I went to the Irish Discworld Con (IDWCon) last weekend and managed to interview the guest of honor, Sir Terry Pratchett (homepage, Wikipedia) for FlirtFM.

Terry is the author of the best-selling Discworld series, a comedy fantasy series which often parodies classical literature, while still maintaining interesting and original characters and plots.

His upcoming book I Shall Wear Midnight will conclude the Tiffany Aching story, that of an apprentice witch’s maturing and moving to “the big city”.

Terry also showed how dangerous (legally) fan ideas can be, with an example of a letter he received advising him to film his movies in the UK and not visit Hollywood.

Like many creative people Terry has had a close relationship with technology, soldering together his first computer, a ZX81. He spoke about how it was possible to extend it, and add your own functionality. He even built what could today be seen as an elementary web cam. It became obvious where much of his inspiration for the sprawling Hex (a computer run by wizards in the books) came from.

Terry has also recently been diagnosed with Alzheimers. He spoke about how voice to text technology has been helping him, as his typing has deteriorated. He even went so far as to say that should his typing skills return he would stay using the voice technology, exclaiming “Hell, this is Star Wars shit! This is what we’ve been dreaming for!”

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (BY-NC).

DD: So, we’re here in the Falls Hotel in Enistymon and I’m here with Terry Pratchett. Start with the books, will you be exploring Tiffany Aching or Sam Vimes further?

TP: Oddly enough, Tifany Aching is in I Shall Wear Midnight and that’s the last of the Tifany Aching books. And while I’m actually doing, it’s also become the most adult because she’s got older throughout the years and nearly 16 in this book. So the book will actually bridge the Tifany Aching series and the main Discworld series, she will certainly meet one or two minor characters out of the major Discworld series, because that’s about right, it’s not time for her to go into the big city, there are things that need to be doing. For heavens sake, she kissed the winter and brought summer back. After you’ve done that you cant spend all you time just bandaging people up. I don’t know how many more books I’m going to write, we can come onto that a little while later.

TP: I like Sam Vimes as much as everybody else, but on the whole, with the books that come up, I write what turns up and asks to be read, like for example, Nation. Nation was like a cuckoo in the nest, I put off the idea because I had it about four months before the big Asian Tsunami, and I thought, “I cant write this yet”. So I left it a year or so, and by then it was in my head so much that I just had to get it written. I don’t know what the next adult book is going to be, but I do know I’m writing “I shall wear Midnight” for Tiffany Aching.

DD: Where do your ideas and inspiration come from?

TP: And there was me thinking you were an intelligent young man!

DD laughs.

DD: Apart from satirizing the real world. For example, do you see yourself and your mannerisms in any of your characters?

TP: I see [myself] in my characters because all the characters must, in some way, be derived… You are the only testbed you’ve got for how human beings think although after a while you get problems to understand the commonality at the time[sic]. So I think I’ve answered that, and if I haven’t I probably did want to.

DD: Which tidbit of your contribution to culture do you think will last the longest, for the most centuries?

TP: Centuries: nothing.

DD: That’s being very modest.

TP: I think Lord of the Rings will survive for a very long time.

DD: But that’s not yours.

TP: No, that’s the point I’m making. I think most books are lodged in their time and place. Having said that, people read Jane Austin. Will people read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in a hundred years? [DD: I'd say so.] I don’t know. Bear in mind a hundred years is a very long time in history, I’m thinking the same about Discworld. You’re talking more or less between the Wright Brothers and the Man on the Moon, lots of things changed. There were lots of best selling authors in the 1930’s that no one’s every heard of now, lots of very good children’s authors, like E. Nesbit for example, who’s still just about heard of, Richmal Crompton who used to write the Just William books, huge children’s books writes in those days who will disappear very soon.

DD: You still have C.S. Lewis, you still have [The Chronicles of] Narnia. You still have a number of books.

TP: Absolutely right, Narnia has been a movie which is an important thing. Some do, some don’t, but I don’t know what [the future holds].

DD: The Discworld MUD, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, have you played at all, have you been involved with the MUD?

TP: No, I don’t know anything about it, I know nothing about it at all, I’ve never played it, I’ve never been in it, I know nothing, who is this foolish man MUD? That’s what you get when you mix water and things. If I knew about it, I’d probably have to worry about copyright and things, so I don’t about it. Don’t talk to me again about anything to do with water and dirt.

TP: As Douglas Adams once said: Lots of people come and ask me to do things, by and large if they say “Can we do a play of this”, sometimes you have to say no, when you’d like to say yes because if it goes pear shaped… these days people send me their manuscripts, “please can you read my manuscript”, “no”. I always write back with a polite letter saying “No. The reason is that one day somebody, not you, but somebody is going to turn around and say, ‘In his book, Terry Pratchett does xyz, and he got that from my manuscript’”. It’s never going to be the person I’m writing to, obviously. But some day, someone will because it will be worth money to do so, or God heaven help us, I might read that manuscript, and something might stay in my mind. It’s just not worth it. But it’s a great shame, remember that JK Rowling was accused of plagiarism, and that was all over the newspapers. In a sense, for a little while, accusation was consider to be fact. As they say, mud sticks. It’s a shame that I have to think that.

TP: We got this letter, quite a few years back now, was another letter, and the cover letter said “This letter has been copied to my solicitors”, “Oh no no!”. “I have got a wonderful idea for Discworld that will make you lots of money and is a sure fire, it’s in this envelop [...] this is what you should so”. The fact that he had copied it to his solicitor rather led me to believe, that was not a good thing for us to do. So we wrote back with our standard letter that we do for the kids with the manuscripts and we said “Thank you for this, we have you letter here, it’s not been opened, and it will not be opened, and in the fullness of time it will be thrown away. The reason is…”, for the reason I’ve just said. A little while ago I said to my PA, “Dig it out”, I got curious, I’m prepared to take a risk, “and I want you to read it. Just you, and on your honor not to tell me anything about it, and if you say ‘Oh, crikey’ then I’ll read it, but it must be that I never know what [it says]“. So he opened it up and said “You will not believe this”. It said “Mr. Pratchett, here’s and idea, don’t go to Hollywood, get Discworld filmed by lots of well know faces in the UK, and they will make very good films”. That is not an idea, that is just as plain as the nose on your face. If I’d opened it, what would I have done? By then we’d already done a couple of films. No court would actually do anything about that because it’s such an obvious thing.

TP: It worries me that you have to worry about these legal things, and it’s the as some stuff on the Internet, it’s like Fan Fiction, you know it happens and fair enough. If you ever see Fan Fiction some people put a copyright in their fanfictions.

*TP makes a sound of displeasure.

TP: In a sense yes, but in another sense no. I tend to keep out of it, and if something dirty has to happen Colin goes in with the knife.

DD: Moving on, Hex in the books had some great tech in-jokes, feeding cheese to your mouse, and there was a lot of tech references in there. What’s been your relationship with technology?

TP: I actually soldered together my first computer, it was a ZX81 which was a kit. The nice thing about ZX81’s was that you had to understand stuff to make it do anything sensible. There were masses and masses of things you could add to a ZX81, I had a ZX81 that could tell the difference between light and dark and make decisions as a result of light and dark, and recognise the difference between a cross and a circle. I made a very very primitive optical system for it, and this is on a ZX81 that had practically no memory whatsoever. I followed the tech all the way up, always sort of doing things. Then really I got into the writing as soon as there was a word processor I could afford. I tried to word process on a ZX81 there was an Amstrad 464, that had floppy discs, and it had a decent little word processor with a spell checker. That was it, end of Terry the tech, here’s Terry the writer. But we still have a big tech room in our office.

TP: This is where we segway nicely into the Alzheimers. A firm called Talking Point have got together with the people who make Dragon and they put a kind of front end on [Dragon] which makes it easier and more sensible. I am both a difficult subject… I said online “I thought the latest Dragon was pretty good, but could use some work”, and these guys phoned me up (they’re fans) and said “we are doing this”. They came and showed me their stuff and I bought it there and then. I went through some minimal training, then the first thing we did was we dumped all my books into the algorithms, so it knew my vocabulary. It has quite a number of different ways of teaching the machine you personal pronunciations and new words, which I seldom have to do now. The upshot of it is now, it is so useful to me now, that if my typing ability came back I would sill talk to the computer because, hell, this is Star Wars shit! This is what we’ve been dreaming for, I might not have my flying car, but at least I can talk to the goddam computer.

DD: One final question to finish off. Since you’ve been diagnosed with Alzheimers do you feel that you’ve been viewed as a patient? Have people’s attitudes toward you changed?

TP: No, not really. I’m behind Dignity in Dying, I believe that terminally ill patients should be allowed to die (within reason) when they want to, in their own bed if necessary, it’s what the Victorians did. I’m not particularly keen on the whole assisted suicide thing, [it's] a bit weird, and if you read the guidelines (how the UK government would consider it) even discussing with my wife the issue of assisted dying is illegal. Come on Mister Plod, *claps* come on if you’re hard enough! How damn silly can you get? Because something like that, you discuss it with your relatives, but you mustn’t because they would have financial interests in your death, and it’s silly.

TP: People come up [to me] about that and about Alzheimers. People come up to me in the street all the time, and they have done while I’ve been in this country, and that’s only been since yesterday, and they talk about their mum having it, and their gran has it, and you can see the fear in their eyes and lots of neighbours who’ve been carers tell me that they… Five or six ladies who’ve been nurses have told me, a stranger, that they’ve hoarded poisons (shall we say drugs) that they know how to use, to ensure that if they get a seriously ill disease they’ll be able to kill themselves. I’m not necessarily pleased that this is the case, but government is way behind what the majority of people think. More than three quarters of people agree with my late father who died about six years ago. He said to be before he died “If you see my lying there with pipes and tubes coming out of me and you know there is no going back, tell them to switch me off”. And I did, but of course they weren’t allowed to. What was the point?

DD: Thank you very much, I think you’re very quickly having to rush off.

TP: I am but a servant of the people.