The Same World, Seen Sideways
I kept reading fantasy, of course.
And if you ask me today who my favorite author is, I have a very easy answer:
The funny thing is that you probably wouldn't look at Ankhara and immediately say, “Ah, yes. Obviously Pratchett.”
His influence on me wasn't that direct.
It was a way of looking at things.
Pratchett could build a completely fantastical world and somehow use it to make you look differently at this one.
That fascinated me.
Fantasy didn't have to be an escape from reality.
Sometimes fantasy could take reality, turn it slightly sideways, and hand it back to you.
And suddenly you could see something that had been sitting in front of you your entire life.
I remember encountering his way of looking at insurance—essentially as betting that something bad is going to happen to you—and something in my brain snapped into place.
Everyone knows what insurance is.
But not everyone looks at it and sees that.
I think being able to look at an ordinary thing from an unusual angle is one of the greatest tools a writer can have.
Pratchett taught me to look sideways.
What If an Idea Could Walk Into the Room?
I never stopped reading comics while all of this was happening.
In fact, after I started working, there was a period when I would buy almost every comic book published in Turkish each month.
A lot of them left something behind.
But Neil Gaiman and The Sandman deserve a separate mention.
I loved the way Gaiman could take fantastical elements and quietly insert them into the modern world.
But The Sandman did something else to my imagination.
It made the abstract concrete.
Dream didn't simply have to be someone who controlled dreams.
He could be Dream.
Death didn't have to be something that happened.
Death could walk into the room. She could speak. She could have a personality.
An abstract concept could become a character without losing what made it abstract in the first place.
That was fascinating to me.
Two Voices I Was Waiting For
There is one small memory that probably shows how important Pratchett and Gaiman had become to me by then.
Good Omens, the book they wrote together, was the first book I can remember actively waiting to be translated into Turkish.
When the translation finally appeared, I bought it immediately.
And finished it.
Eventually, consuming other people's worlds wasn't enough.
And here's the strange part:
Ankhara wasn't my first attempt at Ankhara.
It wasn't even called Ankhara.