
Back in 2008 there was an exciting kerfuffle about the fact that Harry Potter, like Timothy Hunter, is also a boy wizard with a pet owl. I loved Neil Gaiman's robust response:
I doubted she'd read it and that it wouldn't matter if she had: I wasn't the first writer to create a young magician with potential, nor was Rowling the first to send one to school. It's not the ideas, it's what you do with them that matters.It will never satisfy some, of course, but at least he is on the record.
Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.