A Slip of the Keyboard

by Terry Pratchett

  It’s no wonder that this clash of mind-sets produced something like The Leaky Establishment (which of course deals with an entirely different kind of nuclear establishment to the ones I worked in, where things were not actually intended to blow up). The book is practically a documentary. I read it in horror, in between laughing. This man had sat in at exactly the same kind of meetings! He’d dealt with the same kind of people! He’d been at the same Open Days! The sheer reality of it all leaked from every page! It was just like the book I’d been planning to write one day! How could I ever write my book now?

  And then I got to the end and … well, Dave Langford’s garden would probably bear examination by the Health and Safety Executive, that’s all I’ll say.

  I’d rank this book alongside Michael Frayn’s The Tin Men, another neglected classic. I’ve wanted for years to see it back in print. It is one of those books you end up buying several copies of, because you just have to lend it to friends. It’s very funny. It’s very real.

  I hope it’s as successful as hell, and will happily give up any plans to write my own nuclear book. After all, I’ll always have my memories to keep me warm: and, come to think of it, the large, silvery, and curiously heavy mug they presented to me when I left.…

  THE MEANING OF MY CHRISTMAS

  Western Daily Press (Bristol), 24 December 1997

  Exactly twenty-seven years after my search for frankincense in Bristol, I tackled Christmas for the Western Daily Press. Again.

  I am not a member of any religion and I don’t believe in any metaphysical Santa Clauses of any description, and yet, for all that, I like Christmas.

  But it’s become confusing. Now it looks as if everyone’s hell-bent on getting hold of Tinky Winky Spice even though in February you’ll be able to pick one up for a fiver.

  I’ve a theory that parents who tramp from shop to shop in search of the right Teletubby or Action Man are really going through the old hunter/gatherer ritual again. It calls to something ancient in their bones.

  In my latest paperback, Hogfather, I looked at the traditions of a midwinter festival. You have to be a blindly fundamentalist Christian not to understand that there’s been a very old tradition of celebrating the rebirth of the sun.

  Even now, in our centrally heated homes, where we’re separated from the “great cycle of nature,” we still moan about the “nights drawing in.” We need Christmas.

  I’m forty-nine now, and when I was a child Christmas was the time of the big blowout. It was when you got what you couldn’t normally afford, but these days so many people can afford some luxuries through the year that Christmas doesn’t figure in quite the same way.

  But the Christmas holiday still has a lot going for it. When you’re self-employed, like me, for example, it’s often hard to stop working. When your office is next to your living space it’s so easy to wander over and start writing. Saturdays and Sundays become the easiest days of all to work because the phone doesn’t ring as much.

  One of the reasons I like Christmas is because it’s perfectly socially acceptable not to work for a week. It’s a time to take stock.

  In some ways, I’d agree that Christmas is too commercialized. It can’t be good for the country when stuff starts piling up in the shops in early October.

  Some retailers stand or fall by Christmas. Take bookshops. They live for Christmas. If they only opened on 1 December and closed on 24 December, it would probably still be worth their while existing. They become shrines to those bookshop saints, St. Michael and St. Delia.

  But the good points outweigh the bad. Charities do very well at this time of year and, even if you only drop a couple of coins in a collection box in December, surely it’s better than never giving at all. And I like the Christmas story. It’s a positive one and it isn’t shoved down children’s throats anymore. Schools tend to be very politically correct and teachers can’t assume that pupils’ parents are Christians.

  The fact is that our secular society doesn’t offer any alternative celebration or occasion we can enjoy in the depth of winter. Somehow Blair’s Day or something similar doesn’t give you quite the same gut feeling.

  This Christmas our family will do all the usual things—light a huge log fire, cook a turkey, and offer a vegetarian option—and I’ll enjoy it.

  I used to be conned into not enjoying it because it was cool to say that it’s overcommercialized and then I thought: “But it’s fun as well.” Now I think, what the hell, I don’t have to be cool anymore. Anyway, there’s always been overindulgence at the traditional midwinter festival, whether it’s been feasting on a hog or an oven-ready turkey.

  You can do Christmas your own way if you want to badly enough. And a little bit of commercialism doesn’t do anyone any harm. After all, the Wise Men made certain they brought presents, even though the shops were crowded and they had to get hold of some myrrh spice.

  Under all the hype people do tend to be a little bit nicer to each other for a while. They lower their defences and get on with people a little bit more. So what if it’s only for Christmas? Better once a year than never.

  We have a “nonaggression pact” in my family. We try to buy each other something small, but which requires a lot of thought.

  It’s better to ask Santa Claus for a pair of slippers for Christmas rather than peace on earth. You might actually get it.

  Big, jolly fat men with beards can’t deliver world peace. That’s something we have to work at ourselves. And there is no better way at this time of year, than to start with the people next door.

  ALIEN CHRISTMAS

  1987

  [A postprandial speech following “Christmas Dinner” at Beccon ’87 … that is, the preawards banquet at the 1987 U.K. Eastercon.]

  I’m Dreaming of the Right Christmas.…

  It’s not very subtle, but I reckoned that ten o’clock at a British convention banquet (where you have ALCOHOL) was not the time for Oscar Wilde. I don’t know if I delivered this speech, but I must have said something because I got some laughs.

  This is a great idea, isn’t it? So much nicer to have Christmas at this time of the year instead of at the end of December, when the shops are always so crowded. Reminds me of those clips you used to get in the Queen’s Christmas broadcast to the Commonwealth back in the fifties, with the traditional shot of Australians eating chilled prawns, roast turkey, and Christmas pudding on Bondi Beach. There was always a Christmas tree planted in the sand. It was decorated with what I now realize was probably vomit.

  Last week I got this fortune cookie sort of printout which said Your Role Is Eater. I thought, Fantastic, I like role-playing games, I’ve never been an Eater before, I wonder how many hit points it has?

  And then I saw another printout underneath it which said that at 2200 my role was After Dinner Speaker, which is something you’d expect to find only in the very worst dungeon, a monster lurching around in a white frilly shirt looking for an audience. Three hours later the explorers are found bored rigid, their coffee stone cold, the brick-thick after-dinner mint melted in their hands.

  That reminds me why I gave up Dungeons and Dragons. There were too many monsters. Back in the old days you could go around a dungeon without meeting much more than a few orcs and lizard men, but then everyone started inventing monsters and pretty soon it was a case of bugger the magic sword, what you really needed to be the complete adventurer was the Marcus L. Rowland fifteen-volume guide to monsters and the ability to read very, very fast, because if you couldn’t recognize them from the outside, you pretty soon got the chance to try looking at them from the wrong side of their tonsils.

  Anyway, this bit of paper said I was to talk about Alien Christmases, which was handy, because I always like to know what subject it is I’m straying away from. I’ll give it a try; I’ve been a lot of bad things in my time although, praise the Lord, I’ve never been a Blake’s 7 fan.

  Not that Christmases aren’t pretty alien in any case. It’s a funny old thing, but whe
never you see pictures of Santa Claus he’s always got the same toys in his sack. A teddy, a dolly, a trumpet, and a wooden engine. Always. Sometimes he also has a few red and white striped candy canes. Heaven knows why, you never see them in the shops, and if any kid asks for a wooden engine these days it means he lives at the bottom of a hole on a desert island and has never heard of television, because last Christmas my daughter got a lot of toys, a few cars, a plane, stuff like that, and the thing about them was this. Every single one of them was a robot. Not just a simple robot. I know what robots are supposed to look like, I had a robot when I was a kid. You could tell it was a robot, it had two cogwheels going round in its chest and its eyes lit up when you turned its key, and why not, so would yours. And I had a Magic Robot … well, we all had one, didn’t we? And when we got fed up with the smug way he spun around on his mirror getting all the right answers, we cut them out and stuck them down differently for the sheer hell of it, gosh, weren’t we devils.

  But these new robots are subversive. They are robots in disguise.

  There’s this sort of robot war going on around us. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, although the kids seem incredibly well informed on the subject. It appears that you can tell the good robots from the bad robots because the good robots have got human heads, a bit like that scene in Saturn 3, you remember, where the robot gets the idea that the best way to look human is hack someone’s head off and stick it on your antenna. They all look like an American footballer who’s been smashed through a Volkswagen.

  They go around saving the universe from another bunch of robots, saving the universe in this case consisting of great laser battles. The universe doesn’t look that good by the time they’ve saved it, but by golly, it’s saved.

  Anyway, none of her presents looked like it was supposed to. A collection of plastic rocks turned out to be Rock Lords, with exciting rocky names like Boulder and Nugget. Yes, another bunch of bloody robots.

  In fact the only Christmassy thing in our house was the crib, and I’m not certain that at a touch of a button it wouldn’t transform and the Mary and Josephoids would battle it out with the Three Kingons.

  Weirdest of the lot, though, is Kraak, Prince of Darkness. At £14.95 he must be a bargain for a prince of darkness. He’s a Zoid, probably from the planet Zoid in the galaxy of Zoid, because while the models are pretty good the story line behind them is junk, the science fiction equivalent of a McDonald’s hamburger. I like old Kraak, though, because it only took the whole of Christmas morning to put him together. He’s made of red and grey plastic, an absolute miracle of polystyrene technology, and he looks like a chicken that’s been dead for maybe three months. Stuff two batteries up his robot bum and he starts to terrorize the universe as advertised, and he does it like this: what he does is, he walks about nine inches ve-r-ry slowly and painfully, while dozens of little plastic pistons thrash about, and then he falls over.

  Kraak has got the kind of instinct for survival that makes a kamikaze pilot look like the Green Cross Code man. I don’t know what the terrain is like up there on Zoid, but he finds it pretty difficult to travel over the average living room carpet. No wonder he terrorizes the universe, it must be pretty frightening, having a thousand tons of war robot collapse on top of you and lie there with its little feet pathetically going round and round. You want to commit suicide in sympathy. Oh, and he’s got this other fiendish weapon: his head comes off and rolls under the sofa. Pretty scary, that. We’ve tested him out with other Zoids, and I’m here to tell you that the technology of robot fighting machines, basically, is trying to fall over in front of your opponent and trip him up. It’s a hard job, because the natural instinct of all Zoids is to fall over as soon as you take your hand away.

  But even Kraak has problems compared with a robot that was proudly demonstrated to us by the lad next door. A Transformer, I think it was. It isn’t just made of one car or plane, it’s a whole fleet of vehicles which, when disaster threatens, assemble themselves into one great big fighting machine. That’s the theory, anyway. My bet is that at the moment of truth the bloody thing will have to go into battle half-finished because its torso is grounded at Gatwick and its left leg is stuck in a traffic jam outside Luton.

  We recently saw Santa Claus: The Movie. Anyone else seen it? Pretty dreadful, the only laugh is where they apparently let the reindeer snort coke in order to get them to fly. No wonder Rudolph had a red nose, he spends half the time with a straw stuck up it.

  Anyway, you get to see Santa’s workshop. Just as I thought. Every damn toy is made of wood, painted in garish primary colours. It might have been possible, in fact I suppose it’s probably inevitable, that if you pressed the right switch on the rocking horses and jolly wooden dolls they turned into robots, but I doubt it. I looked very carefully over the whole place and there wasn’t a single plastic extrusion machine. Not a single elf looked as though he knew which end to hold a soldering iron. None of the really traditional kids’ toys were there—no Rambos, no plastic models of the Karate Kid, none of those weird little spelling and writing machines designed to help your child talk like a NASA launch controller with sinus trouble and a mental age of five.

  Now, I’ve got a theory to account for this. Basically, it is that Father Christmases are planet specific and we’ve got the wrong one.

  I suspect it was the atom bomb tests in the early fifties that warped the, you know, the fabric of time and space and that. Secret tests at the North Pole opened up this, you know, sort of hole between the dimensions, and all the stuff made by our Father Christmas is somehow diverted to Zoid or wherever and we get all the stuff he makes, and since he’s a robot made out of plastic he only makes the things he’s good at.

  The people it’s really tough on are the kids on Zoid. They wake up on Christmas morning, unplug themselves from their recharger units, clank to the end of the bed (pausing only to fall over once or twice) playfully zapping one another with their megadeath lasers, look into their portable pedal extremity enclosures, and what do they find? Not the playful, cuddly death-dealing instruments of mayhem that they have been led to expect, but wooden trains, trumpets, rag dolls, and those curly red and white sugar walking sticks that you never see in real life. Toys that don’t need batteries. Toys that you don’t have to put together. Toys with varnish on instead of plastic. Alien toys.

  And, because of this amazing two-way time warp thingy, our kids get the rest. Weird plastic masters of the universe which are to the imagination what sandpaper is to a tomato. Alien toys. Maybe it’s being done on purpose, to turn them all into Zoids. Like the song says—you’d better watch out.

  I don’t think it will work, though. I took a look into my daughter’s doll’s house. Old Kraak has been hanging out there since his batteries ran out and his megacannons fell off. Mr. T has been there for a couple of years, ever since she found out he could wear Barbie’s clothes, and I see that some plastic cat-woman is living in the bathroom.

  I don’t know why, but what I saw in there gave me hope. Kraak was having a tea party with a mechanical dog, two Playpeople, and three dolls. He wasn’t trying to zap anyone. No matter what Santa Claus throws at us, we can beat him.…

  And now your mummies and daddies are turning up to take you home; be sure to pick up your balloons and party loot bags, and remember that Father Christmas will soon be along to give presents to all the good boys and girls who’ve won awards.

  2001: THE VISION AND THE REALITY

  Sunday Times, 24 December 2000

  Journalists in the U.K., and in my experience practically everywhere else in the world, find it hard to distinguish between fantasy writers and science fiction writers. I’m down in their contacts book as “guy to talk to about sci-fi.” When possible signs of life were discovered in the famous Martian meteorite ALH84001, I was the person they came to for a comment. Since they had room for a sound bite of about twelve seconds, though, it hardly mattered. Anyone trained as a journalist can be an expert for twelve seconds.
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  For similar reasons, I was asked to write this. I could polish it up now, all the tech is hugely or subtly out of date, but that’s the trouble with the future. It doesn’t stand still for long enough. Anyway, this is journalism, which doesn’t have to be true forever. It just has to be true until tomorrow morning. But I rather enjoyed writing it.

  Dah … DAH … DAAAH! (bing bong bing bong bing bong bing … bong …)

  There had never been a science fiction movie like it. Few have approached it since. You couldn’t see the string. Everything looked right. Even the dialogue worked, even though it sounded as though people were softening one another up to sell them life insurance. They didn’t say, “Eat electric death, Emperor Ming!” They said, “How’s that lovely daughter of yours?”

  And the science was right. Space wasn’t busy and noisy. It was full of dreadful, suffocating silence, and the sound of a human, breathing.

  It was glorious, and we were so enthralled we spent several minutes just watching a spaceship dock with a space station. No explosions, no aliens, no guns at all. Just … grandeur, and technology turned into a ballet.

  Sigh.

  I remember that spaceship. We had proper spaceships in those days, not like the sort you get now.

  Not that we actually get many now, come to think of it. I grew up expecting to see the first man land on the moon. It never occurred to me that I’d see the last one. We thought there’d be a moon base. Then … onward to Mars!

  The future was different back in 1968. Cleaner. Less crowded. And more, well, old-fashioned. We expect the future to be like a huge wave, carrying us forward. We expect to see it coming. Instead, it leaks in around our feet and rises over our heads while we are doing other things. We live in a science fiction world, and we haven’t noticed.