Viren R. Shah Atlanta Signing at Science Fiction & Mystery, October 17 1994
Viren R. Shah
I'm sure someone's gonna post the whole interview on here, but I caught about 8-10 minutes of it, and I'll try and write down the points I remember [I was kinda occupied at the moment, so my recollection might not be too good]
1> RJ feels that the Arthurian legend is very obvious in WoT, so he tried his level best to hide it.
2> As regards Randland being the future/part of our world, he made a reference to the game 'Chinese Whispers'. He said that, like in the game, the happenings of our time/age will be changed/twisted [my words] into Randland's myths, and similarly the occurences in Randland will/have become our myths.
He also mentioned the fact that he tried to 'reverse engineer'[his word] the current myths that we have into WoT's happenings/history, and our history into WoT's myths.
3> He said that he used legends from several sources including Arthurian, Celtic, Indian, North American Indian, Oriental, [and some others which I've forgotten]
4> There was also something mentioned about the songs that he used in the books -- John Adcox asked him whether he had deliberately given the songs a Celtic slant. [I can't for the life of me remember the answer]
5> RJ refused to give hints about the next book.
6> RJ was also surprised that the books were as successful as they turned out to be.
I'm sure that someone else in Atlanta [Erica?? Danny??] will have the interview recorded and will post it. Most of these points we already know from past interviews, so we didn't gain as much info. as I'd have liked to hear.
Anything that I've gotten wrong is definitely 'cause of my recollection, not anything else.
Viren