A Blink of the Screen: Collected Short Fiction

by Terry Pratchett

  About the Book

  In the four decades since his first book appeared in print, Terry Pratchett has become one of the world’s bestselling and best-loved authors. Here for the first time are his short stories and other short-form fiction collected into one volume. A Blink of the Screen charts the course of Pratchett’s long writing career: from his schooldays through to his first writing job on the Bucks Free Press; to the origins of his debut novel, The Carpet People; and on again to the dizzy mastery of the phenomenally successful Discworld® series.

  Here are characters both familiar and yet to be discovered; abandoned worlds and others still expanding; adventure, chickens, death, disco and, actually, some quite disturbing ideas about Christmas, all of it shot through with his inimitable brand of humour.

  With an introduction by Booker Prize-winning author A.S. Byatt, illustrations by the late Josh Kirby and drawings by the author himself, this is a book to treasure.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword by A. S. Byatt

  Non-Discworld Shorter Writings

  The Hades Business (1963)

  Solution (1964)

  The Picture (1965)

  The Prince and the Partridge (1968)

  Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor (1973)

  Kindly Breathe in Short, Thick Pants (1976)

  The Glastonbury Tales (1977)

  There’s No Fool Like an Old Fool Found in an English Queue (1978)

  Coo, They’ve Given Me the Bird (1978)

  And Mind the Monoliths (1978)

  The High Meggas (1986)

  Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting (1987)

  Incubust (1988)

  Final Reward (1988)

  Turntables of the Night (1989)

  #ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’ (1990)

  Hollywood Chickens (1990)

  The Secret Book of the Dead (1991)

  Once and Future (1995)

  FTB (1996)

  Sir Joshua Easement: A Biographical Note (2010)

  Discworld Shorter Writings

  Troll Bridge (1992)

  Theatre of Cruelty (1993)

  The Sea and Little Fishes (1998)

  The Ankh-Morpork National Anthem (1999)

  Medical Notes (2002)

  Thud: A Historical Perspective (2002)

  A Few Words from Lord Havelock Vetinari (2002)

  Death and What Comes Next (2004)

  A Collegiate Casting-out of Devilish Devices (2005)

  Minutes of the Meeting to Form the Proposed Ankh-Morpork Federation of Scouts (2007)

  The Ankh-Morpork Football Association Hall of Fame playing cards (2009)

  Picture Section

  List of Illustrations

  Appendix

  Deleted extract from ‘The Sea and Little Fishes’

  About the Author

  Also by Terry Pratchett

  Copyright

  A Blink of the Screen

  Collected Shorter Fiction

  Terry Pratchett

  My thanks to my old friend and agent Colin Smythe who

  spent a lot of time sieving through a lot of dusty old

  newspapers to find my tracks. Amazingly, he really likes

  doing this kind of thing …

  FOREWORD BY A. S. BYATT

  I remember buying my first Pratchett – it was Men at Arms – in a bookshop in Sloane Square. I badly needed to be psychologically elsewhere and the bright heap of Discworld novels looked like a possible retreat. I turned them over. At first glance Josh Kirby’s covers with pink and bosomy cartoon women as well as energetic dragons did not seem to be my kind of thing. I think what persuaded me was the word Ankh-Morpork. Anyone who could think that up was a real writer. And a discworld had been part of my childhood – there was an illustration in the book of Norse myths I had, of an Indian myth of a world balanced on four elephants on a giant turtle surrounded by a snake.

  I took the book home, read it without stopping, and was hooked. I bought all the books and read them in order. Every summer, whilst thinking out my writing, I read them again. There is always a joke I hadn’t quite got. There is always the quite extraordinary narrative pull of a great storyteller. Later I came to appreciate Josh Kirby’s art too. His creatures have a gleeful wild energy and intricacy – both brash and sophisticated – which is exactly right for these tales.

  Terry Pratchett says his readers are people who work with computers. But my literary friends are often addicted as I am – I once had a very polite tug-of-war over a new book (I think it was Thief of Time) with my scholarly and brilliant editor in a bookshop where I was giving a reading. Last week I had a good talk with a philosopher at a high table about imaginary worlds in general and Pratchett in particular. Also, people who don’t read, read Pratchett. Boys of twelve who hate books. I hope he is never taught in schools – his biography on the back of the books used once to claim that ‘some people had accused him of literature’, and of course he is literature, but best enjoyed in solitude and retreat.

  J. R. R. Tolkien used the term ‘secondary worlds’ to describe fictive, invented worlds with their own creatures, geography, history, people. Human beings have always needed the existence of the other, the unreal – imaginary people and things that are other than ourselves – from fairy tales to myths to urban legends. A maker of secondary worlds needs great resources of inventiveness – both on the large scale and in the fine detail. Pratchett’s world is wonderful because he has the sheer energy of the great storyteller: you think you know all it is possible to know about a dragon, or a policeman, or a plot or a landscape, and he tells you more, a lot more than you had any right to expect, and this is exhilarating.

  From book to book he gets better and his world gets more intricate. He gets more and more attached to his own characters, who become more complicated – consider the way in which Captain Vimes grows from being a drunk in charge of a dysfunctional Night Watch to a commander who can arrest two armies for a breach of the peace. He finds it hard to go on disliking characters. He can invent irritating minor forms of life: an imp that operates a Gooseberry – or Disorganizer – belonging to Vimes, which is redeemed by the discovery that it can do the office accounts; an accountant called A. E. Pessimal, sent to inspect the Watchmen, who turns out to be a hero. (Wikipedia constantly illuminates Pratchett. I didn’t know that the word ‘pessimal’ means ‘bad to a maximal extent’ or ‘most wanting in quality or value’.) But he can do real evil too: take Mr Pin, the villain in The Truth, or the Chief Quisitor, Vorbis, in Small Gods – both with the ferocious single-mindedness, true cruelty, and narrow vision which can’t change.

  As Tolkien says, secondary worlds must be coherent. There is a risk of the creator being romantic, or being seen to have designs – didactic or sentimental – on the reader. I reread Tolkien for the landscape and the persistent sense of danger. I have problems with stories of real children who find themselves in secondary worlds – rather as though their reading had engulfed them. J. K. Rowling is a brilliant inventor of details of magic, but her world has its origin in a boarding school, a place to which I do not want to return. I never enjoyed C. S. Lewis, because I felt he was morally manipulating me as well as his characters. Philip Pullman writes beautifully and dramatically but he is writing against Lewis, and again runs the risk of becoming didactic and controlling. Pratchett, despite the slapstick, the terrible jokes and the very clever complicated jokes, is somehow wise and grown up. As a reader I trust him.

  I was once asked by a television intervi
ewer, ‘Isn’t all this simply really about us?’ and I indignantly replied, ‘No’, because I needed my secondary world to be other, separate and coherent. But he is of course writing about us. 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. And of course, computers. But he writes neither satire nor allegory. What gets into his world is in his world, with its own energy and logic.

  The shorter stories collected in A Blink of the Screen often consist of incursions from the secondary world into our world. A fantasy writer kills off his barbarian hero only to find him on his doorstep, come to ‘meet his maker’. Death dances in a disco. The first story, ‘The Hades Business’, was written when Pratchett was thirteen. It concerns the irruption of the Devil into an advertiser’s flat. Pratchett is apologetic about it but it has a gleeful pace and a very satisfactory ending. All his stories have satisfactory endings. I particularly like the one based on a real incident in 1973 when a lorry overturned in Hollywood let out some crates of chickens, who settled in a shrubbed verge. I like the weird one in which desperate travellers are trapped inside the world of Victorian Christmas cards, with snow covered with ‘tiny tinselly shards’, monstrous robins, and a ‘dreadful oblong slot’. There are tales about computers, including one, written in 1990, which is told by ‘an amiable repairman, not very bright but good with machines’ who works on machines inside which people create their own reality. (Again with a good ending.)

  There is also a collection of stories from the Discworld – including a long and wicked one about Granny Weatherwax and a hilarious version of the national anthem of Ankh-Morpork.

  And there is a grim little poem about how

  They don’t teach you the facts of death,

  Your mum and dad. They give you pets.

  Pratchett comments, ‘I tried to write this as though I was thirteen years old, with that earnest brand of serious amateurishness. This is possibly not a long way from how I write at the best of times …’ I can see what he means. What his teacher understood when he was thirteen, and what we all, thirteen-year-olds, nerds and geeks, reading writers and university teachers, recognize with glee is that he is a born writer, a maker, inimitable.

  Non-Discworld Shorter Writings

  THE HADES BUSINESS

  SCIENCE FANTASY MAGAZINE, ED. JOHN CARNELL, NO. 60, VOL. 20, AUGUST 1963. AN EARLIER VERSION WAS PUBLISHED IN THE TECHNICAL CYGNET, THE HIGH WYCOMBE TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL MAGAZINE

  Argh, argh, argh … if I put my fingers in my ears and go ‘lalalala’ loudly I won’t hear you read this story.

  It’s juvenile. Mind you, so was I, being thirteen at the time. It’s the first thing I ever wrote that got published. In fact it’s the first thing I ever wrote with the feeling that I was writing a real story.

  It began as a piece of homework. The English teacher gave me twenty marks out of twenty for it, and put it in the school magazine. The kids liked it. I was a writer.

  And this was a big deal, because I hadn’t really been anything up until then. I was good at English. At everything else I was middling, one of those kids that don’t catch the teacher’s eye and are very glad of it. I was even bad at sports, except for the one wonderful term when they let us play hockey, when I was bad and very dangerous.

  But the other kids had liked it. I’d sniffed blood.

  There were three, yes, three professional sf and fantasy magazines published in the UK in those days. Unbelievable, but true. I persuaded my aunt, who had a typewriter, to type it out for me, and I sent it to John Carnell, who edited all three. The nerve of the kid.

  He accepted it.

  Oh boy.

  The £14 he paid was enough to buy a second-hand Imperial 58 typewriter from my typing teacher (my mother had decided that I ought to be able to do my own typing, what with being a writer and everything) and, as I write, it seems to me that it was a very good machine for fourteen quid and I just wonder if Mum and Dad didn’t make up the difference on the quiet.

  Fortunately, before I could do too much damage with the thing, study and exams swept me up and threw me out into a job on the local paper, where I learned to write properly or, at least, journalistically.

  I’ve re-read the story and my fingers have itched to strip it down, give it some pacing, scramble those clichés, and, in short, rewrite it from the bottom up. But that would be silly, so I’m going to grit my teeth instead.

  Go ahead, read.

  I can’t hear you! Lalalalalalala!

  Crucible opened his front door and stood rooted to the doormat.

  Imagine the interior of a storm cloud. Sprinkle liberally with ash and garnish with sulphur to taste. You now have a rough idea as to what Crucible’s front hall resembled.

  The smoke was coming from under the study door. Dimly remembering a film he had once seen, Crucible clapped a handkerchief to his nose and staggered to the kitchen. One bucket of water later, he returned. The door would not budge. The phone was in the study, so as to be handy in an emergency. Putting down the pail, Crucible applied his shoulder to the door, which remained closed. He retreated to the opposite wall of the hall, his eyes streaming. Gritting his teeth, he charged.

  The door opened of its own accord. Crucible described a graceful arc across the room, ending in the fireplace, then everything went black, literally and figuratively, and he knew no more.

  A herd of elephants were doing the square dance, in clogs, on Crucible’s head. He could see a hazy figure kneeling over him.

  ‘Here, drink this.’

  Ah, health-giving joy-juice! Ah, invigorating stagger-soup! Those elephants, having changed into slippers, were now dancing a sedate waltz: the whisky was having the desired effect. Crucible opened his eyes again and regarded the visitor.

  ‘Who the devil are you?’

  ‘That’s right!’

  Crucible’s head hit the grate with a hollow ‘clang!’

  The Devil picked him up and sat him in an armchair. Crucible opened one eye.

  The Devil was wearing a sober black suit, with a red carnation in the buttonhole. His thin waxed moustachios, combined with the minute beard, gave him a dignified air. A cloak and collapsible top hat were on the table.

  Crucible had known it would happen. After ten years of prising cash from the unsuspecting businessman, one was bound to be caught by Nemesis. He rose to his feet, brushing the soot from his clothes.

  ‘Shall we be going?’ he asked mournfully.

  ‘Going? Where to?’

  ‘The Other Place, I suppose.’

  ‘The Other Pl—? Oh, you mean home! Good Heav—oops! pardon me – Hell! no! No one’s come Down There for nearly two thousand years. Can’t think why. No, I have come to you because I need some help Down There; the Hell business is just not paying – no more lost souls. Only chap that’s come Down There for the last two thousand years was a raving nit called Dante; went away with quite the wrong impression. You ought to have heard what he said about me!’

  ‘I did read something about it somewhere.’

  ‘Indeed? Bad publicity for me, that. That’s where you come in.’

  ‘Oh?’ Crucible pricked up his ears.

  ‘Yes, I want you to advertise Hell. Clumsy! You’ve spilt your drink all over the carpet.’

  ‘W-why me?’ croaked Crucible.

  ‘You are the owner of the Square Deal Advertising Company, are you not? We want you to make the public conscious, Hell-wise. Not for eternal damnation, of course. Just day trips, etcetera, Grand Tour of Hell, and all that.’

  ‘And if I refuse?’

  ‘What would you say to ten thousand pounds?’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Twenty thousand?’

  ‘Hmm. Aren’t I supposed to give you some tasks; sand-ropes and all that?’

  The Devil looked angry.

  ‘Forty thousand and that’s my last offer. Besides,’ the Devil pressed the tips of his fingers
together and smiled at the ceiling, ‘there are some rather incriminating facts about the Payne-Smith Products case, which we could make public?’

  ‘Now you’re speaking my language. Forty thousand pounds and hush about the P and S case?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘I’m so glad you see it my way,’ said the Devil. Crucible seated himself behind his mahogany desk and took out a pad. He indicated a polished silver box.

  ‘Cigarette?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Crucible took a cigarette himself and felt for his lighter. Suddenly, a thought struck him.

  ‘How do I know you are Old Nick?’

  The Devil shuddered. ‘Please! Nicholas Lucifer to you. Well, I know about the P and S case, don’t I?’

  Crucible’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘You may be some smart-alec Dick. Convince me. Go on, convince me!’

  ‘Okay, you asked for it. By the way, that gun in your left-hand pocket would be useless against me.’ The Devil leaned nonchalantly, extending a finger towards Crucible.

  ‘See? You’re a phoney, a low do—’

  Crack!

  A bolt of lightning shot across the room. The end of Crucible’s cigarette glowed.

  ‘I – I – I’m convinced!’

  ‘So glad.’

  Crucible became his old self.

  ‘Let’s get down to business. I take it you want Hell to be exploited in every possible way?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I can’t do much until I have seen the place – from the living point of view, you understand.’

  ‘Quite. Well, I could take you back with me, but that might be a hair-raising experience for you. Tell you what, if you wait at the corner of this street, at – shall we say, eight o’clock this evening? – I could pick you up and we could walk there. Okay?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll be seeing you, then. Cheerio!’