A Slip of the Keyboard

by Terry Pratchett

  I can remember the click of the central heating going off and the room growing colder, but these things were happening on the horizon of my senses and weren’t relevant. I can’t remember going home with my parents, but I do remember sitting up in bed until three a.m., still reading. I don’t recall going to sleep. I do remember waking up with the book open on my chest, and finding my place, and going on reading. It took me, oh, about twenty-three hours to get to the end.

  Then I picked up the first book and started again. I spent a long time looking at the runes.

  Already, as I admit this, I can feel the circle of new, anxious but friendly faces around me: “My name is Terry and I used to draw dwarf runes in my school notebooks. It started with, you know, the straight ones, everyone can do them, but then I got in deeper and before I knew it I was doing the curly elf ones with the dots. Wait … there’s worse. Before I’d even heard the word fandom I was writing weird fan fiction. I wrote a crossover story setting Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in Middle-earth; the rest of the kids loved it, because a class of thirteen-year-old boys with volcanic acne and groinal longings is not best placed to appreciate Miss Austen’s fine prose. It was a really good bit when the orcs attacked the rectory.…” But around about then, I suspect, the support group would have thrown me out.

  Enthralled I was. To the library I went back, and spake thusly: “Have you got any more books like these? Maybe with maps in? And runes?”

  The librarian gave me a mildly disapproving look, but I ended up with Beowulf and a volume of Norse sagas. He meant well, but it wasn’t the same. It took someone several stanzas just to say who they were.

  But that drew me to the Mythology shelves. The Mythology shelves were next to the Ancient History shelves. What the hell … it was all guys with helmets, wasn’t it? On, on … maybe there’s a magical ring! Or runes!

  The desperate search for the Tolkien effect opened up a new world for me, and it was this one.

  History as it was then taught in British schools was big on kings and acts of Parliament, and was full of dead people. It had a certain strange, mechanistic structure to it. What happened in 1066? The Battle of Hastings. Full marks. And what else happened in 1066? What do you mean, what else happened? The Battle of Hastings was what 1066 was for. We’d “done” the Romans (they came, they saw, they had some baths, they built some roads, and left), but my private reading coloured in the picture. We hadn’t “done” the Greeks. As for the empires of Africa and Asia, did anyone “do” them at all? But, hey, look here in this book; these guys don’t use runes, it’s all pictures of birds and snakes; but, look, they know how to pull a dead king’s brains out through his nose.…

  And on I went, getting the best kind of education possible, which is the one that happens while you think you’re having fun. Would it have happened anyway? Possibly. We never know where the triggers are. But The Lord of the Rings was a step-change in my reading. I was already enjoying it, but The Lord of the Rings opened me up to the rest of the library.

  I used to read it once a year, in the spring.

  I’ve realized that I don’t anymore, and I wonder why. It’s not the dense and sometimes ponderous language. It’s not because the scenery has more character than the characters, or the lack of parts for women, or the other perceived or real offences against the current social codes.

  It’s simply because I have the movie in my head, and it’s been there for forty years. I can still remember the luminous green of the beech woods, the freezing air of the mountains, the terrifying darkness of the dwarf mines, the greenery on the slopes of Ithilien, west of Mordor, still holding out against the encroaching shadow. The protagonists don’t figure much in the movie, because they were never more to me than figures in a landscape that was, itself, the hero. I remember it at least as clearly as—no, come to think of it, more clearly than—I do many of the places I’ve visited in what we like to call the real world. In fact, it is strange to write this and realize that I can remember stretches of the Middle-earth landscape as real places. The characters are faceless, mere points in space from which their dialogue originated. But Middle-earth is a place I went to.

  I suppose the journey was a form of escapism. That was a terrible crime at my school. It’s a terrible crime in a prison; at least, it’s a terrible crime to a jailer. In the early sixties, the word had no positive meanings. But you can escape to as well as from. In my case, the escape was a truly Tolkien experience, as recorded in his Tree and Leaf. I started with a book, and that led me to a library, and that led me everywhere.

  Do I still think, as I did then, that Tolkien was the greatest writer in the world? In the strict sense, no. You can think that at thirteen. If you still think it at fifty-three, something has gone wrong with your life. But sometimes things all come together at the right time in the right place—book, author, style, subject, and reader. The moment was magic.

  And I went on reading; and, since if you read enough books you overflow, I eventually became a writer.

  One day I was doing a signing in a London bookshop and next in the queue was a lady in what, back in the eighties, was called a “power suit” despite its laughable lack of titanium armour and proton guns. She handed over a book for signature. I asked her what her name was. She mumbled something. I asked again … after all, it was a noisy bookshop. There was another mumble, which I could not quite decipher. As I opened my mouth for the third attempt, she said, “It’s Galadriel, okay?”

  I said: “Were you by any chance born in a cannabis plantation in Wales?” She smiled, grimly. “It was a camper van in Cornwall,” she said, “but you’ve got the right idea.”

  It wasn’t Tolkien’s fault, but let us remember in fellowship and sympathy all the Bilboes out there.

  NEIL GAIMAN: AMAZING MASTER CONJUROR

  Boskone 39 Programme Book, February 2002

  When I first met Neil, he called himself a ligger. Say there’s a new book being launched, and there might be drink and there might be food. That’s where the ligger is, looking for something for his magazine, eating nondescript canapés, and drinking warm wine.

  We were both writing fit to burst back then, and he would ring me up in the middle of the night and chat about what we were doing, mostly in darkness. We came to understand one another—it’s good to have someone like that to talk to, when you’re a writer.

  From him I learned the most precious words tax deductible.

  What can I say about Neil Gaiman that has not already been said in The Morbid Imagination: Five Case Studies?

  Well, he’s no genius. He’s better than that.

  He’s not a wizard, in other words, but a conjuror.

  Wizards don’t have to work. They wave their hands, and the magic happens. But conjurors, now … conjurors work very hard. They spend a lot of time in their youth watching, very carefully, the best conjurors of their day. They seek out old books of trickery and, being natural conjurors, read everything else as well, because history itself is just a magic show. They observe the way people think, and the many ways in which they don’t. They learn the subtle use of springs, and how to open mighty temple doors at a touch, and how to make the trumpets sound.

  And they take centre stage and amaze you with flags of all nations and smoke and mirrors, and you cry: “Amazing! How does he do it? What happened to the elephant? Where’s the rabbit? Did he really smash my watch?”

  And in the back row we, the other conjurors, say quietly, “Well done. Isn’t that a variant of the Prague Levitating Sock? Wasn’t that Pasqual’s Spirit Mirror, where the girl isn’t really there? But where the hell did that flaming sword come from?”

  And we wonder if there may be such a thing as wizardry, after all …

  I met Neil in 1985, when The Colour of Magic had just come out. It was my first ever interview as an author. Neil was making a living as a freelance journalist and had the pale features of someone who had sat through the review showings of altogether too many bad movies in order
to live off the freebie cold chicken legs they served at the receptions afterwards (and to build up his contacts book, which is now the size of the Bible and contains rather more interesting people). He was doing journalism in order to eat, which is a very good way of learning journalism. Probably the only real way, come to think of it.

  He also had a very bad hat. It was a grey homburg. He was not a hat person. There was no natural unity between hat and man. That was the first and last time I saw the hat. As if subconsciously aware of the bad hatitude, he used to forget it and leave it behind in restaurants. One day, he never went back for it. I put this in for the serious fans out there: if you search really, really hard, you may find a small restaurant somewhere in London with a dusty grey homburg at the back of a shelf. Who knows what will happen if you try it on?

  Anyway, we got on fine. Hard to say why, but at bottom was a shared delight and amazement at the sheer strangeness of the universe, in stories, in obscure details, in strange old books in unregarded bookshops. We stayed in contact.

  [SFX: pages being ripped off a calendar. You know, you just don’t get that in movies anymore.…]

  And one thing led to another, and he became big in graphic novels, and Discworld took off, and one day he sent me about six pages of a short story and said he didn’t know how it continued, and I didn’t either, and about a year later I took it out of the drawer and did see what happened next, even if I couldn’t see how it all ended yet, and we wrote it together and that was Good Omens. It was done by two guys who didn’t have anything to lose by having fun. We didn’t do it for the money. But, as it turned out, we got a lot of money.

  … hey, let me tell you about the weirdness, like when he was staying with us for the editing and we heard a noise and went into his room and two of our white doves had got in and couldn’t get out; they were panicking around the room and Neil was waking up in a storm of snowy white feathers saying, “Wstfgl?” which is his normal antemeridian vocabulary. Or the time when we were in a bar and he met the Spider Women. Or the time on tour when we checked into our hotel and in the morning it turned out that his TV had been showing him strange late-night seminaked bondage bisexual chat shows, and mine had picked up nothing but reruns of Mr. Ed. And the moment, live on air, when we realized that an underinformed New York radio interviewer with ten minutes of chat still to go thought Good Omens was not a work of fiction …

  [Cut to a train, pounding along the tracks. That’s another scene they never show in movies these days.…]

  And there we were, ten years on, travelling across Sweden and talking about the plot of American Gods (him) and The Amazing Maurice (me). Probably both of us at the same time. It was just like the old days. One of us says, “I don’t know how to deal with this tricky bit of plot”; the other one listens and says, “The solution, Grasshopper, is in the way you state the problem. Fancy a coffee?”

  A lot had happened in those ten years. He’d left the comics world shaken, and it’ll never be quite the same. The effect was akin to that of Tolkien on the fantasy novel—everything afterwards is in some way influenced. I remember on one U.S. Good Omens tour walking round a comics shop. We’d been signing for a lot of comics fans, some of whom were clearly puzzled at the concept of “dis story wid no pitchers in it,” and I wandered around the shelves, looking at the opposition. That’s when I realized he was good. There’s a delicacy of touch, a subtle scalpel, which is the hallmark of his work.

  And when I heard the premise of American Gods I wanted to write it so much I could taste it.…

  When I read Coraline, I saw it as an exquisitely drawn animation; if I close my eyes I can see how the house looks, or the special dolls’ picnic. No wonder he writes scripts now; soon, I hope someone will be intelligent enough to let him direct. When I read the book, I remembered that children’s stories are, indeed, where true horror lives. My childhood nightmares would have been quite featureless without the imaginings of Walt Disney, and there’s a few little details concerning black button eyes in that book that makes a small part of the adult brain want to go and hide behind the sofa. But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror’s defeat.

  It might come as a surprise to many to learn that Neil is either a very nice, approachable guy or an incredible actor. He sometimes takes those shades off. The leather jacket I’m not sure about; I think I once saw him in a tux, or it may have been someone else.

  He takes the view that mornings happen to other people. I think I once saw him at breakfast, although possibly it was just someone who looked a bit like him who was lying with their head in the plate of baked beans. He likes good sushi and quite likes people, too, although not raw; he is kind to fans who are not total jerks, and enjoys talking to people who know how to talk. He doesn’t look as though he’s forty; that may have happened to someone else, too. Or perhaps there’s a special picture locked in his attic.

  Have fun. You’re in the hands of a master conjuror. Or, quite possibly, a wizard.

  P.S.: He really, really likes it if you ask him to sign your battered, treasured copy of Good Omens that has been dropped in the tub at least once and is now held together with very old, yellowing transparent tape. You know the one.

  2001 CARNEGIE MEDAL AWARD SPEECH

  2002

  This was the biggest medal there was, and I ate it. It was made of chocolate.

  That is to say, the real medal wasn’t chocolate, of course, but because I knew I was going to be awarded it in advance—they tell you that sort of thing—and I was a little skittish, Rob and I looked around town for something the same size and shape as the medal. What we found was a perfect chocolate version. So after my speech I said, “… and what I really like is that I can eat it.” And I put it in my mouth. The librarian ladies didn’t know what to do, and I thought to myself “Well, that’s it, I’m bloody well not going to be given another one.”

  I’m pretty sure that the publicists from this award would be quite happy if I said something controversial, but it seems to me that giving me the Carnegie Medal is controversial enough. This is my third attempt. Well, I say my third attempt, but in fact I just sat there in ignorance and someone else attempted it on my behalf, somewhat to my initial dismay.

  The Amazing Maurice is a fantasy book. Of course, everyone knows that fantasy is “all about” wizards, but by now, I hope, everyone with any intelligence knows that, er, whatever everyone knows … is wrong.

  Fantasy is more than wizards. For instance, this book is about rats that are intelligent. But it is also about the even more fantastic idea that humans are capable of intelligence as well. Far more beguiling than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive jewellery into a volcano is the possibility that evil can be defused by talking. The fantasy of justice is more interesting than the fantasy of fairies, and more truly fantastic. In the book the rats go to war, which is, I hope, gripping. But then they make peace, which is astonishing.

  In any case, genre is just a flavouring. It’s not the whole meal. Don’t get confused by the scenery.

  A novel set in Tombstone, Arizona, on October 26, 1881, is what—a Western? The scenery says so, the clothes say so, but the story does not automatically become a Western. Why let a few cactuses tell you what to think? It might be a counterfactual, or a historical novel, or a searing literary indictment of something or other, or a horror novel, or even, perhaps, a romance—although the young lovers would have to speak up a bit and possibly even hide under the table, because the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was going on at the time.

  We categorize too much on the basis of unreliable assumption. A literary novel written by Brian Aldiss must be science fiction, because he is a known science fiction writer; a science fiction novel by Margaret Atwood is literature because she is a literary novelist. Recent Discworld books have spun on such concerns as the nature of belief, politics and even of journalistic freedom, but put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.

  This is
not, on the whole, a complaint. But as I have said, it seems to me that dragons are not really the pure quill of fantasy, when properly done. Real fantasy is that a man with a printing press might defy an entire government because of some half-formed belief that there may be such a thing as the truth. Anyway, fantasy needs no defence now. As a genre it has become quite respectable in recent years. At least, it can demonstrably make lots and lots and lots of money, which passes for respectable these days. When you can buy a plastic Gandalf with kung-fu grip and rocket launcher, you know fantasy has broken through.

  But I’m a humorous writer too, and humour is a real problem.

  It was interesting to see how Maurice was reviewed here and in the United States. Over there, where I’ve only recently made much of an impression, the reviews tended to be quite serious and detailed with, as Maurice himself would have put it, “long words, like corrugated iron.” Over here, while being very nice, they tended towards the “another wacky, zany book by comic author Terry Pratchett.” In fact, Maurice has no whack and very little zane. It’s quite a serious book. Only the scenery is funny.

  The problem is that we think the opposite of funny is serious. It is not. In fact, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out, the opposite of funny is not funny, and the opposite of serious is not serious. Benny Hill was funny and not serious; Rory Bremner is funny and serious; most politicians are serious but, unfortunately, not funny. Humour has its uses. Laughter can get through the keyhole while seriousness is still hammering on the door. New ideas can ride in on the back of a joke; old ideas can be given an added edge.