Alex's Journal

"There are those who believe that knowledge can only be recalled, that there was some Golden Age in the distant past when everything was known and the stones fitted together so you could hardly put a knife between them, you know, and it's obvious they had flying machines, right, because of the way the earthworks can only be seen from above, yeah? and there's this museum I read about where they found a pocket calculator under the altar of this ancient temple, you know what I'm saying? but the government hushed it up...*

* It's amazing how good governments are, given their track record in almost every other field, at hushing things up like alien encounters."

-Terry Pratchett

I didn't attribute this in my original post, but I'm going to hazard a guess given the subject material that it's Pyramids.

And I would be utterly wrong, because it's actually Hogfather I literally just read that four months ago BRAIN WHY HAVE YOU FAILED ME

Terry Pratchett Diagnosed With Rare, Early-Onset Alzheimer's Disease

I take it back about life looking up. Fucking hell! *smashes things*

Thankfully it's been caught VERY early, so it's not like (as he says) he's dead yet, but... Alzheimer's is a fucking terrible way to live, especially in the later stages. And especially for it to happen to Pratchett is... miserable.

The title used to read, according to Neil Gaiman, "PRATCHETT ANGER AT ROWLING'S RISE", which has now been edited to read "Pratchett takes swipe at Rowling" - which isn't true, either, but at least it's not the petty and vindictive title they had earlier...

Here's the story:

Terry Pratchett (supposedly) responds to the furor by pointing out that he wasn't attacking Rowling, but rather asking why this article was trying to elevate her at the expense of other fantasy writers (in specific, tarring the genre with this image: "The genre tends to be deeply conservative -- politically, culturally, psychologically. It looks backward to an idealized, romanticized, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves.")

"And then there's my question. Why didn't the interviewer ask it? Here's the world's best-selling fantasy writer who has just said she hadn't thought she was writing fantasy and also that she doesn't really like the stuff. She goes on to say that she didn't finish TLOTR or the Narnia series and has issues with Lewis. No problem there, but all this revelatory stuff just floated past, apparently unexamined. I'd like to know how an author can write in a genre she doesn't like -- really. I'd like to know what she thinks she is writing."

(Original letter's text here.)

So, there you go. If people start exploding about this, you can now officially roll your eyes at them.