That impressed me. I didn’t know engineers could think like that. Already, the hard edges of the machinery were being filmed with the grease of fantasy—or whimsy, you might say, which is only fantasy with its shirt undone. I realized then that if ever there is a moon base, or a Mars base, or an L5 colony, then our interior decorator minds will furnish the new landscape with reconditioned fantasies: shadowy figures that live in the girderwork and steal electricity, maybe, or dwarfs that come out of the computer panelling and clean your helmet at night, if you leave them a bowl of nutrient soup.
We spray our fantasies on the landscape like a dog sprays urine. It turns it into ours. Once we’ve invented our gods and demons, we can propitiate or exorcize them.
Once we’ve put fairies in the sinister solitary thorn tree, we can decide where we stand in relation to it; we can hang ribbons on it, see visions under it—or bulldoze it up and call ourselves free of superstition.
ELVES WERE BASTARDS
Hillcon programme book, 1992
I reread this twelve years later and thought: wow, I must have been having a really bad day, do I still believe this?
And the answer is yes, for a given value of “yes.”
In 1992, the boom in fantasy that had begun in the mid-eighties had just reached the crest of the wave. You couldn’t move for the stuff, local and imported. A lot of it was good, but much of it was bad—not necessarily badly written, but bad in that it brought nothing to the party. I recall an issue of Locus magazine that discussed or advertised three different titles that included a Dark Lord as the enemy (no, none of them was LOTR). Oh, dear. Dark Lords should be rationed.
Convention bookstalls were crowded with the stuff. The covers had a certain sameness. There were good books in there, but how could you tell? So many unicorns, dragons, quests, elves … heroic fantasy was feeding on itself.
Bad for fantasy, good for me; it was a target-rich environment.
Anyway, that was then … I feel a lot calmer now. Probably it would be a good idea if I kept away from Disneyworld for a while.
I’m called a writer of fantasy, but I’m coming to hate the term. Why? Because what could be so good is often so bad. Because there’s so much trash out there, so much round-eyed worship of mind-numbing myths, so much mindless recycling of ancient cycles, so much unthinking escapism.
I’m not against recycling. The seasons do it. So do pantomimes, so do fairy stories. The retelling of oft-told tales is an honourable art—but there should be some attempt at texture and flair. Star Wars was the quintessential heroic fantasy story, with just enough twist and spin to give it an extra edge. Robocop retold an ancient tale in a new voice and was marvellous; Robocop II was superexpensive trash because people didn’t understand what they’d got.
Unfortunately, there’s still a market for rubbish. I picked up a recently written fantasy book at the weekend, and one character said of another: “He will grow wroth.” Oh, my God. And the phrase was in a page of similar jaw-breaking, mock-archaic narrative. Belike, i’faith … this is the language we use to turn high fantasy into third-rate romantic literature. “Yonder lies the palace of my fodder, the king.” That’s not fantasy—that’s just Tolkien reheated until the magic boils away.
I get depressed with these fluffy dragons and noble elves. Elves were never noble. They were cruel bastards. And I dislike heroes. You can’t trust the buggers. They always let you down. I don’t believe in the natural nobility of kings, because a large percentage of them in our history have turned out to be power-crazed idiots. And I certainly don’t believe in the wisdom of wizards. I’ve worked with their modern equivalents, and I know what I am talking about.
Fantasy should present the familiar in a new light—I try to do that on Discworld. It’s a way of looking at the here and now, not the there and then. Fantasy is the Ur-literature, from which everything else sprang—which is why my knuckles go white when toe-sucking literary critics dismiss it as “genre trash.” And, at its best, it is truly escapist.
But the point about escaping is that you should escape to, as well as from. You should go somewhere worthwhile, and come back the better for the experience. Too much alleged “fantasy” is just empty sugar, life with the crusts cut off.
I’m writing this in Florida, home of fantasy—either the sort that you watch, or the sort that you stick up your nose. They’ve got some weird stuff here; for one thing, they’ve got Disney/MGM and Universal Studios.
And this is what’s weird about them. They aren’t really studios. Oh, they shoot some film here, but that’s kind of secondary. They weren’t built as studios. They were built as … well, as theme parks. Those false frontages, those artful backlots, those false-perspective streets, they were built for no other purpose than to look like something which in turn was built to look like something. Built to look like something that isn’t real.
Whoever would have thought it?
Here in America—and in England, to a lesser extent—you can read newspaper articles and buy alleged books which treat the characters played by TV stars as if they were real people. The world has gone strange. You can’t tell the reality from the fantasy anymore. Think I’m kidding? On the racks at the supermarket are “newspapers” like the Sun, the Midnight Star, the Weekly World News. Typical lead story: Elvis has been found alive in a UFO dredged from the Bermuda Triangle. People read this stuff. It’s not even good SF. They have a vote, same as you.
This is all “escape from” stuff—the Disney rides, the elves, the stupid stories. It goes nowhere. The best stuff does take you somewhere. It takes you to a new place from which to see the world. An interest in fantasy when I was a child gave me an interest in books in general, and I found in books on astronomy and palaeontology a deep sense of wonder that not even Middle-earth could beat.
Let’s not just leave here. Let’s go somewhere else. And if we can trample over some elves to do it, so much the better.
LET THERE BE DRAGONS
The Bookseller, 11 June 1993
A speech in defence of fantasy given when guest of honour at the Booksellers Association Conference annual dinner in Torquay in 1993
I have still got the first book I ever read. It was The Wind in the Willows. Well, it was probably not the first book I ever read—that was no doubt called something like Nursery Fun or Janet and John Book 1. But it was the first book I opened without chewing the covers or wishing I was somewhere else. It was the first book which, at the age of ten, I read because I was genuinely interested.