A Hero's Throne (An Ancient Earth) (39 page)

ROSS: It depends on how you view the source material.

STEPHEN: Right. Exactly right. So, for Bright Empires, I deal with a lot of myths that are either so well recorded, or so recent, that they are accepted as history. Myths in the making, perhaps.

ROSS: It’s a line that keeps on blurring. It blew my mind to find out that until the early to mid-1800s the city of Troy, which is the foundation of just about all of Western literature and poetry, was lost. Most scholars of that period would have said that it never
existed, that it was all just an admirable fantasy. And then they found it. They actually found it and then they had to rewrite the textbooks. Literally. I loved that. I even put that incident into Book 1. It made me think: What else is still out there, waiting to be discovered? What’s the next thing that will make us rethink who we are?

STEPHEN: But that’s the case with all of these myths. Sometimes we might be lucky and, yes, find an entire city, but maybe sometimes, most of the time, we won’t. We may never find Excalibur, or Robin Hood’s bones—it may never happen. But is that any real reason to say that they didn’t exist? The reasons that people wrote, or told, rather, was not just for entertainment. There was something real that they were trying to communicate.

ROSS: And that goes right back to the stories told around the campfire. Trying to answer the questions of why we’re here and where we’re going. Who we really are and how we can try to be better than that. No matter our culture, our religion, our philosophy, we’re all still trying to figure out those fundamental questions, and history, myth, fantasy, whatever slice of the spectrum you like to take, is an essential part of that.

STEPHEN: Amen.

About the Author

Author photo by Colin Munro

Ross Lawhead was born in America but grew up in England. He studied screenplay writing at Bournemouth University before moving on to pencil the
!Hero
graphic novel and coauthor the
!Hero
novel trilogy with his father. He has also coauthored humorous books of poetry and created a theological superhero. Find him at rosslawhead.com/blog.