It's a bugger

Via the journal of one of my most favourite authors, Neil Gaiman, I found a link to a speech by my other most favourite author. This is a speech that was given by Terry Pratchett at a book award ceremony. I know I have waxed lyrically about TP and other great authors before. Forgive me while I do it again.

I've linked to this in reaction to a recent Time Magazine article which says:
"The [fantasy] genre tends to be deeply conservative--politically, culturally, psychologically. It looks backward to an idealized, romanticized, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves"

Huh?? People who dismiss certain books as "just fantasy" either aren't reading decent authors or just don't get it.

TP has created a world with different continents, styles of governments, races, gods & religions, wars, corrupt officials, legal systems, transportation, prejudices (sound familiar?). The stories are written in the fantasy style - they have a pre-industrialisation feel; there are wizards, witches, magic, dragons ("put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer") but there are sparkling moments of clarity for the reader in which you realise that his books are a commentary on the strange, bizarre and downright ridiculous things humans get up to. Suddenly, you're laughing at yourself and our modern 'civilisation'.

In his speech, TP comments on how humour is a very useful tool in putting across ideas:
"The problem is that we think the opposite of funny is serious. It is not. In fact, as G K Chesterton pointed out, the opposite of funny is not funny, and the opposite of serious is not serious. Benny Hill was funny and not serious; Rory Bremner is funny and serious; most politicians are serious but, unfortunately, not funny. Humour has its uses. Laughter can get through the keyhole while seriousness is still hammering on the door. New ideas can ride in on the back of a joke, old ideas can be given an added edge."

This speech was written in 2001 but TP's next statement seems to be even more relevant for the present time:
"It's just unfortunate that the current international situation is pretty much the same old dull, stupid international situation, in a world obsessed by the monsters it has made up, dragons that are hard to kill. We look around and see foreign policies that are little more than the taking of revenge for the revenge that was taken in revenge for the revenge last time. It's a path that leads only downwards, and still the world flocks along it. It makes you want to spit. The dinosaurs were thick as concrete, but they survived for one hundred and fifty million years and it took a damn great asteroid to knock them out. I find myself wondering now if intelligence comes with its own built-in asteroid."

And I'll leave you with a quote from Good Omens By Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman which also seems to sum up the extremes in human behavious that the world is currently seeing:

"And just when you'd think [humans] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than ever Heaven dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger."