I was fortunate in having Charles Vess, to my mind the finest fairy artist since Arthur Rackham, as the illustrator of Stardust, and many times I found myself writing scenes—a lion fighting a unicorn, a flying pirate ship—simply because I wanted to see how Charles would paint them. I was never disappointed.

The book came out, first in illustrated and then in unillustrated form. There seemed to be a general consensus that it was the most inconsequential of my novels. Fantasy fans, for example, wanted it to be an epic, which it took enormous pleasure in not being. Shortly after it was published, I wound up defending it to a journalist who had loved my previous novel, Neverwhere, particularly its social allegories. He had turned Stardust upside down and shaken it, looking for social allegories, and found absolutely nothing of any good purpose.

“What’s it for?” he had asked, which is not a question you expect to be asked when you write fiction for a living.

“It’s a fairy tale,” I told him. “It’s like an ice cream. It’s to make you feel happy when you finish it.”

I don’t think that I convinced him, not even a little bit. There was a French edition of Stardust some years later that contained translator’s notes demonstrating that the whole of the novel was a gloss on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which I wish I had read at the time of the interview. I could have referred it to the journalist, even if I didn’t believe a word.

Still, the people who wanted fairy tales found the book, and some of them knew what it was, and liked it for being exactly that. One of those people was filmmaker Matthew Vaughn.

I tend to be extremely protective when it comes to adaptations of my work, but I enjoyed the screenplay and I really like the film they made—which takes liberties with the plot all over the place. (I know I didn’t write a pirate captain performing a can-can in drag, for a start . . .)

A star still falls, a boy still promises to bring it to his true love, there are still wicked witches and ghosts and lords (although the lords have now become princes). They even gave the story an unabashedly happy ending, which is something people tend to do when they retell fairy tales.

In The Penguin Book of English Folktales, we learn that mid-twentieth-century folklorists had collected an oral story and never noticed it was actually a retelling and simplification of a strange and disturbing children’s story written by the Victorian writer Lucy Clifford.

I would, of course, be happy if Stardust met with a similar fate, if it continued to be retold long after its author was forgotten, if people forgot that it had once been a book and began their tales of the boy who set out to find the fallen star with “Once upon a time,” and finished with “Happily ever after.”

A version of this was originally published in the October 13, 2007, issue of the Guardian. A slightly altered version was included in the program book for the 2013 World Fantasy Convention in Brighton.