Terry Pratchett: 'Fantasy is uni-age'

From the Guardian:  Terry Pratchett: 'Fantasy is uni-age

Terry Pratchett's entourage has taken over a corner of the White Hart hotel in Salisbury, a long-standing haunt of the writer, who has a house just outside the town. There's his PA, Rob Wilkins, whose role has become more demanding since Pratchett announced in 2007 that he had a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's; a publicist; and Mr Boggis, a fan who describes himself as "PA to the PA". Mr Boggis is named after a character from Pratchett's Discworld series; he says he has read all 39 books. I never do discover his real name.

There will be another Discworld book, Raising Steam, in the autumn, but it is nothing if not an industry: this month, Pratchett publishes volume IV in his Science of Discworld series, in which chapters of fantasy alternate with chapters of surprisingly demanding Roundworld [aka Earth] science, supplied by Pratchett's long-time collaborators, mathematician Professor Ian Stewart and biologist Dr Jack Cohen.
The Pratchettian premise is that while Discworld is an entirely logical entity – "flat, circular, held up by four world-bearing elephants standing firmly on the back of a giant space-faring turtle and inhabited by ordinary humans, wizards, witches, trolls, dwarves, vampires, golems, elves, the tooth fairy and the Hogfather" – Roundworld is a largely incomprehensible and obscure little place orbiting one of 200bn stars in a galaxy that is itself one of 200bn galaxies. What is it for? How was it made? Are we – its inhabitants – alone? Is there a God? These are the conundrums Pratchett and his co-authors explore.
"It's useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one," says Pratchett. "There's a lot of science in it, and as Slartibartfast [in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] said: 'I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.' I've never, ever been able to do one. I remember one occasion at Warwick University, when Jack and Ian were at their wits' end because I couldn't get it. I felt totally ashamed."
So as well as writing the Discworld sections, Pratchett also becomes the everyman figure wrestling with difficult scientific propositions. Is he a frustrated scientist? "I was a very keen reader of science fiction," says Pratchett, "and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science."
By the time he was in his teens, Pratchett was writing science fiction and attending conventions. "The first convention I ever went to, I met Arthur C Clarke, Mike Moorcock, John Brunner, and just about everyone who was around. This was like going to see the immortals, and you suddenly realised that they're science fiction writers and they're human beings and you are a human being, so there's no reason why you couldn't be a science fiction writer."
Pratchett was an only child in a working-class family in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. Born in 1948, he grew up in the fevered 1960s, when the beginnings of space travel coincided with a golden age in science fiction. "My mum was fairly pushy, before pushiness was in vogue, and it was her who got me writing." She was of Irish heritage and loved telling stories – a gift she passed on to her son. He says his life can be summed up in one sentence: "Terry Pratchett, from birth to death a writer."
Despite his mother's pushiness, he underperformed at school. "I couldn't get on with the headmaster, and he couldn't get on with me. He really wanted the 60s not to happen, and of course all us boys were very happy that the 60s were happening." Was Pratchett a natural rebel? "No," he says, "a natural complainer." He is, though, thankful he fell out with the head. It made him leave school at 17 to become a journalist on the Bucks Free Press, the perfect apprenticeship for a would-be writer. "Local journalism is journalism," he says. "If you get it wrong, they know where you live. You see more things and do more things than you would ever see or do on a mainstream newspaper. I saw my first dead body on my first day at work."
He moved from local journalism to a PR job with the Central Electricity Generating Board, but never stopped writing and reading; he is an autodidact who devoured everything that came his way, and says he has three libraries at home. "If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn't put it past them – I'm in dead trouble," he says. His early novels did reasonably well, but his breakthrough came in the mid-1980s with Discworld; 2013 marks the 30th anniversary of the first of the series, The Colour of Magic. Much to his relief, he was able to give up the day job and concentrate on writing.
How did he hit on the idea? "It just happened," he says. "It started off as making fun of fantasy fiction. But when The Colour of Magic sold out in hardcover on the first day, I thought I'll do another one." He says the books got better as the series progressed. "I was older and had done more things and thought more things, and just had more experience to put into it." His satire of fantasy books became a satire of the world at large – he says he extended his targets "to stop myself being a man who shouts at the television".
Pratchett still loves attending Discworld conventions, and especially meeting his new generation of readers. "I find those children who have been brought up by two Discworld fans are rather like the Midwich Cuckoos – as bright as buttons." He also likes the fact he has readers of all ages. "Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death."
What unites Discworld readers? "They are serendipitists," says Pratchett, "pickers-up of interesting things you hadn't expected to see. That applies to most science fiction buffs." He says they are also open-minded, and that it wasn't an accident the first interracial kiss on TV happened on Star Trek. "It fits into what science fiction is, which is people being people and not worrying about what shape, size or colour you are. It's hard to read a lot of science fiction and be a bigot."
Pratchett refuses to be bowed down by his illness, and is producing as much as ever, though these days he finds it hard to type: he dictates into a computer and then edits the text. "I'm at an age when all my contemporaries are forgetting where they left their car keys, and I'm still paddling along quite happily," he says. He can be forgetful, and pauses at certain points during the interview while searching for a word or thought, but says his condition remains manageable.
There have been suggestions that at some point his daughter, Rhianna, who writes stories for video games, could take over the Discworld series. "It will be entirely up to her," says Pratchett. "She's doing very well by herself." He is also looking to the survival of his creation on film, and with Rhianna recently set up a production company, Narrativia, to rectify the surprising absence of Discworld movies. "There's always Hollywood interest," he says, "but Hollywood is full to the brim with people who have the ability to say no and only about one person who can say yes. You could die waiting for Hollywood."
Pratchett is protective of the sort of film that might get made: he says he has twice pulled out of deals. "If Discworld is made, it has to be mine, not theirs," he says. "It's all about the money in Hollywood, but how much money does one person need when what I really want is for it to be done properly? It will happen – one day. And with Narrativia protecting my creative interests, I know it will be faithful to my words."
Despite all this talk of protecting the legacy, Pratchett isn't planning on going anywhere just yet. "They'll have to kill me before I go," he laughs. But when his time does come, he will accept it as stoically as his parents, who always insisted on treating death as a fact of life, and not as a taboo. "It's not morbid to talk about death," he insists. "Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death."
Pratchett supports assisted dying, so that the terminally ill can be given the sort of easeful death his parents wanted. "Death is the commonality of mankind," he says. "Everybody dies. Make it as good as you can while you're doing it, but don't worry about it happening – because you can't ultimately do anything about it." In Discworld, Death is an attractive, sympathetic, sometimes comic figure, a far-from-grim reaper – and Pratchett sees no reason to change his view here in Roundworld.
• Pratchett and his co-authors discuss the science of Discworld on 24 April at Conway Hall, London WC1 (details: waterstones.com). Highlights of the event will appear on guardian.co.uk/books

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Explore Terry Pratchett's Discworld

From the Royal Borough Observer:  Explore Terry Pratchett's Discworld

LET Progress Theatre take you on a journey through Terry Pratchett's Discworld, from the noisome swarm of Ankh-Morpork to the wintry landscapes of überwald, a region populated by conservative dwarves, aristocratic vampires and plotting werewolves.

Fifth Elephant, working from Stephen Briggs' adaptation of Pratchett's 24th Discworld novel, joins Ankh-Morpork City Watch Commander Sam Vimes on a diplomatic mission from the city to the mountains, accompanied by a rather undiplomatic group, including a dwarf with gender-identity issues, a troll who prefers to debate with his fists, and a conflicted werewolf. Oh, and there's the small matter of the dwarves' missing Scone of Stone, to sort out.
Director Chris Moran explained that the team of actors at Progress, based in The Mount, Reading, enjoyed staging fantasy plays, in particular, and the play follows on the tail of last year's production of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere: "The year before Neverwhere we did [Pratchett's] Going Postal, which I directed, and there's quite a lot of Terry Pratchett fans in the theatre," she explained. "There's a lot of characters, lots of interesting sets and costumes in the books. We have to be quite creative [with the sets], what we have done is create a basic set similar to Neverwhere, where we have one base stage and then other things that pop out and turn round and come on and off.
"Fifth Elephant is a bit different because it is kind of like a road movie - they go on a quest, and they end up somewhere else, so you never go back to the same place again. There are about 26 different locations, so we had to be mindful of that!"
Chris added that the dedication of Pratchett fans - including John Goodman, who plays Vimes, and read all the Discworld books leading up to Fifth Elephant, in order, to better understand the development of his character - means the cast have an extra burden of not straying too far from Pratchett's characterisation and costume descriptions. "You have an extra layer with Terry Pratchett because we have a lot of die-hard fans that come who have their own expectations because of the descriptions in the book. We're really [just] trying to give the characters life through their costumes."

 

OMG!

Never realized I hadn't posted in over 2 weeks!

Sorry, folks

Things have just gotten away from me the last week and a half...posting should be back on schedule starting this weekend.

Promises, promises. Have we weakened integrity in our search for personal freedom?

From the Northerner Blog (Guardian):  Promises, promises. Have we weakened integrity in our search for personal freedom?

Another year is on its way out and a pristine, new one is on the doorstep. Many of us at this time of the year tend to pause and make some promises or resolutions, about the type of new people we will become in the New Year.
Last year, for the first time ever, I made some resolutions and I have been reflecting on how true, or not, I have managed to stay to them both in letter and spirit. This reflection, has in part, been inspired by an essay I read by GK Chesterton, the less well-known contemporary of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, entitled A Defence of Rash Vows which made me think about the promises that we make, both to ourselves and to others, and how seriously we take them.
In the essay, Chesterton talks about how the vow has become an inconsequential thing. His argument is that it is actually the terror of one's own self in modern times, or rather the terror of the weakness and mutability of the self, that has increased to such an extent that it forms the real basis to either an aversion to vows, or to treating them so lightly that they become meaningless. The essay ends with a rallying cry:

All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in back ways and retreats, but sooner or later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.

The imagery of these last lines is hauntingly evocative. The idea of a person having the willpower to take a stand at this level, not only made me pause and think, it also imbued me with a feeling close to despair at the loss of personal courage being highlighted. It accentuated the fact that an abiding characteristic of modern life is that it is full of small sins and sidesteps. There is not much anymore that resounds in greatness at either end of the personal scale; rather we fumble around in all the murky greys.
GK Chesterton, right, with one of his contemporary enthusiasts, Sir Terry Pratchett. Photograph: David Levene/Getty

  We no longer have a terror of our own selves in terms of not keeping vows or taking stands; instead, we actually celebrate this under a mantle of personal freedom. This often translates into the freedom to change and deviate from anything and everything at will. There is no longer any encouragement for taking a stand, moral or otherwise, and those who do so are derided. In my view, there is far more celebration of those who will break their word at will and manipulate situations to their own ends, than those who feel that it is morally right to honour an agreement both in word and spirit. Those who deviate are celebrated as clever, whilst those who do not are seen as being too stupid to grasp the opportunity.
When I first read the essay, I thought of the people I knew who could be depicted in this manner because of course it is so much easier to point the finger. But then I thought, why go so far? Why not take a good look at my own self? Where am I in all of this? What of all the promises I have made in life - the ones that I kept, the ones that I wanted to keep but genuinely found myself unable to do so and the ones that I broke, either without a thought or at least, without too much strenuous thinking.
This made me think - how important are words? Are we the ones who lend weight to our words or do they lend weight to us? Words and people are intimately inter-connected. The sincerity of a person is judged not only by their words but also by the accompanying actions. If I make a promise, the weight of that promise is equivalent to my weight and worth as an individual.

When the Prophet Muhammad asked the people of Mecca whether, if he told them that an enemy army was approaching from behind him, they would believe him, they said yes. This was an unequivocal testimony to the weight of his words and thus the weight of his character. In our current age, how many of our words, or even of those of national and international leaders, carry such weight? In the age of spin, has spin spun the weight out of our words? How often, now, can we talk about someone being a man of his word? Would anyone be able to say this about us? After all, it can only be said where the belief is present that as the word has been given so it will be done.
A Muslim pilgrim looks at Mecca from the top of Noor mountain. Photograph: Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty Images Of course, inevitably there are times when words fail. When word is given but despite every effort it becomes impossible to keep. The important point however is: was it genuinely impossible to keep or was it a whim inevitably disregarded? For there are times when words are spun like a web, when they are uttered not only lightly without any intention of adherence but also, deliberately used to create a false impression or to entrap. What is the weight then of the person uttering such words, not only in the eyes of other people but also, in their own eyes? Must it not cause you to sink in your own estimation when you know, that even as you speak them, your words are meaningless?
Do you, as a consequence, not become meaningless in your own eyes? Without the strength of our convictions to give weight and provide anchorage, may we not be blown about lightly by the breeze of any whim or fad? Is it perhaps not one of the worst aspects of our current age that not only have we lost the terror of this, but that instead we positively delight in it.
In contemporary culture we frame this concept in a slightly, but very significantly, different way to Chesterton. We no longer talk about a terror of the self or, that it is a terror of our own weakness that stops us making the level of commitment that a vow or promise entails. Instead, we talk about personal freedom. While I believe wholeheartedly in personal freedom and the right to self determination, I feel that the concept is one that is widening as we go along.
Nowadays, it can mean my personal freedom regardless of either the cost to, or the infringement of, another's. It is this type of personal freedom that either stops us from binding ourselves fully or allows us to feel free to bind ourselves continuously but always with a sense of the possibility of retreat. The back door, the way out is always there, always in the corner of our eye. The concept that you and I will fight back to back and take on the world, cannot exist in this scenario because what if either of us has a change of heart at the crucial moment? Likewise, neither does this scenario allow for the burning of boats or bridges.
It is not that I believe that a person should live an unhappy life rather than admit that a particular endeavour may not have been the best thing to commit to. Life is not a straight line; we are subject to many twists and turns all of which also have an effect on our own selves. There have been times when I have felt that I am on a rollercoaster, clinging on for dear life with one very slippery hand, while my body free wheels willy-nilly behind me. What I am deploring is not fallibility but fickleness; the lack of commitment to anything, from an ideal to a person, the lack of appropriate weighting given to words, that is celebrated as personal freedom.
Should this freedom really mean that we can be whatever we choose, whenever we choose, no matter what the cost? Surely there needs to be a balance; a balance between self expression and a responsibility both to ourselves and to those around us. The cause of personal freedom should not mean that we sacrifice courage, steadfastness and the ability to take a stand not only for ourselves but also for others.
What we have to ask ourselves is - in our 'more for me no matter what the expense to you' culture, is the actual expense our own selves? In our search for more encounters, more intensity, more excitement, more thrills, ever-increasing satiation of the senses is it actually our own selves that are diminishing? Is it our own sense of self, our own integrity that is the casualty? After all, how many relationships can we taste, consume, throw away before we are so jaded that they become irrelevant or, conversely, we do. How many promises can we make and break, how many stands can we take and then forsake, before our words become meaningless and in the process so do we.
Syima Aslam, who Tweets here, is a freelance sales and marketing professional based in Bradford. She also blogs about Islam, feminism, culture and parenting.

 

No Pratchett headlines this year...

So I'll just wish everyone a Happy New Year.

Stay turned for fun future posts.