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Tuesday, September 1, 2015

A reply to the attack on Terry Pratchett


Terry Pratchett — literary treasure or potboiling hack? 

I am sensitive to literary politics and literary fashion — I am convinced that perhaps the main reason Illuminatus! has not received the attention it should from literary critics is simply because it was published as science fiction. So when I found out via Twitter about the attack on Terry Pratchett and people who read "potboilers," published in the Guardian, I wrote a response for my newspaper. 

There's a lot more I could have said. For example, despite what Jonathan Jones says, I am far from convinced that Gabriel García Márquez was a better writer than Ray Bradbury. Yes, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a good novel, and if you haven't tried it, you may have missed something. But although Bradbury was more of a short story writer than a novelist, I still think The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man are really good books, and stories such as "The Pedestrian" are really memorable. 

1 comment:

fuzzbuddy said...

Terry Pratchett is one of my favourite writers and here is a great piece in response to that Guardian article: http://www.christopher-priest.co.uk/journal/2605/you-dont-know-what-it-is-do-you-mister-jones/