Let me tell you about the nuclear power plant built on—well, nearly on—an Iron Age burial mound. Pixies’ Mound, the locals called it. And during the course of its construction the station workers got into the habit of blaming everything from a lost hammer to a major project delay on the malign influence of the Pixie (apparently someone had accidentally driven a lorry over his mound, which is the sort of thing pixies really hate). Of course, they didn’t believe it. And as a joke, when the station was finished, the contractors presented the first station manager with a model garden gnome—the Pixie. And it was put in the station’s trophy cabinet. And a story sprang up that if it was ever moved, something would go wrong on the site. And one day it was put in a cupboard. Three weeks later a freak storm swept up the estuary and flooded the pump house to a depth of six feet, knocking four reactors and hundreds of megawatts of generating capacity off-line.
TV crews came out the next day to film the cleanup and, yes, one of the work crew mentioned the Pixie, who was duly exhumed from his cupboard for his moment of celebrity. Ho ho ho, the pixie curse shut the station. Ho ho ho.
In those days you could still be funny about nuclear power. It made a good story on the TV news, and headed up quite a decent piece about the speed with which the station had been brought back on line.
The story went round the world. Somewhere early in its travels the vitally important “ho ho ho” element got removed. And we got letters from everywhere. What was then West Germany led the field, I seem to remember. “Please tell us more about the creature that shut down a nuclear power station,” they said.
I was told to draft a suitable form of reply, and I have to say it was a pretty good one.
It talked about the concept of gremlins, and how lots of trades created little superstitions and mythologies. But as a PR man for the place, I became aware that not everyone on the site was 100 percent behind my cheery statements saying that, of course, we didn’t actually believe it. They were engineers. They knew about Murphy. They weren’t about to upset no pixie.
In fact, I had a conversation with one senior engineer, in the shiny, bright, and modern power station, that went like this:
“You can’t say that no one here believes it.”
“Do you want me to say that people here do believe it, then?”
“No. Say it’s just … a story.”
And later one of them said, “I wonder what legends will accumulate around this place in a thousand years’ time, when it’s just a mound. The villagers will probably say that at midnight you can see a team of physicists walk their rounds.” And we agreed that, if people didn’t think very carefully about warning signs, a dead and buried nuclear reactor would make the classic cursed tomb: not long after breaking into it, people would die mysteriously.
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.
I know now, of course, that it is totally the wrong kind of book for children. There is only one female character and she’s a washerwoman. No attempt is made to explain the social conditioning and lack of proper housing that makes stoats and weasels act the way they do. Mr. Badger’s house is an insult to all those children not fortunate enough to live in a Wild Wood. The Mole and the Rat’s domestic arrangements are probably acceptable, but only if they come right out and talk frankly about them.
But it was pressed into my hand, and because it wasn’t parents or teachers who were recommending the book I read it from end to end, all in one go. And then I started again from the beginning, because I had not realized that there were stories like this.
There’s a feeling that I think is only possible to get when you are a child and discover books: it’s a kind of fizz—you want to read everything that’s in print before it evaporates before your eyes.
I had to draw my own map through this uncharted territory. The message from the management was that, yes, books were a good idea, but I don’t recall anyone advising me in any way. I was left to my own devices.
I am now becoming perceived as a young people’s writer. Teachers and librarians say, “You know, your books are really popular among children who don’t read.” I think this is a compliment; I just wish they would put it another way. In fact, genre authors get to know their reader profile quite intimately, and I know I have a large number of readers who are old enough to drive a car and possibly claim a pension. But the myth persists that all my readers are aged fourteen and called Kevin, and so I have taken an interest in the dark underworld called children’s literature.
Not many people do, it seems to me, apart from those brave souls who work with children and are interested in what they read. They’re unsung resistance heroes in a war that is just possibly being won by Sonic Hedgehogs and bionic plumbers. They don’t have many allies, even where you would expect them. Despite the huge number of titles that pour out to shape the minds of the adults, my Sunday paper reviews a mismatched handful of children’s books at infrequent intervals and, to show its readers that this is some kind of literary play street, generally puts a picture of a teddy bear on the page.
Perhaps the literary editor’s decision is right. In my experience children don’t read reviews of children’s books. They live in a different kind of world.
The aforementioned school librarians tell me that what the children read for fun, what they will actually spend their money on, are fantasy, science fiction, and horror and, while they offer up a prayer of thanks that the kids are reading anything in this electronic age, this worries them. It shouldn’t.
I now know that almost all fiction is, at some level, fantasy. What Agatha Christie wrote was fantasy. What Tom Clancy writes is fantasy. What Jilly Cooper writes is fantasy—at least, I hope for her sake it is. But what people generally have in mind when they hear the word fantasy is swords, talking animals, vampires, rockets (science fiction is fantasy with bolts on), and around the edges it can indeed be pretty silly. Yet fantasy also speculates about the future, rewrites the past, and reconsiders the present. It plays games with the universe.
Fantasy makes many adults uneasy. Children who like the stuff tend to call it “brill” and “megagood.” This always disturbs people. (It worries them so much that when someone like P. D. James uses the mechanisms of science fiction, helpful people redefine the field, thus avoiding bestowing on her the mark of Cain; the book isn’t science fiction “because it’s not all about robots and other planets.” P. D. James writing science fiction? Impossible. But Children of Men is a science fiction book, as is Time’s Arrow, and Fatherland, as was Brian Aldiss’s Methuselah’s Children, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle. Science fiction, the stuff that is seldom reviewed, is often good; it doesn’t need robots, and earth is room enough.)
Of course science fiction and fantasy are sometimes badly written. Many things are. But literary merit is an artificial thing and exists in the eye of the beholder. In a world where Ballard’s Empire of the Sun cannot win the Booker, I’m not too in awe of judgements based on literary merit.
Not long ago I talked to a teacher who, having invited me to talk at her school, was having a bit of trouble with the head teacher, who thought that fantasy was morally suspect and irrelevant to the world of the nineties.
Morally suspect? Shorn of its trappings, most fantasy would find approval in a Victorian household. The morality of fantasy and horror is, by and large, the strict morality of the fairy tale. The vampire is slain, the alien is blown out of the airlock, the Dark Lord is vanquished, and, perhaps at some loss, the good triumph—not because they are better armed but because Providence is on their side.
Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does James Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.
To stay sane, if I may gently paraphrase what Edward Pearce recently wrote in the Guardian, it is frequently necessary for someone to take short views, to look for comfort, to keep a piece of the world still genially ordered, if only for the duration of theatrical time or the length of a book. And this is harmless enough. Classical, written fantasy might introduce children to the occult, but in a healthier way than might otherwise be the case in our strange society. If you’re told about vampires, it’s a good thing to be told about stakes at the same time.
And fantasy’s readers might also learn, in the words of Stephen Sondheim, that witches can be right and giants can be good. They learn that where people stand is perhaps not as important as which way they face. This is part of the dangerous process of growing up.
As for escapism, I’m quite happy about the word. There is nothing wrong with escapism. The key points of consideration, though, are what you are escaping from, and where you are escaping to.
As a suddenly thirsting reader I escaped first of all to what was then called Outer Space. I read a lot of science fiction, which as I have said is only a twentieth-century subset of fantasy. And a lot of it was, in strict literary terms, rubbish. But this was good rubbish. It was like an exercise bicycle for the mind—it doesn’t take you anywhere, but it certainly tones up the muscles.
Irrelevant? I first came a
cross any mention of ancient Greek civilization in a fantasy book—by Mary Renault. But in the fifties most schools taught history like this: there were the Romans who had a lot of baths and built some roads and left. Then there was a lot of undignified pushing and shoving until the Normans arrived, and history officially began.
We did Science, too, in a way. Yuri Gagarin was spinning around above our heads, but I don’t recall anyone at school ever mentioning the fact. I don’t even remember anyone telling us that science was not about messing around with chemicals and magnets, but rather a way of looking at the universe.
Science fiction looked at the universe all the time. I make no apology for having enjoyed it. We live in a science fiction world: two miles down there you’d fry and two miles up there you’d gasp for breath, and there is a small but significant chance that in the next thousand years a large comet or asteroid will smack into the planet. Finding this out when you’re thirteen or so is a bit of an eye-opener. It puts acne in its place, for a start.
Then other worlds out there in space got me interested in this one down here. It is a small mental step from time travel to palaeontology, from swords ’n’ sorcery fantasy to mythology and ancient history. Truth is stranger than fiction; nothing in fantasy enthralled me as much as reading of the evolution of mankind from protoblob to newt, tree shrew, Oxbridge arts graduate, and eventually to tool-using mammal.
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