Terry Pratchett uber alles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett's_Discworld
I can't wait for Thud in October...
Mystery lord of the Discworld
Terry Pratchett does fantasy differently from J.K.Rowling. But his success means that he can consider giving away film rights. Peter Fray reports.
Myths follow Terry Pratchett around almost as persistently as his fans buy his books. There's the myth that he is somehow an unknown writer, the myth that he dislikes Tolkien and the myth that he didn't learn to read until he was 10 years old.
Of all the myths often repeated in respectable journals it is the last one that gets the biggest rise, and the first that bemuses him most. "Oh, God," he says, when asked about his alleged double-digit illiteracy. "If you hadn't learnt to read by 10 at my school you'd get the shit beaten out of you. I was 10 before I started reading books for pleasure."
The first book the young Pratchett read was Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, a rustic fantasy with a message for adults and kids alike. Three years later he was a published author in the school rag and soon after in a magazine called Science Fantasy.
It is tempting to say the rest is history; certainly the rest is fantasy, literally and literary.
For the few people who don't know, Terry Pratchett, 56, is the multi-million-selling author of the Discworld series of books that, if it weren't for J.K. Rowling (more of her later) would be the world's biggest selling fantasy books.
Each Discworld - a world not unlike our own, though shared with the likes of witches, trolls, dwarfs and golems - book sells upwards of 400,000 copies, often many more.
Total sales for the series is, Pratchett estimates, about 35 million copies and the latest, Going Postal, the 33rd in the series, was No.1 in Britain's bestsellers list for a month. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages. Not bad going for an unknown author and not bad for an author who makes fantasy an arena for some seemingly very unfantastic subjects.
"The concerns are real within the book and within the plot but they may well also be considered real, in the sense of the real world, by the reader," he says. "Mr Lipwig in Going Postal, he's got issues, he's got things he's trying to do. You've got to be faithful to the fact you are writing that story."
Moist von Lipwig is a conman, who is pardoned from the hangman's noose only to be delivered unto the living hell of trying to fix the postal service, with not much more help than a few ageing, cantankerous postal workers and a golem, Mr Pump, who acts as parole officer and bodyguard. It is a tale of its time and our time, with plenty of Pratchettesque gags, part absurdism, part satire, part whoopee cushion.
"Going Postal is about venture capitalism and private enterprise versus state control and that kind of thing you don't get in Mordor."
You don't like Tolkien, then? "People keep telling me that," he says. "When I first read Tolkien I was 13 and I was completely blown away. I wrote a crossover short story, Jane Austen meets J.R.R. Tolkien. It was great, especially the bit where the orcs attack the rectory.
"When I saw the first Tolkien movie it was as if Peter Jackson had managed to find the 13-year-old boy I'd been and stuck some electrodes in my head and just filmed everything that I'd imagined.
"I probably still venerate Tolkien but I don't consider him to be the greatest author that has ever been in the world. He wrote an absolutely magnificent book that is firmly based in its time and you could not write the Lord of Rings again.
"There's a difference between immensely and deservedly popular and the best. I don't think I would vote the Lord of Rings as the best book ever written."
The British public begs to differ. About a year ago, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was voted Britain's favourite novel in an extensive BBC viewers' poll called The Big Read. (It also won the recent German equivalent.) J.K. Rowling was fifth, with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Pratchett had five books in the top 100 but none in the top 50. He and Charles Dickens had the most books nominated.
Like Dickens, Pratchett employs a journalist's ear for detail and character. Pratchett spent 13 years in regional journalism, from the age of 17. It exposed him to the weirdness of everyday life and taught him how to write and retain competing stories in his head, skills that still serve him well.
He has three books on the go at the moment, the first to be published (in autumn next year) is the next Discworld instalment, Thud!.
By way of a sneak preview, he reveals the opening line: " 'Thud! That was the noise the body made when it hit the ground'."
Pratchett owes a lot to his time covering courts and crime. He recalls a particularly bizarre moment when, during a coroner's hearing into the death of an old man in a house fire, the local policeman announced that "in the oven was a cold rice pudding".
"It just hung in the air. What can you do? What can you say? Do you burst into tears, join the foreign legion? It was just there."
Eventually, journalism got the better of him or he it. He baled out. "I was a sub-editor on a small chain of newspapers and I saw this chap getting his leaving present and I thought, 'that's going to be me. Do I like it here?' I thought, 'hang on, you're 30, you're too young to be doing the job you are going to be doing for the rest of your life, especially in journalism'."
But Pratchett had too much common sense - the byproduct of a deprived working-class upbringing - to chuck in his day job to become a full-time fantasy writer. Instead, for almost the next decade he was the PR flak and public face of a nuclear power company. It was the 1980s and with, first, Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl, everything nuclear was controversial. "Anything that happened on a nuclear power station was serious news and I was the guy who got the last call at midnight," he says.
He didn't become a professional writer until 1987, though the first Discworld came out in 1983. He has also written several children's books and won, in 2001, the respected Carnegie Medal for children's literature. He surprised the award ceremony by palming the medal for a chocolate coin and, to the shock of the unknowing guests, promptly eating it. Being in PR, the dark side of journalism also seems to have served Pratchett in good stead, especially when it comes to questions he'd prefer not to answer
or realises that most answers could easily be construed as the wrong one. He has also retained the skill to give the answer he wants to give rather than perhaps the one the question demands.
This comes in handy when discussing J.K. Rowling. Pratchett is among Harry Potter's lesser victims. Before the boy wizard came along, Pratchett and his motley crew from Discworld were the kings of the fantasy heap. Now they are merely No.2 , surpassed in a Quidditch-esque rush of books by the tens of million and blockbuster movies. Rowling is worth an estimated £435 million ($A1.1 billion), probably about 10 times more than Pratchett.
Is J.K. Rowling a good writer?
He hesitates. "I've never actually been asked that question." With a marked change in vocal tone, he says: "I think of her as a good and competent writer, a phrase that I would apply to myself as well."
A very diplomatic answer. "I am being political simply because I'm painfully aware that not you, but plenty of people would love, 'Pratchett slams Rowling' as a headline. I've given what I consider a true answer.
"Easing on to a slightly easier facet of that situation is, people say, 'aren't you jealous of J.K. Rowling?' to which my reply is, 'I never dreamed I'd make any kind of money out of writing fantasy because not many people do. I never dreamt I'd become a millionaire out of writing fantasy.'
"It's luck. OK, there's a level of competency that is required. (But) it's down to luck and arriving at the publisher at the right time when the wind is blowing in the right direction.
So if you think that you've been lucky enough to win at the roulette wheel you certainly aren't jealous of someone who's been lucky to win on the baccarat tables next door. It's all ultimately, within reason, a kind of crap shoot.
"There are better writers than me and J.K. Rowling who aren't particularly financially successful."
Pratchett has yet to follow Rowling into Hollywood and, despite earlier reports that the makers of Shrek were planning to produce a film based on his Bromeliad trilogy, he seems a reluctant starter for celluloid fame. "With movies you lose lots of control over characters. They are my characters, really."
But while he is in Australia next week he plans to meet a small Melbourne-based group, Snowgum Films, which is interested in shooting one of his short stories, Troll Bridge. No money is changing hands, Pratchett says. "At 56 how much more money do I need?"
Pratchett's Discworld output has been running at almost two a year for the past 17 years. But a recent heart operation has lead him to take things a little steadier. "It is a kind of warning to pace things a little bit."
Will Discworld ever come to an end? "No ending is planned. (But) it will cease at some point."
Millions of people may have just had their day ruined.
----
Now i'm ending Olympos by dan Simmons,the sequel of Ilium ando also this is a masterpiece.
OLYMPOS Opens Strong
OLYMPOS was released on June 28, 2005, and opened to very strong reviews in Publishers Weekly (starred review), Kirkus Reviews, LOCUS (two reviews), Booklist, The Denver Post, and in other publications. It was #25 on the New York Times extended bestseller list (7/17) and #15 on the Book Sense Pacific Northwest Independent Bestseller List (7/3), as well as #3 on the Denver Post Bestseller List (7/17).
Library Journal calls OLYMPOS "an exceptional creation".
Nick Gevers in LOCUS says of OLYMPOS -- “Considered as a great explosion of Story, Dan Simmons’s OLYMPOS, sequel to the already voluminous ILIUM (2003), is a supreme achievement. . . . this is, in other words, something resembling the ultimate SF novel, a convergence of most, if not all, of SF’s idioms and narrative potentials into a synthesis so commanding that it might appear to put a capstone to the entire literary project that is SF, obviating any need to go further . . . . for readers seeking to understand what SF is and what it can be, the ILIUM/OLYMPOS diptych will for the time being be the cynosure.”
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Originally Posted by Amblerhelen
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