Elf defense

“My mother had a routine (that) I’ve fought against my whole adult life,” Salvatore said in a phone conversation from his home in Massachusetts. He stresses you have “to get out of routines” to make your imagination work.

Part of that good fight against routine includes his writing — in particular, his phenomenally successful fantasy books, especially the saga of Drizzt Do’Urden. His newest book, “Rise of the King: Companions Codex II,” once again finds the dark elf in the middle of a battle against the orc kingdom of Many-Arrows.

Salvatore, 55, said he grew up reading typical children’s fare like “Peanuts” books and “The Wind in the Willows,” but when he was a sophomore in college he began his quest into the world of fantasy.

“My sister gave me a copy of the ‘The Lord of the Rings’ for Christmas. I was sort of mad — I wanted money,” he said. “Then the blizzard of ’78 hit the Boston area and I was stuck at my mother’s house. I went to Middle-earth and remembered the joy of imagining and escaping. Within a year I understood Shakespeare and Chaucer.”

Salvatore then read all the fantasy books he could find. He also changed his major from math to communication, turning his whole world upside down.

“At the time, (the fantasy genre) was lumped with science fiction, and shelves were mostly filled with Asimov and Clarke,” Salvatore said. “When I read all of them, I decided to write my own.”

He completed his first manuscript in 1982 and published his first book, “The Crystal Shard,” in 1988. Since then he has written or co-authored nearly 70 books of fantasy, including two with his son Geno. He said fantasy enables readers of all ages to better understand classics like

“The Iliad,” “The Odyssey” and “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,” even modern works such as “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” that use fantastical elements to tell their stories. And that’s not even including the hugely successful “Game of Thrones” series, which propelled fantasy into the mainstream.

“Science fiction was always treated as the ugly stepsister of fiction,” Salvatore mused, “and fantasy the ugly step sister of science fiction.” But he has his theories about why fantasy has become such a popular genre.

“It’s really about one person, usually an unassuming person, who can make a difference,” he said. “There’s a comfort in (that). There is a tradition in fantasy writing that the hero or antihero is rewarded for making the right choice and punished for bad choices. If the books that I write are anything, they’re my way of making sense of the world.”

He cites the ongoing popularity of “Star Wars” and the rise in attendance of conventions like Indianapolis’ GenCon as further proof of the power of fantasy. He said fantasy has come a long way from when it was identified with outcasts and idealists, but he has a message for authors in denial of their own genre, such as Margaret Atwood who said she doesn’t write fantasy.

“Yes, you do,” he said.

Salvatore is a huge fan of baseball (“The game teaches you how to fail — you either make the play or you don’t and the best teams often lose.”) as well as role-playing games such as “Dungeons & Dragons.” He and his son Bryan recently crowdsourced an original role-playing game, “Demon Wars: Reformation.” Salvatore said he began playing role-playing games in 1980 after a stretch at strategy board games, and called them “a great creative outlet.”

Salvatore said now that his family is raised, he’s begun to explore other arenas, including graphic novels, comics and scripting for video games. But that doesn’t mean he will abandon his fantasy writing.

“It’s not meant as a lament, but you do get pigeonholed in a genre and trapped by success,” he said. “My dream has always been to pitch at Fenway Park, but I never had a curve.”

R.A. Salvatore

Talk and book signing 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 1 Schuler Books & Music — Eastwood 2820 Towne Center Blvd., Lansing (517) 316-7495, schulerbooks. com