The Slush God Speaketh…to Terry Brooks
Here are some outtakes from the SCI FI Wire piece I did about Terry Brooks’s latest novel, Armageddon’s Children a while back. So here’s Terry Brooks…
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…on the genesis of the book:
For years and years I have had requests from readers to write something about The Great Wars, about the beginning of the collapse of civilization and the rise of magic in place of science. I have always resisted that because I just didn’t want to go back in time, because I was always going forward and I hadn’t really thought about it . In ’96, ’97 I started work on Running with the Demon, which was the first of The Word and Void books, and I was interested in writing a dark contemporary fantasy in which there was a threat to humanity that humanity was completely unaware of and that felt like it fell into the fabric things. And I knew when I left that series in ’99, 2000 whenever it was, that whenever I got back into it, I was going to go back into it from the viewpoint of the Knights of the Word, who were the champions of the light [...]. So when I started working on that again about 24 months ago, I just started to think about the possibly of writing about here as the precursor to the Shannara world, and how would that work? Was it something that was a good idea or was it a harebrained ideas that I should forget about? And my editor basically said ‘Yeah, it’s a cool idea. Can you do it?’ So I am still finding that out, I guess.
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…on writing The Ghosts:
The hardest thing or maybe the thing that I took the most pleasure in doing was writing about the Ghosts, who are the street kids that we follow in this book. The kids are between 10 and 18 and have formed their own little family in the ruins in the city of
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