You know, Itâs kind of fitting that It was Sir Terry Pratchett himself who answered this question in an interview, just going to paste this up real fast:
O: Youâre quite a writer. Youâve a gift for language, youâre a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. Youâre so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and Iâm feeling quite amiable. Thatâs why youâre still alive. I think youâd have to explain to me why youâve asked that question.
O: Itâs a rather ghettoized genre.
P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every bookâ I think Iâve done twenty in the seriesâ since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. Iâve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.
O: Itâs certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.
P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfireâ Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized itâ Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldnât have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrimâs Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply nowâ a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connectionsâ Thatâs fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
Now I donât know what youâd consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I donât think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliverâs Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what youâre saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! Iâve got a serious novel. But you donât actually have to do that.
(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.
Have to say I agree with the man.
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