Once More With Footnotes

sure about; I think I once saw him in a tux, or it may have been someone else.
     
                  He takes the view that mornings happen to other people. I think I once saw him at breakfast, although possibly it was just someone who looked a bit like him who was lying with their head in the plate of baked beans. He likes good sushi and quite likes people, too, although not raw; he is kind to fans who are not total jerks, and enjoys talking to people who know how to talk. He doesn't look as though he's forty; t hat may have happened to someone else, too. Or perhaps there's a special picture locked in his attic.
     
                  Have fun. You're in the hands of a master conjurer. Or, quite possibly, a wizard.
     
    -
     
                  PS: He really, really likes it if you ask him to sign your batter ed, treasured copy of Good Omens that has been dropped in the tub at least once and is now held together with very old, yellowing transparent tape. You know the one.

Edited by David Pringle, published in 1998 by Carlton. Dave asked, and I said okay. Somet imes it's as simple as that.
     
     
     
     
     
I ntroduction: T he U ltimate E ncyclopedia of F antasy
     
                  Welcome to the Thunderstorm Cave. Our ability to make other worlds made us human. Lots of animals are bright, but as far as we can tell they've never come up with any ideas about who makes the thunder.
     
                  A proto-human did, in some rain-lashed cave. It must have struck him like a bolt from above. Perhaps it was a bolt from above. Suddenly ... inside his head there were people in the sky, and suddenly there was somewhere that people went when they died ... and suddenly there was this huge ghost world behind this one where all the colours were brighter.
     
                  As time went on, our proto-human found that his daydreams were not only providing explanations, they'd opened a way to a good job in the warm and all the nice bits of mammoth he could eat. He'd got hold of something worth more than food. The news spread. The world's second oldest profession became a growth industry (the oldest is "flint knapper", no matter what you may ha v e heard).
     
                 

It used an invisible invention that sent mankind on the path to ... well, humanity, because before you can change the world you have to be able to form a picture of the world being other than it appears. Imagination, not intelligence, made us human. Squirrels are quite intelligent when it comes to nuts, but as far as we can tell they have never told stories about a hero who stole nuts from the gods.
     
                  That ability has given us all our fiction and our mythology. Most of our religions, too, becau se following the success of "What Thunder Is" and its sequel, "How We Got Fire", which was breaking pile-of-juicy-mammoth-ribs records all along the valley, some bright apprentice with a forehead like a balcony came up with the incredible "We Can Stop The Thunderer Hurting Us If We Do These Special Things" followed by "We Ate The True People And We're Better Than Those People In The Next Valley Because We Do These Special Things". Suddenly, life was a lot more exciting although, for the people in the next v alley, it was going to be somewhat shorter.
     
                  Suddenly, the world was a story. Homo Sapiens became Homo Narrans, "Story-telling Man"; the rest was, literally, history.
     
                  We are creatures of fantasy. We spend a lot of time in that huge ghost world with the bright colours, and one part of it is now called "civilisation". The mental muscles swollen on the aerobics of gods and heroes have gone on to invent new fantasies "natural justice", "eminent domain", "human rights", which have given something approaching solid form. A raft of fantasies, "made-up things", floats us through the cold dark universe.
     
                  It's odd, then, that unashamed fantasy still trails clouds of disapproval. But some of the reasons are easy to see, even in these pages. The sheer torrent of the stuff, for one thing. The telling and retelling. All those new worlds and eternal heroes. And the suggestion that the world could be completely other than it is always annoys those who are content with the way things are. Stories of imagination tend to u p set those without one. Rulers are suspicious of new worlds