A Slip of the Keyboard

by Terry Pratchett

  Off to a signing in a mall. People say, hey, you must see a lot of the world on your travels, but what you mainly see is malls. This is a good mall.

  The shop reported a huge crowd when we were on the way, although it was easily dealt with in under forty-five minutes, which just goes to show.

  Back to the hotel for an interview. Journo and I take a taxi across the carpet to the distant sofa.

  6:30 p.m.: Talk/signing.

  One of the most enjoyable events of this tour. A full house—about 250 people—and I was fairly relaxed so it felt as if it was going well, and it seemed that everyone had a book/books to be signed.

  On the way home, the captain of the 747 came over the speaker and said, “Good evening, I am your captain, Roger Rogers,” and in a cabin full of sweaty business types getting pie-eyed on free booze I was the only one who noticed.…

  CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

  Introduction to the Third Australian Discworld Convention Programme Book, April 2011

  The 2011 Australian Discworld Convention was perfectly wonderful. It wasn’t a large convention, but it was crowded, somehow, with so many things going on. It set the benchmark for every subsequent Discworld convention.

  However, I still remember fondly the first Discworld Convention, held in a (badly) converted department store in Manchester back in 1995. I watched the fans shuffle in, looking at each other in amazement and realizing they were not alone. They’re a loveable lot who drink like the rugby club and fight like the chess club.

  Ladies and Gentlemen,

  Welcome to the Third Australian Discworld Convention!

  It may well be that this is the first ever convention for some of you; I know that in the U.K. about one half of attendees are first timers. When the first ever Discworld Convention took place in Manchester, England, back in 1996 nearly a thousand people turned up, each one expecting to be the only one there. Nevertheless, this fledgling convention boasted several panels, drinking, an extremely good maskerade, drinking, a gala dinner (which included quite possibly the last ever appearance of the genuine preimmigration English curry made from swede, sultanas, and urine) and, of course, drinking. At the end of the three-day event people were quite genuinely in tears at having to leave and certainly there were many friendships made that still endure; something that’s unusual in the general world of fandom.

  Discworld conventions (there are five worldwide this year) are now limited to the size of the biggest hall that can be realistically hired; in the U.K. and U.S. that means an attendance of around a thousand people. I attended my first Antipodean convention in New Zealand only a couple of years after my first ever signing tour down under in August 1990 and made certain that I came again at frequent intervals. The publishers were so pleased that I actually liked spending twenty-four hours in an aeroplane that until not long ago I was turning up probably every other year. Quite often my wife joined me and that meant that at one stage, when I was alternately coming down for a big signing tour and going back for a holiday later in the same year, I ordered some trousers in Perth which had to be altered and so I simply collected them when I next went past three months later. Yes, I actually do like the journey, especially since I have been upgrading myself to First Class!

  Frankly, I’m looking forward to enjoying myself at this convention and hope that you are, too. I am sufficiently keen on talking to people that I often have to get dragged away to do the more formal events, but I always welcome a keen fan who knows the magic words, “What would you like to drink?”

  A small embarrassing detail: I am over sixty and, as above, people will be buying me drinks and drinks have this terrible problem of being temporary. And so if you see me heading purposefully in the general direction of the dunny, do not try to engage me in conversation if you want to live. Yes, it’s actually true; once I was communing with nature and somebody actually pushed a book under the door for me to sign.

  And on the subject of signings, please read and take note of the formal instructions; signings take an awful lot out of the hand and decades of signings have made my hand rather weak. However, it’s still strong enough to pick up a glass.

  I really am looking forward to the convention and that’s no lie.

  Best wishes,

  Terry Pratchett

  Wiltshire, U.K.

  February 2011

  STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART, VIA THE GROIN

  Speech given at Noreascon 2004, WorldCon

  I had a whole speech prepared on my computer, but in the event it wouldn’t open, so this is what I was able to recall from memory. The main thing in speeches is to get that first laugh in, and once you’ve got it, you have the audience in the hollow of your hand.

  My name is Terry Pratchett. If this comes as a surprise to you, you have a little bit of time left in which to leave.

  Some six months ago I wrote a worthy and learned treatise to deliver to you today. However, some events eventuated in the meantime. So, having got you all here, I’m going to tell you about my operation. It turned out that I had very high blood pressure, so for three months I had high blood pressure and pills that weren’t doing any good, which made my blood pressure go up higher. Then for three months I had low blood pressure and pills that did work, but they were the maximum-strength betablockers which are, brothers and sisters, the Devil’s face flannel. It was like having a hot towel on my brain.

  And then they got it all sorted out, and they found that since I had no history of heart disease in my family, a low cholesterol level, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink strong drink—much—wasn’t overweight, and exercised regularly, of course I had heart disease. I complained about this and they said, “Tough luck, even plastic people get struck by lightning.” They weighed my wallet and found it was far too heavy for a man of my age and off I went for an angiogram, where they look at your heart via your groin. Now, the heart and groin are sometimes linked in other ways, but it did seem to me they were taking the long route. They give you a little something which makes you a wee bit sleepy and, hey, you are allowed to watch the operation on television.

  They said, “Is there any particular music you would like to listen to?” And I said “Well, I hadn’t thought about it, really. Er … you got some Jim Steinman?” And they said “Sure,” put on Bat Out of Hell, and got on with the job. I was watching what they were doing and there was my heart on the screen, and I realized I was nodding off and I thought, “But this is so cool! The last thing I’m seeing is my heart, still beating!”

  Then I had to have the stents put in. You know, these things that collapse. You’ve probably been following the various legal cases if you have any heart problems, as I have, but mine apparently are okay. And that’s rather a more serious operation. Beforehand, you go and talk to the surgeon and he explains, “There’s nothing to worry about, it’s quite simple, you will be out next day, oh, by the way will you sign this document?”

  “Oh yes, what’s this document for?”

  “That enables us to take you away and give you full-on open heart surgery if necessary. By the way, my son really likes your books.”

  I said, “If you would like your son to continue to be happy, may I advise some caution tomorrow?”

  And again I was wheeled into the surgery and gently slid into a happy state. Woke up in my room, God knows how many hours later, with a nurse pressing hard on my groin. What can a man say? “Where were you when I was eighteen?” In fact I settled for: “What happened? Did it all work? Did the stents go in?”

  “Yes, they’ve gone in fine, no problems,” she said, “but we had to stop you bleeding from the artery.”

  And the thing about bleeding from the artery, well … bleeding from the vein, you get drops of blood. Bleeding from an artery, the ceiling goes red. Then in comes the surgeon and said, “It’s fine, it’s fine, everything is fine.” But there was just a hint of not-quite-fine in his voice, so I said, “So, it all went well, did it?” in a meaningful sort of way, to which he replied, “Well, t
here were some fun and games.”

  I said, “How long was I on the slab?” And he said, “Oh, about an hour and a half, and please stop calling it a slab.” I said, “Fun and games, I take it, is a medical term meaning ‘You nearly died’?”

  He said, “Well you reacted rather badly to the dye which is used to illuminate the heart, but we hit you up with —— [something I can’t remember, but it sounded like nitroglycerine] and everything was … fine.” Apparently some part of my brain shuts my arteries down when I’m stressed. How my bloodline managed to survive five million years of evolution with this amazing trait, we shall never know, but they changed the medication as a result and I feel, well, fine.

  Then the surgeon said: “What we don’t understand is why you kept on shouting about sandwiches. You kept trying to sit up on the operating table, which is, as I believe I have told you several times, not the slab, saying ‘There he is—with sandwiches!’ ”

  And I said, “Yes, I remember that, there was a man—and he had sandwiches! He had a sort of tray and he was standing in the corner!” And the doctor said, “What kind were they?” And I said, “I don’t know! You wouldn’t let me get near! And sometimes there was this big nose looming in front of me and something like the voice of God saying THERE ARE NOOOOOO SANDWICHES …”

  He said, “Yes, that was probably me.”

  So that’s it, brothers and sisters. I’d have loved to find out if they were going to be cucumber with the crusts cut off. That means you’re going to go to hell. In England, if they are Branston Pickle and cheese that means you are on the way to heaven. But, alas, it was only a near sandwich experience and I survived. But it is nice to know that wherever you are going to go, you are going to get something to eat on the way.

  However, when this happens to a man, he starts to think, and asks the questions that have been bugging him for some time, like “What’s it all about then, when you get right down to it?” and “Is it really too late to get a Porsche?”

  But mostly, “What’s it all about then really when you get down to it?” And you know, I just don’t know. But I’m pretty sure that you should not head towards the sandwiches.

  Two weeks ago we had a Discworld convention in the U.K. A major one is held every two years. Lots of Americans came to it this time. You can tell the Americans, they were the ones that spent a lot of time in the bar singing songs like “Roll Me Over in the Clover.” They had been let out of California, where you are not even allowed to think songs like that.

  And it was great and it was very international and they capped the numbers at 750 which is big for a con in the U.K. On Sunday night, I looked down at this hall and people were having fun and there were lots of people in costume and they were kind of continuously creating Discworld … and I looked upon it and saw that it was pretty good.

  As a kind of experiment, a guild system had been set up, and guilds had to vie with one another to get points for their guild. And as I was telling the kids earlier, you’re sitting there and a sweet little munchkin who is now working for the Assassins’ Guild comes up and goes, “Stabbity, stabbity, stab. That will be two dollars.”

  “No,” I say, “that’s not how assassination works. You do not charge the corpse.” So she thinks about it and says, “My friend Keith,” (another small munchkin salutes) “he’s from the Guild of Alchemists and will bring you alive again for three dollars.” So with rigor mortis setting in, I stuck my hand in my pocket and gave them some of the fake convention money and then she smiled sweetly and said, “And for five dollars, I won’t kill you again.”

  It was amazing to see how this Ankh-Morpork system evolved during the con. Within a few hours of it starting, the head of the Merchants’ Guild embezzled his guild’s money to purchase the assassination of the head of the Assassins’ Guild so he could take it over, and on the second day, the forged money started to appear. It was magnificent! It was Ankh-Morpork come to life. And I looked down at the hall at the people having fun and enjoying themselves and occasionally charging one another to kill them and I thought, “My Work Here Is Done.…”

  My next book out is Going Postal. It’s about a fraud, a criminal, a con man, who to some extent becomes redeemed through the book, and learns that in addition to fooling everybody else that he’s a nice guy, he can even fool himself. And a friend of mine who read a draft copy said, “There is a little bit of autobiography in all books, isn’t there?” Only friends will tell you that.

  And, indeed, I think I am a fraud. I am a Guest of Honour at this convention. When I was a kid, Guests of Honour, as I said the other night, were giants made of gold and half a mile high. They had names like James Blish, Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke.… I’m five foot seven and I’m never going to get any taller.

  I wish I could say I had any purpose in mind when I started the Discworld series. I just thought it was going to be fun. There was an awful lot of bad fantasy around in the early 1980s. There was plenty of good fantasy around, I have to add, but there were just too many dark lords, or differently pigmented lords as we call them now. I thought it was time to have fun with this. The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic were the result. Then I found that they were selling. This came as a huge surprise to me. So I wrote Equal Rites. I wrote a third of Equal Rites in one weekend. In fact, after one of the nuclear power stations I was a press officer for exploded. Well, it didn’t really explode. Well, not much. I mean, it more sort of leaked a bit. But not much. You could hardly see it. And no one died. Trust me on this.

  The nervousness here comes from eight years as a nuclear press officer. I never really had to deal with a genuine nuclear accident, but some of the things I did have to deal with were slightly worse, from my personal point of view.

  There was, for example, the man who came to a nuclear power station on a public Open Day and turned out to be too radioactive to be allowed into the power station. He set off the machine that shouldn’t go bing, which is only supposed to go bing, or rather, not to go bing, when you are leaving the place. That presented a problem: when a man goes through the machine that shouldn’t go bing and it goes bing, you just know that the Health and Safety Executive is going to ask questions if he still goes bing when he leaves, and you’ll have to prove that he brought the bing in with him.

  It turned out that he had been dismantling a Second World War aircraft altimeter on his kitchen table—that’s the kind of thing we Brits do for fun—the night before, and had got pure radium all over his hands. So we scrubbed him up and the power station sent some men in nice clean white suits to take his kitchen table away and put it in the low-level-waste depository. Not many kitchen tables end up like that, or go bing.

  Oh, while I think about it, I’ll mention there’s something about spending a lot of time with engineers that makes you burst out laughing when you hear the term “three completely independent fail-safe systems.” I learned all about the “Fred Factor.”

  It works like this. Someone decides we’ll have a nuclear power station and they call in leading technical architects, and they design it. Subsystems are designed by competent engineers and sub-subsystems are designed by equally competent engineers and so it goes down and down and then you get to Fred. Fred is not a bad person, or even a bad workman. He is just an innocent victim of other people’s assumptions.

  Fred has been given a job sheet and some tools and told he’s got an hour to do the task. Fred has got to wire up three, as it might be, completely independent fail-safe systems and he wires them up and they are indeed completely independent except for one crucial wire from each system which must go through the wall and into the control room. And Fred sits there thinking, “Why should I drill three holes when one will clearly do?” So he takes out his drill and he drills one hole through the wall and he runs all the wires through it and he positions them just under the Acme Sharp-Edged Shelving System, in a bay where a very small truck is shunting goods around and backing up an awful lot and good heavens, one day all three systems fail
at once. That’s a terrible surprise, even to Fred.

  We had various Fred-type emergencies when I was working for the industry. For example, it should be impossible, completely impossible, to pour nuclear waste down a lavatory. But no one told Fred. So when, after a job of work, he was cleaning the top of the reactor, he tipped a bucket of, well to him, dirty water down the lavatory; and it just so happened that the health physicists, checking the sump outside shortly afterwards, heard the Geiger counter suddenly go “bing!” And there, lodged in the sump, was a bit of iron like a piece of grit.

  Unfortunately, just before they had done this, a big tanker had already taken a lot of the sewage sludge away from the station sewage to a big holding tank at a local sewage works. That was good. It was going nowhere, at least. But how do you find a few tiny lumps of welding spatter, smaller than a pea and, frankly, not highly radioactive, in eighty thousand gallons of crap? Just feeling around is not an option.

  There was a meeting between the sewage workers and the nuclear workers, and it was interesting to see the relative concepts of danger and risk. The nuclear workers were saying “Hey, we know about nuclear material, we can handle it, it’s detectable, it’s no problem, we can deal with this; but that? That’s sewage!” And the sewage workers were saying “This is sewage. We’re used to sewage, we eat and drink sewage, we know about sewage, but that? That’s nuclear!”

  And finally they came up with a masterstroke: all the stuff was pumped out into tankers and taken up to a coal-fired power station in the Midlands and burned to ash. The ash was put on a conveyor belt and run under a Geiger counter. It detected three little pieces of weld spatter that were slightly radioactive and that was that. I was impressed. A lot of effort had gone into finding these specks, which were rather less dangerous than our friend’s altimeter, and it seemed to me to be a matter of honour as much as safety. Contrary to popular belief, nuclear engineers are quite keen to keep the ticking stuff on the inside.