fantasy novels since I was a boy.
Conan the Barbarian,' 'Star Wars,' 'Mary Poppins' and 'The Wizard of Oz' were my earliest VHS obsessions.
I didn't read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock - the sword and sorcery novels - when I was about 13 or 14.
Robin McKinley's 'The Blue Sword' was a defining book of my teen years, and I'd love to have more books like that in the world.
I've read fantasy my whole life. Quite literally; my mom read me The Hobbit before I could read stuff to myself. So I love fantasy; that's what I read for fun, it's what I read professionally to keep abreast of what's in the genre - it's where my heart is.
When I was a teenager, what I most wanted to read were fantasy novels. Not Tolkien and Malory, but sword-and-sorcery pulp. I craved glowy blue magic, chainmail bikinis, dragons with unpronounceable names.
My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.
The Seventies were an interesting time to be a reader or writer of fantasy. Tolkien was the great master. Lin Carter was resurrecting wonders of British and American fantasy from the early twentieth century in his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.
I've been reading Tanith Lee since I was a teenager, beginning with 'The Birthgrave' and 'The Storm Lord.' Only recently did I discover, to my delight, how many more of her books I've yet to read.
At the time, sword and sorcery stories were quite popular. There were female warriors waving swords around as well, but the genre is populated entirely with people who have absolutely no responsibility to anyone, so I knew my story would have to be completely different from any of these.
I wanted to be her; I wanted to write her. Red Sonja became anchored in my imagination like a mountain.
Edgar Rice Burroughs taught me pace and gave me a sense of action and adventure.
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've always been a sci-fi/fantasy guy. My book reports in school, whenever you didn't have to do it on Shakespeare, I did it on, like, Piers Anthony and Raymond Feist.
I'm very into fantasy films.
It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle.
If you go back to the Conan the Barbarian series, I really liked that.
I've read everything that Isaac Asimov ever wrote, for a start. I'm massively into my fantasy genre, anything by R.A. Salvatore or David Gemmell. I've read every single book those writers have written.
Escapism has its place. I used to write 'Conan the Barbarian' for Marvel, which takes place in an environment completely removed from the real world.
We didn't want 'Camelot' to become a period drama.
Gemmell's name guarantees a satisfying story and a thumping good read. I recommend all his heroic creations - 'Druss the axeman,' 'the Jerusalem man,' among others - but my favourite has to be 'Waylander': Clint Eastwood with a crossbow and the same 'Make my day, punk' attitude.
There was a movie called 'Hawk the Slayer' when I was a kid. I think only three people saw it, but me and my brother saw it. I remember when I was a kid thinking that's kind of cool. It was just this sort of action adventure-y sort of thing.
I grew up reading a lot of fantasy/sci-fi. It was really all I read - anything from 'Dragonlance,' when I was 12, to 'The Wheel of Time' and Robert Jordan stuff, to George R.R. Martin, who did 'Game of Thrones.'
