I’ve read that you wrote The Magic of Recluce, in part, to prove to yourself that you could successfully write fantasy. Given that, how much of the world’s major historical points did you have in mind when you first started and what came later? Were they mostly vague ideas that you knew would be flushed out later, or were they more concrete?

In writing The Magic of Recluce, I was more concerned with the magic system and in creating a world with a history. Even when I was writing science fiction, I wanted my worlds to have history. So by making historical references I gave myself the opportunity to exploit and expand the history. At the time, I didn’t know all the details; so some ideas were vaguer than others. Some, like the destruction of Fairhaven, were there from the beginning. The most significant expansion, in my view, was in Towers of the Sunset, but every book provides a certain addition to the world of Recluce.