Sour Grapes

So Terry Pratchett says that JK Rowling being elevated at the expense of other writers, ie, him.

Pratchett came along (quite by accident!) to my 18th birthday bash. He brought along a handy briefcase of fine liquors, and a carefree, fun, approachable attitude. It was a blast. This was in the 1980s, before he had achieved what, before Rowling, was probably the greatest success in the UK fantasy genre.

Over the next few years, as he carefully cultivated his fan base, surrounded himself with adoring acolytes, and grew more full of himself, he became more distant and significantly less fun to be around. He was all business. This mealy-mouthed article confirms it.

I’ve never read this Potter stuff, but it seems harmless young adult fiction material. Rowling does stand, however, in a long line of successful writers desperately and vaingloriously denying their genre heritage in an effort to widen their sales appeal.

I am reminded of Moorcock on Tolkien: Epic Pooh.

Like Chesterton, and other orthodox Christian writers who substituted faith for artistic rigour [Tolkien] sees the petit bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos. These people are always sentimentalized in such fiction because traditionally, they are always the last to complain about any deficiencies in the social status quo … High Tory Anglican beliefs permeate the book as thoroughly as they do the books of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, who, consciously or unconsciously, promoted their orthodox Toryism in everything they wrote.

All the current fantasy writers work in the shadow of the two most criminally overlooked modern fantasy writers: Fritz Leiber (whose Lankhmar stories form much more of a template for modern edgy fantasy, RPGs, and MMOGs than the Tolkien stuff) and Jack Vance (whose Dying Earth stories are the template for any number of eschaton-obsessed fantasy works and quests).

Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, of course, stands singularly alone as the la recherche du temps perdu of the genre.