… they are very large, slick productions, where the average original can go anywhere from $5,000 to $500,000. 

Currently, I'm the president of the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists (ASFA), which is an international organization for artists who work in the science fiction and fantasy genre. Over the years ASFA has pushed to get the entire genre of science fiction and fantasy art recognized as more than pulp book covers and considered fine art.  

We're starting to achieve that with some of the brilliant artists that have come forward and successfully pushed the envelope. Artists such as Real Musgrave, whose collectible 3-D pieces and paintings are available throughout the world now. And Hap Heinrickson, who does incredible bronze sculptures that are prized throughout the world. 

One of the newer bronze sculptors, Clayburn Moore, is fairly famous for doing game-related bronze sculptures, but he started out as a fine art sculptor and actually made his first science fiction and fantasy debut at one of our art shows. He runs Moore Creations and is best known for doing sculptures of famous comic book and game-related figures.  

Crescent Blues: You know, I hate it when people denigrate those poor book covers, because half the time they're why I buy the book. 

Teresa Patterson: Those covers are being taken much more seriously than they were before. But in the early days of the pulps, it was just something garish and splashy to sell the books. Still, it's been a very long, hard journey for anyone related to science fiction and fantasy art to be taken seriously by the art establishment. It's been only recently that collectors' plate companies have been willing to deal with science fiction and fantasy art, or some of the fine art printmakers have been willing to work with science fiction and fantasy artists. 

Crescent Blues: Has the explosion of games and cards -- U.S. Games Systems publishing artists' tarot, for example, and such companies as Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf putting out those really exquisite card games -- helped the standing of science fiction and fantasy art? 

Teresa Patterson: Definitely. Right now, the gaming and products market is probably the biggest market in science fiction and fantasy. To the point that last year, ASFA voted two new Chesley Awards -- one of them for game-related art to cover all those new pieces that are being created for the card games and video games, and another for product-related art to cover those fabulous movie posters paintings and box-top paintings. 

Crescent Blues: What's a Chesley Award? 

Teresa Patterson: The Chesley Awards are the awards given out once a year by ASFA to honor the best work of that year, plus a lifetime achievement award within the genres of science fiction and fantasy. The award is named after the famous astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell. 

Crescent Blues: Do you still paint? 

Teresa Patterson: At the moment, the only art I do is the balloons, unless I have to doodle something for an ASFA Quarterly article. I do a regular column for the ASFA bulletin, and I've given up waiting for better illustrators to illustrate things for me, so I usually sit down and do it myself.  

Crescent Blues: Ironically enough, although your short stories appear in several anthologies, you're best known for your work on a project that combines both fiction and art, The World of Robert Jordan's the Wheel of Time. How did you come to collaborate with Robert Jordan on the guide to his Wheel of Time series? 

Teresa Patterson: I had worked with the packager of the book before. He needed someone he knew he could work with, who could handle the project and who wouldn't get their ego involved, because this would have to be a no-ego project. It was all about Robert Jordan. You can't put yourself in it anywhere. Finally, the packager needed someone who would be able to handle the non-fiction elements of the book and still make it interesting. 

Crescent Blues: You say "non-fiction elements" as if there was more involved. Does this mean The World of Robert Jordan's the Wheel of Time originally included fiction? 

Teresa Patterson: It was supposed to include fiction by Mr. Jordan and me, working together. The fiction sections all got cut. We're hoping there may be some way that in the future they will see the light of day. 

Crescent Blues: An expanded "authors' edition?" 

Teresa Patterson: No, it would probably be in a separate work. But whether that's ever going to happen or not, I honestly don't know. The problem was with pricing and space considerations. The book wound up being much longer than the publisher expected, and they decided that the only thing they could cut was the fiction, because anything else they cut would dilute the purpose of the book. Personally, I think they made a mistake, but I'm just one of the authors. [Laughs.] 

Crescent Blues: How did it wind up being longer than anticipated? 

Teresa Patterson: When a World book is designed, the packager looks at the earlier books in the series. The other ones they've done include A Dragonrider's Guide to Pern and The Guide to Amber, both of which were trade paperbacks. The packager was going on [those precedents]. So when he originally came to me about the project, he said, "If you get this, can you do it? We need about 60,000 words in three months?" 

And not being a fool, I said, "Sure," while having tongue firmly planted in cheek. At that point I had not read the books. I had only vaguely heard about Robert Jordan, and I had no idea of the depth of his world.  

Crescent Blues: It's over 20 books, isn't it? 

Teresa Patterson: No, it's actually eight books at this point. But each book is around 900 printed pages, which equates to somewhere around 1,500 manuscript pages, which is the equivalent of two or three regular books contained in each one. So you could say it might be the equivalent of around 20 books. 

The thing is, Robert Jordan is a master world-builder. As someone who reads a lot of fantasy, Tolkien included, I can honestly say I have not run into anyone who does as diverse and detailed a job of world-building as Robert Jordan. Various cultures, various terrains, various ecologies. He uses the principles of physics, so his magic system actually has rules that make it more like a scientific system than magic. And all of these things, I think, are part of why he's so popular with the readers. 

But the downside was, his world is complex. It's very easy to get lost and lose cohesion with what went before and what the world was really like and how this related to that over there. My job was to try to take all these diverse pieces and put them together in a book you could easily use as a reference. And in the book, we tried to put some things that were not shown anywhere else, so that there were surprises that won't come out until later books. 

Crescent Blues: Did everything have to be derived from the eight-times-nine hundred pages, or did Jordan have a master plan for his world? 

Teresa Patterson: He has a master plan for his world, most of which is still in his head. He does know exactly where it's going and how it's all going to end. What he doesn't know is how many books it's going to take to get there. 

Crescent Blues: I seem to recall reading that Jordan didn't realize it was going to take this long to tell the story.  

Teresa Patterson: No he didn't. He planned to whip this out and go back to writing history, which is his real love. That's why he wrote under a pseudonym. His real name is James Rigney. 

Crescent Blues: What was his area of history? 

Teresa Patterson: Military history, but what area, I'm not actually certain. 

But I should add that the Wheel of Time universe is a joint creation of Mr. Jordan and his wife, Harriet. Harriet is his editor. Harriet is very much involved in her husband's work, both as the nurturer and the editor helping him to bring it to life, and part of the creative energy. 

Crescent Blues: This is interesting, because from reading "The Gift" (in Time of the Vampires), I get the feeling that you have a certain penchant for historical research yourself. 

Teresa Patterson: I honestly feel that if you're going to tell any kind of story, you have to be able to make it feel real to the reader. When you're doing either science fiction or fantasy, you have an additional challenge -- you must be able to cause the reader to suspend their disbelief. In other words, you must make them able to easily believe in what you are telling them.  

To me, the best way to do that is to have enough reality involved in your background and your universe, so that the parts that are created or fictitious or magical make sense, because the rest of it is so obviously grounded in what is known and real. And even if the readers themselves aren't experts in horsemanship or firearms, I think they can tell the difference between something that is real and true, and something that you're making up out of whole cloth. 

As a writer in fantasy or science fiction, the more of it you can pull from reality, the less likely readers are to spot where you had to go sideways and invent stuff. And the more they will be drawn in where you want them to be and become involved in the lives and thoughts and feelings of your characters. And that means research. Writing fantasy usually means research into whatever areas of history most closely resemble your fantasy world, as well as studying cultural dynamics so that you understand how the changes you're proposing would affect the culture. 

Physics is important, because the best stories involving magic are those where the magic has real rules just like science and technology. In fact, it's been said that one man's science is another man's magic. In my opinion, you have to write fantasy to that end. And especially so in science fiction -- you can extrapolate stuff that isn't real, but it only, really, solidly works if it is plausible. If it feels like it's real. It does that best if you've done enough research so that the beginnings are real. 

Crescent Blues: Did you approach The World of Robert Jordan's the Wheel of Time in the same way? 

Teresa Patterson - Continued