A Slip of the Keyboard

by Terry Pratchett

  Of course we didn’t get the moon base. That was because we realized that the Race for Space had been a mad bout in international willie-waving. So we left the exploration of space to a bunch of flying Lego kits and, instead, filled earth orbit with dull satellites that do dull things.

  Remember the transatlantic phone calls, usually made at Christmas, which were a matter of a vast sum of money and a lot of technical negotiation? And then we spent a lot of time saying, “It’s dark here, is it dark where you are?” and marvelled at the fact that you could have two times at the same time. But recently I rang home while walking through Perth, Australia, to check that the cat was okay. I just dialled the number. It wasn’t very exciting. I didn’t even ask if it was dark.

  The price of a very cheap video recorder now buys us a little GPS device that’ll pinpoint us anywhere on the planet. You read Longitude? The sheer excitement of humanity trying to find out exactly where it is? A little black box now does the job better than the man with the sextant and the chronometer ever could. It’s rather dull. Even my car knows where it is and in a pleasant voice, rather like HAL’s sister, can navigate me through Swindon. We don’t have to be lost anymore.

  Remember the weather forecasts? They used to be one step above a lottery, rather than a pretty good description of what’s going to happen.

  Dull, dull, dull. This stuff is all science fiction that has come true—Arthur C. Clarke is a keen and persuasive salesman for the benefits of satellite technology—and it has come true quietly and it has become humdrum. We hold in our hands a power that emperors dreamed of, and we say, “It was only £69.95 because Dixons had a sale on.”

  What’s odd about the movie 2001 now? It’s not “Pan Am” on the side of the spaceship. Companies come and go. It’s not Leonard Rossiter wandering around the space station, or the sixties style, all black and white and cerise. It’s the lack of keyboards.

  Dr. Heywood Floyd is important enough to have a moon shuttle all to himself and he uses a pen? Where’s the portable computer? Where’s the handset? You mean he’s not in constant communication? Why isn’t he shouting, “HELLO! I’M ON THE SHUTTLE!’? Why isn’t he connected!’? The Bell videophone he uses in the movie? What? You mean they still have call-boxes?

  I’d have to stop and think before I could say how many computers we own, but the most amazing thing is that three … no, four … no, five of them, all miracles of technology by the standards of the sixties, lie unused in cupboards or stripped for parts because they are uselessly out of date. Like many other people, I suspect, I’ve got a few drawers full of cutting-edge technology that got blunted really quickly. Even I, easily old enough to be a grandfather (I could say to the kids, “See that Moon up there? We used to go there”), used them more or less instinctively. I grew up reading about this stuff. I suffer from the other kind of future shock: I’m shocked that we still don’t have reliable voice recognition as good as HAL’s, for example.

  Science fiction certainly predicted the age of computers. Sooner or later, if you burrow deep enough in the piles of old magazines, you’ll find it predicted more or less anything you want; if you fling a thousand darts at the board, some of them will hit the bull. There are even references to something that could be considered as the Net. But what took us by surprise was that the people using the computers were not, in fact, shiny new people, but the same dumb old human beings that there have always been. They didn’t—much—want to use the technology to get educated. They wanted to look at porn, play games, steal things, and chat.

  We’re not doing it right. We get handed all this new technology and we’re just not up to scratch. And that’s just as well, because the dream as sold is pretty suspect, too. It’s a worldwide community, provided you use American English. It’s a wonderful tool for business, if you’re the right kind of business—that is to say, one that doesn’t make anything except losses. It brings people together, if your idea of social intercourse is an in-basket full of spam written by people with the social skills of pig dribble. It’s a wonderful education tool, if what you want to learn is how to download other people’s work straight into your essay.

  What we are, in fact, are electronic ape-men. We woke up just now in the electronic dawn and there, looming against the brightening sky, is this huge black rectangle. And we’re reaching out and touching it and saying, “Is it WAP enabled? Can we have sex with it? Can you get it in a different colour? Is it being sold cheap because the Monolith2 is being released next month and has a built-in PDA for the same price? Can we have sex with it? Look, it says here I can ‘Make $$$ a Month by Sitting on my Butt’. Wow, can we use this for smashing pigs over the head? Hey, can we have sex with it?”

  And like ape-men trying out sticks and stones and fire for the first time, there’s a lot of spearing ourselves in the foot, accidentally dropping rocks on the kids, acute problems in trying to have sex with fire, and so on. We have to learn to deal with it.

  Where will it all take us? We don’t know, because we’re back to being ape-men again. And if ape-men try to second-guess the future, they’ll dream of little more than killing bigger pigs.

  We don’t know what the new wave of technology is going to bring because it’s still only up to our knees and we’re not used to living in it, so we’re trying and discarding ideas very quickly. Reading books off a screen? It doesn’t seem to work for us. But electronic paper is already out there. Maybe you’d like just one book on your shelf, that looks and feels just like a book, but which could be any one of a thousand titles chosen from the little keypad on the back? That’s still ape-man thinking. There’s nascent technologies out there that could give us the power of gods—at least, some of the more homely ones.

  In the movie, the ape-man throws the bone up into the air and it never comes down. Lucky for him. We’ve been throwing lots of bones into the air and they’ve been dropping all over the place, often where we can’t see them until too late, and too often on other people. The tide is rising—literally, this time. More and more people are trying to occupy less and less ground. We’re not killing off the planet. It has recovered from worse catastrophes than us. But the bones are coming back down with a vengeance, and we may not survive being not quite intelligent enough.

  Shorn of the spaceships, the message in the movie is as relevant here as it was in that other future: what the ape-men really need to do now is learn to become human. It would be a good idea to learn really fast, don’t you think?

  THE GOD MOMENT

  Mail on Sunday, 22 June 2008, headlined “I create gods all the time—now I think one might exist”

  I like the small gods. Like Anoia. And I think the Universe has meaning. It has a purpose. It might not be our purpose, but we’re part of it.

  The vicar when I lived in Penn was a Reverend Muspratt. He was quite posh for a clergyman—I think old ladies gave him a lot of money and a lot of tea. He came in one day through the scullery.*1 My father had brought back from Burma a bust of the Buddha and my mother really liked it. Reverend Muspratt pointed at it and said “That is a pagan icon.”

  Even I, at that time, knew enough to know that anyone talking to my mum like that was in trouble. She threw him out onto the step.

  I’m a kind of atheist—because, well, you never know.…

  There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.

  But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should. It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I’m not used to this.

  As a fantasy writer I create fresh gods and philosophies almost with every new book (I’m rather pleased with Anoia, the goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers, whose temple is hung about with the bent remains of egg whisks and sp
atulas. She actually appears to work in this world, too). But since contracting Alzheimer’s disease I have spent my long winter walks trying to work out what it is, if anything, that I really believe.

  I read the Old Testament all the way through when I was about thirteen and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read the Origin of Species, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that or because of that, it all made perfect sense. As soon as I was allowed out again I went and borrowed the sequel and even then it struck me that Darwin had missed a trick with the title. If only a good publicist had pointed out to him that the Ascent of Man had more reader appeal, perhaps there wouldn’t have been quite as much fuss.

  Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

  The New Testament, now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work on wood—a material that couldn’t have been widely available in Palestine.

  But I could never see the two testaments as one coherent narrative. Besides, by then I was reading mythology for fun, and had run into Sir George Frazer’s Folklore in the Old Testament, a velvet-gloved hatchet job if ever there was one. By the time I was fourteen I was too smart for my own god.

  I could never find the answers, you see. Perhaps I asked the wrong kind of question, or was the wrong kind of kid, even back in primary school.

  I was puzzled by the fact that, according to the hymn, there was a green hill far away “without a city wall.” What was so unusual about a hill not having a wall? If only someone had explained … And that is how it went—there was never the explanation.

  I asked a teacher what the opposite of a miracle was and she, without thinking, I assume, said it was an act of god. You shouldn’t say something like that to the kind of kid who will grow up to be a writer; we have long memories. But I’d asked the question because my mother had told me about two families she knew in the East End of London. They lived in a pair of semidetached houses. The daughter of one was due to get married to the son of the other and on the night before the wedding a German bomb destroyed all the members of both families who were staying in those houses in one go, except for the sailor brother of the groom who arrived in time to help scrabble through the wreckage with his bare hands. Like many of the stories she told me, this had an enormous effect on me. I thought it was a miracle. It was exactly the same shape as a miracle. It was just … reversed.

  Did the sailor thank his god that the bomb had missed him? Or did he curse because it had not missed his family? If the sailor had given thanks, wouldn’t he be betraying his family? If God saved one, he could have saved the rest, couldn’t he? After all, isn’t God in charge? Why does he act as if he isn’t? Does he want us to act as if he isn’t, too? (As a kid I had a very clear image of the Almighty: he had a tail coat and pinstriped trousers, black, slicked-down hair, and an aquiline nose. On the whole, I was probably a rather strange child, and I wonder what my life might have been like if I’d met a decent theologian when I was nine.)

  About five years ago that child rose up in me again, and I began work on a book, soon to see the light of day as Nation. It came to me overnight, in all but the fine detail.

  It is set on a world very like this one, at the time of an explosion very like that of Krakatoa, and in the centre of my book, a thirteen-year-old boy, now orphaned, screams at his gods for answers when he hasn’t fully understood what the questions are. He hates them too much not to believe. He has had to bury his own family; he is not going to give thanks to anyone. And I watched him try to build a new nation and a new philosophy. “The creator gave us the brains to prove he doesn’t exist,” he says as an old man. “It is better to build a seismograph than to worship the volcano.”

  I agree. I don’t believe. I never have, not in big beards in the sky. But I was brought up traditionally Church of England, which is to say that while churchgoing did not figure in my family’s plans for the Sabbath, practically all the Ten Commandments were obeyed by instinct and a general air of reason, kindness, and decency prevailed. Belief was never mentioned at home, but right actions were taught by daily example.

  Possibly because of this, I’ve never disliked religion. I think it has some purpose in our evolution. I don’t have much truck with the “religion is the cause of most of our wars” school of thought, because in fact that’s manifestly done by mad, manipulative, and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God.

  I number believers of all sorts among my friends. Some of them are praying for me. I’m happy that they wish to do this, I really am, but I think science may be a better bet.

  So what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat show sofa? More accurately it was the memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was okay and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from?

  Me, actually—the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it’s what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.

  It’s that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Hawking. It doesn’t require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation, and inquiring minds. I don’t think I’ve found God but I may have seen where gods come from.

  *1 We had sculleries in those days. I like them.

  A GENUINE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR

  Inaugural Professorial Lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, 4 November 2010

  I like Trinity College. I hope to go there again one day, although they have someone new at the top these days, since Professor David Lloyd is now in charge at the University of South Australia—a very long way from Dublin. When they asked me to be a professor I said, “Are you mad?”

  They said, “Yes. We’re Irish.”

  Ladies and Gentlemen of the University, and distinguished guests.

  Much to my astonishment, I find myself addressing you as your latest and most disreputable professor. Only a little while ago I couldn’t even spell academic and now I am one.

  I greet you as the author of the notorious Discworld series, written over three decades by a man with only one A level to his name, and since that was for journalism, it probably doesn’t count. Although, oddly, I am occasionally presented with evidence that I am the creator of academics; over the years I have received a fairly large number of letters from grateful parents telling me that their son, and it is usually their son, would not pick up a book at all until he found Discworld and suddenly started reading like a demon and is now tearing his way through university, and I get embarrassed, but cheerful when professors tell me that they recall lining up to have me sign a book when they were nineteen. Embarrassed and cheerful, that is, and feeling very, very old.

  Tonight may be a very interesting experiment for all of us, because what you have done now, ladies and gentlemen, is gone and got yourselves a genuine absent-minded professor. It is common knowledge, because I took great pains to make it so, that I have a weird form of Alzheimer’s called posterior cortical atrophy, which I may describe as a topological version of the traditional disease. In short, I am topologically disadvantaged when it comes to complexities like revolving doors with mirrors, whereat I have to work hard to know if I’m coming or going, although in truth I have spent most of my life not knowing if I was coming or going. Putting on my pants in the morning, too, had also begun to be a problem un
til I realized that the solution was to turn the situation on its head and look at it from another direction; like all sensible men of my age I wear stout Y-fronts (I hope you’re writing this down) but try as I might, the chances of getting them on right first time is 50-50. It’s not that I don’t know where the legs go, and they never end up on my head, but which way round they are, that’s another story. It took some time to realize that there was no point in mucking about with the pants because somehow my eye/brain coordination has difficulty in deconstructing pants. Should the Y therefore be in the wrong place, i.e., back to front, just lower the damn things to the ground, walk around them, and put them on again from the opposite direction—it works every time. Plus, of course, provides healthy exercise.

  I make no apology for telling you this, especially since several elderly gentlemen hearing this confession will be thinking, “Bloody good idea! I’ll give it a try!”

  However, I must, for the sake of exactitude, tell you that yesterday, which again started with a healthy stroll around my pants, I walked, correctly aligned in the groinal region, into my office where I worked on the second draft of my next book, and it was goddam literature, so it was, and by now I know when I am on improved form; I was nearly flying.

  Usually, if there is no warm body to assist me with my early drafts, I dictate most letters by talking to my computer, something which comes so easily to anybody descended from chattering monkeys. It’s not perfect, because Pratchett’s First Law of Digital Systems is that when they are sufficiently complex they act very much like analogue systems and get ideas of their own. The situation is like riding a good-but-nervous racehorse: you learn when it’s ready to gallop, and when you should slow down a little. Nevertheless, even if my touch-typing ability miraculously came back to me, I would still talk the stories, because stories should be spoken.