one day maybe there will, and Terry is certain that it will never happen. In either case, neither of them will believe it until they’re actually eating popcorn at the premiere. And even then, probably not.
NEIL GAIMAN ON TERRY PRATCHETT
Right.
So it’s February of 1985, and it’s a Chinese restaurant in London, and it’s the author’s first interview. His publicist had been pleasantly surprised that anyone would want to talk to him (the author has just written a funny fantasy book called The Colour of Magic), but she’s set up this lunch with a young journalist anyway. The author, a former journalist, has a hat, but it’s a small, black leathery cap, not a Proper Author Hat. Not yet. The journalist has a hat too. It’s a grayish thing, sort of like the ones Humphrey Bogart wears in movies, only when the journalist wears it he doesn’t look like Humphrey Bogart: he looks like someone wearing a grown-up’s hat. The journalist is slowly discovering that, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot become a hat person: it’s not just that it itches, or blows off at inconvenient moments, it’s that he forgets, and leaves it in restaurants, and is now getting very used to knocking on the doors of restaurants about 11:00 a.m. and asking if they found a hat. One day, very soon now, the journalist will stop bothering with hats, and decide to buy a black leather jacket instead.
So they have lunch, and the interview gets printed in Space Voyager magazine, along with a photo of the author browsing the shelves in Forbidden Planet, and most important, they make each other laugh, and like the way the other one thinks.
And the author is Terry Pratchett, and the journalist is me, and it’s been two decades since I left a hat in a restaurant, and one and a half decades since Terry discovered his inner Bestselling-Author-with-a-Proper-Author-Hat.
We don’t see each other much these days, what with living on different continents, and, when we’re on each other’s continent, spending all our time signing books for other people. The last time we ate together was at a sushi counter in Minneapolis, after a signing. It was an all-you-can-eat night, where they put your sushi on little boats and floated it over to you. After a while, obviously feeling we were taking unfair advantage of the whole all-you-can-eat thing, the sushi chef gave up on the putting sushi on little boats, produced something that looked like the Leaning Tower of Yellowtail, handed it to us, and announced that he was going home.
Nothing much had changed, except everything.
These are the things I realized back in 1985:
Terry knew a lot. He had the kind of head that people get when they’re interested in things, and go and ask questions and listen and read. He knew genre, enough to know the territory, and he knew enough outside genre to be interesting.
He was ferociously intelligent.
He was having fun. Then again, Terry is that rarity, the kind of author who likes Writing, not Having Written, or Being a Writer, but the actual sitting there and making things up in front of a screen. At the time we met, he was still working as a press officer for the South Western Electricity board. He wrote four hundred words a night, every night: it was the only way for him to keep a real job and still write books. One night, a year later, he finished a novel, with a hundred words still to go, so he put a piece of paper into his typewriter, and wrote a hundred words of the next novel.
(The day he retired to become a full-time writer, he phoned me up. “It’s only been half an hour since I retired, and already I hate those bastards,” he said cheerfully.)
There was something else that was obvious in 1985: Terry was a science fiction writer. It was the way his mind worked: the urge to take it all apart, and put it back together in different ways, to see how it all fit together. It was the engine that drove Discworld—it’s not a “what if. . .” or an “if only … ” or even an “if this goes on … ”; it was the far more subtle and dangerous “If there was really a … , what would that mean? How would it work?”
In the Nicholls-Clute Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, there was an ancient woodcut of a man pushing his head through the back of the