Wednesday, November 28, 2012
No new news on Terry Pratchett
Last week there was a lot of news over Pratchett's Assisted Suicide documentary winning an International Emmy. This week, no news.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Leader: Facing Death (and Binky)
From the New Statesman: Leader: Facing Death (and Binky)
There are some who dismiss the work of Terry Pratchett as silly fantasy – and, in a sense, it is. His gift has always been in treating the big subjects with the lightest touch and in smuggling huge banks of wisdom past unsuspecting, giggling readers.
Pratchett has known for some years that there is little time for writing left: his diagnosis with a rare form of Alzheimer’s in 2007 seemed a particularly cruel punishment for someone so adept with words. Yet, with typical verve (this is a man who owns a sword made from meteorites), he began to campaign for dignity in dying and the right to end his life at a time of his choosing. “I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod,” he wrote in the Mail on Sunday. “Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, ‘If wet, in the library.’ Who could say that this is bad?”
In pursuing this admirable campaign, Pratchett has shown great courage: for who, knowing that their death was on a tighter schedule than other people’s, would want to be constantly reminded of that fact? Then again, as a writer, he has always been comfortable with confronting mortality: Death – a skeleton in a robe, riding a horse called Binky – has been a character in most of the Discworld novels.
Until that endgame approaches, Pratchett is determined to write as much as he can, in whatever way he can. In his interview with Laurie Penny , he says that he can no longer type and so dictates his books. He also reveals that his daughter, Rhianna, already a respected writer, will carry on the Discworld series after he has to say goodbye to it. That will be a truly sad day, both for Pratchett’s family and for his millions of readers, but it is typical of his wisdom, warmth and humanity that he has made what one of his characters might call “practical arrangements” for the world he has created to live on after his death.
There are some who dismiss the work of Terry Pratchett as silly fantasy – and, in a sense, it is. His gift has always been in treating the big subjects with the lightest touch and in smuggling huge banks of wisdom past unsuspecting, giggling readers.
Pratchett has known for some years that there is little time for writing left: his diagnosis with a rare form of Alzheimer’s in 2007 seemed a particularly cruel punishment for someone so adept with words. Yet, with typical verve (this is a man who owns a sword made from meteorites), he began to campaign for dignity in dying and the right to end his life at a time of his choosing. “I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod,” he wrote in the Mail on Sunday. “Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, ‘If wet, in the library.’ Who could say that this is bad?”
In pursuing this admirable campaign, Pratchett has shown great courage: for who, knowing that their death was on a tighter schedule than other people’s, would want to be constantly reminded of that fact? Then again, as a writer, he has always been comfortable with confronting mortality: Death – a skeleton in a robe, riding a horse called Binky – has been a character in most of the Discworld novels.
Until that endgame approaches, Pratchett is determined to write as much as he can, in whatever way he can. In his interview with Laurie Penny , he says that he can no longer type and so dictates his books. He also reveals that his daughter, Rhianna, already a respected writer, will carry on the Discworld series after he has to say goodbye to it. That will be a truly sad day, both for Pratchett’s family and for his millions of readers, but it is typical of his wisdom, warmth and humanity that he has made what one of his characters might call “practical arrangements” for the world he has created to live on after his death.
Friday, November 23, 2012
The politics of Pratchett
From The New Statesman: The politics of Pratchett
“He is, of course, writing about us,” A S Byatt observed of Terry Pratchett. “He is good at policemen, businessmen, fraudsters, murderers, banks and shares, and at music with rocks in it besides, as well as at goblins, witches, dragons, trolls and dwarfs.”
One of the commonest misconceptions about Pratchett’s books is that their fantasy setting somehow divorces them from the real world and its concerns. But as the Discworld series developed, its themes became increasingly political (with both a big and a small “p”). Take Feet of Clay (1996), possibly my favourite in the series. It is an interrogation of power as an ancient vampire herald called Dragon, King of Arms searches obsessively for the “true ruler” of the city-state of Ankh-Morpork –while Captain Carrot, the only living descendant of the last monarch, steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that he is the heir, preferring to serve in the City Watch. (His boss Samuel Vimes, incidentally, is a descendant of the last man to kill a king of Ankh-Morpork.) Vimes’s hatred of authority prompts the Machiavellian Patrician to keep giving him aristocratic titles just to annoy him.
Set against this is another plot strand: the desperate attempts by the Golems (creatures formed from clay and kept as slaves by human beings) to make themselves a king. The Golems are given life by the sacred words in their heads, but they fill their king’s mind with so many hopes and obsessions and aspirations that he is driven mad. You might not notice all this on a first reading – you’ll be too busy laughing about a bull that thinks it’s two bulls because each of its eyes has a different field of vision – but it’s in there.
Similarly, Going Postal is about capitalism. It tells the story of a notorious conman given a second chance if he promises to revive the Post Office. This is a shambolic bureaucracy, but one that offers steady jobs to the old and the slightly simple – unlike the rival “clacks”, a semaphore system where equipment is run into the ground and profit is put before the workers’ safety.
In among the sweeping themes are pointed vignettes: in Small Gods (1992), it turns out that only one person sincerely believes in the state religion, despite its enthusiastic enforcement by an inquisition. (This being Pratchett, a deity’s corporeal manifestation is in direct proportion to the strength of belief, resulting in the god Om taking the form of a one-eyed tortoise.)
In Jingo (1997), a new island appears in the sea between Ankh-Morpork and the nearby state of Klatch, prompting both to prepare for war – and culminating in Vimes trying to arrest both armies for a “breach of the peace”. In the earlier Equal Rites, a girl discovers that she’s a wizard, rather than a witch, and tries to enrol at the men-only Unseen University (an eccentric organisation that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in academia).
The moral cores of the series are Vimes and the witch Granny Weatherwax, characters to whom Pratchett has returned again and again. Both are feared –Weatherwax’s nickname from the trolls is “She Who Must Be Avoided” and to the dwarves she is “Go Around the Other Side of the Mountain” – but they are also unbending in their principles, fiercely loyal and protective, and unafraid to take the right decision even if it is hard and unpopular. As Death – another recurring character – says in Reaper Man (1991): “There’s no justice. There’s just us.”
“He is, of course, writing about us,” A S Byatt observed of Terry Pratchett. “He is good at policemen, businessmen, fraudsters, murderers, banks and shares, and at music with rocks in it besides, as well as at goblins, witches, dragons, trolls and dwarfs.”
One of the commonest misconceptions about Pratchett’s books is that their fantasy setting somehow divorces them from the real world and its concerns. But as the Discworld series developed, its themes became increasingly political (with both a big and a small “p”). Take Feet of Clay (1996), possibly my favourite in the series. It is an interrogation of power as an ancient vampire herald called Dragon, King of Arms searches obsessively for the “true ruler” of the city-state of Ankh-Morpork –while Captain Carrot, the only living descendant of the last monarch, steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that he is the heir, preferring to serve in the City Watch. (His boss Samuel Vimes, incidentally, is a descendant of the last man to kill a king of Ankh-Morpork.) Vimes’s hatred of authority prompts the Machiavellian Patrician to keep giving him aristocratic titles just to annoy him.
Set against this is another plot strand: the desperate attempts by the Golems (creatures formed from clay and kept as slaves by human beings) to make themselves a king. The Golems are given life by the sacred words in their heads, but they fill their king’s mind with so many hopes and obsessions and aspirations that he is driven mad. You might not notice all this on a first reading – you’ll be too busy laughing about a bull that thinks it’s two bulls because each of its eyes has a different field of vision – but it’s in there.
Similarly, Going Postal is about capitalism. It tells the story of a notorious conman given a second chance if he promises to revive the Post Office. This is a shambolic bureaucracy, but one that offers steady jobs to the old and the slightly simple – unlike the rival “clacks”, a semaphore system where equipment is run into the ground and profit is put before the workers’ safety.
In among the sweeping themes are pointed vignettes: in Small Gods (1992), it turns out that only one person sincerely believes in the state religion, despite its enthusiastic enforcement by an inquisition. (This being Pratchett, a deity’s corporeal manifestation is in direct proportion to the strength of belief, resulting in the god Om taking the form of a one-eyed tortoise.)
In Jingo (1997), a new island appears in the sea between Ankh-Morpork and the nearby state of Klatch, prompting both to prepare for war – and culminating in Vimes trying to arrest both armies for a “breach of the peace”. In the earlier Equal Rites, a girl discovers that she’s a wizard, rather than a witch, and tries to enrol at the men-only Unseen University (an eccentric organisation that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in academia).
The moral cores of the series are Vimes and the witch Granny Weatherwax, characters to whom Pratchett has returned again and again. Both are feared –Weatherwax’s nickname from the trolls is “She Who Must Be Avoided” and to the dwarves she is “Go Around the Other Side of the Mountain” – but they are also unbending in their principles, fiercely loyal and protective, and unafraid to take the right decision even if it is hard and unpopular. As Death – another recurring character – says in Reaper Man (1991): “There’s no justice. There’s just us.”
Thursday, November 22, 2012
The Great A'Tuin
The Discworld, travelling through space on the back
of Great A'Tuin, a Giant Star Turtle, in the original cover art by Paul
Kidby.
Terry Pratchett: Sex, death and nature
From the New Statesman: Terry Pratchett: Sex, death and nature
For more than 40 years, Terry Pratchett has used science fiction and fantasy to craft subtle satires. But the onset of Alzheimer’s has forced him to confront a stark question – what will happen when he is no longer able to write?
For more than 40 years, Terry Pratchett has used science fiction and fantasy to craft subtle satires. But the onset of Alzheimer’s has forced him to confront a stark question – what will happen when he is no longer able to write?
I’m sitting in a café on Salisbury high street and a frail old man in a big black hat has just told me that he is going to die. “No medicine can prevent it,” says Sir Terry Pratchett, 64, national treasure, author of 54 books and counting, campaigner for assisted dying and professional morbid bastard. “Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom,” he explains.
This is a story about death. Not Death with a capital “D”, that bony guy with the scythe and the sparkling blue eyes who shows up in nearly every one of Pratchett’s 30-plus novels in the Discworld series, swearing and smiling ineffably and being kind to cats. This is a story about death with a small “d” – the inconvenient little fact, the “embuggerance” that has been an implicit feature of Pratchett’s life and work since the author was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, in 2007.
Pratchett’s writing career spans 45 years. He is Britain’s second-best-read author, having sold more than 80 million books worldwide. His Discworld series began as a pure comic fantasy with The Colour of Magic in 1983. It is the story of a lacklustre wizard tearing haplessly arounda flat world that travels through space on the back of a giant turtle. The books that followed have proved to be something more complicated, something deeper. A terse and bitingly moral satirical voice developed over the series. Most science-fiction and fantasy authors who become successful must confront their own politics sooner or later, because inventing a universe from scratch and inviting millions of readers to join you there demands a certain moral responsibility. Writers from Ursula K Le Guin and Robert Heinlein to China Miéville have used the fantastic as an explicitly political space, imagining other worlds where humanity might organise itself differently.
Pratchett went in precisely the opposite direction. He began to write like a man who knows that the most fascinating place in the known and imagined universe is this one, right here. Pratchett uses nerdy fantasy and slapstick comedy as tools to tell stories about racism and religious hatred, war and the nature of bigotry, love and sin and sex and death, always death, knotted into the ersatz adventures of talking dogs, zombie revolutionaries, crime-fighting werewolves, tooth fairies, crocodile gods and funny little men who sell suspicious sausages on street corners.
The stranger his books become, the more they look and sound like Britain in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: girls meet boys meet gender-bending dwarves; decent people are destroyed by their own cowardice; priests tell lies and blood-sucking lawyers run everything, although in the Discworld they truly are vampires.
“Terry is just really good at human beings,” says the author Neil Gaiman, a collaborator and close friend of Pratchett’s. The two co-wrote the 1990 bestseller Good Omens. “He’s good at genuine human emotions, in the tradition of English humour writing.
“You can point to classic P G Wodehouse, you can point to Alan Coren – these people who define the style of English humorous writing – and Terry is a master of it. He also understands all of the tropes of various different genres and can deploy them. When Terry began, people pointed to Douglas Adams, because he also wrote stuff set on different worlds, but Wodehouse is the closest person out there – although Terry’s range is wider.”
Like many friends of Pratchett’s, Gaiman finds it difficult to discuss his illness, so much so, that he agrees to speak about it only over Skype, email being too cold and stark. “I love the fact that Terry fucking embraced his Alzheimer’s,” Gaiman says. “I love that he took it and used it to raise the profile of the ‘dignity in dying’ campaign.”
Alzheimer’s is always cruel, but the form of the disease with which Pratchett has been diagnosed has a peculiarly savage irony. He has lost the ability to use a keyboard altogether and can do very little with a pen. His most recent four books have been written entirely by dictation, and with the help of his assistant of 12 years, Rob Wilkins.
“I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate,” Pratchett says, as Rob drives us to the café in a rather unexpected large gold Jaguar. “It’s a speech-to-text program,” he explains, “and there’s an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.”
So, how does that differ from using his hands to write?
“Actually, it’s much, much better,” he says. I hesitate, and he senses scepticism.
“Think about it! We are monkeys,” says Pratchett. “We talk. We like talking. We are not born to go . . .” He turns and makes click-clack motions, like somebody’s fusty grandfather disapproving of the internet. Indeed, Pratchett is as passionate about technology as any fantasy writer should be. Decades ago, when the internet first opened up to non-specialists, com - munities such as alt.fan.pratchett quickly eveloped for readers of his books to share stories and meet each other. “You have to have a bit of nerd in you to get used to it, of course,” he says. He sizes me up suspiciously. “If you’re not a nerd I don’t want to speak to you. You must at least have taken the lid off your computer at some point?”
I don’t dare say no, because I suspect if I admitted that I work on a Mac and am worried about voiding the warranty, the interview really would be over. “Anyway, the algorithms are amazing,” he says. “I gave them everything I’d ever written that was electronic, and overnight it stewed it all up and worked out how the words would, should, sound.”
“We’ve got workarounds,” Rob says. “We’ve built the system so once the alarm goes off [in the morning] the computer switches on, so Terry doesn’t need to find the switch to turn on the computer.”
Rob is, in many ways, the archetypal Terry Pratchett fan. He’s big-hearted, fizzing with all the nerdy energy of a first-generation immigrant to the digital universe, crammed into a badly fitting black T-shirt, and utterly devoted. If there is a reason why Pratchett’s debilitating illness has had so little effect on his output to date, Rob is it. He’s the one who turns up at the house at any time of day or night to take dictation or fix a problem, and Terry’s wife has resigned herself to the fact that this is part of the job.
“If we create a workaround, that’s great, because we’ve got something to beat the disease,” he says, hurrying off to order the drinks. Both of them use the plural “we” to describe their work; the author’s Twitter feed is @terryandrob. Together, they are like boyhood friends, chatting about Alzheimer’s as if it were a particularly difficult video-game level they are determined to conquer. “We’ll soon have a system where Terry will be able to turn the lights on, open the curtains and all of those things just by talking,” says Rob. “It’s good fun. It means that we’re beating the disease every day.” He nods. “We like doing that.”
Where Pratchett is gruff and practical, Rob is expansive, the sort of man who gives a reporter he’s just met a great big hug when he recognises a fellow fan. In Choosing to Die, the Bafta award winning BBC documentary about the work of the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland that Pratchett presented last year, the writer is terse and solemn as he watches two men with terminal illness end their lives by choice. Rob is the one who rages about how unfair it all is.
Since his diagnosis, Pratchett has become a campaigner for the cause of dignity in dying. He spends all the energy he can on giving talks and making programmes to raise awareness of the condition. “We have a problem now that people think they are not going to die,” he says. “Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.
“When people go to funerals these days, they don’t really know what to do. They don’t go to church anyway – that’s because they’re sensible – but they don’t know what to sing or when to go up or where to stand.”
Rituals are important in Pratchett’s world. He isn’t the sort of writer who was ever going to refuse a knighthood when offered it, but he did arrange to have a sword of his own forged using a lump of meteorite metal, reasoning that if one is to be a knight one should do the thing properly.
“I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first,” he says. “My mum used to tell me lots of stories as she took me to school – she’d take me all the way to school, which would be about a mile and a half, and then she’d go to work.
“I was a kid from the council houses. The house I was born into was one which anyone on the dole would not set foot in because when you’re poorer in a rural area you’re really poor. My dad got the occasional rabbit here or there, mushrooms and stuff, and because he was a good mechanic he could keep a car down.
“They didn’t know they were incredibly good parents and I didn’t realise they were incredibly good parents until I grew up. Parents that stick kids in front of the television by themselves should be shot in the head.” He reserves the elderly curmudgeon’s privilege of wishing a good death on everyone, and an early one on anyone who disagrees with him.
When he began writing novels, more than 40 years ago, he and his wife, Lyn, were “hippies, but hippies with jobs”, he says. “I had a beard that Darwin would have got lost in, but I worked as a sub-editor on a paper, and we just had about enough room in our small cottage to have one child. Rhianna’s an only child, which is probably a good thing. You either go under when you’re an only child or you become a fighter. Rhianna is a fighter.”
Rhianna Pratchett is already a respected games writer in her own right. It was recently revealed that she is the creative mind behind the new Lara Croft franchise reboot, and she will be a co-writer on the BBC Discworld series The Watch, news of which has had fans like me chewing their cheeks in excitement. Mine may never recover after hearing some particularly exciting casting details that I’m absolutely not allowed to tell you about.
Run by Pratchett’s new production company, Narrativia, The Watch will continue the wellloved City Watch saga where the books left off, and Rhianna will be an important member of the writing team. The author tells me that he will be happy for her to continue writing the Discworld books when he is no longer able to do so. “The Discworld is safe in my daughter’s hands,” Pratchett assures me.
Rhianna has grown up immersed in her father’s universe and knows it inside out. Listening to him talking about his daughter, I realise it is the first time I’ve heard him acknowledge the possibility of not being able to write any more.
“The biggest thing about Terry for me, the thing that I’ve always found fascinating, is how much he loves writing,” Neil Gaiman says. “Not every writer does –we go from one end of the scale to the other. With Douglas Adams, novels had to be squeezed out of him like the last bit of toothpaste out of a tube, but then you have people like Terry; he would rather write than anything. As long as I’ve known him, since I met him when he worked [at the Central Electricity Generating Board] as a publicist, he would get home every night and write his 400 words.”
Right now the books are still coming out, rapidly but erratically – as if there’s wrapping up to be done. Stories that were waiting to be told are emerging haphazardly. Last summer, Pratchett published The Long Earth, a hard-sci-fi epic about alternative universes and resource allocation set in the near future; this winter it’s Dodger, a historical-fantastical story of Victorian London starring Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew and a fistful of stock Dickensian characters brought stinkily to life. Though they are marketed to teenage readers, the stories have grown increasingly bleak, with resource wars, human cruelty and rivers of shit floating with corpses.
“What do you tell kids?” Pratchett asks, while we are still in the café. “ ‘Prepare for a short life,’ ” he says, before taking a sip of his tea. “We are going to end up fighting each other for resources. And waste most of those resources fighting with one another.
“I was in Indonesia a little while ago, and you can see the palm oil plantations. We went up in a helicopter, and they go from horizon to horizon. And once the palm oil has been taken away what you’ve got left is desert. And I mean desert – desert which is stone. We’re not going to get out of this one alive.”
It is at this point that he breaks into song. I don’t mean this figuratively. I mean that he calmly and decisively starts singing the old English folk tune “The Larks They Sang Melodious”. He has a good voice, a quavering baritone that has lost none of its strength, and he doesn’t give a damn that half of the café has turned to look.
Pratchett sings two whole verses. The song is full of firelight and longing and nostalgia for warmer, younger days, and if you half-close your eyes you could be sitting around a country fire, listening to some elderly relative tell you stories about love and death that are no less true for being ever so slightly made up. Except that that’s not where we are – we’re in a branch of Starbucks, drinking slightly stale tea, and “The Larks They Sang Melodious” was not written to be sung over piped-in Brazilian jazz.
“When you’re all singing together, it brings things together,” he says. “I know the songs that my grandfather and my father sang. Rhianna knows the songs that I sang, ’cause these days just about any songs that have ever been written are available somewhere.”
He is a raving fan of traditional music, and tells me with pride that he once “got a kiss from Maddy Prior. No, no, I won’t get in trouble if you write that down. Have you ever heard of Thomas Tallis?” he asks. Without waiting for an answer, he says: “Well, I was walking through the kitchen one day recently and we’d got the radio on, and ‘Spem in alium’ was on, and I went down on my knees. I wouldn’t give you tuppence to go to church, but I really did.”
I don’t mention that the reason everybody now knows about Tallis’s harmonies and 40- part canticle is that they feature in the bonkbuster Fifty Shades of Grey.
“Of course, that song I just sang, it’s all about sex, really,” he says, grinning.
“Let’s start with Harold Shipman,” he says, and that’s when I know Pratchett is trolling me. Because I’m not the first to notice that, with his bristly white beard and sharp features, the fantasy author bears an uncanny resemblance to . . . Harold Shipman, aka “Dr Death”, the GP who hanged himself in 2004 after he was exposed as a man who had murdered countless patients in their beds.
“What [Shipman] did was terrible . . . it knocked all the moxy out of all the doctors. It means that these days everyone has to fight like hell to keep some poor bugger alive even though he’s struggling. The difference is that Shipman was killing people that weren’t ill!” Talking about death with a man who is, in all likelihood, significantly closer to it than you are is terrifically uncomfortable, especially when you start getting into the particulars of the disease that will, one way or another, end his life. But Pratchett’s gruff matter-of-factitude makes the whole thing much easier, like a plaster being ripped off all at once.
I start to ask, “Have the doctors told you – I mean —” He intercepts before I can work through the knot in my tongue. “Have they told me when I’m going to die?” he finishes. Suddenly I suspect that in recent months he has often had to finish difficult sentences for relatives and reporters.
No, he hasn’t had the date yet. “If you didn’t know I had anything like this, you wouldn’t know,” he says quietly. That’s not quite true: Pratchett is whip-sharp, and talking to him makes you want to sit up straight and make sure your shoelaces are tied, yet he is noticeably frailer than his 64 years might lead you to expect, and occasionally he drifts off at the end of a sentence.
In fact, just before this interview went to press, Rob contacted me to say that Pratchett had almost died of what they had thought was a heart attack, in early November, while in New York on a book signing tour. The pair were on the way back to their hotel from a visit to Ground Zero, Rob says, when Pratchett “took a very bad turn. We were sitting in the back of a taxi when I noticed his breathing had become laboured.” A few minutes later, Pratchett passed out.
In a written account of the incident, which he plans to publish, he claims not to remember much, other than feeling “simply dreadful, and very cold, although sweat was pouring down my face, and I couldn’t even focus and just seemed to be slipping away. Rob kept asking me if I was OK and telling me we didn’t have far to go . . . I have to take his word for what happened next.”
What happened next is that Pratchett collapsed. “I had to kneel on the back seat of the taxi and give him CPR,” Rob says. “It was fingers down throat stuff. He nearly died.”
The author was rushed to hospital, but recovered swiftly. Doctors told him that he had suffered an atrial fibrillation, caused by the cumulative effect of drugs he had been prescribed for high blood pressure and made worse by his busy touring schedule. He now downplays the incident. “I once heard it mentioned that signing tours can kill you quicker than drugs, booze and fast women,” he tells the New Statesman. “Some of which I haven’t tried.” It’s made him wonder if he should slow down and devote more time to writing and his family, but he enjoys life on the road too much to give it up.
Earlier, when we met, I had asked Pratchett how his health affected his outlook on life.
“Mostly, I’m incredibly angry. Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I’m angry about bankers. About the government. They’re fecking useless.” He really does say “fecking”. “I know what Granny Weatherwax [a no-nonsense witch who crops up in several Discworld novels] would say to David Cameron. She’d push him to one side and say, ‘I can’t be having with you.’ [His sort] don’t do anything but suck up to the lawyers. Why isn’t someone hanged?”
There is a starkness here that runs throughout the Discworld books. Isn’t he worried that he might be scaring the kids with all this discussion of death? Not at all – in fact, if there’s one thing that distinguishes Pratchett’s contributions to the young adult section of bookshops, it is his willingness to bring young people face to face with some of the more gruesome facts of human existence, with the silly seriousnessness you would expect of a dying comedy writer who’d had a personal coat of arms made up with a Latin motto that features in his own books. The motto is “Noli timere messorem” – don’t fear the reaper.
His latest children’s book, I Shall Wear Midnight, features a set piece in which the young heroine has to prevent the suicide of a man who has recently beaten his unmarried, pregnant, 13-year-old daughter so badly that she has miscarried – and bury the foetus. Harry Potter it ain’t. Yet the kids gobble it up, because one thing that Pratchett understands is that just because kids like stories doesn’t mean they like to be lied to.
So, the possibility of young readers seeing their favourite author on television talking frankly about his own death worries him not a whit. “Scaring the kids is a fine and noble thing to do,” he says. “I’m happy to tell kids to prepare for a short life. But it works like this – you can take them through the dark forest, but you must bring them out into the light.”
For more than 40 years, Terry Pratchett has used science fiction and fantasy to craft subtle satires. But the onset of Alzheimer’s has forced him to confront a stark question – what will happen when he is no longer able to write?
For more than 40 years, Terry Pratchett has used science fiction and fantasy to craft subtle satires. But the onset of Alzheimer’s has forced him to confront a stark question – what will happen when he is no longer able to write?
I’m sitting in a café on Salisbury high street and a frail old man in a big black hat has just told me that he is going to die. “No medicine can prevent it,” says Sir Terry Pratchett, 64, national treasure, author of 54 books and counting, campaigner for assisted dying and professional morbid bastard. “Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom,” he explains.
This is a story about death. Not Death with a capital “D”, that bony guy with the scythe and the sparkling blue eyes who shows up in nearly every one of Pratchett’s 30-plus novels in the Discworld series, swearing and smiling ineffably and being kind to cats. This is a story about death with a small “d” – the inconvenient little fact, the “embuggerance” that has been an implicit feature of Pratchett’s life and work since the author was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, in 2007.
Pratchett’s writing career spans 45 years. He is Britain’s second-best-read author, having sold more than 80 million books worldwide. His Discworld series began as a pure comic fantasy with The Colour of Magic in 1983. It is the story of a lacklustre wizard tearing haplessly arounda flat world that travels through space on the back of a giant turtle. The books that followed have proved to be something more complicated, something deeper. A terse and bitingly moral satirical voice developed over the series. Most science-fiction and fantasy authors who become successful must confront their own politics sooner or later, because inventing a universe from scratch and inviting millions of readers to join you there demands a certain moral responsibility. Writers from Ursula K Le Guin and Robert Heinlein to China Miéville have used the fantastic as an explicitly political space, imagining other worlds where humanity might organise itself differently.
Pratchett went in precisely the opposite direction. He began to write like a man who knows that the most fascinating place in the known and imagined universe is this one, right here. Pratchett uses nerdy fantasy and slapstick comedy as tools to tell stories about racism and religious hatred, war and the nature of bigotry, love and sin and sex and death, always death, knotted into the ersatz adventures of talking dogs, zombie revolutionaries, crime-fighting werewolves, tooth fairies, crocodile gods and funny little men who sell suspicious sausages on street corners.
The stranger his books become, the more they look and sound like Britain in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: girls meet boys meet gender-bending dwarves; decent people are destroyed by their own cowardice; priests tell lies and blood-sucking lawyers run everything, although in the Discworld they truly are vampires.
“Terry is just really good at human beings,” says the author Neil Gaiman, a collaborator and close friend of Pratchett’s. The two co-wrote the 1990 bestseller Good Omens. “He’s good at genuine human emotions, in the tradition of English humour writing.
“You can point to classic P G Wodehouse, you can point to Alan Coren – these people who define the style of English humorous writing – and Terry is a master of it. He also understands all of the tropes of various different genres and can deploy them. When Terry began, people pointed to Douglas Adams, because he also wrote stuff set on different worlds, but Wodehouse is the closest person out there – although Terry’s range is wider.”
Like many friends of Pratchett’s, Gaiman finds it difficult to discuss his illness, so much so, that he agrees to speak about it only over Skype, email being too cold and stark. “I love the fact that Terry fucking embraced his Alzheimer’s,” Gaiman says. “I love that he took it and used it to raise the profile of the ‘dignity in dying’ campaign.”
Alzheimer’s is always cruel, but the form of the disease with which Pratchett has been diagnosed has a peculiarly savage irony. He has lost the ability to use a keyboard altogether and can do very little with a pen. His most recent four books have been written entirely by dictation, and with the help of his assistant of 12 years, Rob Wilkins.
“I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate,” Pratchett says, as Rob drives us to the café in a rather unexpected large gold Jaguar. “It’s a speech-to-text program,” he explains, “and there’s an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.”
So, how does that differ from using his hands to write?
“Actually, it’s much, much better,” he says. I hesitate, and he senses scepticism.
“Think about it! We are monkeys,” says Pratchett. “We talk. We like talking. We are not born to go . . .” He turns and makes click-clack motions, like somebody’s fusty grandfather disapproving of the internet. Indeed, Pratchett is as passionate about technology as any fantasy writer should be. Decades ago, when the internet first opened up to non-specialists, com - munities such as alt.fan.pratchett quickly eveloped for readers of his books to share stories and meet each other. “You have to have a bit of nerd in you to get used to it, of course,” he says. He sizes me up suspiciously. “If you’re not a nerd I don’t want to speak to you. You must at least have taken the lid off your computer at some point?”
I don’t dare say no, because I suspect if I admitted that I work on a Mac and am worried about voiding the warranty, the interview really would be over. “Anyway, the algorithms are amazing,” he says. “I gave them everything I’d ever written that was electronic, and overnight it stewed it all up and worked out how the words would, should, sound.”
“We’ve got workarounds,” Rob says. “We’ve built the system so once the alarm goes off [in the morning] the computer switches on, so Terry doesn’t need to find the switch to turn on the computer.”
The great dictator
Pratchett’s assistant juggles the smartphone and pulls in to the café where we’re due to have our meeting. You can’t really understand Terry Pratchett without understanding Rob Wilkins, whose name I keep accidentally writing down as Willikins, a loyal butler-character with hidden depths who turns up in many of the Discworld books.Rob is, in many ways, the archetypal Terry Pratchett fan. He’s big-hearted, fizzing with all the nerdy energy of a first-generation immigrant to the digital universe, crammed into a badly fitting black T-shirt, and utterly devoted. If there is a reason why Pratchett’s debilitating illness has had so little effect on his output to date, Rob is it. He’s the one who turns up at the house at any time of day or night to take dictation or fix a problem, and Terry’s wife has resigned herself to the fact that this is part of the job.
“If we create a workaround, that’s great, because we’ve got something to beat the disease,” he says, hurrying off to order the drinks. Both of them use the plural “we” to describe their work; the author’s Twitter feed is @terryandrob. Together, they are like boyhood friends, chatting about Alzheimer’s as if it were a particularly difficult video-game level they are determined to conquer. “We’ll soon have a system where Terry will be able to turn the lights on, open the curtains and all of those things just by talking,” says Rob. “It’s good fun. It means that we’re beating the disease every day.” He nods. “We like doing that.”
Where Pratchett is gruff and practical, Rob is expansive, the sort of man who gives a reporter he’s just met a great big hug when he recognises a fellow fan. In Choosing to Die, the Bafta award winning BBC documentary about the work of the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland that Pratchett presented last year, the writer is terse and solemn as he watches two men with terminal illness end their lives by choice. Rob is the one who rages about how unfair it all is.
Since his diagnosis, Pratchett has become a campaigner for the cause of dignity in dying. He spends all the energy he can on giving talks and making programmes to raise awareness of the condition. “We have a problem now that people think they are not going to die,” he says. “Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.
“When people go to funerals these days, they don’t really know what to do. They don’t go to church anyway – that’s because they’re sensible – but they don’t know what to sing or when to go up or where to stand.”
Rituals are important in Pratchett’s world. He isn’t the sort of writer who was ever going to refuse a knighthood when offered it, but he did arrange to have a sword of his own forged using a lump of meteorite metal, reasoning that if one is to be a knight one should do the thing properly.
Country boy
Terry Pratchett grew up in Buckinghamshire and Somerset in the 1950s, an only child. Songs and stories were part of that rural upbringing from the outset – stories about aliens and space travel alongside traditional tales of the dubious doings of maidens fair and their mates.“I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first,” he says. “My mum used to tell me lots of stories as she took me to school – she’d take me all the way to school, which would be about a mile and a half, and then she’d go to work.
“I was a kid from the council houses. The house I was born into was one which anyone on the dole would not set foot in because when you’re poorer in a rural area you’re really poor. My dad got the occasional rabbit here or there, mushrooms and stuff, and because he was a good mechanic he could keep a car down.
“They didn’t know they were incredibly good parents and I didn’t realise they were incredibly good parents until I grew up. Parents that stick kids in front of the television by themselves should be shot in the head.” He reserves the elderly curmudgeon’s privilege of wishing a good death on everyone, and an early one on anyone who disagrees with him.
When he began writing novels, more than 40 years ago, he and his wife, Lyn, were “hippies, but hippies with jobs”, he says. “I had a beard that Darwin would have got lost in, but I worked as a sub-editor on a paper, and we just had about enough room in our small cottage to have one child. Rhianna’s an only child, which is probably a good thing. You either go under when you’re an only child or you become a fighter. Rhianna is a fighter.”
Rhianna Pratchett is already a respected games writer in her own right. It was recently revealed that she is the creative mind behind the new Lara Croft franchise reboot, and she will be a co-writer on the BBC Discworld series The Watch, news of which has had fans like me chewing their cheeks in excitement. Mine may never recover after hearing some particularly exciting casting details that I’m absolutely not allowed to tell you about.
Run by Pratchett’s new production company, Narrativia, The Watch will continue the wellloved City Watch saga where the books left off, and Rhianna will be an important member of the writing team. The author tells me that he will be happy for her to continue writing the Discworld books when he is no longer able to do so. “The Discworld is safe in my daughter’s hands,” Pratchett assures me.
Rhianna has grown up immersed in her father’s universe and knows it inside out. Listening to him talking about his daughter, I realise it is the first time I’ve heard him acknowledge the possibility of not being able to write any more.
“The biggest thing about Terry for me, the thing that I’ve always found fascinating, is how much he loves writing,” Neil Gaiman says. “Not every writer does –we go from one end of the scale to the other. With Douglas Adams, novels had to be squeezed out of him like the last bit of toothpaste out of a tube, but then you have people like Terry; he would rather write than anything. As long as I’ve known him, since I met him when he worked [at the Central Electricity Generating Board] as a publicist, he would get home every night and write his 400 words.”
Right now the books are still coming out, rapidly but erratically – as if there’s wrapping up to be done. Stories that were waiting to be told are emerging haphazardly. Last summer, Pratchett published The Long Earth, a hard-sci-fi epic about alternative universes and resource allocation set in the near future; this winter it’s Dodger, a historical-fantastical story of Victorian London starring Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew and a fistful of stock Dickensian characters brought stinkily to life. Though they are marketed to teenage readers, the stories have grown increasingly bleak, with resource wars, human cruelty and rivers of shit floating with corpses.
“What do you tell kids?” Pratchett asks, while we are still in the café. “ ‘Prepare for a short life,’ ” he says, before taking a sip of his tea. “We are going to end up fighting each other for resources. And waste most of those resources fighting with one another.
“I was in Indonesia a little while ago, and you can see the palm oil plantations. We went up in a helicopter, and they go from horizon to horizon. And once the palm oil has been taken away what you’ve got left is desert. And I mean desert – desert which is stone. We’re not going to get out of this one alive.”
It is at this point that he breaks into song. I don’t mean this figuratively. I mean that he calmly and decisively starts singing the old English folk tune “The Larks They Sang Melodious”. He has a good voice, a quavering baritone that has lost none of its strength, and he doesn’t give a damn that half of the café has turned to look.
Pratchett sings two whole verses. The song is full of firelight and longing and nostalgia for warmer, younger days, and if you half-close your eyes you could be sitting around a country fire, listening to some elderly relative tell you stories about love and death that are no less true for being ever so slightly made up. Except that that’s not where we are – we’re in a branch of Starbucks, drinking slightly stale tea, and “The Larks They Sang Melodious” was not written to be sung over piped-in Brazilian jazz.
“When you’re all singing together, it brings things together,” he says. “I know the songs that my grandfather and my father sang. Rhianna knows the songs that I sang, ’cause these days just about any songs that have ever been written are available somewhere.”
He is a raving fan of traditional music, and tells me with pride that he once “got a kiss from Maddy Prior. No, no, I won’t get in trouble if you write that down. Have you ever heard of Thomas Tallis?” he asks. Without waiting for an answer, he says: “Well, I was walking through the kitchen one day recently and we’d got the radio on, and ‘Spem in alium’ was on, and I went down on my knees. I wouldn’t give you tuppence to go to church, but I really did.”
I don’t mention that the reason everybody now knows about Tallis’s harmonies and 40- part canticle is that they feature in the bonkbuster Fifty Shades of Grey.
“Of course, that song I just sang, it’s all about sex, really,” he says, grinning.
Is this the end?
Sex and death and nature red in tooth and claw. Humour black as a fantasy writer’s hat. Dumping uncomfortable human truths on the table and sprinkling them with a little bit of fairy dust. That is what has been in Pratchett’s work from the start, steeping the nasty stuff in music and magic to make it bearable without ever lying to the kids, not for an instant. The campaign for assisted dying just takes that sentiment to its logical, practical conclusion.“Let’s start with Harold Shipman,” he says, and that’s when I know Pratchett is trolling me. Because I’m not the first to notice that, with his bristly white beard and sharp features, the fantasy author bears an uncanny resemblance to . . . Harold Shipman, aka “Dr Death”, the GP who hanged himself in 2004 after he was exposed as a man who had murdered countless patients in their beds.
“What [Shipman] did was terrible . . . it knocked all the moxy out of all the doctors. It means that these days everyone has to fight like hell to keep some poor bugger alive even though he’s struggling. The difference is that Shipman was killing people that weren’t ill!” Talking about death with a man who is, in all likelihood, significantly closer to it than you are is terrifically uncomfortable, especially when you start getting into the particulars of the disease that will, one way or another, end his life. But Pratchett’s gruff matter-of-factitude makes the whole thing much easier, like a plaster being ripped off all at once.
I start to ask, “Have the doctors told you – I mean —” He intercepts before I can work through the knot in my tongue. “Have they told me when I’m going to die?” he finishes. Suddenly I suspect that in recent months he has often had to finish difficult sentences for relatives and reporters.
No, he hasn’t had the date yet. “If you didn’t know I had anything like this, you wouldn’t know,” he says quietly. That’s not quite true: Pratchett is whip-sharp, and talking to him makes you want to sit up straight and make sure your shoelaces are tied, yet he is noticeably frailer than his 64 years might lead you to expect, and occasionally he drifts off at the end of a sentence.
In fact, just before this interview went to press, Rob contacted me to say that Pratchett had almost died of what they had thought was a heart attack, in early November, while in New York on a book signing tour. The pair were on the way back to their hotel from a visit to Ground Zero, Rob says, when Pratchett “took a very bad turn. We were sitting in the back of a taxi when I noticed his breathing had become laboured.” A few minutes later, Pratchett passed out.
In a written account of the incident, which he plans to publish, he claims not to remember much, other than feeling “simply dreadful, and very cold, although sweat was pouring down my face, and I couldn’t even focus and just seemed to be slipping away. Rob kept asking me if I was OK and telling me we didn’t have far to go . . . I have to take his word for what happened next.”
What happened next is that Pratchett collapsed. “I had to kneel on the back seat of the taxi and give him CPR,” Rob says. “It was fingers down throat stuff. He nearly died.”
The author was rushed to hospital, but recovered swiftly. Doctors told him that he had suffered an atrial fibrillation, caused by the cumulative effect of drugs he had been prescribed for high blood pressure and made worse by his busy touring schedule. He now downplays the incident. “I once heard it mentioned that signing tours can kill you quicker than drugs, booze and fast women,” he tells the New Statesman. “Some of which I haven’t tried.” It’s made him wonder if he should slow down and devote more time to writing and his family, but he enjoys life on the road too much to give it up.
Earlier, when we met, I had asked Pratchett how his health affected his outlook on life.
“Mostly, I’m incredibly angry. Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I’m angry about bankers. About the government. They’re fecking useless.” He really does say “fecking”. “I know what Granny Weatherwax [a no-nonsense witch who crops up in several Discworld novels] would say to David Cameron. She’d push him to one side and say, ‘I can’t be having with you.’ [His sort] don’t do anything but suck up to the lawyers. Why isn’t someone hanged?”
There is a starkness here that runs throughout the Discworld books. Isn’t he worried that he might be scaring the kids with all this discussion of death? Not at all – in fact, if there’s one thing that distinguishes Pratchett’s contributions to the young adult section of bookshops, it is his willingness to bring young people face to face with some of the more gruesome facts of human existence, with the silly seriousnessness you would expect of a dying comedy writer who’d had a personal coat of arms made up with a Latin motto that features in his own books. The motto is “Noli timere messorem” – don’t fear the reaper.
His latest children’s book, I Shall Wear Midnight, features a set piece in which the young heroine has to prevent the suicide of a man who has recently beaten his unmarried, pregnant, 13-year-old daughter so badly that she has miscarried – and bury the foetus. Harry Potter it ain’t. Yet the kids gobble it up, because one thing that Pratchett understands is that just because kids like stories doesn’t mean they like to be lied to.
So, the possibility of young readers seeing their favourite author on television talking frankly about his own death worries him not a whit. “Scaring the kids is a fine and noble thing to do,” he says. “I’m happy to tell kids to prepare for a short life. But it works like this – you can take them through the dark forest, but you must bring them out into the light.”
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Burlingame's "Wyrd Sisters" Take the Stage
This was actually from last weekend, but I share it so you know this playscript is in existence. Track it down if you want to perform it.
From Burlingame-Hillsburger Patch: Burlingame's "Wyrd Sisters" Take the Stage
magine Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Now shake it up and add some laughs and you’re left with Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett.
The Burlingame High School Drama Department presents this comedic retelling of the classic this weekend.
The play features a trio of witches, a murdered ruler and a Kingdom in peril. Will the truth come out and save the day?
You can see for yourself November 16 and 17 at 7 p.m. and November 18 at 2 p.m.
From Burlingame-Hillsburger Patch: Burlingame's "Wyrd Sisters" Take the Stage
magine Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Now shake it up and add some laughs and you’re left with Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett.
The Burlingame High School Drama Department presents this comedic retelling of the classic this weekend.
The play features a trio of witches, a murdered ruler and a Kingdom in peril. Will the truth come out and save the day?
You can see for yourself November 16 and 17 at 7 p.m. and November 18 at 2 p.m.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Terry Pratchett on his latest novel, his medical diagnosis, and more
From AVClub: Terry Pratchett on his latest novel, his medical diagnosis, and more
Until J.K. Rowling came along, Terry Pratchett was Britain’s bestselling author; his website reports that he still sells 3 million books a year worldwide, with more than 70 million overall sales. He’s written 50 books and collaborated on many more, from children’s picture books to adult science fiction to Good Omens, a humorous book about the Antichrist, co-authored with Neil Gaiman. But he’s best known for the Discworld series, which currently numbers 39 stand-alone novels following a wide variety of witches, wizards, and ordinary people trying to get by in a rapidly modernizing fantasy world. His most recent titles include Snuff, the latest Discworld book to focus on hard-edged cop and reluctant aristocrat Commander Vimes; The Long Earth, a collaborative SF novel about characters navigating a seemingly endless series of parallel worlds; and Dodger, a young-adult novel centering on the adventures of the boy who inspired Charles Dickens’ Artful Dodger character in Oliver Twist. Dodger features Dickens as a prominent character, and brings in many other real-life figures, including reformer and Punch co-founder Henry Mayhew.
In 2007, Pratchett revealed that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and he gradually became a right-to-die advocate in his native Britain, with two documentaries studying his positions: Terry Pratchett: Living With Alzheimer’s and Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die. His diagnosis has since been revised to posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), a rarer variant of Alzheimer’s that has given him difficulties with typing or reading, but has left him still capable of producing dense, playful, deeply felt novels at his usual quick rate. Earlier this year, he also announced the formation of Narrativia Productions, a company named after his personification of his muse, and designed to produce new adaptations of his rarely adapted work. On a brief U.S. tour in support of Dodger, Pratchett sat down with The A.V. Club to talk about Narrativia, his new working methods, why he wouldn’t want to go back to the old ones, and his lack of regret over going public with his condition. Oh, and also a really mean way to play laser tag.
The A.V. Club: When I first interviewed you 12 years ago, I asked, “What’s next for you?” and you promptly rattled off the plans for your next eight books. Do you still have that kind of backlog in your mind?
Terry Pratchett: Was it really eight books, or was that exaggeration for effect?
AVC: No, you really did lay out a plan for your next several series, and you definitely followed it.
TP: All right, let me think. If I am spared… That’s a thing my granny used to say. Does your granny ever say things like that? If I am spared, when I get back home, I’ll be carrying on working on my half of The Long Earth 2. As soon as that’s finished, I’ve got a large amount of the next Discworld to come. As everybody knows, most of the work is done in the second draft. But I like doing that, because I do the second draft very fast. And some people, including me, would like me to then go on to do a sequel to Dodger, because I know there’s at least one very good sequel to be had.
But at the same time… A long, long time ago, I thought I’d like to do a Discworld football book—soccer, obviously. And I worked on it for a long time, and I realized I couldn’t… I don’t really plan. I’m almost intuitive about things. I just see how the whole thing can happen. And very, very often, that really works. Some of the best ones. If I let Commander Vimes loose by himself and let him tell us what he thinks, it’s much better than me putting words in his mouth. In Snuff, Vimes is on the screen the whole time. All I’m doing is painting in what Vimes will do. We know what he is, we know how he thinks, we know what kind of person he is. So all I have to do is push his little piece around on the playing board, and Vimes will be doing all those things. And occasionally come out with things I hadn’t thought about until the very moment the time came for it to be said. “I thank my Lady Narrativia for favors bestowed.”
And so, going back to the football one, I chucked it away with, oh, about several thousand words done, then a lot later, something in my head went “Ping!” and I said, “I know how it goes! I know where the plot is, and it isn’t where I thought.” I was looking in an obvious place for the plot, and it wasn’t there; it was hiding somewhere else. And that became Unseen Academicals. Right now, I have, on what I call the naughty shelf, another one of those things. There is a lovely Discworld one, and a lot of it is done, and it’s got some elegant characters, really infested ones, and some wonderful things in it. [Whispers.] But there’s no fecking plot. There’s no fecking plot! I’m having such fun with the interactions of these people.
AVC: Is that typical for you? Usually, do the characters come before the plot, or which way does that generally go?
TP: Well, the characters are the plot. What they do and say and the things that happen to them are, in a sense, what the plot is. You can’t take character and plot apart from each other, really. Actually, the day before yesterday, I was able to sit down with my agent and she said, “Tell me about this month and how it’s going.” It was like being put in front of your teacher, and I started to garble. And the garbling was, “All right, and I know how it goes, because that one, then that, and that bit there, which I didn’t think was important, now becomes increasingly important. And then the gentleman will be helping him to do this sort of thing, and…” [Excited garbling noises.] It’s all there, mostly, but I have to change a lot of what I’ve done, so it’s not quite so done as it sounds. My wife says I plot in my sleep.
AVC: It sounds like you’re working on four things at once in your head most of the time. Is it necessary to have that subconscious help to keep it all straight and to make parts progress?
TP: Shit knows, I don’t. That’s just how I do it. Working with Steve [Baxter] on Long Earth, there were only about three occasions when we were together. Because we would decide, “You do this bit about this, and you do this other bit,” and then something very nice happened. I was very pleased about it, because it happened in the same way when I was working with Neil [Gaiman]. When we were doing the last Friday of Long Earth, we really wanted to get it to the editor that day, and the editor was standing there, and somehow, in that last afternoon, we did a lot of work. It seemed to us that all the bits… It’s like an explosion, but going backward. And at one point, Steve said, “That’s a good bit.” He really liked a particular phrase I’d put in. And I said to him, “I thought you’d put it in.” And almost exactly the same thing happened when [Neil and I] were working on Good Omens. We were actually titivating each other’s work as it got past us, so sooner or later it became both of us.
AVC: You said most of the work is done in the second draft. How do you do revisions these days, given how you work?
TP: Not the second draft. I mean, the first draft may have quite a lot of intricate bits in. Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon. I’ve still got the whole concept as one thing in my mind. How do I do it now? First of all, using TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate, I knock it out on the computer. You know about Dragon Dictate? It’s text-to-speech.
I’ll sit there with my eyes shut, listening to Rob, my PA, or someone from the agency, reading what I’ve written. That, if you can afford to do it, is one of the best ways. It comes alive in the speech, and it picks up other things. Small errors you haven’t noticed. Even if I could get my typing back, I wouldn’t go back to typing. We are monkeys. We like to chatter. Chattering doesn’t cost us anything. So you can do a whole page, look at it, “Didn’t get that quite right.” Scrap it, do it again, put in the little bits that you think are necessary. Doesn’t matter. It’s only talking. Doesn’t mean a thing. Whereas after a while, bashing a keyboard can get up on your nerves.
And in that second draft, that’s most of the work of the book. Because now I’ve got it smooth. And a lot of the third draft comes down to making the ending good. I’m often not sure what the ending is going to be, because I like it to be a surprise. If I’m doing this right, it will come out on the right ending. And so far, it’s never let me down. This sounds like the man sitting in the dustbin and playing a trumpet underwater. And it just works. It absolutely works. I think Snuff was one of the best books I’ve ever written. And all I really did was know exactly the mindset of Commander Vimes, wind him up, and present him with a problem. Go to Central Casting for the other people, and then Lady Narrativia throws in the little extra things along the way that you haven’t expected.
AVC: Was there a process of preparing to write Dodger? Did you revisit Charles Dickens, or Henry Mayhew, or any of your other inspirations?
TP: Oh, good question. In my early teens, I read every bound volume of the magazine Punch. Every writer of any distinction in the English language, and I mean including America and England, at some time wrote for Punch. Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men In A Boat, I loved. I was very impressed when I read a piece by Mark Twain in Punch, and realized that despite the fact that they were on different continents, Jerome K. Jerome and Mark Twain had the same kind of laconic, laid-back, “The human race is damn stupid, but quite interesting” attitude. They were almost talking with the same voice.
And when you’re an adolescent and you notice this, this is like great, good stuff. So I was looking through Punch all the way from the beginning of the Victorian era to about the 1960s, and that meant I read the best works of some of the best satirists, and indeed best writers, that were out there. And, you know, if you want to be a blacksmith, you go and watch the blacksmith working, and you work out what the blacksmith does.
But on top of that, I picked up an awful lot of Victoriana, which put me in very good stead for Dodger. And in the days when Neil was almost always in England, we would often go to old bookshops. I’ve got shelves of books of Victorian slang, that sort of thing. Miscellaneous books of the Victorian era, which tell you things that are amazing, that you’ve never heard of before. All these things, you just pick them up, as picking up clams. Because of Lady Narrativia, you whistle and they turn up. For example, St. Nevers’ Day, that’s been in the English language for quite a long time, certainly in the Victorian era. “Can you lend me a sixpence? I’ll give it back St. Nevers’ Day,” which obviously means never. And that was useful for Dodger. [The character] Mrs. Holland is based on a real woman who ran a brothel. I dug out what I knew about her and put in other things that would actually fit, and there she was. Dickens was easy, because it’s easy to pick up Dickens’ tone of voice once you read it. He has a clear tone of voice, and actually, he was a reporter; he was a journalist. There’s a bit in Dodger where Dickens makes certain that Dodger isn’t going to talk to any other journalists [about his story]. That’s the kind of thing a journalist says, and Dickens would have said it in those certain places.
AVC: Was it all just living in the back of your head, or did you go back and review any of it when you were putting the book together?
TP: Nearly everything there was stuff I knew. I think we looked up some things like where did Mayhew live at one point, who were the governors of Bedlam at that time. But mostly, I pretty much remembered things. It’s a whole lot of fun; when you’ve got a lifetime of walking along the seashore picking up clams, you suddenly find one clam that’s actually got a clam in it. [Laughs.]
AVC: Some people have called Dodger a form of fan fiction, because it brings together all of these characters—
TP: Isn’t fan fiction saying, “Oh, I like Mr. Spock, so I’m going to write about him”? Tell me why it’s fan fiction.
AVC: Well, you’re bringing together literary characters and real-world people in a story, because of your own fandom.
TP: Well, you’re very nearly right on that, but I would put it in a different way. Let me line this one up: We lose the past at our peril. A lot gets lost. Lots of words get lost, wonderful words like “firkytoodle.” “Don’t you ever firkytoodle.” Well actually you can, if you’re married. I’ve got a lot of Victoriana. The main reason I wrote Dodger was that as an adolescent, I read London Labour And The London Poor, and that’s great source material. It doesn’t matter if dragons are flying overhead or whatever—a lot of Victoriana is still cut in the frame of fantasy. I was talking to various people, and said, “Do you know about London Labour And The London Poor? “No, no, no, no.” Mayhew, he talked to everybody. He wrote it all down. And you see the level of privation for these people. Nobody in the United States could live that way, even slaves. But people forget.
I once told some kids that my father could have shaken hands with Wyatt Earp. And they said, “No! Wyatt Earp’s from the old days.” I said, “So’s my father.” My father was 9 when Wyatt Earp died. Admittedly, my father never got to the United States. But it doesn’t sound like history. It sounds like “some time ago.” But it’s not like the Battle of Agincourt. So I wrote Dodger, really, for Mayhew. To get that wonderful book—it’s always around somewhere. Being Victorian, he isn’t explicit about what he wants to say, but you recognize what he’s talking about. It’s so much fun. I brought them together for the love of bringing them together. To say to folks that “Actually, everything in this book is real, except the plot.”
AVC: What about Sweeney Todd?
TP: What I have done there is make him considerably more real than he was.
AVC: Where did that particular interpretation of him come from?
TP: Do you [get Bernard Cornwell’s] Sharpe series here? Sharpe is excellently researched. Might get on very well with the author. Toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, men were actually being thrown against walls. Men would end up running up a whole load of other dead men to get to the top of a wall. That’s how wars were fought in those days. And then you think, “Here’s a doctor. His job is not to kill people, but on the battlefield, he would kill men, because these men were blown apart by cannon and were shrieking, and so the knife was there to help them die.” And then you think, “He would have seen horrors on the battlefield, as bad as Vietnam at least.” Even worse than that, because there is no real medication. But he’s a doctor. That’s not what he set out to be. He did not want to be taking men to bits; he was there to get them better. Well, these days, we can see how that could drive a decent person nuts. And that’s what happened to him. He was getting flashbacks all the time of the dead men that he had killed.
AVC: This is all very dark source material, but Dodger winds up being a fairly romanticized story.
TP: Not that romanticized. Remember, my romanticized character actually has to deal with a corpse. But what he’s got going for him is that this corpse he’s working on, he didn’t kill her. She will get a good burial, and hopefully another life will be saved.
AVC: What initially inspired you to explore Dodger as if he were a real person instead of this side character in a novel?
TP: I think the thought just occurred to me, “Why don’t I write a book about the boy that gave Charles Dickens the idea for Dodger?”
AVC: Did you see yourself in Dodger, or did you see your experiences in what he’s trying to do?
TP: If parallels are there, other people will see them. I don’t. I can see myself in Commander Vimes, because I actually used bits of myself in him, because I’m a kid from the council houses, the tenements. So first of all, I get the OBE [Order Of The British Empire, a high British honor. —ed]. Ka-ching! Not too long afterward, an elderly lady is behind me bringing down a big sword—I got knighted. It’s the Queen. She’s quite small. When it was being done, my mother—I’m so glad she was alive to see it—she was in a wheelchair so close to the Queen, with the same kind of hairstyle. I thought, “I really hope we don’t mix them up when it’s time to go home.” [Laughs.] It would have been much more interesting for the future of the world. You think, “How did I get from there to here? Who am I to have got from here to here? What happened?”
And Vimes is doing all this as well. He’s quite nobby now. He’s got lots of money and wealth, and he’s not the boy he was. He feels somehow ashamed that that is the case, which is actually rather dumb. That’s what we do, to our shame, us writers—you grab from out of your stomach somewhere what’s really on your mind, and you put it on the mouth of the character.
AVC: You’ve been gravitating toward more and more Vimes stories over the years, leaving some of the other characters behind.
TP: The next one going out, I hope, will be a new character. Good to do one of those every now and again. I think a lot of fans would like me to write about Vimes all the time. But I haven’t got a Vimes one on the immediate list. I’ve finished Tiffany Aching. If I do continue Tiffany Aching, she would then be part of the witches’ books. She’s adult enough now. [The Discworld books centering on young witch Tiffany Aching have been marketed as young-adult, while the books about Granny Weatherwax and other adult witches are nominally adult books. —ed.] In the U.K. at least, no one gives a shit who I’m supposed to be writing for. They’ll read it anyway. The kids read the adult books, and the adults read the kids’ books. Of course, they’re both accessible, which is the nice way of fantasy fiction.
AVC: Do you write any differently for a book that will be marketed to young adults, vs. an adult title?
TP: Young adult is so close. I was surprised that both my editors gave me a thumbs-up on a lot of the parts of Dodger, saying “Today’s kids know about vampires and all kinds of stuff.” They aren’t the kids that were kids when I was a kid. I really enjoyed Dodger disguised as the old lady coming to get the corpse, especially the way he beat up the guy who tried to jump an old lady. That had to be there for the movie. I thought the consensus was, it all depends on the outcome. Like The Amazing Maurice [And His Educated Rodents], for example. There’s a lot of darkness in that. One American mother wrote to me and said she read The Amazing Maurice to her little girl. There’s a really nasty bit where rats are fighting one another and getting killed. She is upset, and the little girl isn’t. The little girl taps her on the knee and says, “Don’t worry, Mom, it’ll all get better.” Because she knows that that’s the compact. You’re allowed to grant people into the darkness, but you must allow them to come out again.
AVC: Your adult books do that too, though. Your protagonists have to really fight for their victories, often through a lot of darkness, but they always emerge in the end.
TP: Well! I suppose I’m that kind of guy, right?
AVC: Do you think of young-adult books any differently in terms of style, or is it just a content question?
TP: Initially, that bothered me a lot. The typical thing. Suppose you made mention of the Fab Four. What kid knows who they are? They might these days, mind, but you can’t be certain. You have to assume that kids of some age are not going to know some things, or some words. When I was quite young, I used to work in the local library. One day, I was carting books around. A lady asked me what kind of book would I suggest for a child of 6? I said, “A book intended for a child of 7.” She said, “Why?” I said, “You want them to grow.” When you were a kid, you undoubtedly read books you were not suited for. Did you tell your mum about them? Did you understand all the words at that time? “Pederasty,” I had difficulty with. “Ogre,” I thought was “ogg-ree,” because I’d never heard it said.
I read grown-up literature because I could in that library. I could run around and do what I wanted. I read stuff that kids shouldn’t know about, but because it came in when you weren’t sitting with mom and dad side by side, very embarrassed, you’re just, “Ah, that’s an interesting word. That’s an interesting thing they’re doing.” So that just gets locked up there, and sooner or later it will lock into its right place. I don’t think you can say, “Oh, this isn’t for kids” with the written word, where you might with other things.
AVC: You mentioned the scene of Dodger fighting a mugger while wearing women’s clothing as being in the book for the movie. Do you hope to see a movie made out of Dodger?
TP: One always hopes. And now we’ve got our own production company. We might be able to do something.
AVC: Your production company has been billed as handling TV series—are you going to do movies as well? Or do you want to do Dodger as a TV series?
TP: If it was possible do it, I think I would. Yes, of course I would, because we could keep some track of it. Hollywood is famously known for buggering up stuff. With something like Dodger, it has to be done right. Sam Raimi was going to do The Wee Free Men, you know about all this?
AVC: Yes, and Terry Gilliam was going to do Good Omens. There have been a lot of options over the years.
TP: Yes, but actually Sam Raimi came in because the studio wanted it to be not what I wanted. I spoke to Sam for four hours, and he really got The Wee Free Men. What he wanted to do was more or less what I wanted to do. According to Sam, the studio wanted to kind of Disney it. Every time Tiffany Aching did something good, she got a star. I think it was in The Wee Free Men where one of the older witches says, “If you wish upon a star, a little fool is what you are. The stars are far too far away, and they can’t listen anyway.” Tiffany gets it hard until the end, when she gets the rewards of working. It isn’t because you’re good. It isn’t because you’re particularly nice. It’s because you just got down to the problem and sorted it out.
AVC: Whatever happened with Raimi’s version? Is there any chance of that going forward?
TP: Pam Pettler [Corpse Bride, Monster House, 9] had done a very nice script. I don’t know. It’s in there in the ether. We had some difficulties with my agent, Ralph Vincinanza. He was somewhat secretive. I’m not one to blacken his name at this point, but what can you make of somebody getting a contact from Disney, who wanted to do a book of mine, and he didn’t tell me, to the point that they actually—not exactly crashed, but arrived at a convention in England so they could talk to me. That was six months after they contacted him. That was the beginning of the end of the relationship. He in fact, not too far long afterward, died anyway. And it wasn’t me, I promise you. We just wondered how many other things he didn’t do. Had he had a long-term illness? It didn’t sound like it. Were there other things, little things forgotten? Put it on the side, think about that later on. We are working on, if you must know, The Watch for television. I love the hell out of the idea. Rhianna [Pratchett, his daughter] and myself thought of it together. She’s a bloody good writer. She wants to do something with it as well, and I would like to see it happen. It’s not going to interfere with the rest of the book series. It’s just going to pick up from where we are now.
AVC: Do you want to be personally involved with the TV series? Do you have time?
TP: I will be personally involved with that. Oh yes. Like hell. But I think I know the people who are going to be doing it, and they are trustworthy people. And they get it, too. I’ll tell you how close in thinking myself and my daughter are. When she was in her early teens, I took her to a convention. Part of it was outside. It was summertime. People were playing laser tag. People in charge of it asked me and Rhianna whether we’d like to be on one of the teams. So we did that. There we were, lined up to go into action. There was Rhianna and myself, and two other guys on our side, and four guys on the other. The rules were that if anyone was dead, you could pick up their weapon and use that. They blew the whistle for the start, and Rhianna and I exchanged eye contact for a fraction of a second, then shot the other two guys in our team and picked up their weapons, so we could fight with multiple weapons as a team. In my mind’s eye, it can’t possibly be as good as I think it was, but I remember seeing Rhianna in front of me charging the citadel of the other side, just going for it madly. I thought, “That’s my girl.” [Laughs.]
AVC: Do you have an ideal person in mind to play Sam Vimes?
TP: There are actors I see occasionally and think, “Can they do the whole thing?” You have to have that inner bitterness. There is a layer of that. There’s a layer of— in a sense, he doesn’t like himself much. Good actors can get this sort of thing in. You never know. There clearly is an actor that can do it.
AVC: Your Alzheimer’s and your right-to-die advocacy have become a major focus when the media talks about you. Are you concerned about it overshadowing your writing?
TP: I get pissed off when they initially start with it. It’s all been very hectic, and I’m rather tired of it. I say, “Most of the problems I have these days are from being 65.” Certainly from reading the last eight books I’ve written, with Alzheimer’s, or PCA, no one would have noticed. They all became bestsellers. People are misled. That’s because I misled them, because I was misled as well. PCA is a different kind of Alzheimer’s. It’s quite slow. It took away my typing ability first. Go figure. You’d expect the fingers to keep going, know what they’re doing. I know lots of people with PCA much older than me, still going strong. Bits knock off, but it doesn’t seem to be that much different than your granddad saying, “Where did I put my shoes?” It’s that kind of thing. It’s not standing in the street and not knowing where the hell you are, or anything like that.
AVC: Do you ever regret going public?
TP: Absolutely not. Apart from anything else—I have to tell you this, and I’m ashamed to say it—my profile went up hugely, you know, because now I was the man on the television. Never been the man on the television much. Indeed, sales actually went up and went up. When I went ahead and was actually arguing for assisted dying in the U.K.—actually, most people who aren’t absolute God-botherers are in favor of it. Especially working-class people who might not have the money to have a really good death anyway. Doing that even helped me more. I didn’t expect it to. I don’t even really want it to. If I make any money out of it, I give it to charity. Tell the truth at all times in these matters is what I say. Otherwise, it would seem that I was ashamed.
AVC: If you could only have one legacy, would you rather it be “He was a tireless advocate, who changed the world for people who want to die,” or “He was a really great writer”?
TP: I’d go for “really great writer.” Although I don’t think I am. I know I have a style which is recognizable. I think you can see Terry Pratchett in every book. I like doing it. I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that’s it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called The Truth.
Until J.K. Rowling came along, Terry Pratchett was Britain’s bestselling author; his website reports that he still sells 3 million books a year worldwide, with more than 70 million overall sales. He’s written 50 books and collaborated on many more, from children’s picture books to adult science fiction to Good Omens, a humorous book about the Antichrist, co-authored with Neil Gaiman. But he’s best known for the Discworld series, which currently numbers 39 stand-alone novels following a wide variety of witches, wizards, and ordinary people trying to get by in a rapidly modernizing fantasy world. His most recent titles include Snuff, the latest Discworld book to focus on hard-edged cop and reluctant aristocrat Commander Vimes; The Long Earth, a collaborative SF novel about characters navigating a seemingly endless series of parallel worlds; and Dodger, a young-adult novel centering on the adventures of the boy who inspired Charles Dickens’ Artful Dodger character in Oliver Twist. Dodger features Dickens as a prominent character, and brings in many other real-life figures, including reformer and Punch co-founder Henry Mayhew.
In 2007, Pratchett revealed that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and he gradually became a right-to-die advocate in his native Britain, with two documentaries studying his positions: Terry Pratchett: Living With Alzheimer’s and Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die. His diagnosis has since been revised to posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), a rarer variant of Alzheimer’s that has given him difficulties with typing or reading, but has left him still capable of producing dense, playful, deeply felt novels at his usual quick rate. Earlier this year, he also announced the formation of Narrativia Productions, a company named after his personification of his muse, and designed to produce new adaptations of his rarely adapted work. On a brief U.S. tour in support of Dodger, Pratchett sat down with The A.V. Club to talk about Narrativia, his new working methods, why he wouldn’t want to go back to the old ones, and his lack of regret over going public with his condition. Oh, and also a really mean way to play laser tag.
The A.V. Club: When I first interviewed you 12 years ago, I asked, “What’s next for you?” and you promptly rattled off the plans for your next eight books. Do you still have that kind of backlog in your mind?
Terry Pratchett: Was it really eight books, or was that exaggeration for effect?
AVC: No, you really did lay out a plan for your next several series, and you definitely followed it.
TP: All right, let me think. If I am spared… That’s a thing my granny used to say. Does your granny ever say things like that? If I am spared, when I get back home, I’ll be carrying on working on my half of The Long Earth 2. As soon as that’s finished, I’ve got a large amount of the next Discworld to come. As everybody knows, most of the work is done in the second draft. But I like doing that, because I do the second draft very fast. And some people, including me, would like me to then go on to do a sequel to Dodger, because I know there’s at least one very good sequel to be had.
But at the same time… A long, long time ago, I thought I’d like to do a Discworld football book—soccer, obviously. And I worked on it for a long time, and I realized I couldn’t… I don’t really plan. I’m almost intuitive about things. I just see how the whole thing can happen. And very, very often, that really works. Some of the best ones. If I let Commander Vimes loose by himself and let him tell us what he thinks, it’s much better than me putting words in his mouth. In Snuff, Vimes is on the screen the whole time. All I’m doing is painting in what Vimes will do. We know what he is, we know how he thinks, we know what kind of person he is. So all I have to do is push his little piece around on the playing board, and Vimes will be doing all those things. And occasionally come out with things I hadn’t thought about until the very moment the time came for it to be said. “I thank my Lady Narrativia for favors bestowed.”
And so, going back to the football one, I chucked it away with, oh, about several thousand words done, then a lot later, something in my head went “Ping!” and I said, “I know how it goes! I know where the plot is, and it isn’t where I thought.” I was looking in an obvious place for the plot, and it wasn’t there; it was hiding somewhere else. And that became Unseen Academicals. Right now, I have, on what I call the naughty shelf, another one of those things. There is a lovely Discworld one, and a lot of it is done, and it’s got some elegant characters, really infested ones, and some wonderful things in it. [Whispers.] But there’s no fecking plot. There’s no fecking plot! I’m having such fun with the interactions of these people.
AVC: Is that typical for you? Usually, do the characters come before the plot, or which way does that generally go?
TP: Well, the characters are the plot. What they do and say and the things that happen to them are, in a sense, what the plot is. You can’t take character and plot apart from each other, really. Actually, the day before yesterday, I was able to sit down with my agent and she said, “Tell me about this month and how it’s going.” It was like being put in front of your teacher, and I started to garble. And the garbling was, “All right, and I know how it goes, because that one, then that, and that bit there, which I didn’t think was important, now becomes increasingly important. And then the gentleman will be helping him to do this sort of thing, and…” [Excited garbling noises.] It’s all there, mostly, but I have to change a lot of what I’ve done, so it’s not quite so done as it sounds. My wife says I plot in my sleep.
AVC: It sounds like you’re working on four things at once in your head most of the time. Is it necessary to have that subconscious help to keep it all straight and to make parts progress?
TP: Shit knows, I don’t. That’s just how I do it. Working with Steve [Baxter] on Long Earth, there were only about three occasions when we were together. Because we would decide, “You do this bit about this, and you do this other bit,” and then something very nice happened. I was very pleased about it, because it happened in the same way when I was working with Neil [Gaiman]. When we were doing the last Friday of Long Earth, we really wanted to get it to the editor that day, and the editor was standing there, and somehow, in that last afternoon, we did a lot of work. It seemed to us that all the bits… It’s like an explosion, but going backward. And at one point, Steve said, “That’s a good bit.” He really liked a particular phrase I’d put in. And I said to him, “I thought you’d put it in.” And almost exactly the same thing happened when [Neil and I] were working on Good Omens. We were actually titivating each other’s work as it got past us, so sooner or later it became both of us.
AVC: You said most of the work is done in the second draft. How do you do revisions these days, given how you work?
TP: Not the second draft. I mean, the first draft may have quite a lot of intricate bits in. Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon. I’ve still got the whole concept as one thing in my mind. How do I do it now? First of all, using TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate, I knock it out on the computer. You know about Dragon Dictate? It’s text-to-speech.
I’ll sit there with my eyes shut, listening to Rob, my PA, or someone from the agency, reading what I’ve written. That, if you can afford to do it, is one of the best ways. It comes alive in the speech, and it picks up other things. Small errors you haven’t noticed. Even if I could get my typing back, I wouldn’t go back to typing. We are monkeys. We like to chatter. Chattering doesn’t cost us anything. So you can do a whole page, look at it, “Didn’t get that quite right.” Scrap it, do it again, put in the little bits that you think are necessary. Doesn’t matter. It’s only talking. Doesn’t mean a thing. Whereas after a while, bashing a keyboard can get up on your nerves.
And in that second draft, that’s most of the work of the book. Because now I’ve got it smooth. And a lot of the third draft comes down to making the ending good. I’m often not sure what the ending is going to be, because I like it to be a surprise. If I’m doing this right, it will come out on the right ending. And so far, it’s never let me down. This sounds like the man sitting in the dustbin and playing a trumpet underwater. And it just works. It absolutely works. I think Snuff was one of the best books I’ve ever written. And all I really did was know exactly the mindset of Commander Vimes, wind him up, and present him with a problem. Go to Central Casting for the other people, and then Lady Narrativia throws in the little extra things along the way that you haven’t expected.
AVC: Was there a process of preparing to write Dodger? Did you revisit Charles Dickens, or Henry Mayhew, or any of your other inspirations?
TP: Oh, good question. In my early teens, I read every bound volume of the magazine Punch. Every writer of any distinction in the English language, and I mean including America and England, at some time wrote for Punch. Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men In A Boat, I loved. I was very impressed when I read a piece by Mark Twain in Punch, and realized that despite the fact that they were on different continents, Jerome K. Jerome and Mark Twain had the same kind of laconic, laid-back, “The human race is damn stupid, but quite interesting” attitude. They were almost talking with the same voice.
And when you’re an adolescent and you notice this, this is like great, good stuff. So I was looking through Punch all the way from the beginning of the Victorian era to about the 1960s, and that meant I read the best works of some of the best satirists, and indeed best writers, that were out there. And, you know, if you want to be a blacksmith, you go and watch the blacksmith working, and you work out what the blacksmith does.
But on top of that, I picked up an awful lot of Victoriana, which put me in very good stead for Dodger. And in the days when Neil was almost always in England, we would often go to old bookshops. I’ve got shelves of books of Victorian slang, that sort of thing. Miscellaneous books of the Victorian era, which tell you things that are amazing, that you’ve never heard of before. All these things, you just pick them up, as picking up clams. Because of Lady Narrativia, you whistle and they turn up. For example, St. Nevers’ Day, that’s been in the English language for quite a long time, certainly in the Victorian era. “Can you lend me a sixpence? I’ll give it back St. Nevers’ Day,” which obviously means never. And that was useful for Dodger. [The character] Mrs. Holland is based on a real woman who ran a brothel. I dug out what I knew about her and put in other things that would actually fit, and there she was. Dickens was easy, because it’s easy to pick up Dickens’ tone of voice once you read it. He has a clear tone of voice, and actually, he was a reporter; he was a journalist. There’s a bit in Dodger where Dickens makes certain that Dodger isn’t going to talk to any other journalists [about his story]. That’s the kind of thing a journalist says, and Dickens would have said it in those certain places.
AVC: Was it all just living in the back of your head, or did you go back and review any of it when you were putting the book together?
TP: Nearly everything there was stuff I knew. I think we looked up some things like where did Mayhew live at one point, who were the governors of Bedlam at that time. But mostly, I pretty much remembered things. It’s a whole lot of fun; when you’ve got a lifetime of walking along the seashore picking up clams, you suddenly find one clam that’s actually got a clam in it. [Laughs.]
AVC: Some people have called Dodger a form of fan fiction, because it brings together all of these characters—
TP: Isn’t fan fiction saying, “Oh, I like Mr. Spock, so I’m going to write about him”? Tell me why it’s fan fiction.
AVC: Well, you’re bringing together literary characters and real-world people in a story, because of your own fandom.
TP: Well, you’re very nearly right on that, but I would put it in a different way. Let me line this one up: We lose the past at our peril. A lot gets lost. Lots of words get lost, wonderful words like “firkytoodle.” “Don’t you ever firkytoodle.” Well actually you can, if you’re married. I’ve got a lot of Victoriana. The main reason I wrote Dodger was that as an adolescent, I read London Labour And The London Poor, and that’s great source material. It doesn’t matter if dragons are flying overhead or whatever—a lot of Victoriana is still cut in the frame of fantasy. I was talking to various people, and said, “Do you know about London Labour And The London Poor? “No, no, no, no.” Mayhew, he talked to everybody. He wrote it all down. And you see the level of privation for these people. Nobody in the United States could live that way, even slaves. But people forget.
I once told some kids that my father could have shaken hands with Wyatt Earp. And they said, “No! Wyatt Earp’s from the old days.” I said, “So’s my father.” My father was 9 when Wyatt Earp died. Admittedly, my father never got to the United States. But it doesn’t sound like history. It sounds like “some time ago.” But it’s not like the Battle of Agincourt. So I wrote Dodger, really, for Mayhew. To get that wonderful book—it’s always around somewhere. Being Victorian, he isn’t explicit about what he wants to say, but you recognize what he’s talking about. It’s so much fun. I brought them together for the love of bringing them together. To say to folks that “Actually, everything in this book is real, except the plot.”
AVC: What about Sweeney Todd?
TP: What I have done there is make him considerably more real than he was.
AVC: Where did that particular interpretation of him come from?
TP: Do you [get Bernard Cornwell’s] Sharpe series here? Sharpe is excellently researched. Might get on very well with the author. Toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, men were actually being thrown against walls. Men would end up running up a whole load of other dead men to get to the top of a wall. That’s how wars were fought in those days. And then you think, “Here’s a doctor. His job is not to kill people, but on the battlefield, he would kill men, because these men were blown apart by cannon and were shrieking, and so the knife was there to help them die.” And then you think, “He would have seen horrors on the battlefield, as bad as Vietnam at least.” Even worse than that, because there is no real medication. But he’s a doctor. That’s not what he set out to be. He did not want to be taking men to bits; he was there to get them better. Well, these days, we can see how that could drive a decent person nuts. And that’s what happened to him. He was getting flashbacks all the time of the dead men that he had killed.
AVC: This is all very dark source material, but Dodger winds up being a fairly romanticized story.
TP: Not that romanticized. Remember, my romanticized character actually has to deal with a corpse. But what he’s got going for him is that this corpse he’s working on, he didn’t kill her. She will get a good burial, and hopefully another life will be saved.
AVC: What initially inspired you to explore Dodger as if he were a real person instead of this side character in a novel?
TP: I think the thought just occurred to me, “Why don’t I write a book about the boy that gave Charles Dickens the idea for Dodger?”
AVC: Did you see yourself in Dodger, or did you see your experiences in what he’s trying to do?
TP: If parallels are there, other people will see them. I don’t. I can see myself in Commander Vimes, because I actually used bits of myself in him, because I’m a kid from the council houses, the tenements. So first of all, I get the OBE [Order Of The British Empire, a high British honor. —ed]. Ka-ching! Not too long afterward, an elderly lady is behind me bringing down a big sword—I got knighted. It’s the Queen. She’s quite small. When it was being done, my mother—I’m so glad she was alive to see it—she was in a wheelchair so close to the Queen, with the same kind of hairstyle. I thought, “I really hope we don’t mix them up when it’s time to go home.” [Laughs.] It would have been much more interesting for the future of the world. You think, “How did I get from there to here? Who am I to have got from here to here? What happened?”
And Vimes is doing all this as well. He’s quite nobby now. He’s got lots of money and wealth, and he’s not the boy he was. He feels somehow ashamed that that is the case, which is actually rather dumb. That’s what we do, to our shame, us writers—you grab from out of your stomach somewhere what’s really on your mind, and you put it on the mouth of the character.
AVC: You’ve been gravitating toward more and more Vimes stories over the years, leaving some of the other characters behind.
TP: The next one going out, I hope, will be a new character. Good to do one of those every now and again. I think a lot of fans would like me to write about Vimes all the time. But I haven’t got a Vimes one on the immediate list. I’ve finished Tiffany Aching. If I do continue Tiffany Aching, she would then be part of the witches’ books. She’s adult enough now. [The Discworld books centering on young witch Tiffany Aching have been marketed as young-adult, while the books about Granny Weatherwax and other adult witches are nominally adult books. —ed.] In the U.K. at least, no one gives a shit who I’m supposed to be writing for. They’ll read it anyway. The kids read the adult books, and the adults read the kids’ books. Of course, they’re both accessible, which is the nice way of fantasy fiction.
AVC: Do you write any differently for a book that will be marketed to young adults, vs. an adult title?
TP: Young adult is so close. I was surprised that both my editors gave me a thumbs-up on a lot of the parts of Dodger, saying “Today’s kids know about vampires and all kinds of stuff.” They aren’t the kids that were kids when I was a kid. I really enjoyed Dodger disguised as the old lady coming to get the corpse, especially the way he beat up the guy who tried to jump an old lady. That had to be there for the movie. I thought the consensus was, it all depends on the outcome. Like The Amazing Maurice [And His Educated Rodents], for example. There’s a lot of darkness in that. One American mother wrote to me and said she read The Amazing Maurice to her little girl. There’s a really nasty bit where rats are fighting one another and getting killed. She is upset, and the little girl isn’t. The little girl taps her on the knee and says, “Don’t worry, Mom, it’ll all get better.” Because she knows that that’s the compact. You’re allowed to grant people into the darkness, but you must allow them to come out again.
AVC: Your adult books do that too, though. Your protagonists have to really fight for their victories, often through a lot of darkness, but they always emerge in the end.
TP: Well! I suppose I’m that kind of guy, right?
AVC: Do you think of young-adult books any differently in terms of style, or is it just a content question?
TP: Initially, that bothered me a lot. The typical thing. Suppose you made mention of the Fab Four. What kid knows who they are? They might these days, mind, but you can’t be certain. You have to assume that kids of some age are not going to know some things, or some words. When I was quite young, I used to work in the local library. One day, I was carting books around. A lady asked me what kind of book would I suggest for a child of 6? I said, “A book intended for a child of 7.” She said, “Why?” I said, “You want them to grow.” When you were a kid, you undoubtedly read books you were not suited for. Did you tell your mum about them? Did you understand all the words at that time? “Pederasty,” I had difficulty with. “Ogre,” I thought was “ogg-ree,” because I’d never heard it said.
I read grown-up literature because I could in that library. I could run around and do what I wanted. I read stuff that kids shouldn’t know about, but because it came in when you weren’t sitting with mom and dad side by side, very embarrassed, you’re just, “Ah, that’s an interesting word. That’s an interesting thing they’re doing.” So that just gets locked up there, and sooner or later it will lock into its right place. I don’t think you can say, “Oh, this isn’t for kids” with the written word, where you might with other things.
AVC: You mentioned the scene of Dodger fighting a mugger while wearing women’s clothing as being in the book for the movie. Do you hope to see a movie made out of Dodger?
TP: One always hopes. And now we’ve got our own production company. We might be able to do something.
AVC: Your production company has been billed as handling TV series—are you going to do movies as well? Or do you want to do Dodger as a TV series?
TP: If it was possible do it, I think I would. Yes, of course I would, because we could keep some track of it. Hollywood is famously known for buggering up stuff. With something like Dodger, it has to be done right. Sam Raimi was going to do The Wee Free Men, you know about all this?
AVC: Yes, and Terry Gilliam was going to do Good Omens. There have been a lot of options over the years.
TP: Yes, but actually Sam Raimi came in because the studio wanted it to be not what I wanted. I spoke to Sam for four hours, and he really got The Wee Free Men. What he wanted to do was more or less what I wanted to do. According to Sam, the studio wanted to kind of Disney it. Every time Tiffany Aching did something good, she got a star. I think it was in The Wee Free Men where one of the older witches says, “If you wish upon a star, a little fool is what you are. The stars are far too far away, and they can’t listen anyway.” Tiffany gets it hard until the end, when she gets the rewards of working. It isn’t because you’re good. It isn’t because you’re particularly nice. It’s because you just got down to the problem and sorted it out.
AVC: Whatever happened with Raimi’s version? Is there any chance of that going forward?
TP: Pam Pettler [Corpse Bride, Monster House, 9] had done a very nice script. I don’t know. It’s in there in the ether. We had some difficulties with my agent, Ralph Vincinanza. He was somewhat secretive. I’m not one to blacken his name at this point, but what can you make of somebody getting a contact from Disney, who wanted to do a book of mine, and he didn’t tell me, to the point that they actually—not exactly crashed, but arrived at a convention in England so they could talk to me. That was six months after they contacted him. That was the beginning of the end of the relationship. He in fact, not too far long afterward, died anyway. And it wasn’t me, I promise you. We just wondered how many other things he didn’t do. Had he had a long-term illness? It didn’t sound like it. Were there other things, little things forgotten? Put it on the side, think about that later on. We are working on, if you must know, The Watch for television. I love the hell out of the idea. Rhianna [Pratchett, his daughter] and myself thought of it together. She’s a bloody good writer. She wants to do something with it as well, and I would like to see it happen. It’s not going to interfere with the rest of the book series. It’s just going to pick up from where we are now.
AVC: Do you want to be personally involved with the TV series? Do you have time?
TP: I will be personally involved with that. Oh yes. Like hell. But I think I know the people who are going to be doing it, and they are trustworthy people. And they get it, too. I’ll tell you how close in thinking myself and my daughter are. When she was in her early teens, I took her to a convention. Part of it was outside. It was summertime. People were playing laser tag. People in charge of it asked me and Rhianna whether we’d like to be on one of the teams. So we did that. There we were, lined up to go into action. There was Rhianna and myself, and two other guys on our side, and four guys on the other. The rules were that if anyone was dead, you could pick up their weapon and use that. They blew the whistle for the start, and Rhianna and I exchanged eye contact for a fraction of a second, then shot the other two guys in our team and picked up their weapons, so we could fight with multiple weapons as a team. In my mind’s eye, it can’t possibly be as good as I think it was, but I remember seeing Rhianna in front of me charging the citadel of the other side, just going for it madly. I thought, “That’s my girl.” [Laughs.]
AVC: Do you have an ideal person in mind to play Sam Vimes?
TP: There are actors I see occasionally and think, “Can they do the whole thing?” You have to have that inner bitterness. There is a layer of that. There’s a layer of— in a sense, he doesn’t like himself much. Good actors can get this sort of thing in. You never know. There clearly is an actor that can do it.
AVC: Your Alzheimer’s and your right-to-die advocacy have become a major focus when the media talks about you. Are you concerned about it overshadowing your writing?
TP: I get pissed off when they initially start with it. It’s all been very hectic, and I’m rather tired of it. I say, “Most of the problems I have these days are from being 65.” Certainly from reading the last eight books I’ve written, with Alzheimer’s, or PCA, no one would have noticed. They all became bestsellers. People are misled. That’s because I misled them, because I was misled as well. PCA is a different kind of Alzheimer’s. It’s quite slow. It took away my typing ability first. Go figure. You’d expect the fingers to keep going, know what they’re doing. I know lots of people with PCA much older than me, still going strong. Bits knock off, but it doesn’t seem to be that much different than your granddad saying, “Where did I put my shoes?” It’s that kind of thing. It’s not standing in the street and not knowing where the hell you are, or anything like that.
AVC: Do you ever regret going public?
TP: Absolutely not. Apart from anything else—I have to tell you this, and I’m ashamed to say it—my profile went up hugely, you know, because now I was the man on the television. Never been the man on the television much. Indeed, sales actually went up and went up. When I went ahead and was actually arguing for assisted dying in the U.K.—actually, most people who aren’t absolute God-botherers are in favor of it. Especially working-class people who might not have the money to have a really good death anyway. Doing that even helped me more. I didn’t expect it to. I don’t even really want it to. If I make any money out of it, I give it to charity. Tell the truth at all times in these matters is what I say. Otherwise, it would seem that I was ashamed.
AVC: If you could only have one legacy, would you rather it be “He was a tireless advocate, who changed the world for people who want to die,” or “He was a really great writer”?
TP: I’d go for “really great writer.” Although I don’t think I am. I know I have a style which is recognizable. I think you can see Terry Pratchett in every book. I like doing it. I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that’s it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called The Truth.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Terry Pratchett: My daughter Rhianna will take over the Discworld when I'm gone
From the New Statesman: Terry Pratchett: My daughter Rhianna will take over the Discworld when I'm gone
Terry Pratchett plans to hand over the Discworld series to his daughter Rhianna, he reveals in this week's New Statesman.
In an interview with Laurie Penny - who has returned to the NS as a contributing editor - the author, campaigner and "professional morbid bastard" talks about his life and work. They discuss his diagnosis with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer's, in 2007. Since then, his health has declined markedly:
Terry Pratchett plans to hand over the Discworld series to his daughter Rhianna, he reveals in this week's New Statesman.
In an interview with Laurie Penny - who has returned to the NS as a contributing editor - the author, campaigner and "professional morbid bastard" talks about his life and work. They discuss his diagnosis with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer's, in 2007. Since then, his health has declined markedly:
He has lost the ability to use a keyboard altogether and can do very little with a pen. His most recent four books have been written entirely by dictation, and with the help of his assistant of 12 years, Rob Wilkins.Pratchett's assistant of 12 years, Rob Wilkins, also reveals that earlier this month, the author suffered an atrial fibrillation in the back seat of a New York taxi. Were it not for emergency CPR, he would have died.
"I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate," Pratchett says, as Rob drives us to the café in a rather unexpected large gold Jaguar. "It's a speech-to-text program," he explains, "and there's an add-on for talking which some guys came up with."
So, how does that differ from using his hands to write?
"Actually, it's much, much better," he says.
I hesitate, and he senses scepticism.
"Think about it! We are monkeys," says Pratchett. "We talk. We like talking. We are not born to go . . ." He turns and makes click-clack motions, like somebody's fusty grandfather disapproving of the internet.
What happened next is that Pratchett collapsed. “I had to kneel on the back seat of the taxi and give him CPR,” Rob says. “It was fingers down throat stuff. He nearly died.”
The author was rushed to hospital, but recovered swiftly. Doctors told him that he had suffered an atrial fibrillation, caused by the cumulative effect of drugs he had been prescribed for high blood pressure and made worse by his busy touring schedule. He now downplays the incident. “I once heard it mentioned that signing tours can kill you quicker than drugs, booze and fast women,” he tells the New Statesman. “Some of which I haven’t tried.” It’s made him wonder if he should slow down and devote more time to writing and his family, but he enjoys life on the road too much to give it up.
Nonetheless, it has focused attention on the future of his work, as
well as on his only child, Rhianna Pratchett (herself an accomplished
writer). Penny writes:
[Rhianna] will be a co-writer on the BBC Discworld series The Watch, news of which has had fans like me chewing their cheeks in excitement. Mine may never recover after hearing some particularly exciting casting details that I'm absolutely not allowed to tell you about.Pratchett says that his reaction to this fact is mostly to be "incredibly angry".
Run by Pratchett's new production company, Narrativia, The Watch will continue the well-loved City Watch saga where the books left off, and Rhianna will be an important member of the writing team. The author tells me that he will be happy for her to continue writing the Discworld books when he is no longer able to do so. "The Discworld is safe in my daughter's hands," Pratchett assures me.
Rhianna has grown up immersed in her father's universe and knows it inside out. Listening to him talking about his daughter, I realise it is the first time I've heard him acknowledge the possibility of not being able to write any more.
“Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I’m angry about bankers. About the government. They’re fecking useless.” He really does say “fecking”. “I know what Granny Weatherwax [a no-nonsense witch who crops up in several Discworld novels] would say to David Cameron. . ."
Saturday, November 10, 2012
The Dark Side of the Sun (1976)
The Dark Side of the Sun is a science fiction novel by Terry Pratchett, first published in 1976. It s his first novel for adults.
From Wikipedia
It is similar to the work of Isaac Asimov. According to Don D'Ammassa, both this and Pratchett's 1981 sci-fi novel Strata are spoofing parts of Larry Niven's Ringworld. The holiday of Hogswatch, which appears in the Discworld books, is celebrated by the characters in The Dark Side of the Sun.
Scattered irregularly across this "life-bubble" are ancient artefacts of a mysterious race called the Jokers, who became extinct long before any of the current races arose. These artefacts are usually astounding feats of engineering (such as a pair of stars shaped into rings and joined together like links in a chain), but leave no hints about the Jokers' physical form or day-to-day life. The only piece of translatable Joker text is a poem, which cryptically states that they have gone to their new home, which "lies at the dark side of the sun".
However, not having been told of his father's prediction, and against incalculably distant odds, Dom survives the assassination attempt. When the recording of his father's prediction is played back, a time delay added specifically for this unlikely eventuality plays a little more of the recording, in which his father makes a further prediction - that Dom will discover the Jokers' homeworld.
Dom sets out, with Hrsh-Hgn (his tutor, a swamp-dwelling phnobe), Isaac (his robot, equipped with Man-Friday subcircuitry) and Ig (his pet swamp ig) in tow, on a picaresque adventure to find the Jokers' world. He visits many corners of the "life-bubble", encountering Joker artefacts, his god-father, who is a sentient planet, and the sexless, octopoid Creapii, among many other weird and diverse aliens and planets. At the same time he finds himself surviving - at increasingly improbable odds - numerous assassination attempts by a mysterious conspiracy which has long worked to prevent anybody from locating the Jokers, assassinating anybody deemed by p-math having a chance of doing so.
Widdershins is a planet orbiting the star CY Aquirii[4] (a parody of CY Aquarii) settled by a joint party of phnobes and earth-humans. The planet is mostly water and marsh.[5]Their wealth derives from both the chance discovery of pilac, a safe death-immunity drug and googoo, a fungal copier and regenerator of human tissue. The vegetation is blue.
Chief among them are:
From Wikipedia
It is similar to the work of Isaac Asimov. According to Don D'Ammassa, both this and Pratchett's 1981 sci-fi novel Strata are spoofing parts of Larry Niven's Ringworld. The holiday of Hogswatch, which appears in the Discworld books, is celebrated by the characters in The Dark Side of the Sun.
Overview
The story is set in a portion of the galaxy populated by fifty-two different sentient species. All of these species, humanity among them, have evolved in the last five million years, and all of them have evolved in a spherical volume of space only a few dozen light-years across centred on Wolf 359. The rest of the galaxy is sterile as far as anybody can tell.Scattered irregularly across this "life-bubble" are ancient artefacts of a mysterious race called the Jokers, who became extinct long before any of the current races arose. These artefacts are usually astounding feats of engineering (such as a pair of stars shaped into rings and joined together like links in a chain), but leave no hints about the Jokers' physical form or day-to-day life. The only piece of translatable Joker text is a poem, which cryptically states that they have gone to their new home, which "lies at the dark side of the sun".
Plot
Dominickdaniel "Dom" Sabalos IV is the son of the inventor of probability math, a science able to predict anything apart from anything to do with the Jokers, and the first person to have had his life fully quantified using p-math. Before being mysteriously assassinated, his father predicted that Dom too would be killed, on the day of his investiture as Chairman of his wealthy home planet of Widdershins.However, not having been told of his father's prediction, and against incalculably distant odds, Dom survives the assassination attempt. When the recording of his father's prediction is played back, a time delay added specifically for this unlikely eventuality plays a little more of the recording, in which his father makes a further prediction - that Dom will discover the Jokers' homeworld.
Dom sets out, with Hrsh-Hgn (his tutor, a swamp-dwelling phnobe), Isaac (his robot, equipped with Man-Friday subcircuitry) and Ig (his pet swamp ig) in tow, on a picaresque adventure to find the Jokers' world. He visits many corners of the "life-bubble", encountering Joker artefacts, his god-father, who is a sentient planet, and the sexless, octopoid Creapii, among many other weird and diverse aliens and planets. At the same time he finds himself surviving - at increasingly improbable odds - numerous assassination attempts by a mysterious conspiracy which has long worked to prevent anybody from locating the Jokers, assassinating anybody deemed by p-math having a chance of doing so.
Setting
The book is set in the far future. No current date is given, although the dating system is "A.S."[4] (After Sadhim).Widdershins is a planet orbiting the star CY Aquirii[4] (a parody of CY Aquarii) settled by a joint party of phnobes and earth-humans. The planet is mostly water and marsh.[5]Their wealth derives from both the chance discovery of pilac, a safe death-immunity drug and googoo, a fungal copier and regenerator of human tissue. The vegetation is blue.
Races
52 different sentient species (including earth-humanity) exist in the novel.Chief among them are:
- Earth-humans - Natives of Old Earth who have settled such diverse worlds as Third Eye and Eggplant.
- Subraces:
- Widdershine - left-handed, night-black skin, hairless, UV-tolerant eyes, skin-cancer resistant
- Terra Novae - stocky, two hearts
- Pineals - Phobish
- Whole Erse - warriors
- Eggplant - vegetarian carnivores
- Third Eye - telepathic
- Class Five Robots - the most sentient and intelligent kind
- Subraces:
- Phnobes - Natives of Phnobis. Three sexes.
- Creapii - Natives from Creap, first planet of 70 Ophiuchis A. Oldest race (after Jokers). Octopodial. Non-gendered. Extremophiles. Names are chemical and degrees (e.g. CReegE + 698°).
- Sub-species:
- Low-degree (silicon-oxygen)
- Middle-degree (silicon-carbon, 500°C)
- High-degree (aluminum-silicon polymer)
- Others (silicon-boron, etc.)
- Sub-species:
- Drosks - Natives of Quaducquakucckuaquekekecqac. Cuboid, omni-carnivores.
- Sundogs - Natives from Eggplant, since relocated to Band. Space dwellers, lay eggs (in orbit of Band) every ten years.
- Spooners - small, icy worlds.
- Tarquins - protostar dwellers.
- The Pod - Space roaming hydrogen eaters.
- Sidewinders
- The Two Evolutions of Seard
- Jokers - Natives of Jokers World. Elder race.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Strata (1981)
From Wikipedia:
Strata is a comic science fiction novel by Terry Pratchett. Published in 1981, it is one of Pratchett's first novels and one of only two purely science fiction novels he has written, the other being The Dark Side of the Sun.
Although it takes place in a different fictional universe and is more science fiction than fantasy, it could be said to be a kind of precursor to the Discworld novels, as it also features a flat Earth similar to the Discworld. It has been called a "preconsideration" of Discworld, though the plot and characters are modelled on (or parodies of) the novel Ringworld by Larry Niven
Kin and two aliens, the four-armed frog-like, paranoid and muscular Kung Marco and Silver, a bear-like Shand, historian and linguist by profession, are recruited by the mysterious Jago Jalo for an expedition. Jalo, a human who more than a thousand years ago embarked on a relativistic journey has made a stunning discovery - a flat Earth. However, when the team rendezvous on the Kung homeworld, the violent Jalo unexpectedly has an heart-attack and dies. Shocked by the large amounts of weapons on-board Jalo's spaceship, Kin has misgivings about the expedition, but Silver and Marco see the possibility of reaping great technological rewards and launch the vessel. When the expedition finally arrives at Jalo's pre-programmed coordinates, they find a flattened version of the mediaeval Eastern hemisphere of Earth, clearly artificial. It rotates around its hub inside a gigantic hollow sphere with tiny "stars" affixed to the interior, complete with a small sun, moon and fake planets revolving around it.
After their ship is hit by one of the orbiting "planets", Kin, Marco and Silver are forced to abandon ship and land on the flat Earth with the help of their lift-belt equipped suits. A return from the flat Earth now seems impossible, unless they are able to find its mysterious builders, so they embark on a journey to a structure they have spotted at the hub of the Disc, the only thing which does not match geographically with the Earth they know. En route, they encounter the superstitious Medieval inhabitants of the Disc, who believe the end of the world is near, due to increasingly chaotic climate (caused by the Disc's machinery breaking down), the recent disappearance of one of their planets and the general devastation caused by the ship's crash. They also discover a number of other differences. What Kin Arad knows as Reme is called Rome on the Disc, and there is a strange Christos cult that is completely unfamiliar to Kin Arad. Also, Venus is conspicuously lacking its giant (lunar-sized) moon Adonis, which dominates the sunset sky on the Earth Kin knows, and led humanity to a heliocentric world view early on. Since only the Eastern hemisphere of Earth is represented, the continent of America is completely missing; the travellers rescue a party of Vikings in the process of searching for Vinland, when their ship is about to sail over the edge of the world.
In addition, there are real "magical" creatures and objects on the Disc, demons and magic purses and flying carpets - all of them, the travellers realise, highly advanced and sophisticated technological constructs like the Disc itself. Indeed, the world itself is an extremely old and sophisticated automated system. At the very end of the story, Kin comes to suspect that the builders of the flat world in fact constructed the universe as a whole, with the evidence of previous races being hoaxes and the flat world being an inside joke, analogous to the false strata Kin and the Company themselves manufacture, and the occasional hoaxes put in these strata by rebellious employees.
Kin and the others eventually reach the hub and Kin makes contact with the Disc's controlling systems. She is told that, despite advanced robotic maintenance, sheer entropy build-up threatens the Disc's further existence. The machines offer their advanced technology, in exchange for Kin's construction of a real replacement Earth for the flat planet's inhabitants. Kin agrees; the implication being that the world she will build is in fact our own Earth. Kin is excited about the massive task at hand; just like Ringworld's Louis Wu, whom she parallels, she is over two hundred years old, and thus constantly under the threat of growing tired of life.
Humanity appears to be merely the latest of a long series of intelligent species who have evolved, altered the universe to better suit themselves, and then died out before the next species arose and started the cycle all over again. Before humans, there were the Great Spindle Kings, a race of acutely claustrophobic telepaths, who could live only a few hundred per planet and therefore built entire worlds from scratch to accommodate their population. Before them were the Wheelers, who were themselves preceded by increasingly alien races extending all the way back to the Big Bang. Interestingly, all of what is known about the intelligent species who have lived before humans is revealed to be incorrect near the end of the book, when the Disc's computer system (built by the universe's actual creators) reveals to Kin that the entire universe is only 70,000 years old and that evidence and remains of long dead civilizations were fabricated by the universe's creators to make the universe appear older than it is (much like the Company fabricated prehistoric fossils on their created worlds to make them appear older than they really were).
Strata is a comic science fiction novel by Terry Pratchett. Published in 1981, it is one of Pratchett's first novels and one of only two purely science fiction novels he has written, the other being The Dark Side of the Sun.
Although it takes place in a different fictional universe and is more science fiction than fantasy, it could be said to be a kind of precursor to the Discworld novels, as it also features a flat Earth similar to the Discworld. It has been called a "preconsideration" of Discworld, though the plot and characters are modelled on (or parodies of) the novel Ringworld by Larry Niven
Plot summary
Kin Arad is a human planetary engineer working for the Company, a human organisation that "builds" habitable planets with techniques and equipment salvaged from the Spindle Kings, an extinct alien race, excelling in terraforming. The expressed aim of the Company's planet building is to create branches of humanity diverse enough to ensure the whole species' survival for eternity, since the Earth's population in the past has been decimated due to the lethal Mindquakes, epidemic mass deaths caused by too much homogeneity among the populace.All planets built by the Company are carefully crafted with artificial strata containing false fossils, indistinguishable from the real thing. On occasion, however, mischievous Company employees will attempt to place anomalous objects in the strata, like running shoes or other out-of-place-artefacts as practical jokes, hoping to cause confusion among future archaeologists when the planets' beginnings have been long forgotten. The Company does not allow this however, and secretly monitors the generated strata in order to detect this, fearing such actions may cause the collapse of entire civilizations when the artefacts are eventually unearthed.Kin and two aliens, the four-armed frog-like, paranoid and muscular Kung Marco and Silver, a bear-like Shand, historian and linguist by profession, are recruited by the mysterious Jago Jalo for an expedition. Jalo, a human who more than a thousand years ago embarked on a relativistic journey has made a stunning discovery - a flat Earth. However, when the team rendezvous on the Kung homeworld, the violent Jalo unexpectedly has an heart-attack and dies. Shocked by the large amounts of weapons on-board Jalo's spaceship, Kin has misgivings about the expedition, but Silver and Marco see the possibility of reaping great technological rewards and launch the vessel. When the expedition finally arrives at Jalo's pre-programmed coordinates, they find a flattened version of the mediaeval Eastern hemisphere of Earth, clearly artificial. It rotates around its hub inside a gigantic hollow sphere with tiny "stars" affixed to the interior, complete with a small sun, moon and fake planets revolving around it.
After their ship is hit by one of the orbiting "planets", Kin, Marco and Silver are forced to abandon ship and land on the flat Earth with the help of their lift-belt equipped suits. A return from the flat Earth now seems impossible, unless they are able to find its mysterious builders, so they embark on a journey to a structure they have spotted at the hub of the Disc, the only thing which does not match geographically with the Earth they know. En route, they encounter the superstitious Medieval inhabitants of the Disc, who believe the end of the world is near, due to increasingly chaotic climate (caused by the Disc's machinery breaking down), the recent disappearance of one of their planets and the general devastation caused by the ship's crash. They also discover a number of other differences. What Kin Arad knows as Reme is called Rome on the Disc, and there is a strange Christos cult that is completely unfamiliar to Kin Arad. Also, Venus is conspicuously lacking its giant (lunar-sized) moon Adonis, which dominates the sunset sky on the Earth Kin knows, and led humanity to a heliocentric world view early on. Since only the Eastern hemisphere of Earth is represented, the continent of America is completely missing; the travellers rescue a party of Vikings in the process of searching for Vinland, when their ship is about to sail over the edge of the world.
In addition, there are real "magical" creatures and objects on the Disc, demons and magic purses and flying carpets - all of them, the travellers realise, highly advanced and sophisticated technological constructs like the Disc itself. Indeed, the world itself is an extremely old and sophisticated automated system. At the very end of the story, Kin comes to suspect that the builders of the flat world in fact constructed the universe as a whole, with the evidence of previous races being hoaxes and the flat world being an inside joke, analogous to the false strata Kin and the Company themselves manufacture, and the occasional hoaxes put in these strata by rebellious employees.
Kin and the others eventually reach the hub and Kin makes contact with the Disc's controlling systems. She is told that, despite advanced robotic maintenance, sheer entropy build-up threatens the Disc's further existence. The machines offer their advanced technology, in exchange for Kin's construction of a real replacement Earth for the flat planet's inhabitants. Kin agrees; the implication being that the world she will build is in fact our own Earth. Kin is excited about the massive task at hand; just like Ringworld's Louis Wu, whom she parallels, she is over two hundred years old, and thus constantly under the threat of growing tired of life.
Ideas and themes
The history of the planet "Earth" in Strata unfolded very differently from our Earth. North America is named Valhalla, and was colonised in the first millennium A.D. by the Vikings, led by Leif Ericson; the Roman Empire is known as Reme instead, after the other twin in the story of Romulus and Remus; the planet Venus is orbited by a moon like Earth's Luna. None of the Abrahamic religions ever developed in its history; a mixture of Buddhism and folk religion seems to have predominated, punctuated by an assortment of flash-in-the-pan religious cults. Humanity is much more developed in the field of space travel and has met several other intelligent species, such as the tall, frog-like Kungs and the bear-like Shandi. It is implied that the reason for the historical discrepancies is that our Earth was actually created by Kin Arad to replace the flat Earth featured in the book, which was starting to malfunction. While the history of the real "Earth" in Strata clearly is not the one we are familiar with, the history of the flat Earth is consistent with our own, up to the point where the expedition arrives.Humanity appears to be merely the latest of a long series of intelligent species who have evolved, altered the universe to better suit themselves, and then died out before the next species arose and started the cycle all over again. Before humans, there were the Great Spindle Kings, a race of acutely claustrophobic telepaths, who could live only a few hundred per planet and therefore built entire worlds from scratch to accommodate their population. Before them were the Wheelers, who were themselves preceded by increasingly alien races extending all the way back to the Big Bang. Interestingly, all of what is known about the intelligent species who have lived before humans is revealed to be incorrect near the end of the book, when the Disc's computer system (built by the universe's actual creators) reveals to Kin that the entire universe is only 70,000 years old and that evidence and remains of long dead civilizations were fabricated by the universe's creators to make the universe appear older than it is (much like the Company fabricated prehistoric fossils on their created worlds to make them appear older than they really were).
Translations
- Страта (Bulgarian)
- Strata (Czech)
- Delven (Dutch) (published together with The Dark Side of the Sun in one volume in 1982: republished separately as Strata in 1994)
- Strate-à-gemmes (French)
- Strata (German)
- Dysk (Polish) (first edition was entitled "Warstwy Wszechświata", Polish for "Layers of the Universe"; "Strata" means "loss" in Polish)
- Страта (Russian)
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Terry Pratchett assisted suicide documentary Choosing to Die wins Grierson British Documentary Award
From the Telegraph: Terry Pratchett assisted suicide documentary Choosing to Die wins Grierson British Documentary Award
The controversial documentary, which followed a man who travelled to Switzerland for assisted suicide, has won an award at the 2012 Grierson British Documentary Awards.
The controversial documentary, which followed a man who travelled to Switzerland for assisted suicide, has won an award at the 2012 Grierson British Documentary Awards.
Terry
Pratchett's film Choosing to Die received 1,219 complaints when it
was aired BBC Two on June 13 last year.
Pratchett,
who suffers from Alzheimer's, presented the documentary which featured Peter
Smedley, a 71-year-old man who suffered from motor neurone disease. The
documentary was awarded Best Documentary on a Contemporary Theme. The
chairman of the awards jury said it was "beautifully cast and genuinely
revelatory".
The documentary was one of several winners at the event, which was hosted by
artist Grayson Perry, who donned a bright red dress for the ceremony at The
Empire Leicester Square.
The awards were celebrating their 40th year and were set up by the Grierson
Trust in 1972 to commemorate the life and work of world-renowned Scottish
documentary film-maker John Grierson, whose work includes the GPO film Night
Mail.
Fellow Scot Kevin Macdonald, known for films One Day in September, Touching the Void, Marley, and the Oscar-winning The Last King of Scotland, was awarded the Grierson's Trustees award. Charlotte Moore, BBC Commissioning Editor of Documentaries said he had made "an outstanding contribution to the art and craft of the British documentary".
Other winners included a Culture Show special on artist Jeremy Deller, Channel 4 school programme Educating Essex came highly commended but the BBC's Protecting Our Children, about adoption, won the Best Documentary category, while the BBC's natural history show Frozen Planet lost out to After Life: The Strange Science of Decay in the science strand.
A highlights show of the awards will air on Sky Arts 2 on Monday 12 November at 8.00pm
Fellow Scot Kevin Macdonald, known for films One Day in September, Touching the Void, Marley, and the Oscar-winning The Last King of Scotland, was awarded the Grierson's Trustees award. Charlotte Moore, BBC Commissioning Editor of Documentaries said he had made "an outstanding contribution to the art and craft of the British documentary".
Other winners included a Culture Show special on artist Jeremy Deller, Channel 4 school programme Educating Essex came highly commended but the BBC's Protecting Our Children, about adoption, won the Best Documentary category, while the BBC's natural history show Frozen Planet lost out to After Life: The Strange Science of Decay in the science strand.
A highlights show of the awards will air on Sky Arts 2 on Monday 12 November at 8.00pm
Monday, November 5, 2012
The Carpet People (1971)
Terry Pratchett's first published novel:
from Wikipedia:
The Carpet People is a fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett which was originally published in 1971, but was later re-written by the author when his work became more widespread and well-known. In the Author's Note of the revised edition, published in 1992, Terry Pratchett wrote: "This book had two authors, and they were both the same person."
The Carpet People contains much of the humour and some of the concepts which later became a major part of the Discworld series, as well as parodies of everyday objects from our world. Before creating the Discworld, Terry Pratchett wrote about two different flat worlds, first in this novel, and then in the novel Strata.
The Munrungs cross the carpet to find a new home after their village is destroyed by the powerful and mysterious natural force Fray. The origins of Fray are never explained in the book, but it is described in a way to suggest sweeping or vacuuming (some reviewers have suggested it represents human footfalls), and is referred to as sweeping on the back cover of the current UK edition.
The tribe is led by Glurk, who is advised by Pismire, a philosopher and the tribal Shaman. Glurk's younger brother Snibril, however, is the book's protagonist, and is described by Pismire as having the kind of enquiring mind which is "dangerous". Snibril also has the unique ability to detect Fray a few minutes before it strikes - this ability manifests itself as an extremely painful migraine.
The only source of metal on the carpet is mined from a dropped penny; wood is taken from discarded matchsticks, while the clairvoyant Wights obtain varnish by scraping it from a chair leg (the chair leg is known to the Carpet People as "Achairleg").
The story ends following an epic battle against the Mouls - a race of Fray-worshipping creatures. At this point Snibril makes the decision to leave the tribe and to explore the furthest reaches of the carpet.
One Munrung is afflicted with sinus problems, a normally unpleasant situation but which proves fortuitous to this story's successful conclusion.
from Wikipedia:
The Carpet People is a fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett which was originally published in 1971, but was later re-written by the author when his work became more widespread and well-known. In the Author's Note of the revised edition, published in 1992, Terry Pratchett wrote: "This book had two authors, and they were both the same person."
The Carpet People contains much of the humour and some of the concepts which later became a major part of the Discworld series, as well as parodies of everyday objects from our world. Before creating the Discworld, Terry Pratchett wrote about two different flat worlds, first in this novel, and then in the novel Strata.
Plot summary
The story follows the journey of a tribe called the Munrungs, across a world known as the Carpet. Its resemblance to carpets does not end there; instead of trees, the landscape is a forest of hairs, and is littered with large grains of dust and vegetation. The sky is only referred to as above and below the surface is underlay, riddled with caves, and ultimately the Floor.The Munrungs cross the carpet to find a new home after their village is destroyed by the powerful and mysterious natural force Fray. The origins of Fray are never explained in the book, but it is described in a way to suggest sweeping or vacuuming (some reviewers have suggested it represents human footfalls), and is referred to as sweeping on the back cover of the current UK edition.
The tribe is led by Glurk, who is advised by Pismire, a philosopher and the tribal Shaman. Glurk's younger brother Snibril, however, is the book's protagonist, and is described by Pismire as having the kind of enquiring mind which is "dangerous". Snibril also has the unique ability to detect Fray a few minutes before it strikes - this ability manifests itself as an extremely painful migraine.
The only source of metal on the carpet is mined from a dropped penny; wood is taken from discarded matchsticks, while the clairvoyant Wights obtain varnish by scraping it from a chair leg (the chair leg is known to the Carpet People as "Achairleg").
The story ends following an epic battle against the Mouls - a race of Fray-worshipping creatures. At this point Snibril makes the decision to leave the tribe and to explore the furthest reaches of the carpet.
Themes
The book has been described as 'The Lord of the Rings on a Rug'. It explores the conflict between traditions and innovation. There is an established civilisation, complete with bureaucrats, taxes imposed and collected, and permits; there are people who resent the establishment; there is a need for both groups to find common ground in order to save their collective civilisation.One Munrung is afflicted with sinus problems, a normally unpleasant situation but which proves fortuitous to this story's successful conclusion.
Continuity
Terry Pratchett's novel Eric mentions that the president of the cabinet of demons has carpets inhabited by tribes of liliputs, possibly suggesting a link between The Carpet People and Discworld universes, or possibly merely one of Pratchett's in-jokes.
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