A Slip of the Keyboard (14 page)

Right at the bottom, at the tip of the root, is the fear of the dark and the cold, but once you’ve given darkness a name you have a measure of control. Or at least you think you have, which is nearly as important.

The desire to build structures is as strong as ever even now, among brilliant, intelligent us, who know all about Teflon and central heating. For example: reality tells me that, when I’m bored on a long journey, I stop off at a gas station and buy a cassette tape from the rack, and, since these racks are invariably stocked by someone
with the musical taste and discernment of a duck egg, I generally play safe and buy a compilation album by a middle-of-the-road group I won’t actually throw up listening to. So odd corners of the car fill up with cheap compilation albums. That’s reality’s story, anyway. But I’d found myself developing the superstition that any tape cassette, if left in a car for about a fortnight, turns into a
Best of Queen
album. Friends say this is ridiculous. They say their cassettes turn into Bruce Springsteen compilations.

Okay, it’s a gag. I hardly believe it at all. I’ve found the rational explanation. Like the whispering in our old house; I traced that to starlings roosting under the eaves. If you want a definition of the word
susurration
, it’s the noise starlings make at night. And the great beast that stood behind me, breathing heavily, while I was reading one day; someone down the street was mowing their lawn with one of those old-fashioned push mowers, and the noise was bouncing around, hitting the corner of the room behind me, and sounded, with the clatter of the cutting stroke and the freewheeling of the chain, like—well, like some horrible beast. The twenty seconds it took for me to analyse the sound without moving my head seemed to last a whole lot longer.

Let me tell you about the nuclear power plant built on—well, nearly on—an Iron Age burial mound. Pixies’ Mound, the locals called it. And during the course of its construction the station workers got into the habit of blaming everything from a lost hammer to a major project delay on the malign influence of the Pixie (apparently someone had accidentally driven a lorry over his mound, which is the sort of thing pixies really hate). Of course, they didn’t believe it. And as a joke, when the station was finished, the contractors presented the first station manager with a model garden gnome—the Pixie. And it was put in the station’s trophy cabinet. And a story sprang up that if it was ever moved, something would go wrong on the site. And one day it was put in a cupboard. Three weeks later a freak storm swept up the estuary and flooded
the pump house to a depth of six feet, knocking four reactors and hundreds of megawatts of generating capacity off-line.

TV crews came out the next day to film the cleanup and, yes, one of the work crew mentioned the Pixie, who was duly exhumed from his cupboard for his moment of celebrity. Ho ho ho, the pixie curse shut the station. Ho ho ho.

In those days you could still be funny about nuclear power. It made a good story on the TV news, and headed up quite a decent piece about the speed with which the station had been brought back on line.

The story went round the world. Somewhere early in its travels the vitally important “ho ho ho” element got removed. And we got letters from everywhere. What was then West Germany led the field, I seem to remember. “Please tell us more about the creature that shut down a nuclear power station,” they said.

I was told to draft a suitable form of reply, and I have to say it was a pretty good one.

It talked about the concept of gremlins, and how lots of trades created little superstitions and mythologies. But as a PR man for the place, I became aware that not everyone on the site was 100 percent behind my cheery statements saying that, of course, we didn’t actually believe it. They were engineers. They knew about Murphy. They weren’t about to upset no pixie.

In fact, I had a conversation with one senior engineer, in the shiny, bright, and modern power station, that went like this:

“You can’t say that no one here believes it.”

“Do you want me to say that people here do believe it, then?”

“No. Say it’s just … a story.”

And later one of them said, “I wonder what legends will accumulate around this place in a thousand years’ time, when it’s just a mound. The villagers will probably say that at midnight you can see a team of physicists walk their rounds.” And we agreed that, if people didn’t think very carefully about warning signs, a dead and
buried nuclear reactor would make the classic cursed tomb: not long after breaking into it, people would die mysteriously.

That impressed me. I didn’t know engineers could think like that. Already, the hard edges of the machinery were being filmed with the grease of fantasy—or whimsy, you might say, which is only fantasy with its shirt undone. I realized then that if ever there is a moon base, or a Mars base, or an L5 colony, then our interior decorator minds will furnish the new landscape with reconditioned fantasies: shadowy figures that live in the girderwork and steal electricity, maybe, or dwarfs that come out of the computer panelling and clean your helmet at night, if you leave them a bowl of nutrient soup.

We spray our fantasies on the landscape like a dog sprays urine. It turns it into ours. Once we’ve invented our gods and demons, we can propitiate or exorcize them.

Once we’ve put fairies in the sinister solitary thorn tree, we can decide where we stand in relation to it; we can hang ribbons on it, see visions under it—or bulldoze it up and call ourselves free of superstition.

Hillcon programme book, 1992

I’m called a writer of fantasy, but I’m coming to hate the term. Why? Because what could be so good is often so bad. Because there’s so much trash out there, so much round-eyed worship of mind-numbing myths, so much mindless recycling of ancient cycles, so much unthinking escapism.

I’m not against recycling. The seasons do it. So do pantomimes, so do fairy stories. The retelling of oft-told tales is an honourable art—but there should be some attempt at texture and flair.
Star Wars
was the quintessential heroic fantasy story, with just enough twist and spin to give it an extra edge.
Robocop
retold an ancient tale in a new voice and was marvellous;
Robocop II
was superexpensive trash because people didn’t understand what they’d got.

Unfortunately, there’s still a market for rubbish. I picked up a recently written fantasy book at the weekend, and one character said of another: “He will grow wroth.” Oh, my God. And the phrase was in a page of similar jaw-breaking, mock-archaic narrative. Belike, i’faith … this is the language we use to turn high fantasy into third-rate romantic literature. “Yonder lies the palace of my fodder, the king.” That’s not fantasy—that’s just Tolkien reheated until the magic boils away.

I get depressed with these fluffy dragons and noble elves. Elves were never noble. They were cruel bastards. And I dislike heroes. You can’t trust the buggers. They always let you down. I don’t believe in the natural nobility of kings, because a large percentage of them in our history have turned out to be power-crazed idiots. And I certainly don’t believe in the wisdom of wizards. I’ve worked with their modern equivalents, and I know what I am talking about.

Fantasy should present the familiar in a new light—I try to do
that on Discworld. It’s a way of looking at the here and now, not the there and then. Fantasy is the Ur-literature, from which everything else sprang—which is why my knuckles go white when toe-sucking literary critics dismiss it as “genre trash.” And, at its best, it is truly escapist.

But the point about escaping is that you should escape to, as well as from. You should go somewhere worthwhile, and come back the better for the experience. Too much alleged “fantasy” is just empty sugar, life with the crusts cut off.

I’m writing this in Florida, home of fantasy—either the sort that you watch, or the sort that you stick up your nose. They’ve got some weird stuff here; for one thing, they’ve got Disney/MGM and Universal Studios.

And this is what’s weird about them. They aren’t really studios. Oh, they shoot some film here, but that’s kind of secondary. They weren’t built as studios. They were built as … well, as theme parks. Those false frontages, those artful backlots, those false-perspective streets, they were built for no other purpose than to look like something which in turn was built to look like something. Built to look like something that isn’t real.

Whoever would have thought it?

Here in America—and in England, to a lesser extent—you can read newspaper articles and buy alleged books which treat the characters played by TV stars as if they were real people. The world has gone strange. You can’t tell the reality from the fantasy anymore. Think I’m kidding? On the racks at the supermarket are “newspapers” like the
Sun
, the
Midnight Star
, the
Weekly World News
. Typical lead story: Elvis has been found alive in a UFO dredged from the Bermuda Triangle. People read this stuff. It’s not even good SF. They have a vote, same as you.

This is all “escape from” stuff—the Disney rides, the elves, the stupid stories. It goes nowhere. The best stuff does take you somewhere. It takes you to a new place from which to see the world. An
interest in fantasy when I was a child gave me an interest in books in general, and I found in books on astronomy and palaeontology a deep sense of wonder that not even Middle-earth could beat.

Let’s not just leave here. Let’s go somewhere else. And if we can trample over some elves to do it, so much the better.

The Bookseller
,
11 June 1993

I have still got the first book I ever read. It was
The Wind in the Willows
. Well, it was probably not the first book I ever read—that was no doubt called something like
Nursery Fun
or
Janet and John
Book 1. But it was the first book I opened without chewing the covers or wishing I was somewhere else. It was the first book which, at the age of ten, I read because I was genuinely interested.

I know now, of course, that it is totally the wrong kind of book for children. There is only one female character and she’s a washerwoman. No attempt is made to explain the social conditioning and lack of proper housing that makes stoats and weasels act the way they do. Mr. Badger’s house is an insult to all those children not fortunate enough to live in a Wild Wood. The Mole and the Rat’s
domestic arrangements are probably acceptable, but only if they come right out and talk frankly about them.