A Slip of the Keyboard (8 page)

It was amazing to see how this Ankh-Morpork system evolved during the con. Within a few hours of it starting, the head of the Merchants’ Guild embezzled his guild’s money to purchase the assassination of the head of the Assassins’ Guild so he could take it over, and on the second day, the forged money started to appear. It was magnificent! It was Ankh-Morpork come to life. And I looked down at the hall at the people having fun and enjoying themselves and occasionally charging one another to kill them and I thought, “My Work Here Is Done.…”

My next book out is
Going Postal
. It’s about a fraud, a criminal, a con man, who to some extent becomes redeemed through the book, and learns that in addition to fooling everybody else that he’s a nice guy, he can even fool himself. And a friend of mine who read a draft copy said, “There is a little bit of autobiography in all books, isn’t there?” Only friends will tell you that.

And, indeed, I think I am a fraud. I am a Guest of Honour at this convention. When I was a kid, Guests of Honour, as I said the other night, were giants made of gold and half a mile high. They had names like James Blish, Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke.… I’m five foot seven and I’m never going to get any taller.

I wish I could say I had any purpose in mind when I started the Discworld series. I just thought it was going to be fun. There
was an awful lot of bad fantasy around in the early 1980s. There was plenty of good fantasy around, I have to add, but there were just too many dark lords, or differently pigmented lords as we call them now. I thought it was time to have fun with this.
The Colour of Magic
and
The Light Fantastic
were the result. Then I found that they were selling. This came as a huge surprise to me. So I wrote
Equal Rites
. I wrote a third of
Equal Rites
in one weekend. In fact, after one of the nuclear power stations I was a press officer for exploded. Well, it didn’t really explode. Well, not much. I mean, it more sort of leaked a bit. But not much. You could hardly see it. And no one died. Trust me on this.

The nervousness here comes from eight years as a nuclear press officer. I never really had to deal with a genuine nuclear accident, but some of the things I did have to deal with were slightly worse, from my personal point of view.

There was, for example, the man who came to a nuclear power station on a public Open Day and turned out to be too radioactive to be allowed into the power station. He set off the machine that shouldn’t go bing, which is only supposed to go bing, or rather, not to go bing, when you are leaving the place. That presented a problem: when a man goes through the machine that shouldn’t go bing and it goes bing, you just know that the Health and Safety Executive is going to ask questions if he still goes bing when he leaves, and you’ll have to prove that he brought the bing in with him.

It turned out that he had been dismantling a Second World War aircraft altimeter on his kitchen table—that’s the kind of thing we Brits do for fun—the night before, and had got pure radium all over his hands. So we scrubbed him up and the power station sent some men in nice clean white suits to take his kitchen table away and put it in the low-level-waste depository. Not many kitchen tables end up like that, or go bing.

Oh, while I think about it, I’ll mention there’s something about spending a lot of time with engineers that makes you burst out
laughing when you hear the term “three completely independent fail-safe systems.” I learned all about the “Fred Factor.”

It works like this. Someone decides we’ll have a nuclear power station and they call in leading technical architects, and they design it. Subsystems are designed by competent engineers and sub-subsystems are designed by equally competent engineers and so it goes down and down and then you get to Fred. Fred is not a bad person, or even a bad workman. He is just an innocent victim of other people’s assumptions.

Fred has been given a job sheet and some tools and told he’s got an hour to do the task. Fred has got to wire up three, as it might be, completely independent fail-safe systems and he wires them up and they are indeed completely independent except for one crucial wire from each system which must go through the wall and into the control room. And Fred sits there thinking, “Why should I drill three holes when one will clearly do?” So he takes out his drill and he drills one hole through the wall and he runs all the wires through it and he positions them just under the Acme Sharp-Edged Shelving System, in a bay where a very small truck is shunting goods around and backing up an awful lot and good heavens, one day all three systems fail at once. That’s a terrible surprise, even to Fred.

We had various Fred-type emergencies when I was working for the industry. For example, it should be impossible, completely impossible, to pour nuclear waste down a lavatory. But no one told Fred. So when, after a job of work, he was cleaning the top of the reactor, he tipped a bucket of, well to him, dirty water down the lavatory; and it just so happened that the health physicists, checking the sump outside shortly afterwards, heard the Geiger counter suddenly go “bing!” And there, lodged in the sump, was a bit of iron like a piece of grit.

Unfortunately, just before they had done this, a big tanker had already taken a lot of the sewage sludge away from the station
sewage to a big holding tank at a local sewage works. That was good. It was going nowhere, at least. But how do you find a few tiny lumps of welding spatter, smaller than a pea and, frankly, not highly radioactive, in eighty thousand gallons of crap? Just feeling around is not an option.

There was a meeting between the sewage workers and the nuclear workers, and it was interesting to see the relative concepts of danger and risk. The nuclear workers were saying “Hey, we know about nuclear material, we can handle it, it’s detectable, it’s no problem, we can deal with this; but that? That’s sewage!” And the sewage workers were saying “This is sewage. We’re used to sewage, we eat and drink sewage, we know about sewage, but that? That’s nuclear!”

And finally they came up with a masterstroke: all the stuff was pumped out into tankers and taken up to a coal-fired power station in the Midlands and burned to ash. The ash was put on a conveyor belt and run under a Geiger counter. It detected three little pieces of weld spatter that were slightly radioactive and that was that. I was impressed. A lot of effort had gone into finding these specks, which were rather less dangerous than our friend’s altimeter, and it seemed to me to be a matter of honour as much as safety. Contrary to popular belief, nuclear engineers are quite keen to keep the ticking stuff on the inside.

I remember speaking to the guy who had actually hauled the stuff in his tanker. And I said, “Were you worried?” And he said, “Well, not really. The last load I had to haul was prawns three months beyond their sell-by date. That did worry me a bit.”

All those involved in the enterprise—including me, because I’d handled the media—got a little informal certificate commemorating our efforts. And since engineers are sophisticated humorists, it was printed on dark brown paper.

And then one day … well, I can’t remember what happened at which power station at this particular point, I think Fred had done
something. I spent all day answering the phones and I was so hyper when I got home late on Friday night that I opened up the computer and started to work. On Sunday morning, my wife came up quietly, saved the work in progress, and tucked me up in bed. And that was the last third of
Equal Rites
.

I decided I had to get out of the industry as quickly as I possibly could. There was such a never-ending level of media interest it was messing with my head. Besides, the early Discworld books were selling well enough to make turning pro a possibility. I gave them a month’s notice. It was a fairly pleasant farewell, and they gave me a lovely statuette made of a kind of nice dull grey metal which I really treasure and I keep it by my bed because it saves having to switch the light on while I read.

I finished … and then I wrote more—and possibly began a work rate which has led to the fact that I am now on blood-pressure pills. I lived in dread of not having work in progress. And I developed the habit of starting a book on the same day as I’d finished the last one. There was one period where I had a schedule of four hundred finished words a day. If I could finish the book in three hundred words, I wrote a hundred words of the next book. No excuses. Granddad died, go to funeral, four hundred words. Christmas time, nip out after dinner, four hundred words. And I did that for years and years and years, because I was fixated on the idea that if you have not got work in progress, you are in fact not a writer at all, you are a bum. And somehow I thought that if I stopped writing, the magic would go away. And I was getting some successes. The books were selling very well.
Mort
got to no. 2 in the bestseller lists.
Sourcery
got to no. 1 and stayed in the list for three months. And that started a trend which has continued to this day. I’ve lost count of how many books I’ve sold. I’ve heard fifty million, I’m sure of forty-five million. It’s hard to keep track. There are so many books and translations and all the backlists and things.…

America turned out to be a problem. Some of you may have been
privy to me begging on my knees for a Hugo last night. For a wannabe stand-up comedian like me, you’ll do anything for a laugh. Would I like a Hugo? I gather it’s unusual to be a WorldCon GoH without several. Well, I know that for most of my writing career I have been ineligible because my publishing history in the United States in the early days was marked by sliding publication dates, publishing out of sequence, publishing uncorrected, publishing with my name printed wrong. There were so many things … oh, and publishing and not telling anyone that you had done it, which is not uncommon. By 1998 I was so depressed about it all that I was quite prepared to officially hand over the U.S. publication rights to a U.K. publisher because some of you people, in fact many of you people, I suspect, were part of the new underground railroad by which tens of thousands of British hardcovers were being imported into the United States by the fans who didn’t like/didn’t want to wait for the U.S. versions. My publishers at the time didn’t seem to get their heads around this. You’d see me at a U.S. WorldCon signing U.K. hardcover after U.K. hardcover for a long, long queue; is there not something wrong with this picture? My editor tried to help, but without backup it all seemed an uphill struggle.

Then my American agent said, “No, wait a bit. I think things are going to change.” And what happened was that there was a big shake-up at HarperCollins and at last I had a publisher who thought “This guy is selling gazillions, but not here! Let’s do something about it!” And they gave me a publicist who actually knew my name, which is generally a good start. In 2000 they even asked me to tour.

Back in 1996 I did a signing tour which was miserable and horrible and I spent all my time flying backwards from hub to hub and living on lard balls and salt licks which is what you live on at airports. And it was a terrible tour and I didn’t want to do another one so when they asked me to this time I sent them a big list of demands, like:

I’m not going to do any radio station called Good Morning, City-I’ve-never-been-to-before-and-will-be-leaving-in-two-hours;

I’m not going to take any flight that gets me into a hotel later than about seven o’clock in the evening.…

Oh, yes … arriving at a hotel at midnight is not good. I think it was Rocky Frisco who saved me in Madison, Wisconsin, because the hotel did no food but he had some cold pizza. That’s life in the fast lane, folks. You get in at midnight, you get cold pizza. And you’re up at 6:30 to do Good Morning, City-where-the-pizza-is-so-cooold …

They agreed to everything. I was astonished. And on the 2000 tour the smallest signing I did was bigger than the biggest signing I did in 1996. I did a tour a couple of years ago, same size crowds, a bit bigger maybe than an English tour. Suddenly, it seems, I’m selling in the United States. And who knows, with a bit of effort all round, within a few years, I might get up to where we could have been in about 1996.

And yet, I still feel like a fraud. It’s all been done in fun, folks. I had no big plans. I wrote the first few books for fun. I wrote the next books for fun. I did it because I really wanted to do it. I did it because I got something out of it.

I was a fan, a real convention-going fan, for only maybe three years. Went to a couple of them in the early ’60s. Went to a WorldCon. Got a job. Started courting girls. And suddenly I was whirled away into what may loosely be called “Real Life.” While I have to say, when you work on a newspaper, life doesn’t appear to be all that real.

In 1973 there was a convention in my area, and I thought, I ought to go back. You know, it’s been, what, eight years since I last went to a con. And I walked in, and there was no one I recognized, and I just couldn’t get a handle on it. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had gone in and gone back into fandom right there and then. Mind you, I do recall that Salman
Rushdie actually came second in a science fiction writing competition organized by Gollancz in the late 1970s. Just imagine if he’d won—Ayatollahs from Mars!—he would have had none of that trouble over the
Satanic Verses
, ’cos it would have been SF and therefore unimportant. He’d have been coming along to cons. He’d be standing here now! Ah, but the little turns and twists of history …

Where do the ideas come from? I do not know. But one of the things I did learn from my science fiction reading was that there were other things you could read besides science fiction. I developed a love of history, which school had singularly failed to inculcate into me. I am now in correspondence with my old history master and we get on very well. But his lessons hadn’t told me the things that were really interesting: that, for example, during a large part of the eighteenth century, you could actually get pubs to pay you to take urine away and the tanners would actually pay you to have urine delivered to them. That’s an interesting fact. It must be even more fun to know it when you are fourteen years old.