A Slip of the Keyboard

by Terry Pratchett

  One game involved climbing up a young beech tree, standing on a fork in the branches, and leaping across to another smooth-trunked tree about five feet away. The important thing was to hit the tree full on and instantly wrap your arms around it, otherwise you dropped into the holly bushes ten feet below. And then, having successfully adhered to the tree, you slid down, getting your trousers all green. There would be this solemn procession of kids … scramble LEAP splat slitherslither. Or LEAP grab panic ARGGGGHHH.

  Of course, we had to make our own entertainment in those days.

  A STAR PUPIL

  From Celebrating 60 Years: Holtspur School 1951–2011, 2011

  I didn’t enjoy primary school. I was the boy who came late. Not one of the real dunces, but more goat than sheep. H. W. Tame, the master, apparently believed he could divine in a six-year-old which secondary school that boy or girl would go on to—and since I was a goat, he had me down as one of the losers. My mum wasn’t going to have any of that, so she did what a lot of mums do—found a teacher locally who could help me.

  I remember the day of the eleven-plus results when H. W. Tame went around the classroom to tell us where we were going. There was silence as I got out of my chair to go and tell my parents, who were waiting outside. I was the only goat that passed.

  There was a book about H. W. Tame called Selected at Six, but if my mother had been a teacher, she would have been head of something.

  Of course I remember my first headmaster, H. W. Tame, a giant of a man, about six hundred miles high as I recall. He was a pioneer of sex education for older primary school children, and I remember when I was about eleven going home from his talk, which we had all been looking forward to with considerable trepidation and excitement. I walked through the autumn leaves kicking them into the air and in my head weighing up the likelihoods and possibilities and deciding to my own satisfaction that he had definitely got it wrong.

  In all truth, I cannot say that my memories of Holtspur School were of the warmest, but possibly that was entirely because I was an absolutely quintessential example of a twit and dreamer. Fortuitously I survived, and the talent of dreaming I subsequently found, when under control, to be remarkably rewarding. That which does not kill us makes us strong. Seriously, it was, well, school, decent enough in its way, and later, depending on your mood at the time, you decide which spectacles to wear when recalling your thoughts.

  I also remember the pantomimes, which H. W. Tame wrote and occasionally appeared in, especially if a giant was wanted. Some time later on, as an adult, I met him at an event and was amazed at the miracle that meant he was now about the same size as me. It was school and if you managed to come out the other side in a reasonably amiable state of mind that must have been a plus.

  ON GRANNY PRATCHETT

  “False Teeth and a Smoking Mermaid”: Famous People Reveal the Strange and Beautiful Truth About Themselves and Their Grandparents, 2004

  Granny Pratchett was very small, very intelligent, badly educated, and rolled her own cigarettes. She carefully dismantled the dog-ends and kept them in an old tobacco tin from which she rolled future fags, occasionally topping it up with fresh tobacco. As a child this fascinated me, because you didn’t need to be a mathematician to see that this meant there must have been some shreds of tobacco she’d been smoking for decades, if not longer.

  She spoke French, having gone off to be a ladies’ maid in France before the First World War. She met Granddad Pratchett by chance, having taken part while she was there in a kind of pen-pal scheme for lonely Tommies at the Front. I suppose it was a happy marriage—when you’re a kid, grandparents just are. But I suspect it would have been a happier one for her if she’d married a man who enjoyed books, because they were her secret vice. She had one treasured shelf of them, all classics, but when I was around twelve I used to loan her my science fiction books, which she read avidly.

  Or so she said. You could never be quite sure with Granny. She was one of the brightest people I’ve met. In another time, with a different background, she would have run companies.

  TALES OF WONDER AND OF PORN

  Noreascon Four: WorldCon programme book, 2004

  The things we love when we’re young stay with us—like astronomy, for me. The day I found out I had PCA, I’d just got a nice new piece for my telescope. And PCA has a lot to do with the eyes—you see, but sometimes you don’t see because the brain is having difficulties processing the signal from the eyes. It’s something I can deal with, but I can’t read small type very easily. And as for the telescope … well, hanging around with a beer while Rob operates it is still good.

  Still, I don’t feel hard done by. I’ve read, oh lordy how I’ve read—I have books stashed everywhere. Those comic books that started everything for me were mostly rather cheapo, but some of them survive to the present day and can still be found somewhere in one of my libraries.

  Well, well, well …

  My first WorldCon was in 1965. It was in London, of course. Only Americans and very rich people (the terms were considered interchangeable) flew the wide Atlantic in those days. Brian Aldiss was the GoH, and Arthur C. Clarke spoke at the banquet, illustrating his uplifting talk by flourishing a nail from the Mayflower and a piece of the heat shield of, I think, Friendship 7.

  Over breakfast, James Blish complained to me about the lack of waffles. I was so proud! The author of the Cities in Flight trilogy had chosen me in whom to confide his displeasure at the narrow choice of British breakfast products!

  There were giants in the world in those days or, at least, people who were very considerably taller than me.

  But that was later.

  I think it all started with a Superman comic that another kid gave to me when I was on holiday. I must have been nine. By the end of the holiday I was wearing my red towel tied round my neck all the time. For what it’s worth, I always preferred Batman. Most local kids did. If you ate up your broccoli and drank your milk you could theoretically be Batman when you grew up, whereas in order to be Superman you had to be born on another planet. My friend Nibbsy, who was a Superman fan, reckoned you could be a kind of Superman if this planet blew up and your dad had the foresight to build a space rocket for you ahead of time. He thought I was in with a chance because my dad could weld. I feared his theory was unsound.

  There were fights at school over the question of whether or not Batman could fly. Those of us who said he couldn’t were in the minority and, therefore, got beaten up by the thick kids. But, hahaha, it wasn’t us who broke limbs by jumping out of their bedroom windows. Shouting “Batmaaagh!” on the way down didn’t work, did it …

  But the undercurrents were stirring. Gotham City had altogether too many carnival floats and too many dumb plots even for a nine-year-old. At about this time, Brooke Bond Tea started bringing out collectable cards in every packet of tea—more particularly, a series called Out Into Space.

  I have them here, now, as I type. Never mind Proust and his biscuit, my ticket to the past is card nine, “Planets and Their Moons.”

  The colours are garish, the paintings are not great, but my family drank tea until their eyeballs floated just so I could get ’em all. Memorize the back of every card and you’d know more than most people today know about the night sky. Admittedly, some of what you’d know would be wrong: Mars was shown with canals. But they got me hooked on space, which is a great addiction because there’s lots of it and it’s obtainable free. And that was great, because they’d just decided to start the Space Age.

  My parents, as they do, bought me a telescope. It was the kind of ’scope kind parents, as they were, buy without the benefit of reading a book on telescopes. Jupiter was a wobbly ball of rainbows but I learned my way around the moon.

  I was going to be an astronomer, because when you were an astronomer you didn’t have to be in bed by ten.

  But it turned out not to matter if you were in bed by ten, because I’d found these stories about Space …

  I’m gl
ad to say I did it right. I found a proper SF bookshop. Of course, a proper SF bookshop, one where the owner is a fan and whose customers are so well known to him that sometimes they help out behind the counter, is handily situated between a tattoo parlour and a porno bookstore.

  My source of supply was inside the porn store. Its main line of business, conducted by a dear old lady who sat knitting in between dealing with customers, was porn.*1 Yet for some reason, possibly to add some weight to the claim to be a bookshop, half the floor space of the tiny place was occupied by cardboard boxes full of secondhand British and American SF magazines, quite often in mint condition.

  Where did they come from? I never found out. All I know is, they filled up as fast as I emptied them. I never saw any other SF fans in there. There were occasionally some men in raincoats staring at the material on the upper shelves in a Zen-like trance when I came in, but they never took any notice of the kid scrabbling through the boxes below. The owner, who took quite a shine to me as possibly her one customer not yet interested in the upper shelves (and sometimes made me a cup of tea) just said gnomically that “people drop them in.”

  Astounding, Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy, New Worlds, Science Fantasy … untold riches, they sleeted down on me at sixpence each. They weren’t the old lady’s main stock in trade and she didn’t know anything about SF, so about three times a week I came out with my school bag bulging. I still found time to do my homework.

  Then, in one of the U.K. mags, there was a mention of the British Science Fiction Association.

  Contact. And that led to the cons, and to that general encouragement to write that is part of the atmosphere. I wrote. I wrote rubbish, mostly, but some of it was okay, and I took notice of those guys on the panels who said: “If you want to be a writer, get another job.” That was newspaper journalism and, for a trainee, a wonderful opportunity to work every god-given hour; the guys should have said: “Get another job but not one which takes over your whole life.” And there were girls. The other job and, indeed, the girls took over.

  The 1965 WorldCon was my last convention for twenty-one years. I’d been formally in fandom for a mere three years, not counting the apprenticeship in the little shop, and didn’t find my way back until I’d written four novels. It’s nice to be home.

  Last time I went past, the shop had totally vanished under the concrete forecourt of a car dealership.

  Either that or, the day I left for the last time, the little lady, her work done, pulled the lever under the desk and the whole place just folded up and slipped away.…

  *1 Soft core, as far as I can recall, although if customers approached the counter they could, after some sombre conversation, obtain mysterious brown envelopes. These may of course have been really rare SF magazines.

  LETTER TO VECTOR

  Vector, 21 September 1963

  When I was an adolescent, everything was happening—it was the sixties—but at school I still got into trouble for bringing in copies of Mad magazine! I found the stuff we were being given was really rather stupid.

  TERRY PRATCHETT (Beaconsfield)

  The article “SF in Schools” in No. 20 [Vector] interested me mainly because

  a) I’m a schoolboy, and

  b) I’m very interested in SF.

  First of all, I think Ron Bennett’s pupils are dead lucky in having a Master who is interested in Science Fiction. All we get at my school are the same old dreary titles “My Pets” or “A Day at a Railway Station.” However charming they are the first time round, they begin to pall after five or six laps. (I exaggerate only slightly, I assure you.)

  Of course, the cry goes up: “Not everyone is interested in Science (ugh!) Fiction.” So what? “A Day at a Railway Station” isn’t everyone’s cup of tea either. Besides, most of the blokes in my form copy the stories out of various magazines; it might interest them to crib out of New Worlds, etc., or Science Fantasy.

  [Editor’s reply: The two composition titles you mention are easily adaptable to SF themes, surely. “My pets”—a Little Fuzzy and a small thoat (I had a banth once but they banned it). “A Day at a Railway Station”—digging among the ancient ruins in some future time when teleportation is universal. AM]

  WRITER’S CHOICE

  Waterstones’ Books Quarterly, 12, 2004

  My granny had one bookshelf. I recall it contained a large book which was a great help to her in times of trouble and confusion, and it was the only one I ever saw her open: it was called The Crossword Puzzle Solver’s Dictionary.

  But the shelf also contained G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill, a book that distils the heart and soul of fantasy—which, I have to say, has little to do with wizards and everything to do with … well, everything. When you’re a kid you fill your local landscape with perils and terrors (there was a barn a few miles from us where, I knew for a fact, giants lived). Chesterton knew why, and could achieve in a sentence what some philosophers can’t manage in a book. He taught one lesson that I took to heart: there’s nothing so strange as the “normal.”

  I came to reading late but hungry and so read adult and children’s books together, without distinguishing very much between them. The Wind in the Willows was the book that dragged me in; I’ve still got my original cheap copy somewhere, in a plastic folder because the spine evaporated years ago. Next time you read it, pay attention to what size the animals are. It changes throughout the book and yet it doesn’t matter.

  By sheer luck I also picked up Mistress Masham’s Repose, by T. H. White, and loved it because it was a children’s book that made absolutely no concessions to children. It was also a work of fiction in which another work of fiction (Gulliver’s Travels) was real; that Chinese box of an idea is wonderful to discover when you’re eleven. In fact I’d developed a taste for works that show us reality from a different perspective, and that led me to slink down towards the science fiction shelves.

  Every literary novelist apparently knows that science fiction is “all about” robots and spaceships and other planets. Oh, there’s plenty of that stuff as topdressing, but at its best science fiction is about us and our Faustian bargain with our big brains, which dragged us out of the trees but may yet drag us into the volcano. The best science-fiction book ever is only erratically in print, and it is The Evolution Man by the late Roy Lewis. Look in vain for robots. In fact, look in vain for Homo sapiens, probably, since the cast is a family of Pleistocene humanoids.

  They’ve learned to walk upright and now they’re ready for the big stuff—fire, cookery, music, arts, and the remarkable discovery that you shouldn’t mate with your sister. Because it’s too easy, says Father, the visionary horde leader. In order to progress, humanity must create inhibitions, frustrations, and complexes, and drive itself out of an animal Eden. To rise, we must screw ourselves up. Wonderful stuff, and my annual read. It’s about time it had a mass-market publisher again.

  Finally, you won’t find this one in a modern bookshop but most good secondhand bookshops have it (unless I’ve been past, because I buy them up and press them on friends). It’s The Specialist, by Charles Sale, and is only a few dozen pages long. Strictly speaking, it’s the reminiscences of a privy builder, but it’s really a gentle education in the nature of humour. That stuff needs deep soil; you can grow wit on a damp flannel.

  INTRODUCTION TO ROY LEWIS’S The Evolution Man

  Corgi, 1989

  You hold in your hands one of the funniest books of the last 500,000 years.*1

  At its simplest, it is a comic account of the discovery and use, by a family of extremely Early Men, of some of the most powerful and fearful things the human race has ever laid a hand on—fire, the spear, marriage, and so on. It’s also a reminder that the problems of progress didn’t start with the atomic age but with the need to cook without being cooked, and eat without being eaten.

  It’s also a reminder that the first weapon to kill people but leave buildings standing was a club.

  It hasn’t
been a bestseller yet (at least in the commonly accepted sense of the word), and perhaps that is because it is so difficult to categorize—nothing hurts a book more than people not knowing what shelf to put it on. Since it was first published in 1960, it has gone through a variety of printings and a variety of names (not just The Evolution Man, which is what Brian Aldiss wisely rechristened it that year when he chose it as one of the first novels to start the Penguin SF list, but also Once Upon an Ice Age and What We Did to Father).

  Aldiss spotted what had not, until then, been noticed by anyone else, including the author—that it was, in fact, extremely good science fiction. The genuine article. Of course it didn’t have rockets in it. So what? You don’t need rockets. We all know this now. In 1960, that perception was less general.

  I bought my copy then because it had “SF” on the cover. I’d buy anything that had “SF” on the cover in those dark days, in the same way that you’ll drink anything marked “liquid” if you’re in a desert. And then I realized that I was reading something literate, novel, and very, very funny. After twenty-eight years that original copy has been loaned to friends so often that the print has nearly been worn off the pages by eyeball pressure.

  If you’ve read this far, it’s probably safe to tell you that this is a cult book. But don’t worry about it. The term simply means that people have stumbled upon it not because of massive advertising but by happy accident, and then cherished the wonderful warm feeling that they’re the only ones who know about it. In other words, it’s a good cult book. By the time you’ve finished it, the cult will be bigger by one.