Father Brown, that prince of humanity and empathy, was a gateway drug into the harder stuff, this being a one-volume collection of three novels: The Napoleon of Notting Hill (my favorite piece of predictive 1984 fiction, and one that hugely informed my own novel Neverwhere), The Man Who Was Thursday (the prototype of all twentieth-century spy stories, as well as being a Nightmare, and a theological delight), and lastly The Flying Inn (which had some excellent poetry in it, but which struck me, as an eleven-year-old, as being oddly small-minded. I suspected that Father Brown would have found it so as well). Then there were the poems and the essays and the art.

Chesterton and Tolkien and Lewis were, as I’ve said, not the only writers I read between the ages of six and thirteen, but they were the authors I read over and over again; each of them played a part in building me. Without them, I cannot imagine that I would have become a writer, and certainly not a writer of fantastic fiction. I would not have understood that the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams could be a vital part of life and of writing.

And without those three writers, I would not be here today. And nor, of course, would any of you. I thank you.

This was the guest of honor speech I gave at MythCon 35, which was held at the University of Michigan, in 2004. This is the annual conference of the Mythopoeic Society. I also read them my just-finished short story “The Problem with Susan,” and nobody garroted me.

The Pornography of Genre, or the Genre of Pornography

This is a transcription of a talk I gave in Orlando to an audience mostly composed of academics. It’s not the actual speech I wrote, because I departed so far from my notes in the giving of it.

Thank you so much. That was so moving. Oddly enough, I think in some ways my talk is about passionate unknowing. I’ve written a speech, because I’m nervous, but I’ve also made lots of little marks in green ink where I’ve told myself I’m allowed to go off and just sort of start talking if I want to. So I have no idea how long this is going to be. It depends on the green-ink bits. What is the official title?

[From crowd: “‘The Pornography of Genre, or the Genre of Pornography.’”]

Yeah, or something like that. It’s actually nothing at all about the genre of pornography. That was just put in to make it a catchy title. I make no apologies.

It is the job of the creator to explode. It is the task of the academic to walk around the bomb site, gathering up the shrapnel, to figure out what kind of an explosion it was, who was killed, how much damage it was meant to do and how close it came to actually achieving that.