Once More With Footnotes

a kind of fizz — you want to read everything that's in print before it evaporates before your eyes.
     
                  I had to draw my own map through this uncharted territory. The message from the management was that, yes, books were a good idea, but I don't recall anyone advising me in any way. I was left to my own devices.
     
                  I am now b ecoming perceived as a young people's writer. Teachers and librarians say, "You know, your books are really popular among children who don't read." I think this is a compliment; I just wish they would put it another way. In fact, genre authors get to know their reader profile quite intimately, and I know I have a large number of readers who are old enough to drive a car and possibly claim a pension. But the myth persists that all my readers are aged 14 and called Kevin, and so I have taken an interest in t h e dark underworld called children's literature.
     
                  Not many people do, it seems to me, apart from those brave souls who work with children and are interested in what they read. They're unsung resistance heroes in a war that is just possibly being won by Son ic Hedgehogs and bionic plumbers. They don't have many allies, even where you would expect them. Despite the huge number of titles that pour out to shape the minds of the adults, my Sunday paper reviews a mismatched handful of children's books at infreque n t intervals and, to show its readers that this is some kind of literary play street, generally puts a picture of a teddy bear on the page.
     
                  Perhaps the literary editor's decision is right. In my experience children don't read reviews of children's books. They live in a different kind of world.
     
                  The aforementioned school librarians tell me that what the children read for fun, what they will actually spend their money on, are fantasy, science fiction, and horror and, while they offer up a prayer of thanks t hat the kids are reading anything in this electronic age, this worries them. It shouldn't.
     
                  I now know that almost all fiction is, at some level, fantasy. What Agatha Christie wrote was fantasy. What Tom Clancy writes is fantasy. What Jilly Cooper writes is fantasy — at least, I hope for her sake it is. But what people generally have in mind when they hear the word fantasy is swords, talking animals, vampires, rockets (science fiction is fantasy with bolts on), and around the edges it can indeed be pretty s i lly. Yet fantasy also speculates about the future, rewrites the past, and reconsiders the present. It plays games with the universe.
     
                  Fantasy makes many adults uneasy. Children who like the stuff tend to call it "brill" and "megagood". This always disturb s people. (It worries them so much that when someone like P. D. James uses the mechanisms of science fiction helpful people redefine the field, thus avoiding bestowing on her the mark of Cain; the book isn't science fiction "because it's not all about rob o ts and other planets". P. D. James writing science fiction? Impossible. But Children of Men is a science fiction book, as is Time's Arrow, and Fatherland, as was Brian Aldiss' Methuselah's Children, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, and Philip K. Dick's Ma n in the High Castle. Science fiction, the stuff that is seldom reviewed, is often good; it doesn't need robots, and Earth is room enough.)
     
                  Of course science fiction and fantasy are sometimes badly written. Many things are. But literary merit is an artif icial thing and exists in the eye of the beholder. In a world where Ballard's Empire of the Sun cannot win the Booker, I'm not too in awe of judgements based on literary merit.
     
                  Not long ago I talked to a teacher who, having invited me to talk at her scho ol, was having a bit of trouble with the head teacher, who thought that fantasy was morally suspect and irrelevant to the world of the '90s.
     
                  Morally suspect? Shorn of its trappings, most fantasy would find approval in a Victorian household. The morality of fantasy and horror is, by and large, the strict morality of the fairy tale. The vampire is slain, the alien is blown out of the airlock, the Dark Lord is vanquished, and, perhaps at some loss, the good triumph — not because they are better armed but beca u se