If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.

If you had an alien race that looked like insects, then they would build robots to look like themselves, not to look like people.

I don't think the author should make the reader do that much work to remember who somebody is.

The real key is time management and being able to focus on what you need to, on using every available minute to accomplish something that needs to be done.

We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up.

I did several interesting jobs, working in restaurants, I worked at a lab rat farm, feeding and watering all these rats. Then I got a full-time job as a technical writer for a large scientific research laboratory.

ELANTRIS is a new BEN HUR for the fantasy genre, with a sweeping, epic storyline and closely personal characters.