"I just make it up in my head; it's up to you buggers in the universities to tell me what it means." (Pratchett, quoted in Butler 56) Terry Pratchett is one of the most commercially successful fantasy writers of recent decades. It's said that "no British railway train is allowed to depart unless at least one passenger is reading a Pratchett novel" (Hunt 91). One out of every hundred books sold in England in 2002 was written by Pratchett (Richards 1). But "popular" doesn't mean "shallow"; the dust-jacket blurb used on many US editions of his books reveals that he has often been "accused of literature," and even as serious a writer as A.S. Byatt recognizes his brilliance and calls him a writer with "a multifarious genius for strong parody" (Byatt).
