erry Pratchett frequently jokes in interviews that he had his first story
published when he was 13 years old, which was a horrific experience for the young
author because he subsequently had to go away and learn to write. He's
spent nearly 40 years since then learning by doing, with astonishing
success. Currently, Pratchett is Britain's best-selling living author.
His first novel, a light fantasy called The Carpet People, was
published in 1971. It was followed by a pair of brief, densely serious
science fiction novels, The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata.
In the latter book, Pratchett dryly parodied Larry Niven's Ringworld
by postulating an artificial flat Earth, a planet-sized "plate full of
continents" manufactured by an extinct race. But when the flat-Earth idea
resurfaced in Pratchett's 1983 fantasy novel The Colour of Magic, it
took on a whole new life. Now it became the setting for a slapdash
Douglas Adams-style comic adventure, as an incompetent, cowardly wizard, a
blithe tourist and a malicious but loyal suitcase with feet toured a
magical world that balanced on the back of a giant space turtle.
In the decades since that first Discworld novel, Pratchett has
written nearly two dozen sequels. There have been spin-off books,
television adaptations, a line of Discworld miniatures, a series of
computer games, a Discworld CD, calendars, maps, comic books--even a
role-playing game rulebook. Pratchett has written a
variety of other books--most notably the charming Bromeliad trilogy
(Truckers, Diggers and Wings), and Good Omens,
which he co-authored with Neil Gaiman, and which might just be the funniest
book ever written about the coming of the Antichrist. But for most fans,
his name is still synonymous with Discworld.
While on tour in the U.S. in support of the 24th Discworld
novel, The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett was typically generous
with his time, as he stretched a scheduled 15-minute interview into
nearly an hour of chat about the various forms Discworld has taken in the
past and will take in the future.
Well, the inevitable question is, what's next? The Fifth Elephant has just come out in the States....
Pratchett: Oh dear ... you write a book, and then the next day,
"What's next?" Yeah, well, okay. The schedule is as follows. The
Truth, which is about the Discworld's first newspaper, is due out in
the fall, here and in the U.K. at the same time. Thief of Time, which
is about nothing you could possibly believe, is due out in May 2001, or
about that time. Not as yet [scheduled] in the U.S., because there's always
been a hate/hate relationship between U.S. children's publishers and
myself, is likely to be The Amazing Morris and His Educated Rodents,
which is--we're not going to call it a junior Discworld, but it's a
Discworld book actually written with the knob turned down a level, so it
will be more accessible to the younger market. Also coming out at Christmas
of next year will be The Last Hero, and that's almost certainly
going to be released in the U.S. and the U.K. at the same time. Very big,
very illustrated. Extremely so.
When you say "very big," do you mean dimensionally?
Pratchett: Well, yes, the normal three, you know. I mean, we're talking
about the size of Dinotopia. Like Dinotopia, the story will
be told in the pictures as well. Unlike Dinotopia, it'll actually
have a good storyline, and better artwork.
I understand the next couple of Discworld books are going to introduce a
completely new set of characters?
Pratchett: The Truth involves new characters as major characters,
with hitherto major characters as minor characters. The Truth is a
newspaper novel, and you always have to have the cops in a newspaper novel.
So you see Vimes, but from someone else's point of view. Now, we know
Vimes, and what a good lad he is, etc., yay. But seen from other
people's points of view, and they might have different opinions of what
civil liberties actually involve.
And the ones from there...?
Pratchett: The next one is Thief of Time. I'm not quite certain
which of the characters will be involved in it as yet, since I'm only a
quarter of the way into it. I know there will be major characters in it,
but only one of them's turned up yet, and only for the space of a few
lines. One of the things the book will do is resolve any slight problems of
temporal arrangement that there may have been in the Discworld series.
Munchkins write to me and say, "Oh, look, on page 134, in the current book,
you distinctly say--but in Guards, Guards! on page 192, it's clear
that it's at least three years later, therefore you've got it wrong!" [Makes aggravated munchkin-strangling gestures.] However, I will now have
an out. I will tell you this much: one of the things Thief of Time
talks about is an event which actually caused the timeline of the Discworld
to crash, and the pieces were picked up and stitched together again as best
they could. There's a whole industry, the Monks of History, who are
dedicated to taking responsibility for all this. ... For example, no one
seems to be bothered that the leading theater in Ankh-Morpork is about as
sophisticated as Shakespeare's Globe Theater, and it's just down the street
from the Opera House, which is practically Victorian. And everyone accepts
this as perfectly normal. Because human beings do. It's amazing what human
beings will accept as always having been there.
It sounds like you work a fairly long way in advance of yourself.
Pratchett: Well, right now I've got two children's--well, let's say young
adult--books planned, but I only have the haziest outline of how they're
going to go. But I know for a certainty that they're going to work. I can
sense it, in a way.
What's the process like for you? Do you start out by saying "I'd like to
write a book about the opera" and then explore how it would fit into
Discworld?
Pratchett: No--since you mentioned, or implied, Maskerade--that one
started in a state of quiet fury at Andrew Lloyd Webber. The Phantom killed
innocent people whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong
time. Now according to The Phantom of the Opera the musical, this is
okay, as long as you look good in a mask and a tux and in the end you
give it all up for lurrrrve. And I don't think so! I don't think that's the
case! In the original book, he's far more a monster, and in the Lon Chaney
film he's far more monster. You can't just dismiss the fact that people got
killed. I've got a puritanical streak in me, I'm afraid. So I read the
original work and saw the movie, and I knew there was a story there. I had
a fan who works for the Royal Opera House who smuggled me behind the scenes
for an hour, and every minute was worth its weight in gold. I discovered
what an insane world opera is, and from there, 'twas but the work of a
moment, the plot unrolled in front of me.
Do you start with a core idea for each book, then work from there to decide which characters to pull in?
Pratchett: Other ideas crowd in. For example, Thief of Time, the
very, very original idea--explaining the discrepancies in the timeline,
that's a side thing--came when I read a newspaper story about a clock made
entirely out of glass by a guy in Germany. I think he had to make one small
part out of metal. And for some reason, that stuck in my mind, the clock of
glass. I played around with the ideas, then phoned up a professor of
mathematics who's also a Discworld fan, and told him, "I want a guy to build
a clock that's completely accurate, what's the smallest unit of time there
could be?" "Ah, this is Planck's whatever, the shortest amount of time that
the smallest possible thing could happen in, like an atom thinking of
changing its mind about moving a little bit." They actually have a
theoretical concept of time that I felt was quite a good theory of time for
the Discworld universe. Never have I had such a visualization of the
imagery in a book ahead of time.
Do you have strong images in your head of what the characters look like?
Pratchett: Oh yeah, yeah.
How do the various screen adaptations measure up to your internal
images?
Pratchett: I really loved Truckers. It wasn't what I had in mind,
but it was very good for what it was, and a lot of time and patience was
taken to get the voices right. The fact that it might not have been exactly
what I imagined doesn't even matter. In some cases it was better. I thought
you could say as much about the animation: it was about as good as it could
be, given the fairly limited budget and so forth. And again, for the U.K., it
had a high-powered cast of voices behind it, and they really gave it
something.
Why were Soul Music and Wyrd Sisters chosen for
animated adaptations?
Pratchett: They chose Wyrd Sisters because it was accessible, in the
sense that everyone knows the story of Macbeth. So the idea of witches
meddling in the affairs of a kingdom brings a certain amount of baggage
with it, and it was felt that that would be a good introduction to
[Discworld], which is probably quite true. They said they wanted to do
Soul Music because rock 'n' roll was also accessible. They came up
with things I wouldn't have thought of, like they do every number in a
different classic rock 'n' roll style, including, I kid you not, the Blues
Brothers number. There's the Hendrix number, the Beatles number--and they
actually had some numbers specifically written for them. "She Won't Change
Her Mind"--it sounds like something off the B side of a Beatles album.
They're magnificent.
So this is an example of something you hadn't visualized yourself?
Pratchett: Because I wasn't visualizing it that way. But because they said
we had to have music, it was just a short step to having different types of
music--the flower power number, the Hendrix number, the heavy metal number,
and the bit at the end with the harp, which sent tears running down my
face. It was poignant, with extra "poig."
Are there any other books you'd particularly like to see animated?
Pratchett: Well, I got on very well with Cosgrove-Hall, and we sold loads
and loads of videos, and then the television promptly screened them at one
in the morning, shoving them into sort of a fantasy limbo. At the time, I
was a big-selling author in the U.K.--it's not like there were no fans out
there. One reason it happened was that the commissioning editor, who was
behind it all the way, moved. And that means we went through a process
known as "orphaning." No one was going to earn any kudos from getting
behind any project that was started by a person now gone. They're going to
downgrade that one because their own projects are important. And I was so
fed up with this. I said, "We all put a lot of time, money and effort into
this, and we got chucked out. The hell with it." They were planned to go on
around 5 o'clock on Sunday, which is kind of children's television but
kind of adult at the same time. And I thought that was a good slot for it,
because there was the occasional risqué bit, though it was so minor, you
could hardly object. I mean, at one of the rock 'n' roll festivals, in the
far distance, you can see a young lady with her top off.
There was also going to be a film adaptation of your novel Mort at
some point.
Pratchett: That may still happen. The curious thing is, it's spent about
nine years going through Development Heck. It nearly happens, then
something goes wrong again, someone moves between one of the consortiums or
something, some film studio is behind it and then someone else takes over
and they want to close it down. Americans are interested in it in different
circumstances and at different times. There doesn't seem to be much made in
Britain apart from by the production company that owns the thing, and
they're really only interested in making gritty, realistic stories about
drunken Scotsmen and naked steelworkers, or anything that you can put Hugh
Grant in. They can't get their heads around fantasy very well.
Do you worry about commercialism? There's also been a Discworld CD, the
computer games, the merchandising?
Pratchett: You say that blithely, but most of the merchandising--what
you'll find out about it if you're a fan, it's not like you're going into a
High Street shop and there's all this Discworld merchandising. All the
T-shirts are produced by people that were fans with some financial
competence, fans who could get it together enough to go and get a good
painting printed onto a shirt. The Discworld scarf, for example--which is
going to be stopped very soon, so it'll suddenly become very valuable to
those who have got it--when Stephen [Briggs] and I did the Discworld
Companion, he actually had half a dozen of them made by the someone in
Oxford who makes real university scarves. University scarves are in the U.K.
what university sweatshirts or whatever are here. The fans heard about
this, and the next thing you know they were clamoring for them, and we've
sold a couple of thousand probably. But that's it. It's that kind of level.
It's not the kind of stand-up merchandising that you get for Star
Wars or even Star Trek.
Because of the lack of aggressive marketing, or because of the small
purchasing scale?
Pratchett: I'm very happy keeping it small-scale. There's less money
sloshing around and people aren't likely to get greedy.
How much involvement do you generally have with spin-offs of your work?
Pratchett: Well, with Johnny and the Dead, I wrote the script. With
the games, quite a lot, but it's getting less and less with each game. But
generally more than you might expect. Bearing in mind that the money I get
from doing things like that, compared to what I could get for a novel, is
infinitesimal. I give it far more time than it's technically worth. Because
it's got to be right, or it's got to be as good as I can get it.
What's happening with the film adaptation of Good Omens?
Pratchett: Terry Gilliam is signed up to direct, which is great, because
Neil [Gaiman] and I both feel a bad Gilliam Good Omens will be
better than anyone else's good Good Omens. We've both had a
horrendous experience with Good Omens in the past, and we're both
keeping out of it. You have to be clear--the fact that Terry Gilliam is
signed up does not mean it might happen. There's a lot of things he's
signed up for. But people have got to get the money, and things like that.
Are you or Neil going to work on the script at all?
Pratchett: No! Neither of us.
Why not? You've both done script work.
Pratchett: Never boil your own baby. We both worked on the script last
time, though Neil stayed with it longer than I did. But by the time--they
wanted everything out that ought to be in. They wanted Adam to be evil from
the word go. In other words, it just became The Omen! The whole
point of Good Omens is that Adam is exactly between good and
evil. That is the whole point!
And that's similar to what happened with Mort, I understand. The
producers didn't think Death would be popular because it was too morbid, so
they wanted him removed.
Pratchett: Oh yeah, and there have been other people who wanted far more
conflict between Death and Mort, and like that. I mean, why? They kind of
get on until the very end. You get jerked around quite a bit. You have to
deal with 15 people with absolute power to say no and no power
whatever to say yes.
Regarding The Fifth Elephant, is the
title consciously a reference to the film The Fifth Element?
Pratchett: I was aware of The Fifth Element, obviously. I'd seen the
movie [grimacing]. French. French science fiction, oh good,
just like French comics. [affected accent] Oh deah. Verrah verrah
stylish. It's probably how Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy should
be filmed.
So why the similarity of titles?
Pratchett: Because why not? I thought it would be fun.
The Fifth Elephant seems to mark a progression in your work. The novels seem to be getting more complex as they go.
Pratchett: Well, not more complex. I would say darker. Like Carpe
Jugulum was pretty damn dark. So was Jingo--I mean, people were
dying.
Jingo seems like another turning point, as there's more morality
edging into your work--you mentioned your puritanical streak earlier. It
seems like darker themes and more powerful villains are part of that trend.
Pratchett: Yeah, because you can't have someone twiddling their mustache
and saying "Ha ha ha HA!" But sometimes the worst villains are the people
who think they're being good. One of the things I enjoyed most about
Carpe Jugulum was when one of the witches, Agnes, sees a vampire's
idea of how people and vampires can live together. Everyone is on a rota,
everyone on the town comes to the square to give a little bit of blood.
Much more civilized. And that's far more horrific, because that's doing it
by the numbers. In the last century we came up with a very good name for
people who inflicted terror by numbers, by lists.
But that seems far more typical of the villains you usually write
about--people who mean well and just don't get the point, villains who are
insane, villains who are laughable. In The Fifth Elephant you broke the
mold with a villain who was outright evil simply for the sake of being
evil.
Pratchett: Oh yes, Wolf. The point is, he believes "we are so much more
important than you, you don't matter," and that happens often enough.
You're right, yes. It's actually refreshing to have someone like that. It's
actually refreshing to put Vimes up against him, and refreshing to see that
Vimes can only deal with him if he puts a framework of law over how he's
dealing with him.
Are you making a conscious effort to make your works darker, or is it just
a natural progression?
Pratchett: It just becomes that. It has to be. In Esther Friesner's
wonderful phrase, "You need tragic relief."
Does it take you longer to write a convoluted book like The Fifth
Elephant than it takes to write a lighter, more comic book like Last
Continent?
Pratchett: No, no. Well, it's hard to say. The reason there's been a slight pause in the books is that I've been doing other things. I mean, just
answering all the mail takes time.
You're well known for personally answering your fan mail. And you
apparently spend a lot of time reading the Usenet group alt.fan.pratchett.
Pratchett: Not on alt.fan.pratchett for the last year. Ostensibly, the
reason is that it's no longer healthy for an author to hang around a
newsgroup where people are saying "Well, I think it would be a very good
idea if so-and-so happened, and then so-and-so happened, and then so-and-so
happened." Because there have been one or two cases where people came very
very near to second-guessing what I would like.
So you mean it's not legally healthy for you?
Pratchett: Well, not legally as such. I think legally I would be okay with
99 percent of the people there. But there's going to be some
lackwit who says "He stole my idea!" and all he needs is a sympathetic ear
in the media, and it can look bad, whether or not there's any legal aspect.
People don't understand about ideas. There are people who think "Why don't
you do a Discworld novel about pirates?" is giving me the idea for a novel.
But there's also the fact that I've been on it for, God, eight years now,
and I just thought "The hell with it, I just don't think I can keep doing
this." As they say, every month is September. September is classically when
all the newbies get their hands on
computers for the first time because they're going to school, or
college, for the first time. Of course, now, there's so much Internet
access that every month is September. Also, you have to deal with the
people who genuinely don't know the difference between research, satire
and plagiarization, so you get people saying Wyrd Sisters was
plagiarized from Macbeth and the like.
There was a point when you said that one out of every three words you
wrote was fiction, and the rest went into fan letters and the Internet and
the like. Is that still true?
Pratchett: Yeah, it is.
Why spend so much time on it?
Pratchett: It's time spent on the business of being Terry Pratchett.
Business? Do you do it out of a sense of duty to your fans, or is it fun
for you?
Pratchett: The best analogy I can give is rock music. You can spend as much
time in the studio as you like, getting the album exactly right, but in
your heart of hearts you know it's not rock 'n' roll until you take it on
the road. Besides which, because I've been a fan, I'm acutely aware of the
complicity between fans and writers.
Speaking of fandom, you told Neil Gaiman in a 1985 interview that you "hate
and despise Trekkies." Is that still true?
Pratchett: No, it isn't. I made jokes at their expense about Trek
conventions: "Trekkies are so low that they can walk under a snake, but a
Blake's Seven fan can walk under a snake while wearing a top hat."
There are variations that go on. But in a sense I'm slightly envious.
People that have found their way, talking in a kind of Tibetan sense--Trek
fandom seems to be a full and satisfying life. I'm happy for them. The kind
of people who say "get a life" typically don't have any life at all. You
look at some guy with friends all over the world--no girlfriends, maybe,
but still a full social life, mainly talking about computers--and you tell
him to get a life ... well, he's got a life. We've all got lives. If people
are having a lot of fun doing something different from what you want to do,
well, that's not your business. Maybe I've just mellowed. What I did object
to is the way Star Trek was coming to take over the old science
fiction fandom. Star Trek became science fiction, and that seemed to
reflect badly on the mass of genuine literary, written science fiction.
Have you ever considered going back to science fiction, or had a story idea
that could be expressed better through science fiction than fantasy?
Pratchett: Well, I have got one or two, and years from now I might get down
to writing them. But I'm no orbital mechanics guy. Even when I write
science fiction, we're not talking Niven and Pournelle, we're not talking
Greg Bear.
Do you still have an interest in the genre?
Pratchett: Oh yes, I read far more science fiction than fantasy, I know far more about what's going on in the field.
What do you read for fun?
Pratchett: Thrillers. Good thrillers, like Carl Hiaasen and Donald
Westlake. I think all good authors should read outside their field.
Otherwise they're just recycling.
