I wouldn’t know how to write a weak female character. I read so much epic fantasy growing up, where you have these sword-wielding, in-your-face warrior maidens.
If the general opinion is pessimistic, fantasy is going to hold its own.
When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn’t have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.
Audiences have taken a liking for supernatural and fantasy shows. The genre is doing well on the small screen, and I wanted to get into that mould. I have never played a naagin, and such roles have always intrigued me.
‘Outlander’ is based on a group of books; there’s a slight fantasy element to it, but ours is authentic – we try to stick to historical accuracy as possible. Ours is about a small group of people and a core relationship rather than big armies.
I’d really like to do a movie, either as a producer or director. My ultimate fantasy would be to direct a movie and produce the entire soundtrack. I don’t really see myself acting.
The fantasy that appeals most to people is the kind that’s rooted thoroughly in somebody looking around a corner and thinking, ‘What if I wandered into this writer’s people here?’ If you’ve done your job and made your people and your settings well enough, that adds an extra dimension that you can’t buy.
The whole idea of doing the Hollywood thing never even occurred to me. When you grow up on the East coast, Hollywood seems like this fantasy land and you don’t think that people can actually make a living there.
Horror, for me, has to involve some sort of fantasy. Horror is something that is in your dreams or your nightmares.
I like to make all kinds of shows and films, whether it’s fantasy or big-popcorn, big-screen escapism or dramas based on real events.
I wanted the feel in these books to be like an epic fantasy, with kings, queens, dukes and court politics, but of course like what I was explaining before, about making the science make sense, you have to make the politics make sense, too.
I got a crash-course education in urban fantasy. I suddenly had to look up all these other writers I was supposed to be in a genre with. I instantly had to become an expert in this genre I knew almost nothing about.
‘Doctor Who’ is where my love of science fiction and fantasy started. I was introduced to it when I was 8, and I’m still an avid viewer.
I remember when I was very young, I had a fever – a long rheumatic fever in bed for four months. And in the days, I stayed alone with the maid. I only had my father’s books with me. They were fantasy books about ghosts, and also books by Edgar Allen Poe that made a forever impression on me.
In all honesty, we all want our fantasy selves to be the best people. We all think in a time of crisis, we will react heroically and with humanity.
I like to be a lot of different things at once and dress different ways and I change my hair all the time, so being an actor lets me live out the fantasy of living out 100,000 different lifetimes in one, without all of the repercussions.
Especially in the world of fantasy and superheroes, it’s great to have role models that aren’t in skimpy little outfits, in impossible poses. That’s so important for young women.
I cling to the fantasy that I could have done something more creative. Like actually writing a script, or writing a book. But the awful truth is that I… probably can’t!
‘Star Trek’ is science fiction. ‘Star Wars’ is science fantasy. Based on the episodes I worked on, I think with ‘Star Wars: Clone Wars,’ we’re starting to see a merging, though. It does deal, philosophically, with some of the issues of the time, which is always something ‘Star Trek’ was known for.
Richard Nixon had a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy life. He was a man with a grandiose thoughts: dreams of not simply being president but maybe becoming one of the truly great presidents of American history.
The genre of fantasy is about magic and occult characters.
I’m a massive science fiction and fantasy geek.
I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.
Most of my books have been written in the form of fantasy.
The idea of a world where all people are alike – in wealth or in anything else – is a fantasy for the stupid.
Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.
That would really be my fantasy – maybe just do three shows a year and each year in a different city, just singing for the people who really want to see it, and then just write for other people. I do love to sing, but I’m just as happy singing in the bathtub, you know?
People like rules, or at least the appearance of rules, even in fantasy.
The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC.
Although the Academy prefers their Best Pictures grounded in realism, not fantasy, Lee’s ‘Life of Pi’ win proved that the voters understand and appreciate the qualities a visionary director needs to create an otherworldly adventure.
The culture of celebrity has become insane. It’s all based on fantasy, and I find it creepy and disturbing.
When you are gestating, you feel full of life, you feel full of joy, you feel full of fantasy, of stories.
I can just remember being broke, wondering if I had any talent – really wondering whether this was all a fantasy – but I had to get out there and keep trying.
When we really start searching for the truth in stories, we can find it everywhere, not just in sincere confessions but in the deliberate lies and imagined possibilities, the magic and fantasy, and all the other unreal elements that go into the concoction of identity.
As a child I was really into fantasy books with elves and goblins and swords, and I went through a phase for a few years when I was reading endless series. But in the end I became totally fed-up with all these sub-Tolkien rip-offs because they all end up doing the same old things and there’s no rigour to it.
I do that mostly because I believe that the fantasy business is in terrible trouble right now, for several reasons, not the least of which being the almost Democrat vs. Republican mentality of readers on the Internet.
I’m not good at fantasy, no. I have been offered stuff, and I can’t get my head around it.
I think as women we’ve always been very used to growing up reading and identifying with male protagonists, especially in fantasy. There’s a saying in publishing that girls will read about boys, but boys will only read about boys, and it’s important to give women strong heroines.
I’m always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.
Science fiction and fantasy is a kind of literature that embodies the highest aspirations of the human race.
I like certain subgenres within science fiction and fantasy, and one of those is urban fantasy, and another is steampunk.
Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it.
While girls average a healthy five hours a week on video games, boys average 13. The problem? The brain chemistry of video games stimulates feel-good dopamine that builds motivation to win in a fantasy while starving the parts of the brain focused on real-world motivation.
I read fantasy books like the Harry Potter books, ‘Twilight,’ also biographies, and I like to read about people who have been through stuff like wars or lost their families – real life stuff, you know? I like to read about their experiences and how they coped with that.
I come from musical theater, and a lot of musical theater is about accepting fantasy. I think it is more about just being open and accepting.
My sister is older than me and would often go off, so I grew up alone in a sense. I had to amuse myself and developed a wonderful fantasy world and quite happily lived in it. I think, in adulthood, that helped me. I love pottering on my own.
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
My first three manuscripts were epic fantasy – like high fantasy – and then the fourth one was a historical fantasy about Mozart as a child. I still have a soft spot for that one!
The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy – you name it – and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?
My wife, Lisa, and I both grew up on wuxia – Chinese historical romances. They’re kind of analogous to Western epics. They’re based on history, just like ‘the Iliad’ and ‘the Odyssey’ are based on history, but they’re romanticized, and a lot of fantasy elements have been added.
The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep.
