Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Playtexts by Stephen Briggs, of Mort, Wyrd Sisters, and Johnny and the Dead (this by Oxford University Press), were also published in 1996, as was Gollancz’s publication of Feet of Clay, described on the jacket as a ‘chilling tale of poisoning and pottery’, featuring, among others, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes, Captain Carrot and the City Watch. The Pratchett Portfolio of Paul Kidby’s illustrations of Discworld denizens, with accompanying text by Terry, was published in September and November saw the publication of Hogfather, the paperback edition ofMaskerade, and the release by Psygnosis of Perfect Entertainment’s game, Discworld II: Missing, Presumed.... As to sales, Hogfather and Maskerade shared the honours by being top of the hardcover and paperback lists respectively two weeks running. It was the third time Terry had had books in the no.1 positions in both lists simultaneously, and as far as I know, no other author had succeeded in doing this even once up to that time. And Hogfather held the no.1 position in the hardcover fiction list for five weeks. The Times stated that by their calculations, he was probably the highest earning author of 1996 in Britain, and certainly had the greatest sales.

  Jingo, in which Ankh-Morpork and Klatch go to war over an island in the Circle Sea that tends to rise and sink, and the Patrician and the City Watch have to settle matters, was published in 1997, as was Discworld’s UnseenUniversity Diary for 1998 (the first of eight co-written with Stephen Briggs and illustrated by Paul Kidby), and Cosgrove Hall’s cartoon series Wyrd Sisters was shown on Channel 4, with Astrion releasing it and Soul Music on video. (For some reason, possibly the arrival of a new head of department, although also commissioned by Channel 4, Soul Music was only transmitted in the middle of the night on 27 December 1999, over two years after its release on video). Corgi have published the illustrated film-scripts of both. Stephen Briggs’ stage adaptations ofGuards! Guards!, and Men at Arms were also published that year.

  Terry’s twenty-second Discworld novel (and first hardcover to be published by Transworld’s Doubleday imprint) –The Last Continent (definitely not about Australia, but just vaguely Australian) – was published at the beginning of May 1998 and was twelve weeks in the no.1 position in the hardcover fiction best-seller list in Britain. The next,Carpe Jugulum, in which the witches battle vampires for the Kingdom of Lancre, was published on 5 November and it and the paperback edition of Jingo (published on the same day) jointly held the no.1 positions in the hardcover and paperback fiction lists for four weeks running.

  As far as Britain is concerned Terry was the 1990s’ best-selling living fiction author (but this was before the Harry Potter phenomenon),. His sales now run at well over three million books a year. In 2001, it was reported that during the first 300 weeks’ existence of the British Booktrack’s (now called Bookscan) weekly bestselling chart, over 60 titles had continuously been in the top 5,000 bestselling titles, and the author with the most titles in this listing was Terry with twelve novels, The Colour of Magic, Guards! Guards!, Pyramids, Soul Music, The Light Fantastic, Reaper Man, Interesting Times, Sourcery, Men at Arms, Equal Rites, Mort and Wyrd Sisters. By 2008 only twelve titles remained in that category, and three of those were Terry’s – The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, andMort. No other author had more than one. The Bookseller’s article announcing this fact therefore crowned him ‘evergreen king’.

  In 2003 the BBC Big Read showed Terry as having as many titles in the top 100 best-loved books – five – as Charles Dickens. (Initially Terry was told he had seven in the list, this being the figure the BBC gave him when they interviewed him for the programme, thus beating Dickens by two books. Subsequently the number was reduced – for some reason not yet divulged – to five, so there was a dead-heat for first place, and all those questions in the interview that referred to his seven titles therefore had to be deleted.) The second 100, as listed in The Big Read Book of Books contained a further ten of Terry’s novels.

  Terry has also written a number of short stories, a number of which have Discworld themes. The longest, ‘The Sea and Little Fishes’ was published in October 1998 (in Legends, a collection edited by Robert Silverberg). He finds that short stories involve him in almost as much work as a full-scale book, and if he is already writing a novel – which is almost all the time – he finds it very difficult to stop and change tracks, as it were, and write a short piece, so there are fewer of that genre around than one might expect. A non-Discworld story, ‘Once and Future’, appeared in a collection in the USA in 1995, but it has not been and will not be published in Britain in the foreseeable future. A collection of short stories, Once More, with Footnotes was published in the US to coincide with the 2004 Worldcon, when Terry was its Guest of Honor. A similar collection has yet to appear in the UK, but I (and Pratchett fandom) live in hopes.

  When he took up his position with the Western Daily Press in 1970 Terry and Lyn moved to a cottage in Rowberrow in Somerset, and in 1993 when he found he could not enlarge the cottage further, the family moved to what Terry has described as ‘a Domesday manorette’ south west of Salisbury. Alert fans will have seen pictures of this on the TV interview at the time Soul Music was published, and in Salisbury Newspapers’ July 2001 issue ofLimited Edition, under the title ‘Planet Pratchett’. Just before the 1993 move, Terry slipped outside the front door of the cottage, hit his head, and mildly concussed himself, blotting out his memory of the previous few hours. Unfortunately, he had received a cheque from me that morning for a rather large sum of money. He knows he put itsomewhere safe, but still has no recollection where, and it has yet to turn up, much to Terry’s puzzlement. The replacement was safely banked, without problem.

  Terry’s work for the Orang-Utan Foundation is common knowledge. In 1995 he went out to Borneo with a film crew to see orang-utans in their native habitat, and among the praise that ‘Terry Pratchett’s Jungle Quest’ received was a comment by Sir Alec Guinness in his diary (published the following year), that it was – apart from one other programme – ‘the most impressive thing I’ve seen on the box this year’). Terry has also done a year’s stint as Chairman of the Society of Authors (1994-95) was elected a permanent member of its Council, and was chairman of the panel of judges for the 1997 Rhône-Poulenc Prizes for Science Books (later known as the Aventis Prizes, and since 2006 the Royal Society Prizes, as they are now owned and managed by the Society).

  His fiftieth birthday at the end of April 1998 was celebrated by a party hosted by Transworld Publishers. While news of a celebration could not be kept from him, I think that its size – fifty guests to a dinner at the Ivy Restaurant in Soho, with various original presents – took him completely by surprise. But what hit the headlines that year was his appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s 1998 Birthday Honours List ‘for services to literature’. The initial soundings-out from Downing Street came as such a surprise to him that initially he suspected that it must be an elaborate hoax. However, accompanied by his family, he went to Buckingham Palace on 26 November 1998 to receive the decoration from the Prince of Wales.

  The Fifth Elephant (the working title of which had been Uberwald Nights) was published in November 1999, as wasNanny Ogg’s Cook Book (written in collaboration with Stephen Briggs, with recipes by Tina Hannan, and illustrated by Paul Kidby).

  In July 1999 he received an honorary Doctorate of Literature (D.Litt.) from the University of Warwick (and in turn granted doctorates of the Unseen University to Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, co-authors with him of The Science of Discworld, which had been published the previous month). This was the first of a string of honorary doctorates, from the University of Portsmouth (2001), the University of Bath (2003), and Bristol University (2004).

  Terry’s twenty-fifth Discworld novel, The Truth, was published in November 2000. This novel had been started some years previously but he put it aside as for some time he could not see how the plot would develop. An idea of how long ago he started planning it is given by the original working title – Interesting Times – which got used
for a different novel, published in 1994. The Truth is about Ankh-Morpork’s first newspaper, so Terry was able to make use of some his experiences from his own reporting days. It was the first Discworld novel to have been published simultaneously in Britain and America.

  It was followed in May 2001 by Thief of Time, featuring Susan, History Monks, the Auditors, the Five Horsemen (including the one who left before they became famous) and even chocolate-covered coffee beans... In August 2001 Gollancz published the 2002 Discworld calendar, entirely made up of pictures by Josh Kirby. They also published the 2002 Diary - The Thieves’ Guild Diary. The Last Hero, featuring Cohen the Barbarian, the Silver Horde, and a cast of ?thousands, amazingly illustrated by Paul Kidby, was published in October 2001. This was followed a couple of weeks later by The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, which won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for the best children’s book of the year. Before the repeat presentation before the Librarians invited to the event, Terry was able to palm the gold medal and replace it with a chocolate-centred gold ‘coin’ of the same size, which he proceeded to eat, to the amazement of his audience.

  Sadly, Josh Kirby died in November 2001, aged seventy-two. He had illustrated the covers of Terry’s books since Corgi first started publishing him in 1985 and it must be true to say that outside America – and for many there – the first Discworld book almost every fan acquired would have had a Kirby picture on its cover, and in many European countries Kirby covers are still essential.

  In Autumn 2002 (the year Terry’s sales accounted for 4.3% of the UK’s general retail market for hardback fiction), Gollancz published The (Reformed) Vampyre’s Diary and a Calendar with work by a number of artists, both for 2003, a year in which Doubleday published Monstrous Regiment, The New Discworld Companion (with Stephen Briggs) and The Wee Free Men, a novel for younger readers, set on Discworld, featuring the Nac Mac Feegle and a young girl discovering she has witch-powers, Tiffany Aching. This won the 2004 W.H.Smith People's Choice Book Award in the Teen Choice Category. It also won the Locus Award for the Best Young Adult Novel of 2003. Terry’s second novel featuring Tiffany Aching, A Hat Full of Sky, which brought Granny Weatherwax in as a major player, was published at the end of April 2004.

  Going Postal, the thirty-third novel in the Discworld sequence, was published in October 2004 (with an ever-enlarged selection of stamps emanating from the Cunning Artificer, Bernard Pearson, some of which are reproduced on the book’s end-papers), and became the UK’s biggest selling hardback novel for 2004. It was followed by The Art of Discworld, in which Terry’s text accompanies Paul Kidby’s illustrations. There were only calendars and no diaries for 2004 or 2005 as Terry had not been able to decide on suitable themes for Stephen Briggs and Paul to work on.

  The 21st anniversary of the November 1983 publication of the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic (which has sold well over a million copies in the Corgi edition alone) took place in 2004, and to mark this Transworld (in association with Colin Smythe Ltd) issued an anniversary hardcover edition of it with a photographic black and gold cover (with 1,000 signed, numbered and slip-cased copies), as well as the next six novels in paperback with similar cover designs. (By 2009, all the Discworld novels will also be available in this alternative format.)

  A two-part four-hour dramatized mini-series adaptation of Hogfather (by Mob Films) for transmission on Sky1 was transmitted in December 2006, and the DVD is now available. Filmed as live-action with CGI, with the late Ian Richardson as the voice of Death, Sir David Jason as Albert, Marc Warren as Teatime and Michelle Dockery as Susan. Filming the snow scenes took place in February 2006 in Scotland and main filming was completed at the Three Mile Studios in London, with the CGI being created by the Moving Picture Company. In April 2007 it won a BAFTA Interactivity Award, the citation being to Aidan Conway, Giles Pooley, Rod Brown, Ian Sharples (Mob Film Company/Sky One Networked Media). Sky invested more in this than in any previous production they’d commissioned, and their confidence was more than justified by the viewing figures of 2.8 million for this £6 million project, making it the highest rated multi-channel commission ever (to that time), beating BBC3’s October 2006 figures for Torchwood.

  While all this was making headlines, Terry finished his next Moist von Lipwig novel, Making Money, published in September 2007, which became the best selling adult fiction novel published that year in the UK, and he finished writing his next young adult novel, Nation, set on a small island in the almost Pacific in the aftermath of a Krakatoa-like eruption. In 2007, too, he had been working with Jacqueline Simpson, eminent folklorist, and former Secretary of the Folklore Society, on The Folklore of Discworld.

  Sir David Jason, Tim Curry, Sean Astin and Christopher Lee (as the voice of Death) are four of the major names inThe Colour of Magic, the Mob’s second Discworld mini-series for Sky1 and RHI Entertainment, which combined the first two Discworld novels under the title of the first book, and was transmitted in Britain in two parts, on Easter Sunday and Monday 2008 and later in the year in North America and Australia. It was mostly filmed in and around Pinewood Studios in south Buckinghamshire (near where I live), with forays to Horsley Towers in Surrey, Cardiff docks, Snowdonia (north Wales) and Niagara Falls. The Mob’s next foray into Discworld will be Going Postal, with an intended transmission date in Spring 2010.

  While on tour in America in summer 2007, Terry told audiences at the National Book Festival in Washington DC (during which Terry breakfasted at the White House and dined at the Library of Congress with the other featured authors) and in New York, that he’d had a stroke, but the symptoms had been misdiagnosed, and were of a far worse illness, posterior cortical atrophy, a rare variant of Alzheimer’s disease, which was diagnosed in December. As he knew he would have to inform his publishers, he thought it wise to make a public announcement: he knew the news would leak out anyway, and he preferred that people should have the full facts immediately. This got considerable press coverage, but it did not prevent him from completing Nation, and by March 2008 he’d decided that he would hit back at the disease and help the search for a cure – or at least help find methods to control it – by donating a million dollars to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust. It took him some time to be prescribed the best drug presently available to combat the symptoms, Aricept, but he does have to pay for it as he is considered too young to be given it without charge by the National Health Service.

  Apart from these events, Terry has been interviewed about his books and his thoughts on Alzheimer’s Disease and the government’s attitude to treating the sufferers, pointing out that up to now (December 2008) Alzheimer’s research has only been getting 3% of the funding that cancer research gets from the government, as well as highlighting the inadequate treatment available to sufferers, on television, radio and in the press. His vociferous support seems to be having a positive effect on the government. As Rebecca Wood, the Chief Executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust said: ‘Terry promised to “scream and harangue” about dementia research. He did much more than that. He became a voice for the 700,000 people in the UK who live with dementia but cannot scream and harangue so loudly. Dementia research is still vastly underfunded, but this is changing thanks to Terry’s incredible work.’ But so much more needs to be done.

  Terry has also been appearing at various festivals, including those in Cheltenham and Edinburgh. He was busy before he discovered he had early onset Alzheimer’s, but now even more so, as he appears to have become the public face of the disease: his particular variant leaves the cognitive parts of his mind virtually untouched, as anyone who has recently seen or heard him on TV or radio or elsewhere can vouch. He even spoke at the Tory Party’s annual conference in September in 2008, and received a standing ovation. The two hour documentary by IWC Media for the BBC, ‘Living with Alzheimer’s’ was shown on BBC2 in February 2009 as part of BBC Headroom, the BBC’s two-year mental health and wellbeing initiative, and received two BAFTA awards. As Terry was in Ennistymon for the first I
rish Discworld Convention at the time the awards were to be announced, his PA Rob Wilkins made the exhausting journey from the West of Ireland to Glasgow, accepted Terry’s award and then returned to Ennistymon, from where he almost immediately had to drive the hire-car back to Dublin,

  This inevitably focuses on activities in the English-speaking world north of the Equator, and much could and should be written about his popularity in other countries and other languages – stage adaptations have been performed on six continents (including Antarctica), and his popularity south of the Equator is considerable. Australia, for example, accounts for about 5% of Transworld’s sales of Terry’s books, and both Thud! and Making Money were no.1 in the Australian hardback fiction bestsellers’ list on publication.

  In January 2009 the Royal National Theatre announced that it was going to stage an adaptation of Nation by Mark Ravenhill in the Olivier Theatre, over Christmas 2009. The previews started on 11 November, with the press night on the 24th, and it was shown on NT Live around the world on 30 January 2010. Corgi had published the playtext in time for the preview nights, but the play changed prior to the first night, so the Corgi text differs from the final version, which is to be published by Pearson as an educational text.

  Terry completed Unseen Academicals some months behind schedule, mainly because of its length (135,000 words – none of his other novels having been more than about 110,000 words) and the complexity of its ‘threads’ and time-line that had to be checked carefully to ensure everything flowed smoothly without internal contradiction. Editing his work now is not nearly as easy for him as it used to be as he now dictates, either to Rob Wilkins or through a voice recognition program. The Mob’s production with Sky of Going Postal (in which Terry has a cameo role as a postman attempting to deliver a letter to the late, unlamented Reacher Gilt) was filmed in Hungary during the very hot summer of 2009, and was transmitted on Sky at the end of May 2010.