There's lots of differences between the two. Turns out, it seems everyone who reads it works in media.
Someone was asking me about the book years ago, and I answered them thinking that this is a pretty specific market this magazine reaches. The "African 'Game of Thrones'" thing started almost a joke. It doesn't matter how wonderful you are, you could die on the next page. In "Game of Thrones," all bets are off with the characters. I love "Game of Thrones." There are things about "Game of Thrones" that I've always loved. Your book is being touted as "the African 'Game of Thrones.'" How does it parallel what George R. That's really what it is, me just pulling on this vast resource that was always available to me but I never really paid attention to. Most of the creatures I'm writing about in some ways don't really exist in African mythology, I just wanted to use that culture, that reservoir of resources, in the same way that "Lord of the Rings" uses Viking lore or Celtic lore, even though it's ultimately not a Viking book.
I didn't want to make a historical novel. I really wanted, almost as an exploratory mission for myself, to look at the myths in African culture and African history and use that as a kind of springboard to make a leap of imagination. Every culture has their fantastic beasts and their creatures and so on. But just look at some of the hallmarks of fantasy and see how much it reflects a Norse or Celtic or Saxon mythology.Įvery culture has their mythologies.
That can't be helped: Most of the books are written by people with Euro-centric worldviews. As somebody who also likes sci-fi and fantasy a lot, I was also kind of exhausted of them, because of how Euro-centric they are. That said, I'm originally a fantasy geek and a sci-fi geek. Me saying "fantasy" is just trying to find a genre that fits into the very limited ways we have to describe books. "I'm still interested in that kind of story: The people who would not be in history books but still manage to shape the course of events." Yes, there are spirits that mean you good and there are spirits that mean you bad, and there are monsters and so on, but it's not looked upon as a sort of distant reality. Meaning: In the worldview of the novel I'm writing, it's not fantasy at all. If I were to give "One Hundred Years of Solitude" to a Yoruba and say, "It's magical realism," they would read it and ask me, "Where's the magic?" It's shorthand, really: It saves me having to explain it in a greater detail. Why make the leap to fantasy?įantasy, in a lot of ways, is more of a Western European definition. Your last novel, "A Brief History of Seven Killings," was realist fiction.
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