From: Raymond E. Feist
Date: 22 August 2011
It's in the FAQ or bio or somewhere, but the short version is I grew up reading what was then called "Boys Adventure Fiction," things like Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Hope, and the pulps, H. Rider Haggard, A. Merrit, R.E. Howard, and some of the adventure stuff of Doyle, Professor Challenger stories as opposed to Holmes (which I also loved), and historical novelists, Thomas Costain, Mary Renault, Rosemary Suttcliff, and Samuel Shellenbarger. There was no market for Boys Adventure and the closets I could get would be the SerpentWar. If you imagine Erik going off to the Crusades with Richard III while Roo became a Merchant in the south of France, that story moves pretty easily from fantasy to historical adventure. Fantasy was as close as I could get to it, so I started writing fantasy.
Best, R.E.F.
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