Terry Pratchett Critical Essay | Critical Review by Tom Shone

Critical Review by Tom Shone

SOURCE: Shone, Tom. “A View from the Back of a Giant Tortoise.” Spectator 269, no. 8563 (22 August 1992): 23.

In the following negative review of Small Gods, Shone accuses Pratchett of relying on his popularity without providing an intellectual challenge to his readership in the novel.

Genre fiction lends itself well to parody. Both Stephen King and James Herbert for instance, have in their two most recent novels lampooned the clichés of horror-writing (clichés with which, it must be said, they had previously picked little argument). It is partly a result of mid-career sag, boredom, a scarcity of supernatural oddities left to tackle—done rats, done dogs, done poltergeists, what else is there but to ransack one's own oeuvre? But there is another reason, less craven: since fantastic literature must be more than normally observant of naturalistic rules and protocols in order to sustain what realism it can, there exists...
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