Jasper Fforde

File:Jasper-Fforde-publicity-portrait.jpg

Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde (born in London on 11 January 1961) is a novelist and aviator living in Wales.

His early career was spent as a focus puller in the film industry. His published books are a series of novels starring Thursday Next: The Eyre Affair (2001), Lost in a Good Book (2002), The Well of Lost Plots (2003), and Something Rotten (2004).

The Big Over Easy (2005), which shares a similar setting with the Next novels, is a reworking of his first written novel, which initially failed to find a publisher. It had the working title of Nursery Crime, which is the title now used to refer to this series of books. The follow-up to The Big Over Easy, The Fourth Bear was published in July 2006 and focuses on Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

A new novel in the Thursday Next series is due to be published in July 2007, entitled The War of the Words. This title is printed in The Fourth Bear but is still subject to change. Also a third Nursery Crime novel, The Last Great Tortoise Race, is due at an unspecified date in the future.

Fforde's books are noted for the number of literary allusions, wordplay and the tightly scripted plot, and also the impossibility of deciding which genre they fit into. The simple answer is that they don't, although they all have elements of metafiction, parody, and fantasy. However, it does help to be widely read, especially with the Thursday Next books, set as they are within a police department that fights crime against literature. An example is this exchange between Next and her father: "That's a hell of a catch.""Second best there is". A reader not knowing the work of Joseph Heller may well miss the reference to the novel "Catch-22". This understanding that Fforde does not signpost all the jokes because the reader is intelligent and knowledgable enough to 'get it' follows the same idea as in the work of Terry Pratchett ("Who do you want to be remembered as the greatest horn player ever, you or some felonious monk?").

Fforde should also be noted for his use of the internet to add a different level to the books at ThursdayNext.com. He talks directly to his fans through comments on the Fforum, which has attracted a small community producing parodies and nonsense roughly connected to the 'Nextian Universe'. This is an alternate reality where the Crimean War is still being fought in 1985, the death of Winston Churchill at an early age (possibly due to Time Guerillas changing history) led to Britain being invaded by Nazi Germany before liberation in the 1950s, and where cloning is commonplace with Thursday sharing her world with dodos, thylacines, woolly mammoths, and neanderthals.

Another way to engage readers has been through the insertion of rogue postcards into copies of the books which now sell for not inconsiderable sums, as well as guerrilla signings, which often confuse purchasers of his books.

Bibliography

Thursday Next

• The Eyre Affair (2001)
• Lost in a Good Book (2002)
• The Well of Lost Plots (2003)
• Something Rotten (2004)

Nursery Crimes

• The Big Over Easy (2005)
• The Fourth Bear (2006)

External links

• Jasper Fforde's Web site
• ThursdayNext.com
• Jasper Fforde Ffan Club
• Home of the new series of Nursery Crime books
• Jasper Fforde at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Jasper Fforde at IMDb
• Interview conducted by Jay Tomio for Fantasybookspot.com