(With nods to and Neil Gaiman.)

Much has been made recently about Terry Pratchett’s “snipe” at JK Rowling, mostly based on an article about Rowling in a recent issue of Time magazine. The Time article was pretty badly written, full of hyperbole and speculation, and an astonishingly bad example of journalism. There was at least one point in that article (that JK Rowling had never read the entire Chronicles of Narnia series) which I knew was an utter lie. And anyone who’s read C. S. Lewis extensively knows that he harbored no “sentimentality toward children”; in fact, he could barely stand to be around children. Rowling did have issues with Narnia, but she did indeed read the entire series, and she enjoyed it. And Pratchett’s “swipe” at Rowling is more properly described as a swipe at the bad reporting in Time magazine.

For a more explicit example of how the press can misinterpret such things, compare Terry Pratchett’s speech which he gave when he accepted the Carnegie Award for The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. You can find it here. Then take a look at this article which reports on his speech.

Now, Terry Pratchett is, by all accounts, a funny and good-natured guy, both as a novelist and as a person. And darned smart. When he says, “Far more beguiling than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive jewellery into a volcano is the possibility that evil can be defused by talking”, he knows perfectly well that The Lord of the Rings is about far, far more than defeating evil just by destroying a ring. But how many bad fantasy writers did miss that point in LotR, and write derivative fantasy in which evil was simply destroyed by destroying an amulet (seems to me I’ve run a good number of D&D games where that was exactly the plot point). And when he says, “Of course, everyone knows that fantasy is ‘all about’ wizards, but by now, I hope, everyone with any intelligence knows that, er, what everyone knows…is wrong”, you have to squint pretty hard to interpret that as an attack on Rowling. At worst, it’s a swipe at people who believe that the Harry Potter books represent all that there is to fantasy.

Neil Gaiman, another brilliant writer, had this to say about the issue. And, of course, he said it much more coherently than I ever could. (On a side note: I once was friends with a woman whose name was C., and who claimed to be Neil Gaiman’s girlfriend at the time. This would have been 1993 or 1994. I didn’t have trouble believing her, because I’ve found a few references to the area that she and I lived in in The Sandman and elsewhere; but now I’m not so sure, because, based on some biographical snippets I’ve read from Gaiman, I’m not sure the chronology works out.)

Anyway. In a way, it’s very frustrating to see the press treat the science fiction and fantasy community this way. It’s the same sort of thinking which prompted some schmuck in Hollywood to make the film Dungeons and Dragons (or worse, a sequel). There’s a thinking predominant in broader society which says it’s simply impossible that anything that is science fiction or fantasy can possibly be of any quality at all (regardless of the phenomenal success of The Lord of the Rings movies), and that’s a shame.

On the other hand, it does give me pause for thought. If Time and other news outlets are so poor at depicting what’s going on in a community that I know something about, then how good can the news media possibly be at reporting anything else?