Shhh. Cock your ears and listen carefully. You can hear it, off in the middle distance. Just skirting the subaudible. Listen:

"Waaaaaaaaaaah!"

That, gentle reader, is the sound of the spec fic literati bemoaning the popularity of the Harry Potter novels.

Their criticisms are varied. "Simplistic," say some. "Over-Commercialized," say others. "Lightweight," "unoriginal," "fluffy." "Too British," say some Americans, "too Americanized," say many more British. In some circles, the criticism is simply inarticulate. It's Martian Sanskrit. Some people, as always, will get down on anything for being too popular.

Some people are simply voicing valid, measured opinions. Some people have whey for brains.

I, on the other hand, advocate a broad-based, non-partisan, global initiative to promote kissing the feet of J.K. Rowling wherever she goes. I mean it- when she steps off a plane for her next American tour, a science-fiction or fantasy reader should evade the security cordon, dive onto the ground, and kiss her feet. When she goes to Buckingham Palace to accept the inevitable, a team of elite skiffy fans should parachute in through the skylights, disarm the palace guards, kiss her feet, and strew roses in her path. In fact, we should all consider chipping in to buy some sort of machine that could precede her in public and do the rose-strewing thing automatically.

Why?

I honestly think that I'll have a career thanks to J.K. Rowling, if you want the truth. I want to write speculative fiction for a living, and in order to do that, I require a healthy population of readers, not just now, but ten, twenty, thirty, and forty or more years from now. Above and beyond the bottom line, I want to see the spec fic readership as a whole continue to exist, simply because it pleases me.

Tens of millions of children around the world have now been primed with the skiffy virus. It might not erupt in its full-blown form in all of them, but look at it this way- if only one percent of the twenty million or so (a pessimistic figure assembled from statistics provided by two newspapers) children ages 5-13 who profess to be avid Potter readers ever parlay their taste in wizards into a broader interest in fantasy and science fiction, something like two hundred thousand new, young readers and purchasers of books are set to enter the greater fan population in the next decade.

This is a good thing,folks. This is a great thing.

Gray Eminences routinely bash the Star Warsfilms for all the same reasons they now bash the HP novels. But I've got a news flash for the stratified, crusted-over wannabe arbiters of skiffy fandom- Star Warsdumped millions of unwary young lads and lasses into the great pool of Geekdom. I know. I'm one of them. Sure, Star Wars unabashedly rips off Duneand Foundation. But I never would have read either of those novels if Star Warshadn't filled my childhood with wonder first.

The fan community cannot stay healthy if the doughy, bitter, gray-haired pundits start to outweigh (numerically, that is) the fresh-faced, know-nothing adolescents who really have nothing driving them save an abiding love for Star Wars, Harry Potter,or something similar. These empty vessels come to the fan community to be enriched. No sane person starts a six year-old off with The Left Hand of Darkness.

Now, thanks in part to J.K. Rowling, a broad demographic of children across the globe has accepted the ideas of wizards, witches, spells, castles, goblins, unicorns, Quidditch, and secret societies into its developing aesthetic. In the years to come, a good number of those children are going to wander into bookstores (not video stores, mind you, not video GAME stores, but book stores. I digress briefly to ask you this... why the FUCK would anyone with any brains at all, in this post-Pokemon age of ADD and glass-eyed television addicts, be upset at the popularity of a series of BOOKS?) to ask for more like the stories they once read. And they will find Tolkien. And Feist. And, Gods save their little souls, Brooks and Jordan and all that lot. And they will find Asimov and Heinlein and Haldeman and Gibson and Sterling and Pullman and Moorcock and Le Guin and Martin and so on and so forth, and the twenty-first century will thus avoid seeing the extinction of the sagging skiffy bookshelf and the opinionated young reader.

The only reasonable course of action, then, is to kiss the feet of the Scottish Queen. Rowling has seeded the readership of our future. What on earth do we have to whine about?