Terry Pratchett, author of more than 70 books, has died aged 66. He had early-onset Alzheimer’s. Here we reproduce our interview with him about tinkering with science, his battle with Alzheimer’s and the odds of escaping from a crab bucket.
TERRY PRATCHETT’s garden is as full of meandering paths, sudden dead ends and hidden gems as one of his Discworld novels. Copper-hued fish navigate their way through a weed-choked pond, a tray of Venus flytraps sits in a greenhouse that overflows with chillies the length of a child’s arm, and beady-eyed tortoises quietly crouch in a herbarium.
Pratchett himself is slight, dressed all in black. His famously luxuriant beard has been trimmed. His study looks like a medieval chapel, complete with cartoon-like cobwebs and wizardly paraphernalia: there’s a giant bronze lectern, Saturn hangs above a desk, a candle drips into a skull and a cat skulks amongst his papers.
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Now 61, Pratchett was knighted this year and has been awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to literature. He is best known for the 37 books set in his fantasy kingdom of Discworld. A flat planet, balanced atop four elephants which are in turn perched upon a giant turtle flying through space, Discworld is like Lord of the Rings 500 years on – humans, werewolves, vampires and goblins live side by side semi-peacefully.
Its creator is clearly excited by science, collecting facts the way another man might stamps. “It goes without saying that truth is indeed much stranger than fiction,” he says. “Occasionally, some fact will hit you so hard in the face you think, there’s a plot there.”
Pratchett’s fascination with science began as a child, as he amassed picture cards given away with packets of Brooke Bond tea, with their images of Jupiter and the “canals” on Mars. His parents bought him his first telescope and he now has his own observatory amid the apples and pears in his garden. “It was an exciting time to be a child,” he recalls, “I discovered reading about the age of 9 and it didn’t take very long to catch on to science fiction. And I read at such speed in those days – like a chainsaw.”
Even though Pratchett’s father was an engineer, he wasn’t tempted to become a scientist. “Science was interesting, but sitting there watching the teacher do experiments was not. And never, to the best of my knowledge, did anyone at any stage tell us that we were on a planet orbiting the sun in the spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.”
With mathematicians Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart from the University of Warwick, he has written three Science of Discworld books. Pratchett admits he doesn’t have the right kind of mind to be a scientist, but relishes tinkering with science. In Nation, his previous (non-Discworld) book, he discusses the scientific method through the mouth of a Victorian girl stranded on a remote South Sea island.
Pratchett’s latest book, Unseen Academicals – an addition to the Discworld series – was prompted by his fans who suggested he write a book about football. “Football is there to carry the plot,” says Pratchett, but the book itself is about his crab bucket theory. The idea, he explains, is that football evolved during the industrial revolution, when people converged on cities from the countryside. “The old certainties back home had gone, they had nothing in common apart from their poverty but they formed a clan by supporting the same football team.” And crab bucket? Because crabs don’t often escape from traps: “Self-made ghettoes are hard to get out of.”
Although Discworld is peopled with wizards and vampires who have agreed not to suck blood, the central character in Unseen Academicals appears to be a goblin, and the main action takes place in a university whose librarian is an orang-utan, Discworld’s themes and characters will nevertheless seem oddly familiar to us here on “Roundworld”. One of Pratchett’s preoccupations is with the natural world and what is happening to it. “I think we’re doomed,” he pronounces, “because politicians think in five years at a time. Every time I remember that we live on a planet, it scares the shit out of me, because they’re such dangerous things to live on: two miles down there you burn, two miles up there you freeze. It’s so delicate.” Pratchett says he’s always recycled and still grows his own veg, evidenced by the marrows as big as space ships and the Halloween-esque squash that litter the garden.
“Planets are dangerous: two miles down you burn, two miles up you freeze”
Recently Pratchett has become almost as famous for having Alzheimer’s disease as he is for selling 65 million books in over 35 languages. He was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) two years ago – a rare form of the disease which causes the back of the brain to shrink. He has lost his ability to type as a result and had to dictate Unseen Academicals to his assistant. For his latest book he’s using a speech-to-text computer program called Dragon Dictate, which learns as it goes. He has dumped his entire collection of novels onto the hard drive and has been training the program not only to recognise his accent but also to learn the words he uses – orc and yennork aren’t in most authors’ lexicons. “It’s astonishing,” he says, but he finds it falls down on punctuation.
So far Pratchett hasn’t noticed any changes in his writing, but he has been approached by scientists who want to track the deterioration they believe may occur. “I like vultures,” says Pratchett with some force, “but at least they have the decency to wait until the donkey has died. It is not fine if people want my co-operation on this.”
Although Pratchett has publicly raged against Alzheimer’s and announced at the Alzheimer’s Research Trust Conference last year that he would “eat a dead mole’s arse” if he thought it would cure him, he says he has come to terms with death. His one stipulation is that he should be allowed to die how and when he wants. He prefers the term “assisted death” to “assisted suicide” because of the negative implications of suicide. “The current situation suits no one. It’s like a nun giving you a sex lesson,” he says. “They don’t want you to do it.”
“I intend to go on living for as long as possible, and no one really knows how long that is, because PCA is rather odd, and also I’m rather odd. I have quite a large brain – although my teachers would line up to tell you I never used any of it very much – and so I’ll keep going.”
Profile
Terry Pratchett began his career as a journalist before becoming a press officer for the UK’s Central Electricity Generating Board. His first novel, Carpet People, was published when he was 23, and the first in the Discworld series, The Colour of Magic, was published 12 years later. His 36th Discworld novel, Making Money, was the UK’s biggest-selling adult fiction hardback of 2008
Readers’ questions for Terry Pratchett
Either Discworld has an infinite supply of water, or all the water that gets lost over its edge is conserved through some miraculous mechanism. What methods do Discworld’s inhabitants use to conserve their supply of water?
Arrangements are made. It goes over the edge and comes back as rain. I’m not quite certain how it gets back, but on the other hand, we’re talking about a giant turtle flying through space.
As a person with Alzheimer’s who supports research into curing the disease, what work have you seen which gives you hope for a cure?
Not a cure, but if you can catch and develop Alzheimer’s at the age of 40 and we can see to it that it slows down and is reined in until you’re in your 90s, who would not want to go for that?
What real-world scientific or technological issues interest or inspire you the most?
The vast reaches of modern physics. I don’t understand them. Science fiction plays with the most outlandish concepts as soon as they’re mentioned in żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ. Alternate universes, I’ll have some of that. And I can’t help but be amazed at how the universe has opened to our inquiries. We don’t run into too many brick walls.
Where can I get a hat like yours?
James Lock & Co. of St James, Pall Mall in London. Ask for a Borsalino.
