I like Harry Potter on so many different levels. J.K. Rowling is without doubt a genius, whatever you may say. I feel she falters here and there momentarily in a couple of the novels, but she tells such a compelling story there's no complaining. You cannot after all, please everyone.

Apart from the fact that Severus Snape is possibly one of the most sensual fantasy characters--not that I have read a great deal of fantasy and science fiction--the story is great because of the way it brings all these people over time and space into the world. I grew up with it for the last seven-10 years (I can't remember now when I first read the first Potter novel, but I don't think the books came out on a yearly basis), and I'm not particularly one for fan fiction, but some of the stuff really tided me over when I was younger.

I think our definition of what is a "classic" is definitely changing. I like how the vote of the consumer (that is, the audience in this case) matters in the narrative arts. So much of the world's information used to be regarded as unchangeable. As things to be appreciated from a distance that did not encourage involvement from the reader.

Conventional wisdom was that the laws of nature were limited and that the ability for man to understand was limited by the limited nature of the universe. But I think our consciousness is a very special product of nature and that evolution and the passage of time, and the fact that we are limited in three dimensions, make for all practical purposes the nature of the universe unlimited, or infinite.

I view Harry Potter, and most other fantasies like Star Wars and The Dark Materials Trilogy, Narnia, etcetera, as worlds that have expanded beyond two minds--the mind of the author, and the mind of the reader, as it used to be, into whole new realms. They are like the worlds imagined in religions, they are the new religions for an atheistic world. Perhaps that is why organized religion fears fantasy. Apart from base superstitions, the idea is if it is accepted by popular culture that Witches and Wizards can exist if you want them to, and the Daily Prophet (the Herald Tribune equivalent for the Harry Potter-verse) that perhaps God exists only because you want him, her or it to.

Fantasy in contemporary culture is more real then ever, these things I say exist in partial reality. Sure, you can't make magic potions in "real life", but the ability to do so in The Sims meant something to me when I was younger, and is still really cool to do when I play the game.

When you start taking into account how most of what you are really is empty matter, and when you get into the tiny bits of what you are made of and the laws of classical physics start to break down, then hot damn, who cares what's "real" or not? These things are as real as you want them to be. Sure, I understand they are not "real" in the sense that magic exists only in stories, and miracles in the fancies of individual people.

But can we truly say they do not exist?

I'm not saying I actually think they do. I think they both do and don't. After all, the release of the seventh book will see very real people and very real emotions being affected in the real world. Are emotions real things anyway? And what can we say about all these emotions being nearly synchronized across the world as people all over read the final installation?

The Internet gives Dawkin's meme theory a new lease of life and a deeper reality than before, I feel.