Peter Harris

Although I am an 'Antipodean' from New Zealand, my deepest sympathies lie with Tolkien and the True West, and therefore with England, or to be accurate what C.S.Lewis calls 'Logres', the true heart of England. So I have been gratified to see my sales on the UK Amazon site increasing to rival those of the US site. Wonderful! Hence this author profile (the US one doesn't feed through to the UK site).

I write fantasy, or rather, I have a World into which I disappear from time to time in order to discover more of it by writing, just as I still often disappear into Middle Earth for my bedtime reading. I hope my World of Aeden will inspire 'secondary belief' for others just as Tolkien's world (and C.S.Lewis's) did for me. And a yearning for something that is beyond all Worlds.

Now, I need to confess to not being (not for many years) a Christian like my two greatest fantasy heroes, but I am a Platonist, a Pagan, and a Romantic, and I hope I have done no violence to the real values of either of those wonderful wizards of the imagination. Also in sometimes styling myself the 'Wizard of Eutopia', I hope I do not put off any Christians of open mind. Gandalf rather than Merlin is my greatest wizardly inspiration. And I do not cast spells on people - well, not by hocus pocus. But I do believe in Magic, in that, as I say in 'How to be a Wizard', Life is magical and we are too.

So, I am a 'Eutopian', believing that a 'Good Place' or piece of true civilisation, can and should be created wherever we live, and in whatever age we find ourselves. Especially important in an 'Age of Jade' such as the one we seem to be slipping into, where everything has been seen on TV or You Tube and the sense of wonder at lovingly created artefacts and ideals seems to be at an all-time low, and all future fictions are Dystopias...

If what I've said resonates with you I think you will like all my books, fiction and non-fiction. If not, you will probably think them hopelessly idealistic, romantic and optimistic. I suppose you could read 'Fantastic Ferrocement' and be a Dystopian DIY, or even get something out of 'Happiness - It's Now or Never' if you believe in 'Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die'. I think there is much, much more to happiness than that, though, and I hope 'The Apples of Aeden' will help remind you what it once was, and can be again.