Once More With Footnotes

to explain the difference between a genre author and, well, a normal one, especially if you take the view that there are rather more genres around than serious literary editors would care to admit. But the "collaborative " aspect is prominent; those sitting in the circle of firelight while the story is told are not passive listeners, but believe they have some rights in the story and that the story itself is a window into another world with a quasi-existence of its own. K i ll off a popular character or make one behave against what the reader considers is their nature, and you get Letters from Fans. Genre editors often acquire fans, a word deriving from fanaticus, meaning "of or belonging to the temple", although I'm grateful to the Oxford English Dictionary for adding that it refers to a possessor of "excessive and mistaken enthusiasm". There was also a reference in my Latin dictionary to "orgiastic rites". These have not so far been part of my experience, although some young er fans have occasionally persuaded their mothers to send me a slice of their birthday cake.
     
                  I think I write fantasy. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then you might as well stick an orange in its bottom and eat it with green peas.
     
                  Most of my books, some 24 in fact, are set in the largely imaginary world of Discworld. I say largely imaginary because of course it has that slight air of solidarity that mythology brings to an image; the idea that the world goes through sp ace on the back of the turtle, as the Discworld does, is found in many cultures. It is either very old indeed or we just naturally have a turtle-shaped hole in our consciousness. It's most developed in Hindu mythology; I don't recall ever learning about it , it being one of those things you grow up knowing without any apparent source, but it's an image that often appears in books of popular astronomy and I suppose I must have got it from one of them when I was a child.
     
                  Some years ago, when Salman Rushdie w as having his bit of trouble with the Ayatollah, a large Indian family turned up at a book signing of mine in Wolverhampton. Did I know, the mother asked, that the world turtle is part of Hindu mythology? Er, yes, I said ... er ... did they mind? They bea m ed and said no, that was fine, and now would 1 sign their books?
     
                  Most of the action in the books takes place on the surface of the disclike world. Although on the face of it the world is populated by men, dwarfs, trolls, dragons, witches, wizards, and so on, the way they act and interact can be, I hope, curiously familiar to the reader. They tend to act from motives we can understand; they tend to be people we think we may have met. My witches, in particular, tend to act like your granny ... but more abo u t them in a moment. The world is magical, not simply in the sense that people in pointy hats can wave their hands and go "shazoom!" in the real expectation of getting results, but in the way it works.
     
                  For what Discworld is, more than anything else, is .. . logical. Relentlessly, solidly logical. The reason it is fantasy is that it is logical about the wrong things, about those parts of human experience where, by tacit agreement, we don't use logic because it doesn't work properly. On Discworld all metapho r s are potentially real, all figures of speech have a way of becoming more than words.
     
                  The leading city of Ankh-Morpork, for example, has a special Bureau of Weights and Measures and, as with those in this world, it keeps a number of standard physical uni ts for the purposes of testing and comparison. It's just that they're not the kind of units with which we are familiar ...
     
                  There may be found, for example, the standard blunt stick that many things are better than a poke in the eye with, the pot of pitch against which the blackness of things may be tested, and the actual newt used in the testing for drunkenness.
     
                  Metaphors and similar sloppy language have caused so much trouble in the city's history, though, that a former ruler banned this sort of thing completely and large areas of literature had to be re-written, leading to stuff like, "My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is a large organ that pumps blood around my