Nice to have you back on the program, Neil.

Neil Gaiman: It’s nice to be back, Neal.

NC: Is there one thing that makes children’s fantasy work?

NG: I think the thing that really makes children’s fantasy work is the power of belief. Children know when they’re being patronized. They know when someone’s telling them a story that the person telling it doesn’t believe or is telling it to kids for their own good. I think–and talking about [The Chronicles of] Narnia, I think the enduring power of Narnia is that really you had C.S. Lewis following these ideas. He had this idea of a faun in a snowstorm with an umbrella and packages and wanted to write the stories and find out who this faun was and where he came from.

NC: You wrote an interesting addendum to “The Chronicles of Narnia”, a story called The Problem of Susan. Why did you want to do it? Was it homage?

NG: No, The Problem of Susan was a story that eventually sort of came out from something that had been bugging me for many, many years. The Narnia books were the books that hooked me as a reader, hooked me as a–I was maybe six years old. I absolutely adored them, went seriously off them when I was 12, came back to them as an adult, first reading them to my older two children and then to my younger daughter. And each time I’d read them, I would get more and more irritated by the way that C.S. Lewis treated women of, let’s say, reproductive age. Girls are cool and he had some terrific girls and there are some nice elderly women in there, but when it gets to sort of beautiful, nice women of reproductive age, they’re wicked witches, they’re ditsy, they’re strange, they’re evil, they’re not to be relied upon. And Susan, who was the oldest of the children, is dismissed in the last book. All the others sort of go off to this wonderful Narnian heaven and we are told that Susan didn’t qualify because she was too interested in invitations, lipstick and nylons. And whether you want to interpret that as being about vanity or being about sex or whatever, she didn’t qualify. And it always struck me as being deeply problematic, and a few years ago I wrote a short story addressing the problem of Susan and playing around with various Narnian ideas and was quite fascinated by how people took it and how much power that story had.

NC: I wonder, another element of–your contribution was received by some with delight and others as blasphemy, I will say. But anyway, is an element of children’s fantasy that children or childlike creatures have to be at risk and that that risk has to be greater than just risk to themselves?

NG: I think that’s definitely part of it. But I don’t think that you can, with any children’s fantasy, sum it up to a formula because I think at that point you run the risk of making something very cold and very strange. In obviously a lot of great children’s fantasy something bigger than threat to themselves is there, but then again, you know, you’ve got Oz in which, yes, the wicked witch is defeated, but really it’s about Dorothy’s quest to go home. You’ve got–a lot of the great children’s fantasies, I think, they’re about kids figuring out who they are and they’re about kids taking other kids to somewhere bigger and stranger and better than they might have in a…

NC: And also–yeah, but also about returning home, growing up in Peter Pan’s world and leaving that world when in fact one of the enduring lessons, I think, of a lot of these books is even as adults, a lot of us would just prefer to live in these worlds.

NG: Oh, absolutely. And, I mean, when I look back at the things that I got from Narnia, I’m very amused watching the current foofaraw about whether or not Narnia is deeply Christian and whether or not Aslan should be perceived as Jesus and so on and so forth, ’cause I look back at what I took from Narnia as a kid and it had Bacchus in it and, you know, the Greek god of wine and it had these fauns and nymphs and Silenus and werewolves. And I went off and found out who they were. Nobody mentioned Jesus and it never occurred to me that this cool, bouncy lion was Jesus. On the other hand, I went and found out everything I could about Bacchus, the god of wine, ’cause he was in there.

NC: If you’d like to join our conversation about children’s fantasy books, give us a call. What was your favorite? Why was it your favorite? Does it hold up? And we’ll go to Michelle. Michelle’s calling from Phoenix, Arizona.

NC: Neil…

NG: I think…kids literature, one of the things that you bring to it is yourself as a child, which can sometimes make it kind of hard to go back to…I remember as an adult going back to some favorite books as a kid and remembering all this wonderful stuff, you know, the wind whipping the snow, the whickering of the horses, the–and reading the section and the entire section turned out to be something, like, `”I hope it stops snowing soon,” said Jack.’ …And I realized that as a kid you bring yourself, you build these worlds and they’re bigger and better than any movie could be. And sometimes they’re there when you go back and sometimes they aren’t.

NC: I wonder, when you said you went seriously off “Narnia” when yo
u we
re 12, was that ’cause it was..baby stuff’?

NG: No. No, no. I went off “Narnia” when I was 12 because I was very slow on the whole Christian allegory bit and I’d completely missed the whole death of Aslan and coming back to life as being a Jesus thing, but I was reading, rereading–I was one of these kids who also read the Narnia books over and over again and, you know, read other books because there weren’t an infinite number of Narnia books to read. But at some point I was reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and I realized that Eustace Scrubb’s getting turned into a dragon and undragoning was actually a rewrite of the blindness of St. Paul on the road to Damascus. And I suddenly thought, hang on, there’s this stuff all through here. And I felt like an author who I had actually trusted to play fair with me had been hiding things in the text and had not entirely been playing as fair as I thought he was. These days it doesn’t bother me, but when I was 12, I got very–got up on my high horse and put the books away.

NC: Michelle, thanks very much, and we hope your son continues to enjoy them.

NC: Yeah. Neil Gaiman, would you agree?

NG: Yes, I think I would, although I don’t think that all fantasy is necessarily about growing up. I think some of it is just about taking one more step on the road towards growing up and learning the lessons that life teaches you. And I think taking those life lessons is the big important thing…when I wrote Coraline, it’s about–you know, it’s really a story about a nine-year-old girl learning a lot about bravery. It’s not about growing up, but it’s definitely about taking those first steps towards independence.

NC: There are lessons, there are morals, if you will, maybe not morals, but…

NG: Not necessarily morals, but definitely lessons.

NC:…did you want to add to that, Christopher?

NC: Neil Gaiman, why don’t you start?

NG: I think there are two big things going on there, one of which is if you’ve actually gone off and created a whole world or a whole order of created things for yourself, you normally want to stick, as an author, more than one story in there. So there’s definitely an urge towards series as an author.

I think as a kid it’s very, very simple, which is that if you like something, you want another one just like that…or as close to that as you can get. And that’s the magic of a series there.

…NC: Here’s an e-mail we got from Kathleen in Portland, Oregon. `My favorites were probably more magic than fantasy, but I loved all the Edward Eager books, ordinary children who find a talisman of some sort, in one case a book that wrote what they said and did as it happened, and have fantastic adventures because of it. I think I love them because they made it seem just possible that it might happen to me.’

And I think that’s an element of it, took. And you see Madeleine L’Engle’s book, the “Wrinkle in Time” books–Neil Gaiman, there’s so much to identify, for a kid, with those kids, as in the kids with–in “Narnia.”

NG: Oh, absolutely. I mean, Edward Eager did something very interesting. He was an enormous fan of E. Nesbit’s books, the Victorian author of things like–Edwardian author of Five Children and It and The Story of the Amulet and things like that, and he just wanted to take them and put them in an environment that his kids would recognize. And so he set them in 1950s and 1930s America. And I think it’s a lovely–I was saying earlier there weren’t any formulas, but it is a lovely formula, just the idea of kids just like you stumbling into that one magical thing that will grant their wishes or almost grant their wishes or give them some wonderful magical thing that, A, they will learn from but what you take away from that as a kid reading it is not necessarily the lessons of Half Magic or Magic by the Lake, whatever, but you take away the magic and the idea that maybe if you just touched the right thing, put the right thing in your pocket or said hello to the right frog, it could all happen to you.

NC: Christopher Paolini, your protagonist discovered the right precious stone and, well, things have developed from there. You’ve talked about, you know, liking to live in that world, but as people do age and get older, lessons get more difficult.

NC: Yeah, Neil Gaiman, I’ve talked to science fiction writers who said, look, there was that first generation who spent, you know, a chapter explaining how the faster-than-light drive worked and then there was the next generation who said, `And then we switched on the warp drive and took off.’

NG: Oh, absolutely. And that really is one of the things that makes, I think, fantasy a little different still from science fiction, though, which is that with fantasy you have things that have baggage. A dragon comes on; a dragon has baggage. And it has wonderful dragon baggage and McCaffrey didn’t invent dragons, you know, nor did any of the other writers. We’re just tapping into something that’s been wandering around in human myth and consciousness forever. And I love that. I love the fact that, you know, if you–you can still write wizards without treading on J.K. Rowling’s territory because it’s such an enormous thing. And by bringing on a wizard, you’re doing a specific thing. I tend not to as a writer just because I tend to go off toward places if it’s going to keep me amused. So I mean, my next children’s fantasy novel, the one that I’m writing right now, is set entirely in a graveyard and…

NC: A chucklefest, is it?

NG: It–I hope so. I decided it was time to rewrite The Jungle Book all set…in a graveyard so it’s called The Graveyard Book…about a kid whose parents are killed and who gets brought up by dead people.

…NC: Tamora Pierce joins us now. She’s written five full quartets of fantasy for both children and young adults. Her novels feature young women as the heroines of a fantasy realm with some medieval characteristics. The latest is called “The Will of the Empress,” and she joins us from member station WNYC in New York City. Nice to have you on the program as well.

NC: Neil Gaiman, some people feel that violence–the dark stuff–shouldn’t be part of children’s fantasy stories. It’s certainly part of yours.

NG: Yeah, part–well, part of most of mine…I’ve written some fairly bright stuff. I think that what’s interesting is the–just that weird little gulf, though, between a book and a film. A book can be anything to the person who’s reading it, to the point where they discover it. A film does tend to be one thing. And something of the size of Lord of the Rings, for example, you can go into it because what you love is Tom Bombadil or Fogol Mabaradowns(?) or whatever, and pretty much ignore the battles. That wasn’t the approach that Peter Jackson took; a different filmmaker could have taken a different approach. But it does kind of lock it down in a very strange way.

You know, for the Narnia books or the Narnia stories, right now inside people’s heads they are the book that they wrote, and there’s a hundred thousand million different Lucys and Susans and Peters and Edmunds running around. In a month or two, maybe there’ll only be four left, and they’ll be the ones from the movie, and I think we would lose something from that.

TP: Also, as violence in children’s books is concerned, and this is something that I can speak to because I get spanked for it all the time, children live in a violent world. Children are hazed and bullied at school; they come home to the news. They do not live in a safe, protected little shell, and if you look at children’s books really closely, you’ll see that it is a–they are terribly violent places. Peter Pan and Hook–if you read the J.M. Barrie book, you’ll see that there are very real edged weapons there and that they come perilously close to Peter’s chest. I know I went around for days with prickling in the skin over my sternum feeling a sharp edge press there from those battles with Hook. The idea of a crocodile munching your arm wasn’t a pretty thing. “Treasure Island,” Blind Pew gripping Jim’s hand. Children’s books–the good ones–are not safe. They are not violence-free because children don’t respect when they have taffy sold to them, as Mark Twain would say.

NC: Neil Gaiman, do you want to start with that?

NG: I don’t ever remember a time that I didn’t want to be a writer. At–when I was a little kid…[I didn’t] think that I could be a writer by writing books; that hadn’t occurred to me. So I would–by the age of 12 I’d come up with wonderful scenarios in which I would tumble into a parallel universe, which didn’t happen to have a copy of Lord of the Rings in, holding the only copy of Lord of the Rings which could then be published with my name on it so I would get to be author of Lord of the Rings. As I grew up, I realized the only way I was actually going to become a writer was to have to write things and start them and finish them. I started out as a journalist, and was a journalist as long as I needed to be a journalist and then started writing comics and fiction, and now just make things up for a living all the time.

NC: Tamora Pierce?