Terry Pratchett
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This book is dedicated to the memory of Nigel Williams, a dear friend and antiquarian book dealer who acquired many a Pratchett novel for me
‘The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned second-hand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.’ Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)
‘A ritual, more compelling than ever man devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These… owe nothing to his forbears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe’s childhood.’
Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast)
Acknowledgements
First I would like to acknowledge my dear friend and colleague Steve Moore, with whom I have discussed Pratchett’s work and who was kind enough to read over the chapters of this book to ensure I didn’t beat too far off the Pratchett track and to offer his own dose of wit and wisdom – many thanks for that.
Posthumous thanks to Nigel Williams, who had one of the most fascinating and value-for-money antiquarian bookshops in the whole of the Charing Cross Road area. Nestled in Cecil Court, Nigel acquired over a dozen Pratchett first editions for me, for which I am eternally grateful.
A big thank you to Colin Smythe, Terry Pratchett’s agent, for casting an eye over the finished book and offering informed and detailed comment, especially clarity regarding early proof copies. Thanks also to Nathan for always wanting to ‘acquire’ the odd Discworld title from me, thus making me read them more quickly (although I did have to borrow the odd one from him too)! And thanks to Simon Gosden for finding a few obscurities for me and always being so amiable. Thanks to my dear friend John Collins for keeping me up to date with the latest press cutting. (Next time my mysterious postman should stop for a small beer or glass of wine perhaps?)
I would also like to thank some dear old friends and acquaintances who pop up in this book in a variety of ways: James Herbert, Clive Barker, Stephen Laws, Simon Clarke, Joe Donnelly, Ian Rankin, Iain Banks, Neil Gaiman, Alice Cooper and Christopher Lee. Your influence stays with me, gentlemen, despite the passing years.
I would also like to thank some of the great fantasy writers past, such as JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Richard Adams, Robert Browning and the great Charles Dickens, who helped me realise the scope of the genre.
Thanks are due to Anita, Samantha, Nathan, Fern and my father Colin, for putting up with yet another book; Berny for the Terry Nation tip-off; and John Blake and John Wordsworth for allowing me to write about Terry Pratchett. Then there is my Danish friend Michael, who always uses Saturday morning football as the catalyst for varied conversation from Lord Nelson to Terry Pratchett – how diverse can you get? Thanks, too, to other members of the Saturday Morning team, specifically John and Robert.
Thanks to Tony Mulliken and those early breakfast meetings, which, as always, helped immensely.
Finally I would like to thank Terry Pratchett himself for being such a stimulating character to research and write about. His imagination and strength of character have brought so much happiness and hope to many people all over this world, and that is one of the fundamental reasons why I was so interested in writing this book.
Craig Cabell
London, 2011
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Introduction (or what this book is and what this book isn’t)
A Serious Note on the Text (and a bit of a rant)
PART ONE THE ROAD TO DREAMS
Chapter One Early On
Chapter Two What Happened Next
Chapter Three And as if by Magic…
PART TWO A FANTASY WORLD
Chapter Four The Colour of Magic
Chapter Five Tripping the Light Fandango
Chapter Six Mort, Faust and Death
Intermission The Carpet People (again)
Chapter Seven A Vastly Populated World
Chapter Eight Grooving with a Pict
Chapter Nine Challenging the Cliché
Chapter Ten The Dreams and Nightmares of Childhood
Chapter Eleven If Music be the Food of Love
Chapter Twelve The Long Dark Tea Party of the Soul
Chapter Thirteen Writing for Children
Chapter Fourteen Nation
Chapter Fifteen Courtly Orangutans
Chapter Sixteen A Character Called Death
Chapter Seventeen Alzheimer’s Disease
Chapter Eighteen The Dark Red Wings of Misery
Chapter Nineteen A Note About Cats
Annex A Pratchett on Screen
Annex B Pratchett at the Theatre
Annex C Terry Pratchett: Complete UK Bibliography and Collector’s Guide
Annex D The Unseen Library Bibliography
Conclusion And Finally
End Note
Further Reading
Plates
Books by Craig Cabell
About the Author
Copyright
A first edition of the first Nac Mac Feegle novel, inscribed in Pratchett’s inimitable way
Introduction
(or what this book is and what this book isn’t)
‘… there are some things we shouldn’t forget, and mostly they add up to where we came from and how we got here and the stories we told ourselves on the way.’ Terry Pratchett (Introduction, The Folklore of Discworld)
Strange things happen to you when you read Terry Pratchett’s novels on the train. People bend over to study the cover and say ‘I’ve read that one’, which is really annoying. Even a ticket inspector has said that to me.
Pratchett’s books are instantly recognisable nowadays, mainly for their impressive Josh Kirby dustwrappers. I know this because during a completely different train journey, I was reliably informed by a fellow passenger that somebody else was reading a book by the same author because the cover was ‘bright and colourful and, well, quite similar, so it must be the same writer’.
There are fans of different characters within the Discworld series, from Rincewind and Luggage to Death and Granny Weatherwax, but perhaps more focus has been placed on Pratchett himself in recent years. Since December 2007, when he publicly announced that he was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, Pratchett has spoken out about the affliction and his own personal plight. He has made a substantial donation to Alzheimer’s Research UK, $1 million, and filmed a two-part programme about the disease for the BBC.* The confrontation he has had with his illness has won the hearts of many people, not just those who love his books, and he continues in his ceaseless quest to break down the stigma attached to the illness.
Pratchett has stated openly that he desires to take his own life when the Alzheimer’s becomes too unbearable. He said he would like to end it ‘sitting in a chair with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod’, and many people sympathise with that. Unfortunately the law is not a living, breathing human being and doesn’t necessarily see it that way.
What I personally find fascinating about Terry Pratchett is his spirit, and it’s that inner strength and ability to tackle the world full on which is the main theme of this book.
Terry Pratchett – The Spirit of Fantasy is not an unofficial biography and not a Discworld companion. It is a tribute to a man who has sold 70 million copies of his books worldwide in 38 languages, and who h
as shown that he wears his heart on his sleeve, even long before his illness. It is also a book that applauds a writer of fantasy whose very soul lives in the real world; and that’s what makes him popular – his ability to make his audience empathise with his works and the real world around them.
Alzheimer’s Research UK is the United Kingdom’s leading dementia research charity. It was founded in 1992 and is totally dependent on donations from individuals, not the government.
It is not my wish to over-analyse and discuss the characters and plotlines of every Terry Pratchett novel in this book. A thousand words on each novel alone would be higher than the entire word count available for this book, and would offer nothing new or insightful about the man or his works. So a different approach was needed, one that exposed relevant moments, situations and characterisations in his work against the backdrop of his life, philosophy and career, in comparison to the fantasy he writes. This may be frustrating for some Pratchett fans, who would like an in-depth analysis of, say, the Night Watch and the streets of Ankh-Morpork, but it is Terry Pratchett himself and how his work reflects the man that are important here.
Pratchett was knighted in the 2009 New Year’s Honours. He had received an OBE in 1998 for services to literature, and many agreed that the accolade was well deserved by the much-loved author.
Pratchett’s career as a novelist started long before The Colour of Magic, his first Discworld novel in 1983. His first novel, The Carpet People, appeared in 1971 and is hugely collectable in its first edition nowadays. But what do the early works tell us about the man, and how did they set the scene for the Discworld novels that followed?
One must pay tribute here to Terry Pratchett’s official website and to his agent Colin Smythe’s website, which list a very comprehensive bibliography. I freely admit that I checked my own collection and other titles against these sites, along with claims of additional collectables; if items appeared to exist outside these official sources, I demanded to see evidence of their existence first.
There is more to Sir Terry Pratchett’s life than Discworld, and this book makes that clear. Conversely, Discworld is so far-reaching, and the books and associated collectables so vast, that an extensive bibliography has been included at the end of the book (Annex C) for the incurable fan.* Not only does this provide a user-friendly checklist of items to acquire but also showcases the sheer volume of work Pratchett has produced and the amount of energy his publishers, agent and various artists have put into creating collectable editions of his works. This is also showcased in Annex A, in which I look at the films (mainly TV mini-series) made from Pratchett’s work, which are all worthy of mention and are much-loved companions to the novels for many fans.
Terry Pratchett is one of the most respected fantasy writers Britain has ever produced. He’s up there with Tolkien and CS Lewis, and one could not bestow a higher – or more relevant – accolade.
‘No choice was left them but to play their part to its end.’
JRR Tolkien (‘The Return of the King’,
The Lord of the Rings)
A Serious Note on the Text
(and a bit of a rant)
Once upon a time Terry Pratchett’s agent Colin Smythe walked into a well-known bookshop and asked where he could find the latest title by his author. Despite the book spending four weeks at number one in the bestseller lists, it couldn’t be found in that part of the bookshop. Smythe was informed that it could be found in the science fiction/fantasy section, giving the distinct impression that books in that department were not worthy of the bestseller bookshelves, even though the title in question had outsold all other bestsellers for several weeks.
For me, it’s not only the injustice that this narrow-mindedness conjures up, it is the superficial labelling of two genres under one heading. Although science fiction and fantasy do come under the umbrella of speculative fiction, they follow two different historical patterns. Fundamentally, science fiction has to be based upon a natural projection of current science, while fantasy doesn’t need any of that but has a strong tradition of dwarves, warriors, wizards and dragons. The greatest visionaries in both genres are a million miles away from each other, people such as HG Wells and JRR Tolkien, or Isaac Asimov and CS Lewis. People did believe once upon a time that there was life on Mars and so was born The War of the Worlds, but Wells’ masterpiece says much more about the vulnerability and scientific naivety of mankind than just speculating about creatures from another planet, and that’s what makes the book so valid today. Conversely, there is no Narnia at the back of the wardrobe, with fauns, talking lions and ice queens (well, not when I last checked), so The Chronicles of Narnia sit squarely in the fantasy genre.
One could argue that The Lord of the Rings created a history that has many parallels with our own great wars and great warriors, and involves the birth of a true language and the spirit of legend – stories passed down by word of mouth. But Hobbits are not based upon a scientific certainty, nor elves or walking/talking trees. The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy. I applaud its ‘fellowship’ and concede that the loyalty and honour Tolkien’s great novel demonstrates is at the heart of every strong friendship in the real world, but dragons don’t exist. On the other hand, Asimov’s Foundation series was based upon political tensions in a science fiction setting. It is as cerebral as Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, but, unlike Wells’ novel, impossible to film. Asimov, like Robert Heinlein, took politics into outer space and found an even more tangled web of intrigue and malice. One can argue that Pratchett weaves politics into his fantasy novels in much the same way, but the fundamental difference is that in science fiction it could conceivably happen because it is a forward projection, whereas in fantasy it can’t, so it can only be satirical at best.
There is a discernible difference between science fiction and fantasy and that mindset is echoed throughout this book. Yes, parallels can be drawn between the two genres, but they don’t necessarily have the same audience. TV’s Doctor Who is not a fantasy series; it is a science fiction adventure series and has always been so. Conversely, a novel such as The Neverending Story cannot be classed as science fiction because it is an impossibility, something that can’t come true in the real world, so it is fantasy.
Sometimes the speculation of the writer can be thought ‘fantastic’ even in the science fiction genre, but this is normally associated with the long-term vision of the writer. Again, HG Wells offers us a classic example with The Island of Doctor Moreau, where he predicts genetic engineering decades before it was ever dreamed of. Then there is Jules Verne and his breathtaking 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; the underwater ship – the nuclear submarine – dreamed up with accuracy.
It is important to understand that there are two genres within the forum known as ‘anorak’. There are also two different audiences that cross over as much as those for detective fiction and historical fiction. ‘And what of the horror genre?’ I hear you cry. Yes, that sits next door to the double-header label of science fiction/fantasy in the high street, as it is also part of anorak heaven; but, oddly, horror fiction can sit on the bestseller shelves, so it is not as poor a relation as science fiction or fantasy in that respect. Not true? Consider this: a writer such as Clive Barker will write either a fantasy novel or a horror novel – never really a science fiction novel – and sit on the bestseller lists because he is known as a horror writer; just as Stephen King sat on the bestseller list with The Eyes of the Dragon and his Dark Tower fantasy series (and that’s ignoring the fact that certain horror novels are now labelled ‘chiller’).
Some people will argue that science fiction and horror are the same genre, or complementary genres. Indeed, I have had many an unresolved discussion about that in my days at Book and Magazine Collector. Does Alien sit alongside Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Strangely, yes – because both are science fiction. If the aliens murdering innocent people and breeding in a horribly grotesque way upset your delicate stomach, making you cry ‘horror’, then tha
t is in itself ignoring the horrors of mother nature, such as the female black widow spider killing and eating her husband after mating. (Does the creature in Alien not behave, in some ways, like a black widow?) So science fiction is a fiction based upon science, and where’s the horror in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? There are always crossovers, people pushing the boundaries, but essentially horror is horror, science fiction is science fiction and fantasy is fantasy. They all have their traditions, specific traits and audiences and one should accept that, or at least popular high-street bookshops should when stocking their bestseller shelves.
Going back to Pratchett not being on the bestseller bookshelves, let us observe that he is now. Like Stephen King, James Herbert et al, he is a fundamental part of the ‘establishment’ of authors who are now bankable products for the high street, but some genre writers are still being ignored. Why? A general feeling is that the problem is endemic in the UK. If a book is science fiction or fantasy it isn’t taken as seriously as ‘grown-up’ genres such as crime and historical fiction. In the US that isn’t the case, as science fiction and fantasy have a huge following and are taken very seriously. Also, the horror genre is turning slightly and becoming more true to life, which gives it more credibility and has sparked its offshoot of chiller fiction.
This book is about the fantasy genre and one of its greatest practitioners, Terry Pratchett, a man who has earned his place on the bestseller lists and is still continuing to break down the boundaries of his chosen genre.
‘Science fiction is a subset of fantasy.’
Terry Pratchett
The above quote cannot be overlooked. I deliberately mentioned a science fiction show called Doctor Who earlier. Pratchett has written about this show in the past, and, although he claims that he watched the very first episode back in 1963 and enjoys watching the show today, he is quite appalled by how the Doctor can expound some fast-talking reason to explain how he has just saved the universe yet again. Pratchett goes on to explain that the logic behind some of the Doctor’s solutions is just too ‘fantastic’ to be science fiction, so the stories are therefore fantasy. To my mind, this is where the genres get muddied. Doctor Who is set in outer space and is a children’s science fiction adventure series (so more pace and less explanation are accepted). It is about an alien with two hearts, not in itself a leap of faith. His ship is bigger on the inside than the outside, an interesting scientific hypothesis, and he has the ability to change his appearance – to regenerate – when his body gets tired or damaged. OK, most of that is science fiction, but ‘What about the regeneration?’ I hear you cry. Let us consider a quote from one of the greatest writers of the macabre, Algernon Blackwood: