ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

Nabasah sad na ovaj Pterijev članak iz 1992. pa reko da podelim:



Elves Were Bastards

I'm called a writer of fantasy, but I'm coming to hate the term. Why? Because what could be so good is often so bad. Because there's so much trash out there, so much round-eyed worship of mind-numbing myths, so much mindless recycling of ancient cycles, so much unthinking escapism.

I'm not against recycling. The seasons do it. So do pantomimes, so do fairy stories. The retelling of oft-told tales is an honourable art—but there should be some attempt at texture and flair. Star Wars was the quintessential heroic fantasy story, with just enough twist and spin to give it an extra edge. Robocop retold an ancient tale in a new voice and was marvellous;
Robocop II was superexpensive trash because people didn't understand what they'd got.

Unfortunately, there's still a market for rubbish. I picked up a recently-written fantasy book at the weekend, and one character said of another: "He will grow wrath." Oh, my God. And the phrase was in a page of similar jaw-breaking, mock-archaic narrative. Belike, i'faith ... this is the language we use to turn high fantasy into third-rate romantic literature. "Yonder lies the palace of my fodder, the king." That's not fantasy—that's just Tolkien reheated until the magic boils away.

I get depressed with these fluffy dragons and noble elves. Elves were never noble. They were cruel bastards. And I dislike heroes. You can't trust the buggers. They always let you down. I don't believe in the natural nobility of kings, because a large percentage of them in our history have turned out to be powercrazed idiots. And I certainly don't believe in the wisdom of wizards. I've worked with their modern equivalents, and I know what I am talking about.

Fantasy should present the familiar in a new light—I try to do that on Discworld. It's a way of looking at the here and now, not the there and then. Fantasy is the Ur-literature, from which everything else sprang—which is why my knuckles go white when toesucking literary critics dismiss it as "genre trash". And, at its best, it is truly escapist.

But the point about escaping is that you should escape to, as well as from. You should go somewhere worthwhile, and come
back the better for the experience. Too much alleged "fantasy" is just empty sugar, life with the crusts cut off.

I'm writing this in Florida, home of fantasy—either the soft that you watch, or the sort that you stick up your nose. They've got
some weird stuff here; for one thing, they've got Disney/MGM and Universal Studios.

And this is what's weird about them. They aren't really studios. Oh, they shoot some film here, but that's kind of secondary.
They weren't built as studios. They were built as ... well, as theme parks. Those false frontages, those artful backlots, those false perspective streets, they were built for no other purposes than to look like something which in turn was built to look like something. Built to look like something that isn't real.

Whoever would have thought it?

Here in America—and in England, to a lesser extent—you can read newspaper articles and buy alleged books which treat the
characters played by TV stars as if they were real people. The world has gone strange. You can't tell the reality from the fantasy anymore. Think I'm kidding? On the racks at the supermarket are "newspapers" like the Sun, the Midnight Star, the Weekly World News. Typical lead story: Elvis has been found alive in a UFO dredged from the Bermuda Triangle. People read this stuff. It's not even good sf. They have a vote, same as you.

This is all "escape from" stuff—the Disney rides, the elves, the stupid stories. It goes nowhere. The best stuff does take you
somewhere. It takes you to a new place from which to see the world. An interest in fantasy when I was a child gave me an interest in books in general, and I found in books on astronomy and palaeontology a deep sense of wonder that not even Middle Earth could beat.

Let's not just leave here. Let's go somewhere else. And if we ran trample over some elves to do it, so much the better.

hehe.. neko pokazao Middle Finger nekim novim gameofthronesima i harrypotterima...?
mi lajk it!

Evo ga još jedan:

Whose Fantasy Are You?

You want fantasy? Here's one ... There's this species that lives on a planet a few miles above molten rock and a few miles below a vacuum that'd suck the air right out of them. They live in a brief geological period between ice ages, when giant asteroids have temporarily stopped smacking into the surface. As far as they can tell, there's nowhere else in the universe where they could stay alive for ten seconds.

And what do they call their fragile little slice of space and time? They call it real life. In a universe where it's known that whole
galaxies can explode, they think there's things like "natural justice" and "destiny". Some of them even believe in democracy ...

I'm a fantasy writer, and even I find it all a bit hard to believe.

Me? I write about people who live on the Discworld, a world that's flat and goes through space on the back of a giant turtle. Readers think the books are funny—I can prove it, I get letters—because in this weird world, people live normal lives. They worry about the sort of things we worry about, like death, taxes, and not falling off. The Discworld is funny because everyone on it believes that they're in real life. (They might be—the last I heard, physicists have discovered all these extra dimensions around the place which we can't see because they're rolled up small; and you don't believe in giant world-carrying turtles?) There are no magic swords or mighty quests. There are just people like us, give or take the odd pointy hat, trying to make sense of it all. Just like us.

We like to build these little worlds where everything gets sorted out and makes sense and, if possible, the good guys win. Noone
would call Agatha Christie a fantasy writer, but look at the books she's most typically associated with—they're about tiny isolated little worlds, usually a country house, or an island, or a train, where a very careful plot is worked out. No mad axeman for Agatha, no unsolved crimes. Hercule Poirot always finds the clues.

And look at Westerns. The famous Code of the West largely consisted of finding somewhere where you could safely shoot the other guy in the back, but we don't really want to know that. We'd rather believe in Clint Eastwood.

I would, anyway. Almost all writers are fantasy writers, but some of us are more honest about it than others.

And everyone reads fantasy ... one way ... or another

I delić trećeg članka:


One day I was doing a signing in a London bookshop and next in the queue was a lady in what, back in the '80s, was called a "power suit" despite its laughable lack of titanium armor and proton guns. She handed over a book for signature. I asked her what her name
was. She mumbled something. I asked again ... after all, it was a noisy bookshop. There was another mumble, which I could not quite
decipher. As I opened my mouth for the third attempt, she said, "It's Galadriel, okay?"

I said: "Were you by any chance born in a cannabis plantation in Wales?" She smiled, grimly. "It was a camper van in Cornwall," she said, "but you've got the right idea."

It wasn't Tolkien's fault, but let us remember in fellowship and sympathy all the Bilboes out there.

Aha, A smejemo se nasim ciganaima za Bruslija ili Tarzana ili Ramba ,,,
a oni sve to prirodno , bez trunke gandze!