Falagar: переводы

→Saruman is another interesting character the White Wizard whose been on the side of good literally hundreds, if not thousands of years, as the wizards are not men, they're Maiar, they're very long-lived. And yet he too, at the end you know succumbs. These are two characters where the human heart is in conflict.

→You know what I'm saying, I love Tolkien. I want to stress that here because I don't want to come across like I'm slamming him. But I am responding to him. One of my favorite characters in Lord of the Ring is Boromir. Boromir is a traditional hero in many ways. He's the Prince, he's the heir to the great kingdom he's very brave, he's a great warrior and all of that, but ultimately he succumbs to the temptation of the ring. But then he dies heroically, protecting innocents. He has that wonderful sense of greatness about him.

→The battle between good and evil is a theme of much of fantasy. But I think the battle between good and evil is thought largely within the individual human heart, by the decisions that we make. It's not like evil dresses up in black clothing and you know, they're really ugly. These are some of the things that Tolkien did; he made them work fabulously, but in the hands of his imitators, they become total clichés. I mean the orc-like creatures who always do dress in black and … they're really ugly and they've got facial deformities or something. You can tell that if somebody's ugly, he must be evil. And then Tolkien's heroes are all very attractive people and all that, of course, again this become cliché in the hands of the Tolkien imitators.

→Yeah, I've always been attracted to grey characters. I've always taken it as a code William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech from the early ‘50's, where he said that the human heart in conflict with the self was the only thing worth writing about. And I think that's true.

→There's also the more complicated morality of the characters and situations in your book. It's not just that people who seem bad might turn out to be better than they seemed, but that also there's sometimes this theme that honor can be kind of a handicap.

→As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen. You know, if you're reading about the War of the Roses, say, you know that the little princes are not going to come out of that tower. Fantasy, of course, doesn't have that constraint. You can still have that driving force, which I think is one of the things that people read books for, what's gonna happen next? I love this character, but god, is he gonna live, is he gonna die? I wanted that kind of suspense.

→I was also reading a lot of historical fiction. And the contrast between that and a lot of the fantasy at the time was dramatic because a lot of the fantasy of Tolkien imitators has a quasi-medieval setting, but it's like the Disneyland Middle Ages. You know, they've got tassels and they've got lords and stuff like that, but they don't really seem to grasp what it was like in the Middle Ages. And then you'd read the historical fiction which was much grittier and more realistic and really give you a sense of what it was like to live in castles or to be in a battle with swords and things like that. And I said what I want to do is combine some of the realism of historical fiction with some of the appeal of fantasy, the magic and the wonder that the best fantasy has.

→And as a Tolkien fan, I sampled a lot of it. And hated a lot of it. It just seemed to me that they were imitating Tolkien without understanding Tolkien and they were imitating the worst things of Tolkien. I mean, I loved Tolkien but I don't think he was perfect. So I did want to do something that replied not only to Tolkien, but to all of the Tolkien successors who had followed that. And essentially made it a branch of, I don't know, YA or something like that.

→But most of publishing regarded Tolkien as a freak: okay, this is one of those weird little books that comes along once in a while and it's a bestseller for reasons nobody can comprehend, but no one will ever do another book like this. And it was [Lester and Judy-Lynn] del Rey at Ballantine Books, which later became Del Rey Books, who really finally challenged that assumption in the late-‘70's, when they published the Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara, which were the first real attempts to follow in Tolkien's footsteps... both with success. And that led to a lot more Tolkien imitators.