The 5th Dimension

About this transcript:

Re: the interview, it was in late January, 1996. I can't remember the exact day, but PTerry was only in Brisbane for one day, so that was it. I'll try and look it up.

Re: The 5th Dimension, we are a weekly half-hour Science Fiction and Fantasy Media Review show which airs on the Briz-31 TV station in Brisbane, Australia. We cover books, magazines, comics, movies, videos, computer games, role playing games, collectible card games, television, fan activities and the Internet. Basically anything connected with SF&F. The interviewer was Peter Petroff, out literary reviewer, the cameraman was me, and the job of microphone stand was ably performed by David Astley, our film and games reviewer. It was conducted in the executive lounge of the Brisbane Hilton.

Robert Whyte

Well, here is the full transcipt of the interview with Terry Pratchett that aired ny The 5th Dimension this week. This is actually a transcript of the raw camera tape, from which about 30% was cut for time in the final broadcast, so you're actually getting a fair bit more than those who watched the show. I hope you enjoy it.

I: - Interviewer
PT: - PTerry

I: Mr Pratchett, welcome to Australia.

PT: Thankyou.

I: This isn't you first time here is it?

PT: No, I've been here before about 5 times.

I: Do you mostly come out here on tour or for holidays?

PT: Mostly on tour. I came once for a holiday. Of course, the tours themselves are a holiday.

I: So you don't have a busy schedule?

PT: Good heavens no, there's whole minutes in the day to myself. Sometimes I can even go to the toilet.

I: You're here in Australia for the release of a new book?

PT: Well, I'm here in Australia for a whole heap or reasons, really. One is that I'm guest of honour at a convention in Canberra and then a few months ago a guy called Richard Curler(sp?) who's a palaeontologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand asked me if I minded if he named a newly discovered species of fossil turtle after me, which is kind of a weird thing. So we bent the trip so that I could go and see the fossil and have a beer with him, which was great because I mean how many times in your life is someone going to name an extinct fossil after you? Two or three at most, I would have said.

I: Was it an honour, or were you thinking "this is what I'm being compared to".

PT: Well, it's 42 million years old. It's an extinct species of leather back turtle, described as being a first class specimen, a frequent world traveller and identified by a certain smoothness of the upper surface, so I feel on the whole he got it exactly right!

I: You are also releasing a new book though.

PT: Well, the point is I'm ALWAYS releasing a new book, that's the beauty of the whole business. Sooner or later there's bound to be another one along.

I: So it's not like you ever come down here just for the fun of it, it's always business.

PT: It's always fun. Signing tours in Australia are fairly tough, but because they're in Australia, it doesn't seem quite as bad as it would be if they were in the UK.

I: So you like the country?

PT: Yes. Yes I do.

I: Even the weather? (it was pushing 36 Celsius the day of the interview)

PT: Yes, even the weather. I like... the difference. I like the fact that you have trees where the leaves stay on all winter and the bark drops off. The way that you have the same cast as in the UK, but they're played by different actors if you see what I mean. The way the birds in the trees turn out to be parrots instead of starlings and things like that. Those sorts of things fascinate me.

I: The new book you've released is part of a series called the Discworld. Now unbelieveably some people haven't heard of the Discworld. What is it?

PT: It's a type of fog.

I: (said unbelievingly)It's a type of fog? In what way?

PT: (laughs) I just said that because I always get kind of puzzled when people hit me with that question. The other, and possibly more correct answer is that it is 19 books which are theoretically classical fantasy stories but possibly a little more relevant to the present day. That's one description. There's probably hundreds of others.

I: One of the things that appeals to the readers is that you have not so much invented as adopted and take over a world that is flat and rides on the back of elephants that ride on the back of a turtle. How did you take the idea?

PT: The physical shape of the Discworld is taken from world mythology. There a plenty of myths about a world travelling through space on the back of a turtle. I just chose it as a ridiculous idea, because as far as I'm concerned the stories are about the people on the surface, and as I said before, it's kind of in disguise. There are wizards and witches and dragons and all the paraphernalia of fairy stories, but they act in a curiously twentieth century way. So I deliberately chose a ridiculous background perhaps in order to highlight the characters.

I: The Discworld however isn't all you've created. You've also written several other books as well.

PT: I tend to write anything that crosses my mind. I've written some childrens books. Some what you might call classical fantasy childrens books and some set in the present day. I even wrote a funny book about cats because as some time in your life everyone has to write a funny book about cats and I thought I might as well get it over with.

I: No other animals?

PT: No. Cats are good to write about. For some reason people like to read about cats.

I: Cats aren't the only animal you're interested in however. A while ago you filmed a documentary about orangutans.

PT: That was shown on British TV in 1995, and that simply happened because even in the early Discworld books I wanted the librarian of a magical university to be turned into something by accident, and I just chose orangutans because they're funny. Then later on when I was doing lecture tours I didn't really want paying but I did suggest to people that donations to charity would be a good idea and I found out there was an Orangutan Foundation because basically you know there's about one tree left in Indonesia, so the foundations job is to coax them down, give them a shave and a suit, teach them to drive and get them jobs in television.[1] So I started fundraising for them and they asked me to go out to Borneo and front a documentary about orangutans and all the work that was being done, and it turned out to be an awful lot of fun. I ended up upriver talking to Berute Galdicas(sp?) who is the orangutan equivalent of Dianne Fossey, and when I say the orangutan equivalent, she is human but you know what I mean, and it was all tremendous fun. I was sitting in this boat up in a rainforest somewhere thinking "I'm here because I write funny books about witches and wizards."

I: How did you get started in writing? What was the first step on the road?

PT: I wrote my first story when I was 13, which I sent off to a magazine and they published it. It was as simple as that and no-one ever told me it was supposed to be difficult. I wrote my first novel when I was 17, and I was so ignorant that I sent it off to a publisher by the simple means of looking up publishers in the phone book and sending it to the nearest one. He accepted it and sent me back a contract and a little cheque, so I thought "this is how its done." You write a book, send it off and you get a cheque for it. It would be nice to say that I struggled for 20 years to get something published, but it didn't go like that. I never really took it seriously.

I: So you never had to cope with rejection?

PT: No, but I suppose that could be BECAUSE I never really took it seriously. About every 5 years I'd write a book and it would get published and the rest of the time I just hung out and enjoyed life. It didn't worry me me very much and I had a full time job in any case.

I: What were you doing at the time?

PT: Well, most of the time I was a journalist, which was pretty good experience for being a writer anyway..

I: How did you start off as a journalist?

PT: I just left school and went to see the editor of the local paper and asked him if he had a job and he said yes. All the difficult things in my life seem to be easy. It's the easy things that are difficult.

I: Such as?

PT: Well actually finding spare time for one thing. People say "what sort of hobbies do you have" and I sit there and think "I haven't actually got any." They ask what I do in my spare time and I think "I haven't got any of that, either." but that's because a lot of our style of thinking is based on the fact that people spend most of their time doing things they don't REALLY want to do in places they don't really want to be. I spend most my time doing exactly what I want to do in a place that's exactly where I want to be and so I don't really need the hobbies. You know I have lots of interests and things.

I: So basically your work is something you enjoy so much it's not work.

PT: Weeeell you need a different vocabulary to talk about this sort of thing. It is work, and sometimes it's difficult, but that's not the same as asying that it's not enjoyable.

I: In your books one of the things that you're famous for is, out of nowhere you'll pluck little 'factlets', bits of history, bits of science, bits of philosophy, bizarre literary references. Where do you get these from? Some people either think you've taken 5 university degrees or that you've been wandering through God's library.

PT: Well, it's a bit difficult to explain, but when I was a kid we had this thing, I don't know whether you've ever head of it, called education. Admittedly these days you can pass a chemistry subject by writing an essay on what it feels like to be a hydrogen atom, but actually even as I say that I realise that the education system really didn't get involved. When I was about 11 I discovered fantasy and science fiction, and there wasn't very much of it about in those days, it was really pretty much as if it was a kind of pornography, and it tended to end up in the same shop too.

I: The old pulp fiction style of books?

PT: Well, yes there was that, but there was quite a bit of good stuff being written too.

I: Such as?

PT: Well, Brian Aldiss was just getting started in those days and there were guys like James Blish and Harry Harrison was just starting out. Arthur C. Clarke wasn't a megastar in those days, you know, you could go and meet him a conventions, but the amount of stuff you'd find on the shelves of your local bookshop was actually quite small. So I read all the SF and Fantasy I could get my hands on very quickly and it actually got me reading, sort of from a dead stop to maximum acceleration in a few weeks. So I started off as I remember reading mythology because you're still talking about guys wuth helmets bashing one another. When I ran out off all the mythology I could get my hands on, I started reading ancient history because it was guys with helmets bashing one another. In the same way when I ran out of available SF I read astronomy and palaeontology and geology which if they're well written are as good as science fiction and in many respects ARE science fiction. I mean, lets face it, you can set your monsters on another planet, or you can set them on this planet 65 million years ago, with the added bonus that they really existed. But I think that the key thing was that I followed this course by treating everything as if it was a type of science fiction and I read it in that way, after the same kind of buzz that I got from science fiction and it worked in a funny kind of way. I picked up an education like a jigsaw puzzle. You added a bit here and a bit there, whereas I can't really remember very much of what I learnt at school that was useful. Cunning and guile probably, and the ability to stay alive. SF gave me an education, and while it's not terribly deep at any one point, it's spread quite wide. I think the key distinguishing feature about Discworld fans as far as I can discern it is once there was the idea that the classic science fiction and fantasy fan was a boy about 14 years old, but according to my mail about half my readers are female and there's a huge age spread. The series has been going since 1985 in paperback so there's this smear effect so that if you started reading at 14 you're about 25 anyway, so there is a huge spread but a common denominator I suspect is that they are all the kind of people who tend to be good at Trivial Pursuit. (laughs)

I: A lot of your books seem to contain certain... universal truths. What are the universal truths that you believe in?

PT: I believe you should write a book worth GBP4.99 if that's the price it's selling for. This seems to me to be the fundamental truth for an author to believe in, because if you get that one wrong, everything else will go wrong as well. Beyond that, I don't talk about it very much. You write the books and out the go and if people say "what do you mean?" you point at the books. You don't lean back and say "I meant this" or "I wanted to say that". That's not how you play the game.

I: We've already discussed you readership, and you've developed, even though you might want to shy away from the word, a cult following. You're going off to a convention after this, later this year there's going to be a Discworld convention. How do you feel about the fans, the fact that they hang on your every word?

PT: Well first of all you have to distinguish between fans and readers. I've got more readers than fans, in order to sell as well as I do that must be the case. People who just enjoy reading the books but would never go to a convention or buy a t-shirt. People who read the Discworld, for want of a better phrase, as part of a balanced reading diet. I always have trouble with the word cult. For instance there's recently been a dramatisation of Pride and Prejudice on UK television. Very popular, the books had an upsurge, people organised coach trips to the places where they filmed it, but no-one would call Jane Austen a cult author. I always sell more books every year than the Booker Prize winner, but no-one would call them cult authors. So it's obviously not a matter on the number of books you sell, and it's always seemed to me that cult was a slightly put-down word. It means "read by students".

I: But you're not only read by students, are you?

PT: I always say "what do you do to avoid being called cult". I don't particularly object, but no-one's ever been able to give me a satisfactory definintion of what a cult author is. Because the inference is "doesn't sell very many, but is very popular among those who read them" which probably doesn't apply as far as I'm concerned. But either way it feels pretty good.

I: Mr Pratchett, enjoy the rest of your stay in Australia, and thank you very much.

Robert Whyte
Death is only a milestone - albeit one that is dropped on you from a very great height - Terry Pratchett.

[1] I think that this comment was aimed at myself, an ex-rugby player who was driving the crew that day and managed to get lost on the way to PTerry's hotel and as a consequence arrived half an hour late.

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