erry Pratchett is one of the world's most popular writers and the most successful author of humorous fantasy since the days of Lord Dunsany, Thorne Smith and L. Sprague de Camp. As of 2005, he has written 45 novel-length works for both adults and children (plus many other collaborations, picture books and publications, such as calendars) which have sold more than 40 million copies in numerous languages.
Pratchett is most famous for his Discworld series; the 30th volume set on that strange, flat planet, Thud!, was published in October 2005. While Pratchett has granted many interviews, he has rarely, if ever, said much about the origins of his work and how he hunts down ideas for his stories. But at the 2005 Minicon (the annual science fiction convention in Minneapolis) he discussed for the first time publicly the childhood experiences that led to the creation of several of the characters in the Discworld, as well as his investigation of life among the Mendips—the legend-haunted hills of Somersetshire, England. The following is an edited version of the interview that Pratchett has approved for publication.
Terry, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Pratchett: Well, I was born. [Pauses for laughter.]
I had suspected as much.
Pratchett: I was born in a nursing home, but was taken to a little village in Buckinghamshire. I'm a quintessential example of an only child. The house I grew up in—cue Monty Python—didn't even have water. My father had to run a hosepipe every day or so to the house next door and fill up a little cistern that my mother would use in the scullery. It was kind of deep country. We had gaslights, and every week or two my mother used to come home with a huge 90-volt dry battery that ran the radio. But we didn't think we were poor. Everyone we knew was in the same situation, so we just thought that was the way things were.
It was right after the war, so that if you had a house with a roof on it, you were ahead of the game.
There were plenty of kids in the village, and it was idyllic, because we were the last pre-television generation. We went around in a kind of cloud of dust with loads of arms and legs sticking out. We didn't have a pond; otherwise I would have drowned fairly young anyway. Apart from that we had everything else that you needed. We probably never went more than half a mile or two-thirds of a mile from our home. But there were woods and fields, you know. It was magnificent.
One of my earliest memories is being taken by my mother up to a large department store called Gammages, in London, to see Father Christmas. So here's this kid who grows up in a house with candles and gaslight, goes up to London on the train—which is an excitement in its own right. I was about 6. He goes to a brightly lit department store. There were more toys than you could ever possibly imagine. And lots of my future writing started to happen on that day. Let's see if you can spot the links.
First of all, a very small person in a huge department store—I'd got lost. When my mother found me, I was going up the escalators and getting off and then going down the other side.
And then we scurried off to see Father Christmas. You flew to the North Pole on board this rather wooden-looking aeroplane. I can remember this with crystal clarity—you got in a door on this side, and you weren't supposed to realize that the door you got out of was on the other side of the aeroplane. And you got in and there was apparently the sound of the aeroplane starting up, and then a creak and rattle as canvas clouds were wound past the windows. When I close my eyes, I can remember the squeak of the clouds.
And then I got out, and I cannot remember Father Christmas, because you cannot look upon the face of a god. There was this figure about 25 feet high that kind of rumbled, and I got a present. I think I probably pissed myself, as most kids do. Father Christmases always have something waterproof around the knee area. One of the little-known tips of the trade.
So Hogfather got a start there. And the Trucker's Trilogy [Truckers (1988), Diggers (1990) and Wings (1990)] got a start there. The nice thing was that—whereas other kids had plenty of brothers and sisters—I got to go home where I had a room all by myself, and at Christmastime there was only one kid to buy presents for, so I scored in every direction.
And then in the course of time you discovered fandom.
Pratchett: That came later. The big thing was that, in 1957, Brook Bond Tea produced the "Out Into Space" cards. My family all went a sort of orange color from drinking tea so that I could collect these things. They were like baseball cards. It took me a while to realize this—and that only in the last year or two: I discovered astronomy first. We had pretty good skies where we were. And you collected 50 of these tea cards—and, basically, give or take a few changes in what we know—if you knew everything on those cards, you'd know more astronomy than probably 99.99 percent of the population. And I collected them avidly and watched the sky.
They went the way of all things. You know, after you've left home, your mother finds this alternate ending to Star Wars that this nice Mr. Lucas gave you and she throws it away.
Recently I contacted this card collector over the magic of the Internet and bought the set again. I could actually just about afford it now. There was a 60-pound version and a 300-pound version. The difference was in the small print on some of the cards. So I thought I'd have the 60-pound version.
It was like that bloke Proust. He eats a biscuit and he goes back in time. I just look at Jupiter—it's a black and purple color on that card—and I'm 9 years old again.
My parents got me a telescope. I think it was special kind of telescope—produced by the Kind of Telescope Your Parents Get You Without Reading the Book About Telescopes Telescope Company. So everything you could see had a halo round it. You could just about see the moons of Jupiter, and that's that. But you got to stay outside. ... I got to be really expert on the moon. And then a few years ago I bought myself a Meade LX2000, and then we had an observatory built—a purpose-built one. Because our house is a thousand years old there's all kinds of planning things involved in that. In fact, we nearly had a thatched observatory at one point!
Curiously enough, the science fiction came from astronomy. I wasn't really an astronomer, because astronomers have to take it seriously and do mathematics. I just thought it was really cool 'cause you could stay up all night.
I've got a kind of tourist's mentality. I take an interest in things. I learn a lot about them, but I'm never going to get that hooked. So I was into short-wave radio. I built myself a receiver and listened in, and that was fun, and then moved onto something else.
Then I invented the integrated circuit.
[doing a double take] How did you come up with that?
Pratchett: It was interesting. I didn't know that someone else had done it. But I was sitting there thinking, I'm building all these little matchbox transistor radios. I had a transistor—it cost me seven shillings and sixpence—that was one-third of a pound in those days. And transistors were so valuable that you bought little sockets to plug them into your circuits. You know, you saved up your pocket money and bought one transistor. And I thought, "OK, I wonder if I can actually make it so that the resistor, the capacitor and the transistor and the diode are all part of the same thing," so that you didn't have to wire between them. I was only 13 at the time, but if I'd been a bit older and a bit quicker to the patent office, who knows?
I'm reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's story that if he'd patented the concept of communications satellites, he would have retired in, say, 1947.
Pratchett: All this SF brought me the same kick I was getting from all this stuff. That, and the fact that via the book The Wind in the Willows [by Kenneth Grahame], I was getting interested in the fantasy side. I was rolling all around that curve of mass that distorts space, but ultimately I was going to go down the hole marked "science fiction."
Those were the days when it was quite possible to have read all the SF that was published in hardcover. Not all the SF published in magazines, perhaps, but you'd go to a convention and everyone else had read what you had read. And the girls were not allowed! But sometimes wives and girlfriends would sort of tag along.
Most people wore sports jackets, as I recall. And they were called Ken. Unless they were called Ted.
And speaking of Ted, your first sale was to Ted Carnell.
Pratchett: That was a magnificent segue.
I try.
Pratchett: I was 13 years old. After school I used to go round to an old bomb site in High Wickham, and there was this little kind of garden shed on it called "The Little Bookshop," where this elderly lady sat knitting and making tea all day—and sold eye-watering pornography. But in order to have something to put in the window she seemed to have an unlimited supply of reasonably good quality secondhand British and American SF. I think it must have come from the air force base nearby. I'd go in there about twice a week after school. I was aware that the upper shelves were of a certain pinky nature.
But around the floor, in cardboard boxes, unsorted, there were even copies of Unknown Worlds and things like that. God knows, I think my mum threw those out as well. Anyone knowing what this shop sold must have been a bit puzzled at this 13-year-old kid going in there twice a week and coming out with a very full satchel! I mean, how the hell did he find time to do his homework?
Yes, I made a sale and I found out about fandom, and I went off to my first convention in 1963 or '64, and that was it. I dropped out after three or four years because I got my job—I was a trainee journalist on the local paper, which meant that you were a trainee, and therefore a drag on their resources. And they work you very hard and they pay you practically nothing, but you're the traditional apprentice, and you are actually learning a trade. I was working the evenings, and I was courting, and I was studying for the exams that you have to pass to get your training certificate, and life just became very full.
But I always had a book sort of on the go, and it would take me about five years to write it. After I'd done The Color of Magic [1983], at the same sort of speed, they actually began to sell. And so, nothing if not greedy, I wrote Light Fantastic [1986], and suddenly life shifted. By Mort [1987], which was the fourth book, I was making more than enough to leave my job, which was, as everyone knows, a press officer for some nuclear power station.
Am I correct in recalling that you took the job immediately after the Three Mile Island incident?
Pratchett: [Nods.] I joined the industry not long after Three Mile Island [in 1979], and I was there all the way through Chernobyl [in 1986]. But we had our own local incidents. About every Friday one of the reactors would blow up—again. It was my job to say, "Well, we didn't leave much radioactivity. You could barely see it!" In fact, nothing much every really happened, but sensitivity to nuclear issues was so high that even a planned shutdown became a big deal.
I learned a lot on that job. You know, when you put scientists and engineers and bureaucrats all in the same building, kind of interesting things emerge. Dave Langford wrote a book called The Leaky Establishment, which I thought was actually a work of nonfiction because it was exactly as I remember the Central Electricity Generating Board. For example, everything that you wrote had to be typed by the young ladies in the typing pool. But word processors and printers were becoming so cheap that the scientists would actually type out their own reports with long equations in them. And then the printout went down to the typing area to be retyped by these young ladies who had been to typing school and nothing else. With any luck there'd be several days of sending them back and forth to get all the equations right. It was extremely silly.
They had to change the rules for me because I said, "I am the press officer. I have to type press releases. On the whole, if a reactor explodes, I don't think people want to be told about it next week."
So I was allowed to do my own typing.
Discworld is possibly the most successful and sustained mythos of the age.
Pratchett: Well, there is this woman—I don't know if you've heard of her. ... If you narrow the parameters a bit, like "written by a bald guy," that sort of thing, well, maybe. It has done OK. It's sold about 40 million copies worldwide so far.
Now, how did I start out? It was to have fun with some of the cliches. It was as simple as that.
And also I just built up over the years, from all of the random reading I was doing, a kind of serendipitous research—research not knowing what it is you're researching. The nature of Discworld gave me the opportunity to do all kinds of things. I could fit more or less anything into it. By about book four, I discovered the joy of plot. (That was Mort.) I went back a bit with Sourcery [1988], because I knew the fans wanted more of Rincewind. I didn't particularly enjoy writing Sourcery, but it stayed on the best-seller list for three months. And then I said, "Sod the fans, I'll do what I like."
Now, I kind of do my own thing, and that has indeed changed a lot over the years—and so have I. I think on the whole I write better now than I did. There was to a certain extent more freedom in the early books, because the biggest problem with a created universe like this is that it fills up.
The city watch, which is now quite a force to be reckoned with, represents a kind of a problem; it's like having Superman in place—there isn't actually much room for Batman until Superman is out of town for a while. It will be the sheer weight of history and geography that will probably bring Discworld to an end.
There are a number of themes that keep re-occurring in your work. Obviously, Death is ever-present—in a sort of a jovial, uncle-ish kind of way. And that prompts me to ask about your attitude toward peoples' beliefs that are, as it were, not related to the reality around us.
Pratchett: When I worked as a local and regional journalist, many years ago, for some reason I used to get the "nut" jobs. I remember one particularly, very believable, elderly couple who had seen this strange craft land in the woods. This was in October or November. They were a thoroughly believable couple. And they said that at such-and-such a point it landed, and they had watched it land just behind this wood, but they were a bit frightened to go and have a look. So I went out on my motorbike that evening at the same time, and there it was—I saw it. It was a sort of orangey-red color, and it actually did glow. Once again, it landed behind the woods, and then, obviously, it went further down, and then indeed—finally darkness fell. You know, that one probably was a no-brainer, really; the sun sets every day.
You meet the occasional people who are perfectly normal, except that for the electrical fluids, the woman sometimes woke up to find herself floating four feet above the bed. "Good," I said, "but how do you know it's four feet, by the way? Could it be three feet, nine inches? I'd like to write this down." And then there was the woman who kept her window open so she could look out for the flying saucers. ...
How did the concept of witchcraft come to your attention as a kid?
Pratchett: The thing about England is that the numinous is all around you. Certainly in the chalk area, where I live now—and I was born on the chalk—the mounds in fields and standing stones have legends about them. Every hill is Arthur's seat.
Every other well ...
Pratchett: ... is holy or something, or probably belongs to fairies or saints—or both. Time-share, you know. Where we used to live in the Mendips was within easy walking distance of the Wimblestone. On Midsummer's Eve it would get up and dance around the field, and if it saw you—exactly how, I don't know—it would crush you to death. And there are tales of a farmer who tried to move it, and teams of horses couldn't budge it. In fact, it is a lump of dolomitic conglomerate, if you happen to know what that is.
And I have to ask, how near is it to the pub from that stone?
Pratchett: They say that all the pubs on the Mendips are connected by straight lines. What they mean is that they probably aren't officially, but you just set out across the fields and walk through the fences and things, because the cider does very strange things to your brain.
That's what we would call hard cider on this side of the Atlantic.
Pratchett: Actually, it's scrumpy. At a cider house locally, one tourist was taken to hospital and stomach-pumped after drinking two pints. In 1973, my wife Lyn and I were at a cider house. It had settles—benches with a high back—and I could listen to the old boys behind us, and they were discussing how you could tell the difference between fox footprints and cat footprints in the snow. One of them said, "Well, yer cat, you see, he'd a' walked like this." [Pratchett gestures with his hands in imitation of a cat walking.] "But renard, he'd a walked like that." And I said to Lyn, we better remember that because it was possibly just about the last time in these islands where somebody will unselfconsciously refer to a fox as "renard." They were a great bunch of guys; they all had weatherbeaten faces and one tooth.
The reason is that cider eats your teeth away. It also eats away at your brain. Here's a little test for those of you scientifically oriented people. To make scrumpy, you press it on big wooden presses down on the farm on the Somerset levels, and it goes into the metal runnels, and from there it goes into the vats where it begins the fermentation process.
It's very, very acidic apple juice. And you make your runnels out of the easily worked metal available in large quantities on the Mendips—it's lead. And then possibly you put a side of beef into the barrel to give it something to feed on.
One day the county analyst published something about the levels of lead in the rough cider. After that I went to see old Harry, the guy from whom we used to buy our cider. I said, "Harry, do you think there's anything to the rumor that rough cider damages your brain?" [Pratchett puts on an expression reminiscent of one of the characters from the Goon Show.] "Ooh, I dunno 'bout that, ol' boy!" [He gurgles on for a few lines in nearly incomprehensible Mendips speech.]
On the other hand, wherever he went, Old Harry had in his back pocket a roll of 20-pound notes. So he may only have had a few brain cells left, but bloody hell, they were good ones!
You're more aware of the continuation of history there, and witchcraft and stuff like that comes naturally. I read up on it a lot when I was a kid, and added to it more and more with my interest in folklore.
Granny Weatherwax evolved from all that.
And I used to know Nanny Ogg. She was a little old lady with the most filthy laugh you could imagine, and she had had several husbands, was a widow, and she was kind of small and dumpy and walked with a stick. She really loved her booze. She was just a lovely character, and so I put her in the books almost without any changes. Granny Weatherwax, on the other hand, is actually a made-up character but seems real. She's always seemed very real to me. But I have to be kind of careful. It's their job to believe in this stuff [he says, gesturing toward the audience at the convention]. If I start believing in it too much, then I'll be a candidate for the white blazer with the optional long sleeves.
Terry, did you do national military service?
Pratchett: No, it stopped about three years before I would have done.
I ask because of the many acute observations in your books about the military—for instance, the way young soldiers smoke cigarettes.
Pratchett: Well, yes. I've actually seen a guy who, when someone was coming and he shouldn't have been smoking, do this. [He mimes a man hiding a lit cigarette in his mouth.] It's just observation of life. I get it all the time, you know; people say how do you know the military, how do you know about the witch stuff? Well, they're all people. It's about the dynamics of a group. Like the dynamics of a group with an officer class above them, for example. It's just the way people act.
Let me ask: Are any of you familiar with the word "twaddle," meaning rubbish or nonsense? [The audience generally acknowledges it is.] Oddly enough, I went to an old lemonade factory that had been preserved from the 1930s, and it had the room where they made the twaddle, which was the basic syrup from which you made all soft drinks. You started with 10 gallons of twaddle, and added a hundred gallons of water, and then added the flavorings. And we had a long discussion with the curator as to what had come first—and clearly twaddle meaning nonsense is very, very old. This is the sort of thing I like doing. Because somewhere in there you'll find a really great fact that will fit beautifully in a story. I follow these little leads—how the factory works, how they made the lemonade in these great big glass carboys. I've got something planned for another book from it.
You know, when I was a kid I used to get books like The Romance of the Postage System or The Romance of Steel Making. And these things are romantic! They really are—but we don't think like that any more. There was a very famous poem—"This is night mail crossing the border,/ Bringing the cheque and the postal order." And it was done to the rhythm of the train going faster and slower. It is absolutely amazing that you can post a letter and it arrives the next day.
I go off and research clocks, or gas making or something, and invariably you'll find something in it that's not about clocks or gas making, but it's a fact that's just thrown to you. For example, this is a spoiler for those who haven't yet read Feet of Clay [1996]. I was reading a book about alchemy and read about how you could slowly poison someone using a candlewick soaked in arsenic. It's a perfectly good way of poisoning someone very slowly. And the nice thing was, the people searching the room for the source of the poison had to carry it around with them to see where they were going. This is exactly the kind of thing that springs out at you and becomes part of a plot.
I'm fascinated with steam engines, and the telegraph, and intricate mechanisms. I think technology was at its very best just before the electronic age, because what you could use electricity for was just turning motors. By the time telephony replaced telegraphy, they had found ways of getting 12 messages simultaneously along one telegraph wire. Real, genuine, Jules Verne ingenuity had been applied to a world of cogwheels and vibrating reeds.
It was more fun than integrated circuits.
You've won many awards, and there's one in particular that remains more mysterious to those of us born in America than any other. And that is that in 1998 you were granted the Order of the British Empire. Now, if I understand it correctly, didn't you have to go to Buckingham Palace and meet the queen?
Pratchett: It was Prince Charles that day. And he's the one who has been identified to me as a Discworld fan.
And how did the conversation go?
Pratchett: Well, I put him at his ease. I said, "Well, how long have you been a prince, then? That long?" Well, he asked a few small questions. He did not say, "Hey, I'm one of your greatest fans. Will you sign this book for me?" The royal family do not do that kind of thing.
Let me explain how it all works. You get this letter from the prime minister's office, and the first thing you do is to phone up your agent and say, "This is a joke, isn't it?" And he does a bit of ringing around and calls back to say, "It's not a joke."
It was a great day when it happened. It was a day in May. My latest book had got to number one. Then I walked out in our garden and a wild orchid had come up. And then I opened this letter saying I had got the OBE. So that was sort of like, monarch, readership and God were voting for you in one day.
The letter from the prime minister's office is very strange. It says, "Now, look, if we were to give you an award, and we're not saying we will, would you—if we did, and we might not—say yes?" All that's to save embarrassment. And so I wrote back a letter saying, "If you did—and I understand you might not—I would in all likelihood say yes." And then you have to keep very quiet about it. Which is a bit hard.
Like when I won the Carnegie, which is possibly the highest children's book award. You know about it for about two months beforehand. And it's very difficult for the phrase "I've just won the Carnegie" not to insert itself in every sentence. You have to keep quiet about it.
So my mom came. And you can imagine my mom walking around Buckingham Palace. [He mimes his mother wiping dust away from the tabletop and shaking her head in displeasure.] And my wife and my daughter came along. It was great.
But it was sort of weird. All the OBEs go in, and all the CBEs and the MBEs, and IBEs, HGI, HIVs—all go in at once. And there's no alcohol. Buckingham Palace have been doing this for a very long time. There is no alcohol. And the Chief Goldknobstick in Ordinary comes and chats with you. Great lad. They are good at this. He tells you what's going to happen, and there's Air Vice Marshal So-and-So, "We call him Charlie, you'll go up there and stop when you get level with him." And there's this jolly RAF guy, with gold braid all over him, standing there. They've all got what the British aristocracy are very good at—not exactly the common touch, but they talk to you and you get on with them.
There were also no lavatorial facilities. They have what must be called the Chief Watcher of the Bladder, however, who looks for anyone who is beginning to search, you know. And you realize that there is this area of wall with this very thin door line around it. Sort of like a James Bond door. You push it and you go into this lovely Victorian lavatory.
Then there's the Band of the Royal Horse Artillery—and I think, frankly, that shooting horses is not something the military should be doing. And the band were playing songs from Les Miserables. You know, there's a lot of songs you shouldn't be playing in these circumstances; there's a song about the downtrodden masses, for instance. La-la-la la la-la-la.
By the way, I was in a morning suit and looked bloody stylish.
And you finally go up and have a little chat, along the lines of, "Well done."
And then what you want is a brandy.
It's kind of weird, because the only service I've ever done for literature was to declare on every possible occasion that I don't like it. I'm not quite certain why I got it. It's quite fashionable to turn it down. But it's only worth turning it down if you can tell people that you turned it down; there's no point turning it down and no one knows, eh? And I thought, when people asked me why I accepted it, for the best reason: It made my mum proud.
The other thing is, we've always been going on about SF getting out of its ghetto and that sort of stuff. Well, if they're going to hand you a gong, well, be there when the medals are handed out. Never refuse a medal or a promotion.
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