So what gets Terry Pratchett hot under the hat? It seems that fantasy fiction's answer to Jamiroquai is ready to use up almost half of his daily allocation of words to leap to the defence of his craft.
An interview in Time magazine with JK Rowling characterised the world of fantasy as backward-looking, and deeply conservative, where "knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves". Pratchett hit back in the letters pages of the Sunday Times yesterday, complaining that the "continued elevation of JK Rowling" is always "achieved at the expense of other writers".
Fantasy-writing "has always been edgy and inventive", he continues. "Ever since The Lord of the Rings revitalised the genre, writers have played with it, reinvented it, subverted it and bent it to the times."
But what really seems to have got his goat is Rowling's admission that she doesn't really like fantasy novels, and was unaware that she'd written one until it had been published.
"I'm not the world's greatest expert," he fumes, "but I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue."
I'll take my wizarding hat off to that.
