Highest Paid Authors

[Deleted]

Here's a couple of results from a very quick search (I'll do a more thorough one when I have more time)

forum.fanfiction.net/topic/1394/29508192/1/

www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/44240-did-deathly-hallows-feel-like-it-was-ghost.html

[Erasmus]

If anybody deserves recognition for popular, entertaining and intelligent writing with something to say it is Sir Terry Pratchett and I'm delighted that he has had a gong, if only a little one. Apart from JK Rowling, we are so snooty about fantasy (and the science-fiction that is is so often paired with). All fiction is fantasy in a sense but the typical reaction of anybody who has not read any Pratchett is that it is all Tolkienesque boys' stuff that no respectable adult, especially not a female one, should waste time on.

Yet great classics were fantasy, even if we have developed a similar attitude to them as being for children since. Nobody at the time thought of Gulliver's Travels as for children, to the extent that the publisher removed certain elements and added his own fawning to the Queen (Anne - she's dead you know) and there's some evidence that Swift had it printed from a copy so that if he should be prosecuted he could disown the manuscript. Likewise, Voltaire's Candide is set in an essentially fantastical 'Patagonia' and several of Shakespeare's comedies could be invoked - especially The Tempest. Satire in a fantasy setting, whether in some imaginary Earthly land or on the Moon, has a long history.

Terry Pratchett started with a couple of science-fiction books about which the less said the better, though they are infinitely more inspired than anything by L.Ron Hubbard (or quite a bit by Robert Heinlein) and Hubbard cobbled a whole 'religion' together out of his! He subsequently parodied or satirized the swords & sorcery that was experiencing a resurgence fuelled by Dungeons & Dragons. So far, so nothing special.

However, TP subsequently developed the Discworld and its assortment of societies both human and other into a satire on just about everything satirizable. It even has a satire on the rise of the Internet (or could be telephone or telegraph) in the form of a continental semaphore system. Without breaking the conceit of setting the conventions of fantasy in a realistic world where life involves a bit more than endless questing and spending it all quaffing ("like drinking but more gets spilt") he has managed to tackle all the usual prejudices, the absurdities of war over desolate tracts of land, political corruption (actually a tautology on Discworld - politics is corruption - and the man has never even visited Ireland or the Channel Islands!) and give an arse-about-face analysis of everything.

OK, if you can't eliminate crime let the criminals police it: they are not going to kill their own golden geese or hand out probation orders for upstarts queering their pitch. This was often said of London when the Kray Twins ran crime and Hong Kong when the Triads ran the police; you might pay protection money for your business but you wouldn't get mugged by some addict chancer on your way home.

How does the police force prevent a riot? Open the doors, sit on the steps with a cup of tea and show the people that you are their police service intent first on keeping their peace against anybody, be they looters or Special Forces (but have a few traps ready in case somebody thinks clever to get in through the roof).

In interview, he has said that he finds himself seriously worried by the loss of background information that nobody ever really learnt but just grew up with as standard knowledge, so he has been surprised to be asked how he came out with the astounding idea of three witches in the form of the old non-nonsense Hag, the matriarchal Mother (whose girlhood experience gave her thighs able to wrench a broomstick in full flight back on itself) and the dithery New Age Maiden. Even if Wiccans had not re-invented them, they do have a history as long as you like and even went underground in Christianity as three Maries.

So when everything he has written, that now goes back nearly 30 years is put together, Sir Terry P's œuvres and the casual background to them are impressive, as well as their internal intellectual puns and jokes. It may well be that a century from now, it is his works that are taught as classics as indicative of the time as Dickens, while the Amisses and Rushdies take more the place of Thackeray and Horace Walpole.

[beth]

ahem ... all that about Terry Pratchett and not a mention for Good Omens - my favorite book of all time. Not saying it's the best book I ever read ... stiff competition in that category .. but - absolutely - my favorite. True, he wrote it as co-author with Neil Gaiman, but who better to have as a partner? Douglas Adams, perhaps, but it would be a close race.

If I could, I'd send everyone here a copy, because you don't know what you're missing. The printed version is great, but the audio is delicious. Fantastic reader.

[Erasmus]

I didn't mention it because I was picking up on the way fantasy is disparaged as unworthy when in fact, it has been in the forefront of social satire even before Swift.

I have read Good Omens but I did it fast, so a lot of what it was getting at did not stick.

What I'm getting at though, is that authors can still say something and be popular although despised by the self-appointed Establishment and the opposite can be true too, that it is not necessary to write a wholly simplified closed-off world of the worst soap opera with nothing to say, to be popular.

If any author eschews fantasy but might be considered both popular and literary, it may well be Nick Hornby. I do not like him because I do not like the world he talks about. I did like the dramatization of his About a Boy but only because I identified with the boy in question with far more sense than the fool of a man, and with the girl who takes him on as how I'd expect a girl or later woman to be, but seem to have back-pedalled on.

[beth]

I have much greater fondness ... more respect, too .. for fantasy and sci fi writers than for those who present themselves as "literary" writers (Joyce Carol Oates, et al).

Nick Hornby's fine. I read High Fidelity ... also enjoyed the movie. But, since I'd probably enjoy watching John Cusack blow his nose, I won't out and out recommend it.

[Deleted]

There is a general snobbery in the literary world about so-called 'genre' writers.

IMHO, for instance, Mickey Spillane is one of the greatest American writers of the last fifty or sixty years. However, because he wrote thrillers he has never received the recognition that he deserves.

'Literary fiction' is a difficult area for me. I regard, for instance, Maxine Kumin's 'A Daughter and Her Loves' as a masterpiece but I found, say, Updike's 'Couples' embarrassingly bad.

How on earth Norman Mailer ever got 'An American Dream' published is one of life's abiding mysteries!

[aubrey]

Erasmus, Jencin, Mike - Yay!!!

All fiction is fantasy in a sense

Yay again!!!

J Frantzen was mithering a bit back because the only writers on the cover of Time these days were people like Stephen King, who surely can't be on there because of his writing - it's because he sells a lot. Now Frantzen's on the cover, does he think he's on for his writing? Or because he is selling a lot?

I've got not much problem with literary fiction; but when they do genre they're usually very derivative - IE - when they try Time Travel, or Cloning, or Androids, they're called really innovative, when all they're doing is using ideas that SF gave up on 20 30 years ago.

One of my least favourite books is Possession, by AS Byatt. A real, self-indulgent (all that awful Victorian prose and poetry: very accurate but still bad) mess, with an unbelievable climax (digging up an old grave in a storm), characters introduced just to be described, and a cop out when the puzzle is explained not through the endlessly quoted letters, etc, but by a scene actually set in the past. If she'd only put that scene in at the beginning, we could have been spared the rest of it.

Ruth Rendell did a much better treatment of the same kind of thing in Asta's Diary, in which the puzzle is in the diary, and laid out before you; if you're sharp enough you can pick up the clue and work out what really happened to Asta. There is no need, for a careful writer doing this kind of story, to have a scene set in the past.


In a similar way, Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow is a treatment of a not so different theme (past trauma) as Ruth Rendell's A Fatal Inversion - past trauma living on in the present.

Ruth is a much better writer than those two; but she'll never get mentioned for stuff like The Booker. She has written too much, for one thing.

[beth]

I'm torn about Stephen King. On the plus side, he has created a lot of memorable characters and his plotting is usually pretty good. But, his narrative is over blown and sometimes seems kendless ... and he often has a terrible time ending his books .. tending to go on several pages past what would have been the best cut off.

Since I believe I've read more SK books I enjoyed than not, I'll give him a B+

[Erasmus]

It's strange that some of the greatest Late Victorian and Edwardian authors were genre although it had not been split off then and there were other genre anyway. Sherlock Holmes verges on super-hero in his abilities and includes a lot that comes closer to horror than simple detective. Yet Conan Doyle is still considered literary. There were plenty of Penny Dreadfuls at the time dealing with An 'Orrible Murder. EA Poe? Borderline.

The same goes for HG Wells who wrote purest science-fiction - yet not for Jules Verne (because he was French?). Brave New World is science-fiction that has been copied umpteen times and so is 1984. In fact Huxley wrote quite a lot of SF and wrote in his 1958 Brave New World Revisited essays "Were I to write it now I would set it 60 years in the future, not 600, with television instead of 'Soma'" - how right he was!

There is plenty of bad genre fiction, including bad literary fiction, though it is never admitted as such. It is easy to write cliché situations and characters and they are no less so when couched as magic realism or purporting to investigate the mind of aging authors (when the aging author writing it presumably can't think creatively outside of the box of his own skull any more) than when they are chicklit involving aspirant women who just haven't quite achieved what they'd hoped. Nobody writes about men of the same kind without a measure of sneering at them, so little have we moved from sexist st4ereotyping (or perhaps feminists restored it)

It strikes me actually as very similar to what happened to modern serious music about 50 years ago. It did everything it could to try something new with an orchestra including John Cage's famous 4 minutes and 33 seconds of nothing at all while the audience listened to itself fidgetting. It all became like the Emperor's New Clothes while far more exciting things were developing out of blues and jazz into new genres that the serious world turned its nose up at. Those musicians grew up and went beyond the Western tradition so that even if kids are still stuck in restrictive genres it is nothing like as weird to us as it would have been 50 years ago to anybody to hear the classics interspersed with a bit of Moroccan Oud or Indian film music and a touch of Hildegard von Bingen and Haydn on the Fortepiano and Viola da Gamba topped off by John Taverner's latest return to harmony and melody all in the same programme.

Classic music has had to open out instead of closing in, just as it did early in the last century when Stravinsky and Bartok and Prokofiev were listening to jazz and their own folk traditions after alienating itself in the 19th century and doing so again in the late 20th. Classic literature is about 50 years behind, still in the alienation stage disparaging down its nose about boys bashing guitars and obscure folk and non-European traditions. They forget that the essence of literature always has been a memorable story just as their equivalent composers for a generation forgot that the essence of music is a memorable tune

[beth]

Don't forget, 50 years ago, Leonard Bernstein was receiving world wide acclaim as a composer, conductor, lecturer and pianist.

Also, Glenn Gould was one of the most celebrated classical pianists of the 20th century, especially as an interpreter of the keyboard music of J.S. Bach. Furthermore, he was widely acclaimed as a writer, composer, conductor and broadcaster who played a significant role in devising ways to insure classical music performances were preserved on recordings and tapes. He did a great deal to bring the great works into the day to day lives of the masses ... much as Carl Sagan did science and astronomy.

[Erasmus]

True enough, but those were the populist side that the real musical avant-garde looked askance at as pandering to the masses. Tell them that Louis Armstrong and Moondog and Leonard Berstein would be accepted as composers of at least the second league in 50 years' time and they would have had a heart attack: if you could enjoy it or even understand it, it wasn't pushing the boundaries of music worth consideration - except that actually their stuff was all very much of a closed genre in itself.

In fact, the modern literary scene is just about as moribund. A novel needs to be interesting, meaning that its characters and situations are worth bothering about, and usually that they develop with time. Criticize as we might, JK Rowling has built that in by making her protagonists teenagers. In a way, the whole concept of literature in comparison to some other kind of writing is a construct. It never used to exist. The people waiting for the next installment of Dickens would be reading cheap horror stories as well. The Classic Authors of the present from a future perspective may well be paperback writers currently dismissed from the Literary Establishment. Catherine Cookson springs to mind because most of her romances were based on the realities of her early life in industrial Northern England, just as DH Lawrence's were on his in the East Midlands (and there's a depressing author that school put me off for life!)

[aubrey]

I really wish that Glenn Gould had bothered with playing repeats. I can't listen to his version of the Goldberg Variations because he leaves the repeats out.

I'd argue against the idea that music needs melody. Not on this thread, though.

[mouse]

Sept 29, 2010 9:29:43 GMT -5 @mikemarshall said:

There is a general snobbery in the literary world about so-called 'genre' writers.
.

theres a great deal of snobbery about writing full stop
the only thing that matters to the average reader is..was it an enjoyable read..or was it boring/longwinded and a waste of time
i read a wide variety of books..good bad and awful..from history to murders to what if,s
and the best books are the ones i really want to continue reading
so much so i never ever nowadays look at who is writing a book..i look after i have read it or slung it so i know to look out for that author again...

[beth]

Sept 30, 2010 5:37:58 GMT -5 aubrey said:

I really wish that Glenn Gould had bothered with playing repeats. I can't listen to his version of the Goldberg Variations because he leaves the repeats out.

I'd argue against the idea that music needs melody. Not on this thread, though.

Music may not need melody to be music but, personally, I seem to need it. I love his Goldberg Variations. I do see what you mean ...
just don't agree . I think, perhaps, I am part of the masses he managed to connect with via what passed for multi-media at the time. My aunt and uncle gave me one of his LPs when I was 10 or 11.

[aubrey]

If I'd heard him first, maybe. I got to know it from someone who did do the repeats, and when I heard Gould it was like someone was taking the ball away all the time (I mean, just as you're about to kick it).

I like his Art Of Fugue, though.

He'd have loved electronic keyboards, wouldn't he? No need to stop mumbling, and the ability to adjust the sound, after playing, to exactly what he wanted.