A: Every time I think of something new I jot it down in my notes. And I've built a sort of logic tree if this is so and that is so, then this other thing cannot be so. Sometimes you reach a point where if you follow one line a thing cannot be so, but if you follow another it must be so.

A: I look at the magic as though it were technology in a ways as though it were science. The One Power and Channeling follow rules. It's not simply free wheeling and anything goes, it follows specific rules. Those rules are pretty well worked out now.

A: Yes, it seems to me that the SF you like, as do I, so often the "ta-pocketa-pocketa" if you remember the old Walter Mitty movie, the ta-pocketa-poketa takes over and the characters are just there to see that it happens at the right time. The best SF goes much beyond that and there certainly a lot of flaws in a lot of Fantasy as well, but perhaps that's the reason I decided to go with Fantasy instead of SF.Also, SF has absorbed something from mainstream literature, and that is something I think of as a moral ambivalence, which is the erroneous application of situational ethics. There really isn't anything that's right or wrong, there is no good or evil, it all depends on the circumstances.

A: And I look at this and say, no, no. There is right and there is wrong and there is good and there is evil, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. But it's worth to try to tell the difference you don't just flip a coin.

A: I think so. Not to one value system. There are lots of value systems in this country. But I think that a lot of people want to believe in something, and they want a set of rules in life, or guidelines for life and behavior for what's right to do, or what's wrong to do and they may argue among themselves about whether this or that is right or wrong, but they want to believe in those things.

A: Yes, there is a difference between being tolerant and being a sponge.

A: And the technology is very often much more important than the issues, it seems to me. I say this as someone who likes Neil Stephenson. I like Greg Bear. I reread Heinlein periodically. love Science Fiction.

A: Absolutely. I hate what they did with Starship Troopers. I kept waiting for Heinlein to come out of his grave and beat them all over the head. They made it very blatant that we were going to have a Nazi future there and it was clear that the people who made it had no understanding of Robert Heinlein, or what made him tick, or what he was writing about.

A: Ah, yes. I didn't quite understand why they left that out. I looked at the whole movie and decided I didn't want to buy the DVD on this one.

A: I'd say, ambivalent. I wouldn't say, I was glad that I went but it was something I could not have done otherwise without being someone other than I was.

A: I was a gunner in Hueys. I was in Saigon in the beginning, and then out of Ben Wa, and we flew everywhere. Sun Sea, The Rubber Plantation, down to Cu Chi in the delta, over to Nui Ba Dinh, Black Virgin Mountain, and we were flying into Cambodia long before the "Parrots Beak".

A: I wish we didn't have to do it, but I think it's the best chance we have for making some sort of turnaround in the Arab world. That means forcing a settlement to the Palestinian question. Iraq, before Saddam took over was the most secular and educated nation, and it is the one that has the best chance, despite the difficulties, of moving into something we would recognize as democracy.If that could be done, it might mitigate, to a great extent, a lot of the street hatred of the west. It really is hatred. We let women think, we let them drive cars, we let them get jobs. We tolerate Jews. We do all of these things that are nasty and we are nasty ourselves. There's a great deal of hatred that stems from something that we in the US haven't seen since the Civil War, and possibly not even then. It's something that the Western World really hasn't seen in the last three of four hundred years. It's a hate of the other, because they are the other and not like me, therefore we will kill them.

A: A lot of it comes from awareness. Satellite television has made a lot of places in the world aware of Europe and the US, that thirty or forty years ago were barely aware of us.

A: Yes, by merely being here we threaten them. An expert was asked after 9/11 what we could do to wipe out these people's hatred of us and he paused a moment and then answered, "We could move off the planet."It's something we need to be concerned about. You may say, why do we care if a third world nation has a few A-Bombs, but you know, the Soviet Union was a third world nation. Once the wall came down, we realized we were looking at a Third World Nation that had held the world in the Cold War for all that time simply because they had nuclear weapons.I don't even want to think about a world in which North Korea and Saddam Hussein have nuclear weapons. Both of those governments have people which would be quite willing to use these things.

A: Well, yes, but our TV has been moved to the wee small hours. Movies are still popular, but the people aren't watching it unlike a government edict. They just seem to want to watch something else.

A: Possibly.

A: Well, no except to once again emphasize that you cannot start with Crossroads of Twilight. You must begin with Eye of the World (laughs).

A: Yes, and you don't have to go on, but it is the beginning and you learn things. I don't try to repeat the character's lessons. I simply assume in the later books that you have read what has gone before. You will know.

A: Yes, something very different from the Wheel of Time. A different universe and different culture and no connection to this world or universe, but it is a fantasy. I have the great story arc in mind, and I've been noodling it around in the back of my head for the last seven or eight years.

A: No, but let me give you an example of why. When I first thought I might have what would become the Wheel of Time ready, the character of Rand, who is about 19 years old, and his father Tam, were one character. A man who had run away from home as a boy of thirteen or fourteen, and in that sort of world that you can get if you've grown up on a farm. He began to work with horses among soldiers and then he became a soldier, and having spent twenty years of his life as a soldier, he's tired, and decides he wants to go home. So a man in his middle thirties returns home to his village, and discovers that the place he returns to is not the place he left, and that he is not the young man who ran away, and on top of that the world and phrophecy were hard on his heels. It would have been a very different story than the one I wound up writing. I decided that I wanted to split them because I wanted the major characters to be Candides. I wanted them to look at fresh eyes I wanted everything to be new.