Monday, October 29, 2012
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Sir Terry Pratchett: "Shut up and let me finish my story!"
“How can you fear death when you don’t even know what it is?” he’s wondering, dressed all in wizardly black, seated on a plush red bench in the airy atrium of the May Fair Hotel, London. “You don’t even know
if there’s going to be a ‘you’ there, to see you there. I remember when I was around six I was taken to... not Wookey Hole... um... the Mendip... where are the caves… the name... Somerset... this is PCA for you...”
PCA (posterior cortical atrophy) is the rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s Pratchett was diagnosed with in 2007, aged 59. It affects memory to a degree but is, in fact, more disruptive to his visual processes. He can neither read nor physically write effectively any more – certainly “an embuggerance”, as he’s described it, for Britain’s biggest-selling author behind only JK Rowling. Pratchett is the author of more than 50 books, 39 of them his absurdist-science fiction Discworld phenomenon, published in 38 languages. Right now, though, intent on finishing his story, he asks our photographer, “Are you in a position to Google?”, which yields his answer, “Cheddar Caves!”, and concludes his tale about stumbling over, alone, an archaeological skeleton exhibit and not being afraid, “because I thought, you can’t do anything, you’re under that glass”. He returns to his original point.
“But what people fear is a bad death,” he decides. “They fear being halfway dead. In some clinic. Where they’re prodding and pushing you about.” Or they still fear they’ll languish in this unknown place called Hell. “Or, as we call it these days, ‘care’.” And he cackles, as he often does, with an infectious, glittery-eyed wheeze.
The most inspirational thing about Terry Pratchett today, now 64, the planet’s most passionate proponent of legally assisted dying, is that he’s far more interested in talking about life than he is about death, and in telling a funny story, determined to make you laugh.
“My short-term memory is not very good,” he’ll explain, contemplating his condition today. “On the other hand, my short-term memory is not very good... I was waiting for you to laugh!” You soon realise that it’s you, in fact, who’s considerably more preoccupied with the assumed deterioration of Pratchett’s mind than he is. Later, talking about how we both had parents on their hospital deathbeds who were, as he puts it, “mummified in morphine”, I mention how my mum, a life-long nurse, asked me to ask the nurses to up her morphine dose (she’d pointed to her digital dosage box and managed the words “It’s not enough”) and the nurses told me they could not “because of Harold Shipman”. Pratchett stared, I thought, blankly so I began reminding him about Harold Shipman. “Of course I know Harold Shipman!” he boomed. “And yes, he made it worse, absolutely. As did middle management types – ‘We don’t want to be sued’…”
This year, he was appalled by the fate of locked-in syndrome sufferer Tony Nicklinson, who starved himself to death after his right-to-die appeal was lost. “I went ballistic,” fumes Pratchett. “He was most emphatically compos mentis and had the love of his family. There is no way it could be murder.”
He remains, though, optimistic, still advocating the creation of “a reverse coroner’s court” where the terminally ill, their doctor and closest loved one can be heard and individually assessed “before whatever disease puts them in a bucket”, he notes. “And if the argument is that it’s bad for society because we don’t know what’s going on, let society see it.”
Pratchett himself has vividly shown us in his Bafta-winning documentaries both the daily reality of Alzheimer’s (Living with Alzheimer’s, 2009) and the procedures at Dignitas in Switzerland (Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die, 2011), where we saw motor neurone disease sufferer Peter Smedley, 71, die in his seat, wife by his side.
“So we persevere,” he nods. “Everywhere assisted dying is practised, there’s been no case of anyone having it done against their will. Where people say ‘Granny will be pushed into the garbage system’, it simply has not happened. I’ve even phoned my way through to the FBI. Now, we have to get the Vatican off our backs. The God-botherers. And the shallow politicians that think ‘We might get kicked out if we change the law’. The bastards.”
In 2012, Pratchett’s imagination remains as robust as his personality – “My creative self seems to be alive and well; I’m still me”. Dodger, his latest novel for young adults, a lively tale of a sewer scavenger in Dickensian London, sees Pratchett’s gloriously vivid language undiminished even as he notates his words to voice-recognition technology.
He wrote the book partly because he loves the Victorian era – “It’s the most interesting one,” he chirps before an enormous anecdote ensues about 19th-century “corset wars” – and partly because The Youth need better teaching – “The young generation has no fucking idea about history!”
Pratchett remains a conversational riot, if impossible to interrupt: any attempt to interject into his infinite anecdotes is met with a highly mischievous “Shut up and let me finish my story!” Sometimes, when memory fails him, he’s sure it’s merely “being in my 60s”, as perhaps is his habit of recalling his colourful past: stories about his parents, who he adored (his mechanic dad was “stoic”, his formidably bright, book-encouraging mum could “see through rocks”), about being “a disruptive force” at school in High Wycombe, a cosmology-obsessed teenager forever bringing in Private Eye and Mad magazine “even though Harry (the headmaster) was determined to keep the ’60s out of High Wycombe”.
At 17, he eschewed university for newspaper journalism on the local Bucks Free Press, where his experiences were extreme: seeing a dead body on his first day – “Very, very dead, and I thought ‘Isn’t it amazing, you can go on being sick when you’ve run out of things to be sick with?’” – being pulled from a well full of pig-muck and witnessing body parts scattered along a railway line after a woman’s suicide – “She’d been standing by the track smoking fags and I counted the stubs. She smoked six and then stepped in front of the train”. It’s here, too, he first encountered notions of assisted dying, remembering the former nurse who told him she’d “twice killed somebody” back in the 1930s, ending the agony of a cancer patient, at the behest of his wife, through pillow suffocation, a nursing practice known as “showing them the door”.
No wonder he became both a pragmatic realist and professional absurdist, a one-man Monty Python of satirical science fiction and a humanist without religion. “I have no belief in the war God of the Israelites,” he announces today, though he hopes, with his scientific leanings, our energies might live for ever, “I think we all would like to think so”. Back in the ’70s, he and his wife of 44 years, Lyn, were “hippies, with jobs”, choosing to have one child (Rhianna, who’d become a successful computer games writer) as a contribution to population control (they were evidently ahead of their time). How does he feel, as a hippy, about his fortune?
“If there’s one thing that makes me happy about being a millionaire it is that all the money I’ve got, I earned, and nobody died,” he smiles. “Nobody was momentarily inconvenienced by the work I did. Widows and orphans had no problems from me. People kept saying ‘Can we have more books?’ and I said ‘Okay, here’s another one – kerching!’”
And he dabs, shoulders shaking, at his eyes. Today, his medical prognosis is good – “People with PCA can go on for quite a long time, I’ve been told” – so he’ll simply carry on writing his books and fronting (and funding) his increasingly urgent law-changing crusade, still wishing, as he so memorably detailed in his spellbinding Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Shaking Hands With Death (2010), to die seated in his garden, brandy in one hand, legal potion in the other, with 16th-century English choral composer Thomas Tallis on his iPod.
He is, surely, the least morbid spokesman for The Reaper alive today, a chortling champion of the
light in life before the darkness inevitably descends. The wizardly Sir Terry Pratchett, it turns out, can even make you laugh on your deathbed.
“Mr Smedley was laughing with me at the last minute,” he smiles. “I was telling him I take a lot of pills every day and these days pills don’t come in pill boxes, you have to really pull them out [of the container]. So you’re putting pressure on and pressure on and you get what I call the toilet ping, where it goes ckck, bong, ck, ck, ping, splash! And that was his last laugh. Before he died. He laughed.
He had a good death. Possibly one of the best.”
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Terry Pratchett's books - collaborations and contributions
Collaborations and contributions
- The Unadulterated Cat is a humorous book of cat anecdotes written by Pratchett and illustrated by Gray Jolliffe.
- After the King: Stories In Honour of J.R.R. Tolkien edited by Martin H. Greenberg (1992) contains "Troll Bridge", a short story featuring Cohen the Barbarian. This story was also published in the compilation The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy (2001, edited by Mike Ashley).
- The Wizards of Odd, a short-story compilation edited by Peter Haining (1996), includes a Discworld short story called "Theatre of Cruelty".
- The Flying Sorcerers, another short-story compilation edited by Peter Haining (1997), starts off with a Pratchett story called "Turntables of the Night", featuring Death (albeit not set on Discworld, but in our "reality").
- Knights of Madness (1998, edited by Peter Haining) includes a short story called "Hollywood Chickens".
- Legends, edited by Robert Silverberg (1998), contains a Discworld short story called "The Sea and Little Fishes".
- Digital Dreams, edited by David V Barrett (1990), contains the science fiction short story "# ifdefDEBUG + "world/enough" + "time".
- Meditations on Middle-Earth (2002)
- The Leaky Establishment, written by David Langford (1984), has a foreword by Pratchett in later reissues (from 2001).
- Once More* With Footnotes, edited by Priscilla Olson and Sheila M. Perry (2004), is "an assortment of short stories, articles, introductions, and ephemera" by Pratchett which "have appeared in books, magazines, newspapers, anthologies, and program books, many of which are now hard to find."[125]
- Now We Are Sick, written by Neil Gaiman and Stephen Jones (1994), includes the poem called "The Secret Book of the Dead" by Pratchett.
- The Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2007 includes an article by Pratchett about the process of writing fantasy.
- Good Omens, written with Neil Gaiman (1990)
- The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by David Pringle (1998), has a foreword by Pratchett.[126]
- The Long Earth, written with Stephen Baxter (2012)
Sunday, October 21, 2012
One Minute With: Terry Pratchett, novelist
Where are you now and what can you see?
In a rather nice hotel (in London), and I can see my publicist smirking at me.
What are you currently reading?
I will go back to Gavin Weightman’s ‘The Frozen Water Trade’... which you look at and think ‘how in heaven can this be interesting?’, and it turns out to be absolutely amazing.
Choose a favourite author and say why you admire her/him
GK Chesterton, especially ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill’. I like his way with paradox. My granny lived in Beconsfield and he did too. She told me that he was a big fat man with a squeaky voice.
Describe the room where you usually write
It’s a building separate from the house with a lot of books. If you could get books on the ceiling...
Which fictional character most resembles you?
Commander Vimes from ‘Snuff’, who starts out as a copper and ends up as the knighted chief of police. He realises he is no longer a man of the people, though he’s always seen himself as that. His wife has to explain how he should do things now.
Who is your hero/heroine from outside literature?
My mum, who urged me on.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Terry Pratchett Talks Discworld-Inspired TV Show, New Book Dodger
NEW YORK — An upcoming television show based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels will focus on crime-fighting character Samuel Vimes, said the writer Friday at New York Comic Con.
Vimes is the no-nonsense commander of the City Watch, a burgeoning police force in the fantasy Discworld city of Ankh-Morpork. His exploits will form the basis of the show, to be called The Watch.
“Think of it like a Pratchett-style CSI,” the charismatic British novelist said. “Only you won’t get it over here because you tipped our tea in the harbor ‘n’ all that shit,” he joked to the laughing crowd.
It might be fair to say that Samuel Vimes and Sir Terry aren’t all that dissimilar. Vimes worked his way up from poverty-struck origins to the aristocratic circles of Ankh-Morpork society. Pratchett grew up in public housing and described himself at Comic Con as a “poor man with lots of money.”
“I still clean my own toilet,” he hastened to add.
Pratchett didn’t reveal much else about the upcoming TV show, which is slated for 13 episodes. The crowd seemed more interested in whether, when and from which series there’d be more novels. (Pratchett’s comic fantasy Discworld series has been ongoing for the past three decades.)
Pratchett was at New York Comic Con to promote and introduce Dodger, his latest book, which parodies the life of Charles Dickens. It was released on Sept. 13 in the United Kingdom. The book is the result of a “lifetime of research” and experience, said Pratchett.
“I fully intend there to be a Dodger sequel,” he said, but with a caveat: “as long as I’m spared. You must pray for me.” Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in December 2007. He didn’t waste the opportunity to playfully mock his fans, though: “You don’t look like a praying lot, I must say.”
Pratchett also read the first couple of pages of Dodger aloud to the crowd. The book opens with a dingy Victorian street scene where “the drains and sewers were overflowing.” A young woman is walking the street at night, where she’s set upon by two men and subsequently rescued by a young lad.
“That was pretty good, wasn’t it?” quipped Pratchett after the reading.
He also hinted that he wanted to pen additional novels for his other book series. “I can’t imagine being alive and not writing,” he said.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Researchers Propose Space-Time Crystal as Perfect Clock, Will Probably Destroy Universe
An international team of researchers led by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have proposed a way to build a clock so perfect, it would keep ticking long after the universe is rendered a cold dead place.
Well, not ticking, exactly. The proposal is for the creation of a ”space-time crystal” with structure in four dimensions. Such a device has been a theory for years, but this is the first time researchers have come to the table with a concept that they could conceivably actually build, and would not only act as a perfect clock, but a great experiment in creating wacky things with physics pretty much just to see if you can.
The proposal is based on an experiment in which trapped ions are held in place by a magnetic field and simultaneously repelled by particles with the same charge. The result is a ring of particles — not a crystal as we understand them, like a diamond, but a collection of particles operating continuously at their lowest possible potential energy, resulting in a quantum crystal.
“Under the application of a weak static magnetic field, this ring-shaped ion crystal will begin a rotation that will never stop. The persistent rotation of trapped ions produces temporal order, leading to the formation of a space-time crystal at the lowest quantum energy state,” said research leader Xiang Zhang at Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, stringing together three or four words we understand at a time.
If completed, a space-time crystal could answer many of physics’ most fundamental questions about the relationship between time and space. It would also provide a perfect lab to study things like the many-body problem in physics, which deals with the complexity of interactions of multiple particles on the quantum level.
In related news, Terry Pratchett fans will recall this as pretty much the exact plot of a much-loved Discworld story. And yes, the clock pretty much threatened to end the universe when it was activated. That’s the stuff of fantasy, though. Building an actual 4-dimensional clock made of quantum particles is the stuff of science fiction, and the chances that doing so will actually end the universe are no better than, say, 50%.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Sir Terry Pratchett at the Cheltenham Literature Festival
The author, who has sold a jaw-dropping 80 million books, was diagnosed with early on-set Alzheimer’s in 2007, and made his appearance on day three of Festival 2012 to talk about Dodger, his latest, Dickens-inspired book for young adults.
The writer is showing few signs, if any, of slowing down, however.
His talk with PA and fellow writer, Rob Wilkins, spanned everything from Narrativia, his just-launched, multimedia production company, and the 13-part prime-time TV series that is in-the-pipeline, to the first draft of his next Discworld book – along with a colourful anecdote or few from his travels round Australia and America.
In Dodger, Pratchett reimagines the story of the Artful Dodger, the memorable scamp from Charles Dickens’ novel, Oliver Twist, a tale of the plight of the urban poor in Victorian London, and coincides with the 200-year anniversary of the author’s birth.
Speaking on the inspiration behind Dodger, Pratchett said that as a boy he had been struck by Dickens’, and the social reformer Henry Mayhew’s, depictions of poverty in the reign of Queen Victoria.
“Dickens used fiction to spell out the plight of the underclass in early Victorian London, while Mayhew used hard facts. He was a man of a statistics …you can’t believe how bad things were for the poor in London …that stayed with me for a long time.”
Review by Daisy Blacklock
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Pratchett and Gaiman characters star in fantasy literary pin-up calendar
Artist Lee Moyer, backed by fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss's charity Worldbuilders, published his first literary pin-ups calendar last year, featuring takes on the works of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
This year, Moyer decided that "instead of deceased authors who couldn't fight back", he'd ask 12 fantasy writers to take part, and major names in the genre such as Neil Gaiman, Jim Butcher and Patricia Briggs have all given him the go-ahead.
January will see Moyer's take on Peter S Beagle's Lady Amalthea, the last unicorn. "There's a strange integrity to properly told tales, and to their tellers. Peter is an original – a marvellous person who writes of marvels, but never took on airs of the high-falutin'," said Moyer, who signed the author up to the calendar after "various calls, notes, and emails with Peter in several different locations about the country".
Pratchett, meanwhile, signed off on Moyer's unusual version of Rincewind, a far cry from the author's description of the character in The Colour of Magic as "scrawny, like most wizards". According to The Huffington Post, Gaiman's musician wife Amanda Palmer agreed to model for the calendar as one of her husband's characters, and Martin has signed off on his own pin-up page.
Moyer said that he was "inspired by the idea of strength and competence with beauty, brains, and a whole lot of muscle" for his illustration of Mercy Thompson, from Briggs' bestselling paranormal series. "This is a girl who can take care of herself, and you'd be lucky to have her working on your car. It was a delight to paint her. And moreover to create an old-school garage calendar – not only matching the format of those classic pieces as best I could, but riffing on the style of pin-up great George Petty."
Other characters in the calendar will be from the authors Ray Bradbury, Jacqueline Carey, Charlaine Harris, Robin Hobb, NK Jemisin and Rothfuss himself. Rothfuss's literary charity Worldbuilders partnered with Moyer to publish the calendar, with profits to go to the charity Heifer International.
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Terry Pratchett sets up TV company
Sir Terry Pratchett has launched an independent TV production company, Narrativia, with exclusive global multimedia rights to the author's bestselling works.
Narrativia will produce TV adaptations of some of Pratchett's best-known novels, including a four-part series based on his 1990s comedy Good Omens.
The London-based production firm will be led by managing director Rod Brown alongside Pratchett's daughter and fellow writer, Rhianna Pratchett, and his business manager, Rob Wilkins.
Pratchett said: "This is an exciting and natural development for me and my works, and I look forward to working closely with the team to develop new stories in areas other than just print and ebooks and, of course, seeing my first big-screen project come to fruition."
Narrativia is in the process of producing a 13-part series set in Ankh Morpork, the fictional city from Pratchett's Discworld novels, named The Watch, after the city's police force.
Good Omens will be co-written by Monty Python star Terry Jones and Gavin Scott, whose credits include The Mists of Avalon and Legend of Earthsea. The Watch will be written by Guy Burt, whose credits include The Borgias and The Bletchley Circle.
Pratchett's move to launch his own production company follows a successful series of Sky1 adaptations of his Discworld novels Hogfather, The Colour of Magic and Going Postal.
These were produced by independent producer, The Mob, which is also adapting a fourth Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals, for Sky next year.