The View from the Cheap Seats

by Neil Gaiman

  I am a handful of years too old to have read Diana’s books as a boy. I wish I had—she would have been one of those people who formed the way I saw the world, the way I thought about it and perceived it. Instead, reading her, it felt familiar, and when, in my twenties, I read all of Diana’s books that I could find, it felt like I was coming home.

  If, like me, you love Diana’s fiction, and you wish to learn more about the person, who she was and how she thought, then this book will enlighten you. But it will give you more than that. Her writings assembled in one place tell us how she thought about literature and the reasons for literature, about the place of children’s fiction in the world, about the circumstances that shaped her and her own understanding and vision of who she was and what she did. It is ferociously intelligent, astonishingly readable, and as with so much that Diana Wynne Jones did, she makes each thing she writes, each explanation for why the world is as it is, look so easy.

  * * *

  This is the Foreword to Reflections, a book of essays and nonfiction by Diana Wynne Jones.

  * * *

  Terry Pratchett: An Appreciation

  Right.

  So it’s February of 1985, and it’s a Chinese restaurant in London, and it’s the author’s first interview. His publicist was pleasantly surprised that anyone would want to talk to him (the author has just written a funny fantasy book called The Colour of Magic), but she’s set up this lunch with a young journalist anyway. The author, a former journalist, has a hat, but it’s a small, black leathery cap, not a Proper Author Hat. Not yet. The journalist has a hat too. It’s a grayish thing, sort of like the ones Humphrey Bogart wears in movies, only when the journalist wears it he doesn’t look like Humphrey Bogart: he looks like someone wearing a grown-up’s hat. The journalist is slowly discovering that, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot become a hat person: it’s not just that it itches and blows off at inconvenient moments, it’s that he forgets, and leaves it in restaurants, and is now getting very used to knocking on the doors of restaurants about eleven a.m. and asking if they found a hat. One day, very soon now, the journalist will stop bothering with hats, and decide to buy a black leather jacket instead.

  So they have lunch, and the interview gets printed in Space Voyager magazine, along with a photo of the author browsing the shelves in Forbidden Planet, and most importantly, they make each other laugh, and like the way the other one thinks.

  And the author is Terry Pratchett, and the journalist is me, and it’s been two decades since I left a hat in a restaurant, and one and a half decades since Terry discovered his inner bestselling-author-with-a-Proper-Author-Hat.

  We don’t see each other much these days, what with living on different continents, and, when we’re on each other’s continents, spending all our time signing books for other people. The last time we ate together was at a sushi counter in Minneapolis, after a signing. It was an all-you-can-eat night, where they put your sushi on little boats and floated it over to you. After a while, obviously feeling we were taking unfair advantage of the whole all-you-can-eat thing, the sushi chef gave up on the putting sushi on little boats, produced something that looked like the Leaning Tower of Yellowtail, handed it to us, and announced that he was going home.

  Nothing much had changed, except everything.

  These are the things I realized back in 1985:

  Terry knew a lot. He had the kind of head that people get when they’re interested in things, and go and ask questions and listen and read. He knew genre, enough to know the territory, and he knew enough outside genre to be interesting.

  He was ferociously intelligent.

  He was having fun. Then again, Terry is that rarity, the kind of author who likes writing, not having written, or Being a Writer, but the actual sitting there and making things up in front of a screen. At the time we met, he was still working as a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board. He wrote four hundred words a night, every night: it was the only way for him to keep a real job and still write books. One night, a year later, he finished a novel, with a hundred words still to go, so he put a piece of paper into his typewriter, and wrote a hundred words of the next novel.

  (The day he retired, to become a full-time writer, he phoned me up. “It’s only been half an hour since I retired, and already I hate those bastards,” he said cheerfully.)

  This was something else that was obvious in 1985. Terry was a science fiction writer. It was the way his mind worked: the urge to take it all apart, and put it back together in different ways, to see how it all fit together. It was the engine that drove Discworld. Not a what if . . . or an if only . . . or even an if this goes on . . . ; it was the far more subtle and dangerous If there was really a . . . , what would that mean? How would it work?

  In the Nicholls-Clute Encyclopedia of Science Fiction there was an ancient woodcut, of a man pushing his head through the back of the world, past the sky, and seeing the cogs and the wheels and the engines that drove the universe machine. That’s what people do in Terry Pratchett books, even if the people doing it are sometimes rats and sometimes small girls. People learn things. They open their heads.

  So we discovered we shared a similar sense of humor, and a similar set of cultural referents; we had read the same obscure books, took pleasure in pointing each other to weird Victorian reference books.

  A few years after we met, in 1988, Terry and I wrote a book together. It began as a parody of Richmal Crompton’s William books, which we called William the Antichrist, but rapidly outgrew that conceit and became about a number of other things instead, and we called it Good Omens. It was a funny novel about the end of the world and how we’re all going to die. Working with Terry I felt like a journeyman working alongside a master craftsman in some medieval guild. He constructs novels like a guildmaster might build a cathedral arch. There is art, of course, but that’s the result of building it well. What there is more of is the pleasure taken in constructing something that does what it’s meant to do—to make people read the story, and laugh, and possibly even think.

  (This is how we wrote a novel together. I’d write late at night. Terry wrote early in the morning. In the afternoon we’d have very long phone conversations where we’d read each other the best bits we’d written, and talk about stuff that could happen next. The main objective was to make the other one laugh. We posted floppy disks back and forth. There was one night when we tried using a modem to send some text across the country, at 300/75 speeds, directly from computer to computer, because if e-mail had been invented back then nobody had told us about it. We managed it too. But the post was faster.)

  (No, we won’t write a sequel.)

  Terry has been writing professionally for a very long time, honing his craft, getting quietly better and better. The biggest problem he faces is the problem of excellence: he makes it look easy. The public doesn’t know where the craft lies. It’s wiser to make it look harder than it is, a lesson all jugglers learn.

  In the early days the reviewers compared him to the late Douglas Adams, but then Terry went on to write books as enthusiastically as Douglas avoided writing them, and now, if there is any comparison to be made of anything from the formal rules of a Pratchett novel to the sheer prolific fecundity of the man, it might be to P. G. Wodehouse. But mostly newspapers, magazines and critics do not compare him to anyone. He exists in a blind spot, with two strikes against him: he writes funny books, in a world in which funny is synonymous with trivial, and they are fantasies—or more precisely, they are set on the Discworld, a flat world, which rests on the back of four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of a turtle, heading off through space. It’s a location in which Terry Pratchett can write anything, from hard-bitten crime dramas to vampiric political parodies, to children’s books. And those children’s books have changed things. After all, Terry won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for his pied piper tale The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, awarded by the librarians of the UK, and the Carnegie is a
n award that even newspapers have to respect. (Even so, the newspapers had their revenge, cheerfully misunderstanding Terry’s acceptance speech and accusing him of bashing J. K. Rowling and J. R. R. Tolkien and fantasy, in a speech about the real magic of fantastic fiction.)

  The most recent books have shown Terry in a new mode—books like Night Watch and Monstrous Regiment are darker, deeper, more outraged at what people can do to people, while prouder of what people can do for each other. And yes, the books are still funny, but they no longer follow the jokes: now the books follow the story and the people. Satire is a word that is often used to mean that there aren’t any people in the fiction, and for that reason I’m uncomfortable calling Terry a satirist. What he is, is A Writer, and there are few enough of those around. There are lots of people who call themselves writers, mind you. But it’s not the same thing at all.

  In person, Terry is genial, driven, funny. Practical. He likes writing, and he likes writing fiction. That he became a bestselling author is a good thing: it allows him to write as much as he wishes. He’s guest of honor at the World SF Convention—in many ways the ultimate accolade that the world of speculative fiction can bestow on those who have given it much—and he’ll still be writing, between panels, before breakfast, here and there. He’ll probably write as much in a day at Worldcon as most other authors will manage on a quiet day when there aren’t any DVDs that haven’t been watched and the weather precludes spending time in the garden and the phone’s out of order—and Terry will do this while doing his proper guest of honor share of panels and readings and socializing and drinking exotic drinks of an evening.

  He wasn’t joking about the banana daiquiris, although the last time I saw him we drank ice wine together in his hotel room while we set the world to rights.

  I’m delighted that he’s guest of honor at the Worldcon. He deserves it.

  * * *

  This was written to celebrate Terry Pratchett’s role as Guest of Honor of the 2004 World Science Fiction Convention.

  * * *

  On Dave McKean

  I was twenty-six when I first met Dave McKean. I was a working journalist who wanted to write comics. He was twenty-three, in his last year at art college, and he wanted to draw comics. We met in the offices of a telephone sales company, several members of which, we had been told, were going to bankroll an exciting new anthology comic. It was the kind of comic that was so cool that it was only going to employ untried new talent, and we certainly were that.

  I liked Dave, who was quiet and bearded and quite obviously the most artistically talented person I had ever encountered.

  That mysterious entity which Eddie Campbell calls “the man at the crossroads,” but everyone else knows as Paul Gravett, had been conned into running advertising in his magazine Escape for the Exciting New Comic. He came to take a look at it himself. He liked what Dave was drawing, liked what I was writing, asked if we’d like to work together.

  We did. We wanted to work together very much.

  Somewhere in there we figured out that the reason the Exciting New Comic was only employing untried talent was that no one else would work with the editor. And that he didn’t have the money to publish it. And that it was part of history . . .

  Still, we had our graphic novel to be getting on with for Paul Gravett. It was called Violent Cases.

  We became friends, sharing enthusiasms, and taking pleasure in bringing each other new things. (I gave him Stephen Sondheim, he gave me Jan Švankmajer. He gave me Conlon Nancarrow, I gave him John Cale. It continues.) I met his girlfriend, Clare, who played violin and was starting to think that, as she came up to graduation from university, she probably didn’t want to be a chiropodist.

  People from DC Comics came to England on a talent scouting expedition. Dave and I went up to their hotel room, and they scouted us. “They don’t really want us to do stuff for them,” said Dave, as we walked out of the hotel room. “They were probably just being polite.”

  But we did an outline for Black Orchid and gave them that and a number of paintings anyway, and they took them back to New York with them, politely.

  That was fifteen years ago. Somewhere in there Dave and I did Black Orchid and Signal to Noise, and Mr. Punch and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. And Dave’s done book covers and interior work for Jonathan Carroll and Iain Sinclair and John Cale and CD covers for a hundred bands.

  This is how we talk on the phone: we talk, and we talk and we talk until we’re all talked out, and we’re ready to get off the phone. Then the one who called remembers why he called in the first place and we talk about that.

  Dave McKean is still bearded. He plays badminton on Monday nights. He has two children, Yolanda and Liam, and he lives with them and with Clare (who teaches violin and runs Dave’s life and never became a chiropodist) in a beautiful converted oast house in the Kent countryside.

  When I’m in England I go and stay with them, and I sleep in a perfectly round room.

  Dave is friendly and polite. He knows what he likes and what he doesn’t like, and will tell you. He has a very gentle sense of humor. He likes Mexican food. He will not eat sushi, but has on several occasions humored me by sitting and drinking tea and nibbling chicken in Japanese restaurants.

  You get to his studio by walking across an improvised log bridge over a pond filled with koi carp. I read an article once in the Fortean Times or possibly the Weekly World News about koi exploding, and I have warned him several times of the dangers, but he will not listen. Actually, he scoffs.

  When I wrote Sandman Dave was my best and sharpest critic. He painted, built, or constructed every Sandman cover, and his was the face Sandman presented to the world.

  I never minded Dave being an astonishing artist and visual designer. That never bothered me. That he’s a world-class keyboard player and composer bothers me only a little. That he drives amazing cars very fast down tiny Kentish back roads only bothers me if I’m a passenger after a full meal, and much of the time I keep my eyes shut anyway. That he’s now becoming a world-class film and video director, that he can write comics as well as I can, if not better, that he subsidizes his art (still uncompromised after all these years) with highly paid advertising work which still manages, despite being advertising work, to be witty and heartfelt and beautiful . . . well, frankly, these things bother me. It seems somehow wrong for so much talent to be concentrated in one place, and I am fairly sure the only reason that no one has yet risen up and done something about it is because he’s modest, sensible and nice. If it was me, I’d be dead by now.

  He likes fine liqueurs. He also likes chocolate. One Christmas my wife and I gave Dave and Clare a hamper of chocolate. Chocolates, and things made of chocolate, and chocolate liqueur and even chocolate glasses to drink the liqueur from. There were chocolate truffles in that hamper and Belgian chocolates, and this was not a small hamper. I’m telling you, there was six months of chocolate in that hamper.

  It was empty before New Year’s Day.

  He’s in England, and I’m in America, have been for ten years, and I still miss him as much as I miss anyone. Whenever the opportunity to work with Dave comes up, I just say yes.

  I was amused, when Coraline came out recently, to find people who only knew Dave for his computer-enhanced multimedia work were astonished at the simple elegance of his pen-and-ink drawings. They didn’t know he could draw, or they’d forgotten.

  Dave has created art styles. Some of what he does is recognizable enough as his that art directors will give young artists samples of Dave McKean work and tell them to do that—often a specific art style that Dave created to solve a specific problem, or a place he went as an artist for a little while, decided that it wasn’t where he wanted to be, and moved on.

  (For example, I once suggested to him, remembering Arcimboldo and Josh Kirby’s old Alfred Hitchcock paperback cover paintings, that the cover of Sandman: Brief Lives could be a face made up of faces. This was before Dave owned a computer, and he l
aboriously photographed and painted a head made of smaller faces. He’s been asked to do similar covers many times since by art directors. And so have other artists. I wonder if they know where it came from.)

  People ask me who my favorite artist is, to work with. I’ve worked with world-class artists, after all, heaps of them. World-class people. And when they ask me about my favorite, I say Dave McKean. And then people ask why. I say, because he surprises me.

  He always does. He did it from the first thing we did together, and a couple of weeks ago I looked at the illustrations he’s done for our new graphic novel for all ages, The Wolves in the Walls. He’s combined paintings of people, amazing, funny-scary line drawings of wolves, and photographs of objects (jam, tubas and so on) to create something that is once again not what I expected, nothing like what I had in my head, but better than anything I could have dreamed of, more beautiful and more powerful.

  I don’t think there’s anything Dave McKean cannot do as an artist. (There are certainly things he doesn’t want to do, but that’s not the same thing at all.)

  After sixteen years, some artists are content to rest on their laurels (and Dave has shelves full of laurels, including a World Fantasy Award for best artist). It’s a rare artist who is as restless and as enthusiastic as he was when he was still almost a teenager, still questing for the right way to make art.

  * * *

  This was written for the World Fantasy Convention 2002 Program Book. Dave was Artist Guest of Honor.

  * * *

  How to Read Gene Wolfe

  Look at Gene: a genial smile (the one they named for him), pixie-twinkle in his eyes, a reassuring mustache. Listen to that chuckle. Do not be lulled. He holds all the cards: he has five aces in his hand, and several more up his sleeve.