Fantasy ought to be the magic, the fantasists ought to be the people who are going out there and dreaming the dreams and creating the myths. That is what we should be doing. When we're doing well, we are creating new little myths, saying things in ways that haven't been said before. The Lottery will ever be able to forget it. The problem, as I see it, is that what should be the single most imaginative and most boundary-less form of literature has tended to become one of the most predictable.
Fantasy novels are now pretty much as predictable as a pornographic movie.
And I think it's really sad that what should be a celebration of the boundless imagination has tended by sort of being driven by market forces to become a bad clonal echo of Lord of the Rings . The sci-fi that is popular tends to be stuff like Star Wars , which, frankly, is fantasy to begin with. There's a nervousness lurking out there. Whether Y2K actually brings anything with it or not, I think it's significant that most of America is anticipating the point where the odometer of time rolls over not with an excitation but with a certain amount of dread. We're hoping that there isn't a disaster.