Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion ... So Far

by Terry Pratchett

  I’d be interested to know what kind of reaction you’ve had to Small Gods. It’s not a typical Discworld book.

  I get a different kind of mail. More . . . thoughtful, I suppose.

  Really? It would be easy to imagine you got some mail suggesting you’d be burned in Hell.

  You know, that’s odd. I haven’t had a single overheated letter about that book; they’ve all been positive. Whereas I’ve had one or two letters from the Celtic fringe complaining about the treatment of elves in Lords and Ladies. They said I was slandering the Tuatha de Danaan, which were probably the models for Tolkien’s elves, by deliberately mixing them up with the Sidhe, who were more your basic faerie baby-snatchers. Which was all a bit bewildering. It’s all story.

  Elsewhere in this book the Discworld is referred to as ‘a place of escape’. I get the impression you don’t like the term.

  It depends on how it’s used. Back in the sixties and seventies ‘escapism’ was frowned on – ‘escapist literature’ was definitely a derogatory term. I think people have come round a bit now and know that escaping is fine provided you’re escaping to rather than from. My writing career developed because I read science fiction, the ultimate escapist literature, but it gave me a love of reading in general and that gave me an education.

  Did you expect the series to take off in the way it did?

  Hah! It would probably have scared me if I had known. I recently had to clear nearly two months accumulated mail because I’d been away on tour, and you look at the stack of envelopes and think: they never told me about this when I joined. It’s a bit frightening . . .

  What is your readership?

  Well, according to the mail it’s all ages and all four sexes but with some bunching up in the 9-14 age range – partly because of a crossover with the alleged juvenile books like Truckers and Only You Can Save Mankind – another thickening of the curve in the 18–25 range and another one between 35–45. There’s a significant number of parents who get introduced to the books by their children. People tend to assume that most of my readers are aged fourteen. The evidence of the mail suggests that this is because, if a fourteen-year-old boy likes a book he says things like ‘Brilliant!’ But if his mum likes a book, she quietly writes a note to the author. Teachers and librarians say things like ‘Your books are really popular among children who don’t read’. I think I know what they mean, I just wish they’d put it a different way.

  I notice that you seem to get a lot of mail from women.

  About half of it. I suppose the easy explanation is that it’s because of the witch books, but I don’t really know. I never thought anything much about this and then someone said that most readers of fantasy are males under twenty-five.

  I’ve got the impression, though, that the Josh Kirby covers put older people off.

  I’ve had letters like that. So have the publishers. On the other hand, I get a lot from people who like the covers. I like the covers. The good ones are superb and the ones I don’t like so much are still pretty okay. And I know some of the horrendous experiences that authors can have with covers. Corgi tried an experimental reprint of The Colour of Magic with a non-Kirby cover a few years ago, just to see what happened. I don’t think it made a lot of difference one way or the other, to be frank.

  Do you see yourself still writing Discworld books in ten years’ time?

  No. Not even in five years’ time. Certainly not on a regular basis, anyway.

  Why?

  Well, because there’s only so much I can do with it. It’s fairly flexible, but it has its limits. There are other things I’d like to do, especially after the success of the children’s books. But if I have something to say that could best be said on Discworld, I’ll use it.

  So you find it restricting?

  No. But it’s filling up!

  You’ve gone on record many times as saying that the Discworld will never be mapped. But you’ve let that happen. There’s the Ankh-Morpork Street Map and now you’re saying that maybe the whole Discworld could be mapped.

  Well, I used to say that the Discworld could only be mapped when I’d finished it. The practical fact is that I do have a rough idea in my head – not finely detailed, but enough to make sure that it doesn’t take people in one book three weeks to do a journey that takes someone else a day in another book – and therefore it’s probably possible to pull a map together from these clues.

  It was fascinating to work on the Streets of Ankh-Morpork, though. It made me realise something very important about fantasy. I guess I’d shied away from being too definite about the city because, well, I thought it would restrict future invention; in fact, the mere act of mapping the city encouraged new ideas.

  I suppose I now see the point that, once the world has been established, it can be mapped. I mean, that’s how it’s supposed to happen, isn’t it? You don’t start out by drawing The Jaggedy Mountains and The Wiggly River – you create a world, flesh it out over a dozen books, and then someone comes along and earns a fat wad of cash by mapping it. The Discworld certainly is mappable – occasionally people send me their ideas and they all look pretty similar.

  But it seems to me that the Discworld society at least has changed a lot over the series. It seemed initially to be a fairly straight sub-Tolkien fantasy landscape. Ankh-Morpork was just another fantasy city. Then by degrees it became more like an Italian city state—

  Ah. Lord Vetinari, the Patrician. I worked that one out. Ankh-Morpork was starting to look to you a bit like Renaissance Florence, ruled by the Medici. So it’s a short mental bridge between the Medici and the Vetinari.

  Right. Probably there’s noble families called the Dentistri and the Physiotherapi . . .

  But in more recent books we’re almost in early Victorian times. Sometimes we’re in modern times.

  I can explain all this. Firstly, the Discworld is not a real place. It’s scenery for the novels. Anyway, there’s no reason why worlds should all develop in the same way. The Greeks had all the necessary theoretical knowledge and technical ability to invent the wind-up gramophone – the steam-powered gramophone, come to that. They just never did it. Whereas the Discworld is clearly waiting for steam and electricity and no one’s got around to utilising either of them, so all that ingenuity is being channelled in other ways.

  In one of the books you call Discworld ‘a world, and mirror of worlds’.

  Yes. I get amused when people say – usually about Granny Weatherwax and co – that they’re just like people they know. I mean, they’re supposed to be. That’s one of the things a writer is supposed to achieve. But people seem surprised, as if a witch isn’t traditionally meant to be like someone you know.

  Tell me about Death.

  It’s what happens before bits of your body fall off.

  The character . . . I think you’ve said you get more mail about him than anything else?

  Hmm . . . Yes. Of course, there’s Mort and Reaper Man, and he’s the only character that appears in all the books—

  And in Good Omens and also Johnny and the Dead, I think.

  Well, you know how it is when a studio has a big star under contract, they try to put him in all their films . . .

  He’s really the generic medieval personification, right out of The Seventh Seal, but with a few adjustments. I think people like him because he’s got this pathetic lack of any sense of humour and is powerful and innocent and vulnerable all at the same time. It’s true that he was a lot nastier in the first few books. By Reaper Man he’s clearly going through some sort of mid-life crisis. Or mid-Death crisis.

  You’ve said that you get rather more serious letters from old people and, er, the relatives of the recently deceased.

  Yes, but that comes under the heading of private correspondence, I think.

  I gather you get a lot of correspondence about the possibility of Discworld films. Will we ever see one?

  I don’t know. The only people with money to make films these days are in America. Now
, I’d be the first to admit that there are plenty of intelligent Americans. But too many of the approaches we’ve had suggest that they don’t really understand what the books are about, and maybe never could, and just want to acquire rights because they’ve heard it’s a property. We get things on the lines of ‘Wow, we’d love to do Mort, it’s fantastic, it’s high concept, but we think Americans will have a problem with Death so we’ll leave him out, okay?’ We get occasional European interest from nice people who haven’t got money, but I’ve never seen much point in flogging off options to people who haven’t much chance of getting something done and are just playing at it. It doesn’t much worry me if no films get made.

  Because you think of them as books?

  Right.

  I’ve seen some of the fan letters. What do you think of them?

  The mail is fairly huge, and just about every letter wants me to do something, even if it’s only write a reply. I think I manage to answer everything, sooner or later. It’s the requests for signed photos that always throw me. Who cares what an author looks like?

  It was a breakthrough for me when I suddenly realised, one day, that I could say ‘no’ to things, that if the diary was really full up I could turn something down politely and needn’t feel guilty. I still do feel guilty.

  You seem to have become associated with computers. Do you see yourself as an ‘electronic’ author? There seems to be a large overlap with your fans and computers users. I was at a talk you gave when you asked the audience how many worked with computers on a daily basis, and about half the hall raised their hands.

  Yes, but I was daft to ask. Almost everyone in a white collar job these days has a computer around the place somewhere – certainly if it’s a science-based job.

  I went the route familiar to lots of people, bought a ZX81 when they came out, and worked my way up to bigger machines over the years. But I used to tinker a lot. Good old Sir Clive produced the sub-£100 computer by leaving out the things people had thought computers needed, like a monitor or a disc drive or a decent keyboard. If you wanted to make the ZX81 do anything useful in the real world you had to learn something about it.

  I wanted to do word-processing. If you added some memory and a proper keyboard you could do word-processing on a ZX81, provided they weren’t very long words. And then you printed them out on a tiny printer that made the air smell like a minor industrial accident and copied it all out on a proper typewriter anyway. But it was Using A Computer, and I’d read too much science fiction when I was a kid not to Use A Computer if there was a chance to use one. So what if it made everything more difficult? You had to Grab the Future.

  Electronics always fascinated me, I suppose because it’s a kind of magic. When I was about twelve I had a passion for making really tiny crystal sets; those were the days when, if you really saved your pocket money, you could afford to buy one transistor. I do remember, one day, looking at the latest postage-stamp-sized thing (which of course was connected to a pair of huge Bakelite headphones – I was not perhaps a very logical thinker in this area) and saying to myself: you know, a circuit is only a lot of components all soldered together to do something; you could make it a lot smaller if you sort of built them all in one go. Yep, I independently came up with the idea of the integrated circuit . . .

  Um . . . I’m pretty certain there must have been a few around by 1960, weren’t there?

  Probably. At least in a Texas Instruments lab or something. But I didn’t know that. I was just this kid messing around with crystal sets. I was probably hit by a stray inspiration or something. And fat lot of good it did.

  You say in your very slim autobiographical bits – at least, you used to say – that one of your hobbies was making computers do things they weren’t intended to do. Such as what?

  Work properly, usually. But after I’d worked for a bit at the good ole ZX I bought another one and built speech boards and electronic thermometers and barometer attachments and a real-time clock and wrote huge clunky programmes in BASIC to make it all work. It was a sort of weather forecasting machine.

  I learned a lot. I’d never been very good at science at school and I was terrible at maths, but of my own free will I started to mess about with Boolean algebra and machine code. I’d just started working for the Central Electricity Generating Board at the time and I’d track down Serious Scientists in their lunch hour and say ‘What’s an elegant way to make the machine know that thirty minutes before quarter-past the hour is a quarter to the previous hour?’, and they’d sigh and explain some function I’d never heard of. I think I actually got quite good at thinking in terms of hardware and software at the same time.

  It all ended up with this huge rat’s nest of wire and tons of memory and, in the middle of it all, this little ZX81 sweating like crazy to keep up.

  The thing was, at school there’d never been any incentive to understand maths, except that you’d get hit about the head somewhat if you didn’t. I really resented that, when I thought about it later on. I remember the Friday evening when I worked out how the machine memory addressing worked and there was this glow in my head as I realised all the things I could now do and I thought, ‘Mathematicians must feel like this all the time! Why didn’t anyone tell me it could be like this?’

  Now my interest is less in the machines but in what they can do. For one thing, they do the filing. I write about two novels’ worth of letters a year, and without the computer I’d be buried in filing cabinets.

  As for the writing, I treat the machine like a big glass typewriter. I’m not really interested in going down the ‘camera ready’ road, and I probably use a fifth of the capabilities of the word-processing program and a hundredth of the capabilities of the actual computer; it’s big and very fast and all that speed and power is focused on allowing one guy to work exactly the way he wants to.

  But you once said your computer ate the final draft of Mort!

  Well, okay. But that was because I was working late and wasn’t very experienced and was so tired I kept typing ‘Y’ to all those little messages like ‘Do you REALLY want to do something as bloody stupid as format the entire hard disc Y/N?’. It really happened because I was in the state of mental bewilderment I’m always in when a book’s finished. Fortunately I’d put a print-out in the post to the publishers, and if the worst came to the worst I did have an early draft on a floppy disc. Anyway, it’s not an argument against using computers, it’s an argument against operating machinery when tired. And also against not being bright enough to know how to unerase things. I learned quickly after that.

  The Discworld must be terribly difficult to translate. Do you have much to do with the translators?

  I know the Spanish translator won a prize for The Colour of Magic! And someone attempting to translate The Colour of Magic into Polish read the first page and said he didn’t believe it was possible to think like that in Polish. I get on very well with the Dutch translator, who takes a kind of skewed delight in tracking down the ‘right’ words, and the German translator also contacts me quite regularly – someone recently told me they thought Reaper Man was better in German, which is some kind of triumph for the translator. I do get some occasional enquiries from the others, but mostly the translators do their own thing. I don’t envy them. A lot of foreign fans are bi-lingual, and its hard to please everyone.

  Someone said I should ask you where you get your shirts . . .

  Look, all that happened is that when I was on tour in Australia in 1990 I found a shop in Melbourne that sold really good cotton shirts, of a kind I’ve never been able to find anywhere else. So I bought some. And when I went through again in 1992 I bought some more. And when I went through again in 1993 I bought some more. But I don’t buy all my shirts in Australia. Just most of them.

  Another aspect of the Discworld fandom that has changed remarkably over the years is the relationship between the author and his readers. In this world of Discworld conventions and online communities, it’s fascinating to
look back through the years to see that it wasn’t always so . . .

  READERS AND FAN MAIL

  (originally published in The Discworld Companion, 1994)

  A survey of the cardboard boxes in which Terry Pratchett stores his fan mail, if that’s the proper word for it, turns up one or two constants.

  1) A statistically-significant number of readers meet other Discworld fans while on holiday on otherwise unspoilt Greek islands; one went so far as to claim to have met him, which shows pretty good eyesight since his diary reveals that at the time he was in Australia.

  2) A large number of GCSE students do projects on him.

  Terry: Oh, yes. The less inventive letters go like this: Dear Mr Pratchett, I am one of your greatest fans, I have read all your books, I am doing a project on you for GCSE, can you please send me everything, can I please have it by Friday because it’s due in on Monday . . .

  A browse in his correspondence files suggests that he tries to oblige rather more than he lets on, even when the letters contain twenty numbered questions on the lines of ‘7) Is writing a puffish thing to do?’ and ‘I’d like to be a writer when I leave school. 1) Are you on Flexitime?’

  The lengthy ones get the Update, an A4 page in really tiny print which contains answers to most of the frequently-asked questions.

  3) A large number of letters from people under sixteen are full of numbered sentences.

  Terry: I don’t know why. Maybe that’s how they’re taught to do it: ‘Dear Mr Pratchett, Can I ask you some questions, 1) Where do you get your ideas from?’ . . .

  All letters get answered, except for those he refers to as the terminally weird or unreadable. He lives in constant low-key guilt that he might have missed some.

  Terry: You’re on tour, and a kid in the queue comes up with his mum and says ‘I sent you a letter’ and you think, jeez, did I answer it? I’ve got away with it so far.