For the Delphi Wednesday crowd:

Janet, Martha, Byron & Eileen, Cherp, Gardner & Sue, Pat, Chuq, Mike & Rosa, Paul, George, Brandon, Ralph, Eva (of course)

and, oh yeah, you, too, Resnick.

To those who came in late and to those away too long.

Just after the start of the past decade, I decided to write an Epic Fantasy Novel. It wasn’t anything that I came upon either late or cynically; back when I was a publisher, I published the first three books ever done about swords and sorcery and I’d read Conan when Conan, let alone Arnold Schwarzenegger, wasn’t cool.

I felt a little out of touch, though, in that genre; I still remembered the old stuff: Robert E. Howard, the still-going-strong Fritz Leiber, the ubiquitous Tolkien, and the like, but, aside from a couple of Moorcocks, my contemporary fantasy education was lacking.

Now, I know that reading the best science fiction of prior generations is an essential part of education, but if you read only thirty-year-old SF to get an idea of what was going on, you’d be pretty well out of it. With that thought, I went out and picked up a dozen or so major fantasies by various writers, who were now best-sellers and highly acclaimed and had their own groupies, and settled in to see what heroic fantasy had evolved into, fully expecting the same kind of revolution I knew had happened in science fiction. I won’t mention the titles or the authors, because it didn’t matter.

Before I was halfway through the first one, I had the eerie feeling that, although it had been written within the last couple of years, by someone far younger than I, somehow, I’d read it before. When a quick check to the end showed that it indeed went where I knew it would, I put it down and started anew.