Read The View from the Cheap Seats Online

Authors: Neil Gaiman

The View from the Cheap Seats (44 page)

A Slip of the Keyboard:
Terry Pratchett

I
want to tell you about my friend Terry Pratchett, and it's not easy. I'm going to tell you something you may not know.

Some people have encountered an affable man with a beard and a hat. They believe they have met Sir Terry Pratchett. They have not.

Science fiction conventions often give you someone to look after you, to make sure you get from place to place without getting lost. Some years ago I ran into someone who had once been Terry's handler at a convention in Texas. His eyes misted over at the memory of getting Terry from his panel to the book-dealers' room and back. “What a jolly old elf Sir Terry is,” he said.

And I thought,
No. No, he's not.

Back in February 1991, Terry and I were on a book signing tour for
Good Omens,
a book we had written together. We can tell you dozens of not-only-funny-but-also-true stories about the things that happened on that tour. Terry alludes to a few of them in this book. This story is true, but it is not one of the stories we tell.

We were in San Francisco. We had just done a stock signing in a bookshop, signing the dozen or so copies of our book they had ordered. Terry looked at the itinerary. Next stop was a radio station: we were due to have an hour-long interview on live radio. “From the address, it's just down the street from here,” said Terry. “And we've got half an hour. Let's walk it.”

This was a long time ago, best beloved, in the days before GPS systems and mobile phones and taxi-summoning apps and suchlike useful things that would have told us in moments that no, it would not be a few blocks to the radio station. It would be several miles, all uphill and mostly through a park.

We called the radio station as we went, whenever we passed a pay phone, to tell them that we knew we were now late for a live broadcast, and that we were, promise cross our sweaty hearts, walking as fast as we could.

I would try and say cheerful, optimistic things as we walked. Terry said nothing, in a way that made it very clear that anything I could say would probably just make things worse. I did not, ever, say, at any point on that walk, that all of this would have been avoided if we had just got the bookshop to call us a taxi. There are things you can never unsay, that you cannot say and still remain friends, and that would have been one of them.

We reached the radio station at the top of the hill, a very long way from anywhere, about forty minutes into our hour-long live interview. We arrived all sweaty and out of breath, and they were broadcasting the breaking news. A man had just started shooting people in a local McDonald's, which is not the kind of thing you want to have as your lead-in when you are now meant to talk about a funny book you've written about the end of the world and how we're all going to die.

The radio people were angry with us, too, and understandably so: it's no fun having to improvise when your guests are late. I don't think that our fifteen minutes on the air were very funny.

(I was later told that Terry and I had both been blacklisted by that San Franciscan radio station for several years, because leaving a show's hosts to burble into the dead air for forty minutes is something the Powers of Radio do not easily forget or forgive.)

Still, by the top of the hour it was all over. We went back to our hotel, and this time we took a taxi. Terry was silently furious: with himself, mostly, I suspect, and with the world that had not told him that the distance from the bookshop to the radio station was much further than it had looked on our itinerary. He sat in the back of the cab beside me white with anger, a non-directional ball of fury. I said something hoping to placate him. Perhaps I said that ah well, it had all worked out in the end, and it hadn't been the end of the world, and suggested it was time to not be angry anymore.

Terry looked at me. He said, “Do not underestimate this anger. This anger was the engine that powered
Good Omens
.”

I thought of the driven way that Terry wrote, and of the way that he drove the rest of us with him, and I knew that he was right.

There is a fury to Terry Pratchett's writing. It's the fury that was the engine that powered
Discworld,
and you will discover it here: it's the anger at the headmaster who would decide that six-year-old Terry Pratchett would never be smart enough for the Eleven-Plus exam; anger at pompous critics, and at those who think that serious is the opposite of funny; anger at his early American publishers who could not bring his books out successfully.

The anger is always there, an engine that drives. By the time this book enters its final act, and Terry learns he has a rare, early-onset form of Alzheimer's, the targets of his fury change: now he is angry with his brain and his genetics and, more than these, furious at a country that will not permit him (or others in a similarly intolerable situation) to choose the manner and the time of their passing.

And that anger, it seems to me, is about Terry's underlying sense of what is fair and what is not.

It is that sense of fairness that underlies Terry's work and his
writing, and it's what drove him from school to journalism to the press office of the Central Electricity Generating Board to the position of being one of the best-loved and bestselling writers in the world.

It's the same sense of fairness that means that in this book, sometimes in the cracks, while talking of other things, he takes time to punctiliously acknowledge his influencesâAlan Coren, for example, who pioneered so many of the techniques of short humor that Terry and I have filched over the years; or the glorious overstuffed heady thing that is
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
and its compiler, the Reverend E. Cobham Brewer, that most serendipitous of authors. Terry's
Brewer's
introduction made me smileâwe would call each other up in delight whenever we discovered a book by Brewer we had not seen before (“'Ere! Have you already got a copy of Brewer's
A Dictionary of Miracles: Imitative, Realistic and Dogmatic
?”)

The pieces selected here cover Terry's entire writing career, from schoolboy to Knight of the Realm of Letters, and are still of a piece. Nothing has dated, save perhaps for the references to specific items of computer hardware. (I suspect that, if he has not by now donated it to a charity or a museum, Terry could tell you exactly where his Atari Portfolio is, and just how much he paid for the handcrafted add-on memory card that took its memory up to an impossibly huge one megabyte.) The authorial voice in these essays is always Terry's: genial, informed, sensible, drily amused. I suppose that, if you look quickly and are not paying attention, you might, perhaps, mistake it for jolly.

But beneath any jollity there is a foundation of fury. Terry Pratchett is not one to go gentle into any night, good or otherwise. He will rage, as he leaves, against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness, not just the dying of the light, although that's here too. And, hand in hand with the anger, like an angel and a demon walking hand in hand into the sunset, there is love: for human beings, in all our fallibility; for treasured objects; for stories; and ultimately and in all things, love for human dignity.

Or to put it another way, anger is the engine that drives him, but it is the greatness of spirit that deploys that anger on the side of the angels, or better yet for all of us, the orangutans.

Terry Pratchett is not a jolly old elf at all. Not even close. He's so much more than that.

As Terry walks into the darkness much too soon, I find myself raging too: at the injustice that deprives us ofâwhat? Another twenty or thirty books? Another shelf-full of ideas and glorious phrases and old friends and new, of stories in which people do what they really do do best, which is use their heads to get themselves out of the trouble they got into by not thinking? Another book or two like this, of journalism and agitprop and even the occasional introduction? But truly, the loss of these things does not anger me as it should. It saddens me, but I, who have seen some of them being built close up, understand that any Terry Pratchett book is a small miracle, and we already have more than might be reasonable, and it does not behoove any of us to be greedy.

I rage at the imminent loss of my friend.

And I think,
What would Terry do with this anger?

Then I pick up my pen, and I start to write.

This was the introduction to Terry Pratchett's nonfiction collection,
A Slip of the Keyboard,
2014. I wrote it while he was still with us, could still read it. He told me he liked it, and I was relieved. Terry died on March 12, 2015. I can't talk to him any longer. I miss my friend.

Credits

Many of the pieces appearing in this collection were first published elsewhere. Permission and copyright information as follows:

“Credo” copyright Â© 2015 by Neil Gaiman. First published in the
New Statesman
.

“Telling Lies for a Living . . . and Why We Do It: The Newbery Medal Speech, 2009” copyright Â© 2009 by Neil Gaiman. First published in the
Journal of the Association of Library Service to Children
.

“Four Bookshops” copyright Â© 2002 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores
.

“Three Authors: On Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton; The MythCon 35 Guest of Honor Speech” copyright Â© 2004 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Mythprint
.

“Ghosts in the Machines: Some Hallowe'en Thoughts” copyright Â© 2006 by Neil Gaiman. First published in the
New York Times
.

“Some Reflections on Myth (with Several Digressions onto Gardening, Comics and Fairy Tales)” copyright Â© 1999 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art
#31.

“The PEN Awards and
Charlie Hebdo
” copyright Â© 2015 by Neil Gaiman. First published in the
New Statesman
.

“What the [Very Bad Swear Word] Is a Children's Book, Anyway? The Zena Sutherland Lecture” copyright Â© 2012 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Horn Book Magazine
.

“These Are Not Our Faces” copyright Â© 1996 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
The Faces of Fantasy
.

“Reflections: On Diana Wynne Jones” copyright Â© 2012 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Reflections
.

“Terry Pratchett: An Appreciation” copyright Â© 2004 by Neil Gaiman. First published in the
Noreascon 4 Book
.

“On Dave McKean” copyright Â© 2002 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
World Fantasy Convention 2002 Gods and Monsters
.

“How to Read Gene Wolfe” copyright Â© 2002 by Neil Gaiman. First published in the
Program Book of the World Horror Convention 2002
.

“Remembering Douglas Adams” copyright Â© 2005 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams
.

“Harlan Ellison:
The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World
” copyright Â© 1994 by Neil Gaiman. First published in The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.

“On Stephen King, for the
Sunday Times
” copyright Â© 2012 by Neil Gaiman. First published in the UK
Sunday Times
.

“Geoff Notkin: Meteorite Man” copyright Â© 2012 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Rock Star: Adventures of a Meteorite Man
.

“About Kim Newman, with Notes on the Creation and Eventual Dissolution of the Peace and Love Corporation” copyright Â© 1994 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
The Original Dr. Shade and Other Stories
.

“
Gumshoe:
A Book Review” copyright Â© 1989 Punch Productions Ltd. First published in
Punch
.

“SIMCITY” copyright Â© 1995 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
SimCity 2000
.

“Six to Six” copyright Â© 1988 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Time Out
.

“Fritz Leiber: The Short Stories” copyright Â© 2010 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Selected Stories
.

“
Hothouse
” copyright Â© 2008 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Hothouse
.

“Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 and What Science Fiction Is and Does” copyright Â© 2012 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Fahrenheit 451
.

“Of Time, and Gully Foyle: Alfred Bester and
The Stars My Destination
” copyright Â© 1996 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
The Stars My Destination
.

“Samuel R. Delany and
The Einstein Intersection
” copyright Â© 1998 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
The Einstein Intersection
.

“
The Bride of Frankenstein
” copyright Â© 2005 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Cinema Macabre
.

“
MirrorMask
: An Introduction” copyright Â© 2005 by Neil Gaiman. First published in MirrorMask: The Illustrated Film Script of the Motion Picture from the Jim Henson Company.

“
MirrorMask:
A Sundance Diary” copyright Â© 2005 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Look
magazine.

“The Nature of the Infection: Some Thoughts on
Doctor Who
” copyright Â© 2003 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Eye of the Tyger
.

“On Comics and Films: 2006” copyright Â© 2006 by Neil Gaiman. First published in the
Guardian
.

“Good Comics and Tulips: A Speech” copyright Â© 1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Gods and Tulips
.

“A Speech to Professionals Contemplating Alternative Employment,” Given at PROCON, April 1997 copyright Â© 1997 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Gods and Tulips
.”

“But What Has That to Do with Bacchus? Eddie Campbell and
Deadface
” copyright Â© 1990 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Deadface,
vol. 1:
Immortality Isn't Forever
.

“Confessions: On
Astro City
and Kurt Busiek” copyright Â© 1999 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Astro City: Confession
.

“
Batman: Cover to Cover
” copyright Â© 2005 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Batman: Cover to Cover
.

“
Bone:
An Introduction, and Some Subsequent Thoughts” copyright Â© 2008 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Bone and Beyond
.

“Jack Kirby: King of Comics” copyright Â© 2008 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Kirby: King of Comics
.

“
The Simon and Kirby Superheroes
” copyright Â© 2010 by Neil Gaiman. First published in The Simon and Kirby Superheroes.

“
The Best of the Spirit
” copyright Â© 2005 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
The Best of the Spirit
.

“Will Eisner: New York Stories” copyright Â© 2006 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Will Eisner's New York: Life in the Big City
.

“Some Strangeness in the Proportion: The Exquisite Beauties of Edgar Allan Poe” copyright Â© 2004 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Selected Poems and Tales
.

“On
The New Annotated Dracula
” copyright Â© 2008 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
The New Annotated Dracula
.

“From the Days of Future Past:
The Country of the Blind and Other Stories,
by H. G. Wells” copyright Â© 2006 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
The Country of the Blind and Other Stories
.

“Business as Usual, During Alterations:
Information Doesn't Want to Be Free,
by Cory Doctorow” copyright Â© 2014 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age
.

“The Mystery of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown” Â© 1991 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
100 Great Detectives
.

“Concerning Dreams and Nightmares: The Dream Stories of H. P. Lovecraft” copyright Â© 1995 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death
.

“On
The 13 Clocks
by James Thurber” copyright Â© 2008 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
The 13 Clocks
.

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