You understand, Pryn, I don’t believe in any of it: magic, miracles, religion, the calling of the gods, named… — Samuel R. Delany

I felt, and still feel, that it is important for fantasy to have a grasp of the complexity of fact, if not of factual content.

But as soon as any of us dies, there is only the monster left. What I had been pursuing was not Belham but the monster called Belham. And what my whole journey had taught me was precisely what sort of monster it was: it was made, as all such monsters are, of contradiction, supposition, miscalculation, impossibility, and ignorance.

The audience’s performance is always more or less stochastic.