Paying the PiperI’ve always found it easier to use real settings and cultures than to invent my own. No matter how good a writer’s imagination, the six or seven millennia of available human history can do a better job of creating backgrounds.

More than ten years ago I finally took the advice my friends Jim Baen and Mark Van Name had been giving me and did an afterword, explaining where I got the details of the book I’d just completed. I’d resisted this, feeling that it was bad art–the book should explain itself–and anyway, it was unnecessary. It was obvious to any reader that I was using historical and mythological backgrounds, so why should I bother to tell them? continue reading…