Once More With Footnotes

World.
     
    Peopl e visiting the site now see this and think it's the Pixy Mound. It isn't. That is on the other side of the road, and quite unimpressive by comparison.
     
    But, you know, I'd like to think that on some dark and stormy night lightning will strike both mounds at the same time. It will be that slow, blue, crackling lightning that you only get in movies, of course.
     
    And then there will be a moment of deep silence, that is broken by the muffled yet distinctive cough of a big diesel engine starting up ...
     
    Now, there 's a Press Release you wouldn't want to miss              
     
     
     
     
     
R oots of F antasy
     
                  Last year an American writer told me, "I 'm afraid your books won't sell well over here, because in your books you can't hear the elves sing."
     
                  Well, it looks as though time is provin g him wrong, but not hearing the elves sing is fine by me. I think they probably do far more interesting things. Besides, if the job of elves is to sing, then the elf I'm interested in is the one who's tone deaf. Half of the fun of writing funny fantasy is the search for cliché s to bend. But enough of this ...
     
                  The roots of fantasy go far deeper than mere dragons and elves, and it's a shame that writers now spend so much time in the consensus high fantasy universe ... you know the one.
     
                  Somewhere down tow ards bedrock level is the desire to make worlds which, however apparently complex, bizarre, and downright dangerous they may be, have graspable rules and probably also a moral basis. We know the third brother who gives food to the poor old woman is going t o win through, we know the last desperate million-to-one chance that might just work WILL work, we know that any item presented to the main character in mysterious circumstances will be a major plot token. We know the humble swineherd is really the royal h eir in disguise because in our hearts we know that we are, too, but in this little secondary world there are understandable imperatives and prohibitions which he, unlike us, can thread through to achieve the ... well, the end of the book.
     
                  There is a dark side. Take The Lord of the Rings, which for many of my generation was the first fantasy book they read. My adult mind says that the really interesting bit of LOTR must have been what happened afterward — the troubles of a war-ravaged continent, the Marshall Aid scheme for Mordor, the shift in political power, the democratization of Minas Tirith. Well, that could be a funny fantasy. Or a satire. But not a straight fantasy, because it's too close to our reality. What we want is heroes and solutions, and, yes, singing elves.
     
                  We also know in our hearts that the universe isn't really like that. We always have, ever since the first little circle of firelight when the shaman told us about Zog, who could kill mammoths. The world isn't really like that but it ought to be, and if we believe it enough we might get through another night.
     
                  Fantasy imposes order on the universe. Or, at least, it superimposes order on the universe. And it is a human order. Reality tells us that we exist for a brief, beleaguered span in a cold infinity; fantasy tells us that the figures in the foreground are important. Fantasy peoples the alien Outside, and it doesn't matter a whole lot whether it peoples it with good guys or bad guys. Putting "Hy Brazil" on the map is step in the right di r ection, but if you can't manage that, then "Here be Dragons" is better than nothing. Better dragons than the void.
     
                  Right at the bottom, at the tip of the root, is the fear of the dark and the cold, but once you've given darkness a name you have a measure of control. Or at least you think you have, which is nearly as important.
     
                  The desire to build structures is as strong as ever even now, among brilliant, intelligent us, who know all about Teflon and central heating. For example: reality tells me that, w hen I'm bored on a long journey, I stop off at a gas station and buy a cassette tape from the rack, and, since these racks are invariably stocked by someone with the musical taste and discernment of a duck egg, I generally play safe and buy a compilation a lbum by a middle-of-the-road group I won't