John Bell: What attracted you initially to heroic fantasy, a subgenre of fantastic literature that was once notorious for its less-than-enlightened racial attitude?

As a reader, I was attracted to the action, the mayhem, the exotic settings, and the sheet imaginary power of the genre. Also, I was fascinated by the kinship between heroic fantasy and the ancient myth-cycles that were the world's first literature. The legend of Beowulf, for example, could easily have been marketed today as heroic fantasy. As for the unenlightened racial attitudes, I must admit that when I first encountered the genre, in the early 1960s, I did not pay very much attention to the racial content of the stories I read. It was only when I became deeply absorbed in the study of African history and culture that I took a second look at the fantasy I had been reading, and at that point I began to seriously question the racial content of some of it.

Charles R. Saunders in “A Charles R. Saunders Interview”, by John Bell, Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 18, No. 2, Science Fiction Issue (Summer, 1984), p. 90