The Dragon's Path

the prince standing at his side.
    “Basrahip, high priest of the goddess, may I introduce my new ward Prince Aster. Prince Aster, this is Basrahip.”
    The prince walked forward, stopped the appropriate distance away, and bowed his small head. He looked like a kitten greeting a bull.
    “I am very pleased to meet you, sir,” the prince said.
    Basrahip smiled.
    “No,” he said, softly. “You aren’t. But give it time, young prince. Give it time.”

meet the author
     

    Kyle Zimmerman
     
    D ANIEL A BRAHAM is the author of the critically acclaimed Long Price Quartet. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards, and won the International Horror Guild award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) James S. A. Corey. He lives in New Mexico. Find out more about the author at www.danielabraham.com .

interview
     
    The Dragon’s Path
marks the beginning of a new epic fantasy project for you. What was the impulse behind this project, and how was it different from the other books you’ve written?
Actually, that’s kind of a hard question. The impulse behind a project isn’t something I can really describe. You know, apart from saying that it seemed nifty. But I can talk about the approach. That was very different from what I’ve done before.
    How so?
Well, the last epic fantasy—or second world fantasy or however we want to talk about it—was my first big book, essentially. I wanted to do something different and novel, no pun intended. And I wanted to learn how to write book-length fiction. I’d done a lot of short stories, and I felt pretty comfortable with that length, but novels were a different beast.
    That’s interesting. We should get back to that, but tell me a little about the novelty. What do you mean by that?
I mean, I wanted to do something that people hadn’t seen before. I wanted an epic fantasy without much violence. I wanted to tell a few people’s stories over the span of their whole lives. I wanted to set it someplace that wasn’t a medieval Europe analogue. I wanted to write something that was different. And I did, and I’m proud of it. But part of what I learned is that different is easy in a way I hadn’t expected. And I started getting interested insomething else. I started thinking about how to take elements that are maybe more familiar and remake them. That’s not quite right. I don’t mean take out hoary old tropes and shine them up. I mean, go to what makes epic fantasy epic fantasy—find the genre’s strength—and really engage with it.
    How did you go about that?
Well, back in 2007 I arranged a conversation. A friend of mine has a place just outside Santa Fe with a really nice living room that looks out over the desert, and she let me have kind of a party there. I called it my symposium. We had George R. R. Martin and S. M. Stirling and Walter Jon Williams and Melinda Snodgrass and a few others—a lot of the local folks—and basically we sat around all day talking about what epic fantasy is and does. Where it gets its juice. I have something like four or five hours of recordings from that. I took what we said there and I turned it over in my head until I really understood what my opinions were. And that was the start of The Dagger and the Coin.
    That sounds like a fascinating day. Was there a consensus? Did everyone there have more or less the same opinion on the subject?
Not exactly, no. But there were points that were pretty widely agreed on. Epic fantasy has a lot to do with nostalgia. There’s that sense of looking back at a golden age, and a lot of the time with a sense of loss. Tolkien came up a lot. Pretty much everything since
The Lord of the Rings
has been written in imitation of or reaction against
The Lord of the Rings.
But it also has to do with how the story relates to nature, and whether the world is essentially benign.
The biggest thing that I took away from it, though, is that epic fantasy—and maybe this is true for all literature—but epic fantasy is a conversation. Without Tolkien, you don’t have Terry Brooks, but you also don’t have Stephen Donaldson. Without Donaldson and the rise of the antihero in fantasy, you probablydon’t have
A Song of Ice and Fire.
In a way, that gave me permission.
    Permission for what, exactly?
Permission to react, I guess. Permission to be part of a greater body of literature than just what I’m doing right here. That sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? How about this: it gave me