ORONOron is fifty years old.
OroI began typing the manuscript on my twenty-first birthday in August 1973 on my portable Smith-Corona typewriter, deliberately holding off until that day to do it. But I had already been drawing maps of Attluma and envisioning the story in the months before beginning it. Attluma, I decided, was the logical location for the fantasy and sword-and-sorcery stories I had written till then; otherwise, these narratives floated around on their own, each in its own nameless imaginary land. And it was the landscape in which to set the heroic tragedy I was preparing to write.
The idea of a vast continent doomed to destruction was, of course, inspired by the legend of Atlantis, which still fascinates me. Otherwise, the inspiration for this epic was twofold, the first b
