SOURCE: Pratchett, Terry, and Locus. “Terry Pratchett: Discworld and Beyond.” Locus 43, no. 6 (December 1999): 4, 73-6.

[In the following interview, Pratchett discusses his hopes for humanity's future, his beliefs about the nature of science, and his feelings about the marketing of the Discworld series.]

Terence David John Pratchett was born April 28, 1948 in Beaconsfield, Bucks., UK, and attended High Wycombe Technical High School, where his story “The Hades Business” appeared in the school magazine when he was 13, and commercially in Science Fantasy just two years later. He studied Art, History, and English, but left school at 17 for a newspaper job with the Bucks Free Press. The job brought him into contact with independent publisher Colin Smythe's co-director during an interview, and Pratchett mentioned he had written a book, The Carpet People—would they be interested in looking at it?

Colin Smythe published humorous fantasy The Carpet People in 1971, and then humorous SF The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981)—as well as cartoons for Smythe's monthly journal Psychic Researcher. In 1980, he was named press officer for an electricity company, and he notes, “Although I dealt with other types of power station, the four nuclear power stations in the southwest of England were on my patch, and I had a very exciting eight years as a press officer, before I was making enough money from writing to go full time.”

His first Discworld book, The Colour of Magic, appeared in 1983, and was a success both as book and spinoff—after Corgi bought paperback rights, the BBC “Woman's Hour” adapted it as a six-part serial. One more Discworld book, The Light Fantastic, appeared from Colin Smythe in 1986, and the following year Pratchett moved to Gollancz, first in a co-publishing deal with Smythe, later with Smythe as his agent. By the '90s, his books had become bestsellers, as well as generating numerous spinoffs—a cartoon series, Discworld computer games, desk diaries, non-fiction guides and maps, and dramatic adaptations of various books by Stephen Briggs. Good Omens (1990), a non-Discworld collaboration with Neil Gaiman, has also been very popular, and a film adaptation is in the works. His YA SF series, “The Bromeliad,” has three books of the “Nomes”—Truckers (1989), Diggers (1990), and Wings (1990). The 24th Discworld book, The Fifth Elephant, has just appeared in Britain, with a US edition to follow.

Pratchett and wife Lyn (they married in 1968) are the parents of daughter Rhianna, born in 1976. He received a 1989 British Fantasy Award (best novel) for Pyramids, an O.B.E. in the Queen's Honours of 1998, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Warwick in 1999 (“I was very pleased too—to get to wear the robes and the funny hat, and all that.”)

“Discworld started as an antidote to bad fantasy, because there was a big explosion of fantasy in the late '70s, an awful lot of it was highly derivative, and people weren't bringing new things to it. The first couple of books quite deliberately pastiched bits of other writers and things—good writers, because it's the good ones most people can spot: ‘Ah, here's the Anne McCaffrey bit.’ I was rapidly stitching together a kind of consensus fantasy universe, and the one trick was, ‘Let's make people act.’ I remember a description Mad magazine did about The Flintstones: ‘dinosaurs from 65 million years ago, flung together with idiots from today.’ I tried to do something like that with Discworld. Not everyone on Discworld is entirely a modern character, but they are recognizable to us. Their concerns are more like 20th-century concerns. But they also seem to me to be aware—I've invented things like ‘narrative causality,’ which practically says, ‘the characters know that they are in a story.’ What they do know is that they have roles to play.

“I make notes all the time. Writing the Discworld novels is almost a kind of journalism. It may be journalism that takes place two or three years after the fact, but the last 10 books maybe, have been subtly influenced by moderately current affairs. There's a state of mind I call Delta Star, in acknowledgment to Joseph Wambaugh, who wrote a book called Delta Star. It is, I believe, a term from physics. I use it to mean that state of being when you've got not an idea for a book, but a small constellation of ideas, and you know that there is going to be a story. You don't know what it's going to be, but you can sense that if you investigate these properly, a story is waiting there. And that's a lovely feeling, because for a month or two it's like having your brain tuned in, and other things happen, or you read things, or you see things, overhear things—all of which somehow fit into the story plan, as it unfolds. It's amazing how often things happen in the news which can almost be lifted out.

“In Jingo, one of the things I wanted to explore was just how quickly apparently peaceful populations can be persuaded to go to war. A friend of mine who has a French wife asked her, on my behalf, how long it would take to get France and England to go to war, and she said, ‘About 20 seconds.’

‘Jingoism’ is a term meaning unthinking, mindless, bullying patriotism. The knee-jerk reaction, in some parts of the West, to anything involving Arabs, for example. The way you can dehumanize the enemy by giving them a nickname, and fuel the jingoism by stories of how they are devilishly, cruelly brave on the one hand, but very stupid and cowardly on the other—both at the same time, obviously. Because if you have enough hatred behind it, all these stories can be told in the same conversation. When jingoism is upon a population, they see no inconsistency in all this.

“Mostly wars go on because there was a war yesterday. So you start off by ‘somebody kicked somebody's donkey,’ perhaps scaled up on an international basis, but after a certain time, atrocities are committed in revenge for the atrocities that were committed by the other side yesterday. One of the uses of politicians—they don't have many uses—but one of the specialized uses of politicians is to stop wars. I think it quite hard for soldiers to stop wars. There isn't a ‘don't fire’ trigger on the gun. Sooner or later, people have to talk. That's why I've watched, with admiration and concern, what's been happening in South Africa, because with all the problems it looks as if something that surely had to end in bloodshed is not ending in that much bloodshed—but on the other hand, it hasn't quite ended yet.

“I think we may have atomic terrorism in the future, but let us not fall into the trap of thinking that history has ended now. We have at least a few hundred years left. I always treasure the final scenes of War Games, where flashed up in very quick succession on the big board, the computer WOPR, are the various scenarios that the computer has run, the suggestion being that the US is saying all these little scenarios—‘What if Ireland attacked Israel?’ ‘If Iceland attacked South Africa. …’ I don't know where the battle lines will be drawn in 20 years time.

“In one way, there's absolutely nothing we can do to the planet that is worse than what, for want of a better word, the planet does to itself. Well OK, sometimes it's a rock that smashes in. But catastrophe is a natural state; we just happen to have lived through a very peaceful period. I'm not talking just about asteroids or cometary heads smacking into the planet. Natural catastrophic changes in the content of the atmosphere, for example. Ice ages, of course. Huge volcanic areas going off more or less all at once. There's a whole slew of things that have gone wrong in the history of the planet. We've missed out on them. We have a few seconds on the Earth, at the end of which, if we're still there, we're probably going to die as a species. One mathematical model only gives the human race a couple of hundred years. I distrust that one. It's like dropping the bread once, and then deducing it always falls butter side down.

“I find this as worrying as extrapolating from what we know on the number of planets that are inhabited in the galaxy. We know nothing, but we have a lot of hope. It seems to me it's a basic fallacy—‘How lucky we are to be here’—well, clearly we are, because if we weren't here, we wouldn't be lucky, we wouldn't be us, luck wouldn't exist. We're here because we're here! But we're probably overdue for a big asteroid. Given the life history of the planet, probably there's nothing we can actually do before we become a thin smear in the bedrock. We can probably leave a few chemicals around, a few compounds that wouldn't naturally occur.

“When you and I talk about this, when anyone else interested in science fiction talks about this, they bring to it an entire toolbox of science fiction ideas that have been explored, which is one of the great things about SF. Once we're talking about the future race discovering the ruins of mankind, we're now into a science fiction scenario. I believe we may well be all there is. But the point is, that's only guesswork. I'm also a little worried, when people talk about finding nice blue-green planets that we can move to, because as scientist Jack Cohen pointed out, if they're blue—green inhabitable planets, they probably will be inhabited.

“I have no great hopes of space habitation. Too many things can go wrong. The nice thing about planets is, comparatively small things can go wrong, and checks and balances come into play. I'm not quite certain how you do that on a moon base. Remember, I worked for eight years in the nuclear industry. I know that if you put a handle on a door and mark it ‘Pull,’ six people will pull, three will push, and one will say, ‘Do you want me to pull or push?’ I would hate to have to bank the human race's survival on a generation ship, because when it was being constructed, some guy at some point was anxious to get off early on a Friday afternoon, and something he didn't do then, some washer he didn't put on, is just going to be lurking there for a few hundred years, until finally the nut drops off and the screw falls out, and the piece of cladding comes loose, and another wire presses against a second wire—and suddenly you're going around in circles!

“On the other hand, it's worth a try, because there's nowhere else to go, and the planet will be made uninhabitable no matter what we do. But the optimistic side is this: To the universe, it doesn't matter if we live or die, but it does matter to us. We have invented the concept of things mattering. It does not matter to Mother Nature whether tigers live or die. Millions of species have lived and died, and some of them were—in our eyes—thoroughly worthy of living. But that doesn't matter, when a damn great rock slaps into the planet. I like humanity. I would quite like to see us continue.

“I have a pessimistic head, but an optimistic heart. We're getting old, so everything's going to hell in a handbasket, just as it was for your grandfather. That's why I always take a step back. Mother Nature wants me dead. My daughter is of child-bearing age. I just look back at all the things that have been achieved by technology. The fact that with these glasses on I can see clearly, and a thousand and one other things. They haven't made life better for everybody, and aspects of technology have made life bad for a few, but I cannot believe that it's entirely a bad thing.

“One thing I have learned is that everything is more complicated than you think, up to the point where it's then more simple than you think. Lots and lots of things have conspired, for want of a better word, over the direction our civilization is taking, and science fiction is only a small part of it. Science fiction has given us names for things—death ray, Frankenstein. I wonder how different the whole position with genetically altered crops would be if the word ‘Frankenstein’ wasn't lying around ready to be used. In the '60s, there were pictures of cities in the Amazonian rain forest—yay!—nuclear power making everything run. We'd be genetically altering the crops, and that was good—hey, we can have potatoes that taste like carrots! But who was actually cheerleading?

“Most people just get on with their lives. They hope tomorrow will be no worse than today, hope their children will do better than them. They watch those things—the woman in the Kitchen of the Future, taking the pill out, putting it on the plate, putting the plate into some oven, pressing some buttons, and out comes the great big cake. We were being told that's what it would be like in 1950, 1960, 1970. We were singularly bad at predicting some of the things that have happened, but we still live in a science fiction universe.

“This is something I come back to again and again: We're living in science fiction, but we don't realize it. I was buying something for my wife in Perth, Australia, last time I was on tour. I couldn't remember her size, so I phoned her up. (The time zones are about right.) So I was standing in this shop, saying, ‘Would you prefer it in blue or green?,’ and we were chatting and so on. That is a science fiction conversation! All the more so for being mundane. I'm actually making a phone call all around the world with my mobile phone, to ask my wife her dress size! We no longer think twice about seeing live coverage from anywhere in the world, or indeed on one or two neighboring astronomical bodies.

“I can remember the great excitement at the first live transatlantic pictures. All those things creep in under the wire, and become part of everyday life. Who would have thought, in the opening years of the 20th century, that computing power would be so cheap and readily available, tens of thousands of people would own computers that would periodically download a bit of information from a radio telescope at Arecibo and do a little search of it to try and detect signs of anything resembling a signal from an alien civilization? The computer is so cheap, so powerful, that while you're doing something else, that is going on. Imagine that as a science fiction story in the '60s! But we don't think about it, we just do it.

“How much impact has science fiction had on history in this century? From where we sit, science fiction is very important. But the Western industrialized world is full of people who don't watch Star Trek, don't read science fiction. A genre which has been, on the whole, marginalized and despised at the same time is—as sci-fi Jesuits would say—the hidden hand behind the scenes, changing the way people think. In fact, it's a bunch of guys having fun, or exploring some scientific ideas—which, on the whole, the scientists are presenting to us first.

“Science fiction now has a much more pervasive influence, and there are probably millions of people who watch Star Trek, Red Dwarf, whatever. It's very strange how television channels on the one hand almost disown science fiction, on the other hand know that it's worth putting on at peak viewing time because so many people will watch it. It's just part of the cultural diet now. But to what extent we've steered it I don't know. We have given things names, which is quite a powerful thing—one of the things wizards have done throughout time, the naming of things. Sometimes it's necessary to have the name, so you can have the thing.

“If we include the screen, we always have been taught by science fiction that the flaming sword burns the hand that holds it. You have all the power to build Jurassic Park, but you can't stop one computer nerd shutting down the whole place. There are dangers that come with all these things.

“All the genres are blurred, to the extent that now while there are clearly core things that you can point to and say. ‘This is science fiction, this is fantasy,’ the genres have, to a large extent become tendencies. You can read a Tom Clancy novel which is the usual 1,000 words of weapon specification, and yet it contains a large science fiction element. Romance, western, fantasy, science fiction, are now flavors rather than substances. I've always said that I consider science fiction to be fantasy with nuts and bolts on the outside. The hardness of science fiction is often the hardness of the crust on the meringue. If you knock it too hard, you'll find it's curiously soft on the inside.

“When something's happening on which they want a ‘science fiction writer,’ the BBC phones me up. ‘We've got this thing about water being discovered on the moon, and we'd like a quote from a science fiction writer.’ I don't do that stuff! When they thought they had discovered life on the Martian meteorites, I got phoned up on the news because I was down on their list of ‘sells a lot—science fiction writer.’ I say, ‘Look, I can give you a list of names of real science fiction writers that really have investigated this stuff.’ But they need it in the next ten minutes. We insiders know how fluid everything is between genres, but insofar as the genres are seen from outside, I'm not a science fiction writer. They call me one, but this is because journalists are often too lazy to differentiate.

“I have completed the 24th ‘Discworld’ novel, The Fifth Elephant, and now I'm working on the 25th. Currently, my plan is to take a brief break from Discworld after the 25th, and do some other things I have in mind, but I do know that there are two more Discworld stories I really would like to do. In fact, the one I'm working on at the moment could be buddied, if I was doing what I call Draft Zero, which is the one where you just put down more or less anything. You've rammed the clay onto the potter's wheel, and you're probing to see what shape it's going to be, and it rapidly divided into two stories. For a while, I was writing them in parallel, to see if they connected at any point, and they wouldn't, so it's very nice to know I've got the seed of another novel just sitting there. So I know where two books are, as it were, which gives me a nice, warm feeling.

“Apart from Good Omens, I've done seven non-Discworld books which were marketed as children's books because of certain conventions. If children are the heroes, then it must be a children's book. (Mark Twain existed before marketing directors.) The advantage of Discworld is that it's a whole world, so I can fit practically any fantasy story into it. I've got elements of the modern world, and elements of medieval—I can mix and match. I don't think that even the most rabid fan expects complete consistency within Discworld, because in Ankh-Morpork you have what is apparently a Renaissance city, but with elements of early Victorian England, and the medieval world is still hanging on. It's in a permanent state of turmoil, which is very interesting for the author.

“I've done quite a lot of work on another fantasy series. It's based on one simple premise. It isn't quite like this, but using SF terms, what it boils down to is: A time traveler interferes in Arthurian England—an Arthurian England that never existed, but the one we usually read about and see on the screen—as a result of which, the person who draws the sword from the stone is a 14-year-old girl. That means that you now have the Arthurian cycle rolling down the road, but absolutely nothing from now on is going to be as it, for want of a better word, ‘should’ be. We have our time traveler in the Merlin role, knowing what history should have been. I'm not going to say too much more, except that what you don't get is the Arthurian cycle with the sexes changed, because that doesn't work. If you have a queen wielding the sword, what you get is something much closer to the court of Queen Elizabeth the First, where the queen is wielding her power precisely by not marrying anybody. That gives rise to other things. Different pressures are put on the society. It's a fun thing to do because you have the huge momentum of Arthurian mythology there, which you turn in a different direction right at the start. But it may be, purely for contractual reasons, I'll do one more Discworld before starting that.

“I'm a great admirer of Stephen Baxter, but you can always think with Steve, if you've got to page 100 and he hasn't moved at least a hundred billion trillion years past the destruction of the universe, I'm sure he feels that he's not doing things right! This is the modern incarnation of the big, blush, gosh-wow science fiction. James Blish made my jaws drop. Wow! Wow!

“Whatever else Discworld contains, it's got ‘accessibility’ written on the surface. If you're familiar with that consensus universe which begins with the fairy tale, you can get into this. It's perhaps a little harder now. After 25 books, I have to accept that you are intelligent enough to read the 24th Discworld book in the same way that someone watching Star Trek, the Next Generation has got to know by now that Worf is a Klingon, and that once upon a time the Klingons were enemies of the humans. You don't have to explain it every episode.

“What I found, as the books progressed, was that Discworld was an entire world. I've got the city of Ankh-Morpork, which I hope is becoming the most carefully delineated fantasy city of all time—I think it really operates as a city—which is a huge melting pot of bits that won't melt. I've flung together all the various classical races of fantasy and turned them into citizens. They do generate, from my point of view, wonderful new stories. And I think Discworld has matured sufficiently—the last five or six books I think are quite dark. It's pessimistic in the Arthurian sense, that things will die, and something goes on. There's always the sword back in the stone. There's always the king asleep under the mountain. Nothing is ever final.

“The opening section of Carpe Jugulum contains the somewhat tortured musings of, effectively, a village midwife with no medical backup, who must choose between allowing a newborn baby or its mother to die, because she cannot save both of them, until finally—on her broomstick—she sees the rooftops of all the country below, and thinks of all the other little secrets she's known. This is not fiction. The broomstick is, but you think of the village midwife 100 years ago, 50 years ago in some areas. When the old man is screaming in agony, and the relatives say, ‘Is there anything you can do for him?’ What is never said, and what is possibly not even being articulated in the front levels of the brain, is: ‘Is there some way that you can stop his misery?’ And everyone understands what it is, and no one would ever, ever say what it is. One of the comforts of our civilization is the chances of actually dying in excruciating pain—if it's in a hospital, the chances are that you'll pass peacefully. I find that, as I get older, curiously reassuring. But this is not comedy stuff.

“In Granny Weatherwax's case, all this is impinging on her. She has to make these choices all the time. There's never any reward, and there's never already a way of doing it the right way. And this is wacky comedy writer Terry Pratchett! But in order to get the light, you have to do the shadows. You have to have what I think Esther Friesner called ‘tragic leaks.’ Then, later on, you can have the comedy. Comedy has always had tragedy built in.

“In The Fifth Elephant, I have Uberwald, which is basically the horror country, as opposed to the classic fantasy country. Everyone has a servant called Igor, because you must have a servant called Igor, we just know this. All the Igors are related, and all the Igors are expert surgeons. If you're seriously hurt, Igors will help you out. They've always got a few spare limbs and organs on ice, and it's kind of understood that when you die, it's time to give something back. Igors are a great help to the community, and when an Igor says he has his father's hands, this is no metaphor. With his dying breath, he says that all the bits are going to go, and all the other Igors turn up in their long coats with various insulated boxes, and three-quarters of an hour later they come out of the room and go their separate ways, and the last one is carrying the late Igor's suit and shoes, because he knows a poor soul somewhere who can deal with it. Their motto is, ‘What goes around comes around.’ Within the context of Discworld, there's something quite noble about what they do. They look very ugly, but they are Discworld's medical future.

“There was a scene I went to the wire with my editor on. She said it was just too horrific for a Discworld book. It's the one in the village square, where the people are lining up for the vampires to feed, because that's now part of the compact with the vampires, and they've got some young children there for the first time. Agnes, the witch who is watching this, sees the expressions on the parent's face, and when one cries out, they're hustled out by other members of the village. It's like the story ‘It's a Good Life’, that kind of scenario. Dracula landing in and sucking the neck of some 17-year-old girl in a revealing nightdress, that's the classic way. What the villagers have learned is, this is infinitely worse, because this is just grinding down the soul. It upset my editor so much, in the Discworld context, that she asked, ‘Could you make the children older?’ I said, ‘No, the children are young.’ If they were 16 years old, who cares what happens to a 16-year-old? This was a debate on why it was necessary in the book, and obviously yes, it had to be.

“I'm currently working on The Last Hero, a novella which will be profusely illustrated by Paul Kidby—not my other illustrator, Josh Kirby. He very accurately depicts Discworld as a real place. I've done a scene with the Silver Horde, this elderly bunch of heroes, not one of them under 80, and they're still out there slugging it out—old and geriatric and afflicted, but somehow they always win because they're so good at it! They're so close to the edge of the envelope, they're the place where you lick. On this quest, they meet up with evil Harry Dread. He's the Dark Lord that never made it into the big time—just as he was getting established, a bigger Dark Lord opened up out of town and got all the local Dark Lord custom. But they really like him because he keeps the faith. And it's part of their faith—they're heroes, and there are ways that heroes must act in order to be heroes. If you don't act that way, you're a thug, a murderer. There is a code, and they respect him because he's part of that code. He always makes certain his stupid henchmen are even more stupid than anyone else's. His dungeons are even more easy to escape from. In a sense, all these characters act like gunfighters that have actually seen all the movies, and they know how they are supposed to act.

“Granny Weatherwax is the exemplar. She's well aware of the tendency of human affairs to fall into certain patterns. And they do. We say ‘history repeats itself,’ we say ‘those that do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.’ I get worried when I hear apparently sane adults saying, ‘Did the Apollo landings really happen, or was it just a good special effect?’ Or ‘Did the Holocaust really happen?’ Lots of people say it didn't, and this is within living memory. You realize the foundations are being dug for another stupid thing to happen in 50 years time.

“I no longer read the two Pratchett news groups online. There is one major reason, and one minor reason. The minor reason is, there's only so many times you can smile when a book is being deconstructed by someone that thinks Star Trek, the Next Generation is an old TV series, and has no real sense of history at all. The big reason is that the Internet had changed things. Once upon a time, everybody knew the rules. It was part of playing the game, that you knew the rules. For science fiction, in a sense, fandom is a socially acceptable copyright infringement—and I'm saying this as someone who rode somewhat on the periphery and thought like a fan since he was 13. In the early days of Star Trek, fannish activity was positively encouraged. The wise author ‘didn't know’ that it was happening, and everything worked because everyone involved knew where the limits were. The Internet has changed all that.

“I recently heard from a Russian guy, seeking congratulations for having translated two of my books into Russian and put them on his website. He was most offended when I said, ‘Do you have any idea of the legal implications of what you have done?’ My agent smiles thinly. He has come to the Internet late, but with full force and a lot of technical background. Writers for what were once called the Iron Curtain countries have never been particularly demanding when it comes to payment, because we know people can't pay. What we seek to institute is some kind of a framework that will give you control over what you have done. Now things are loosening up all over the place, and it just annoyed me that the guy didn't even contact me first and say, ‘Hey, can I do this?’ He said, ‘Well, it is bad news for you, but it is good news for the Russian intelligentsia.’

“One other thing about the Internet fans. I believe I'm not the first author to have said I am uneasy with hundreds of people postulating future Discworld plots and developments. I'm very uneasy that I may inadvertently use something reasonably major that has somewhere been postulated by someone. I can sort out the mail. My wife, my agent, and the publisher between them can carefully filter out the stories. But on the newsgroup, there it is. My suspicion is that legally one is on fairly safe ground, but from a PR point of view, you are in it up to your neck. Someone will squeal, others will take up the squeal out of a sense of mischief or because the Internet is a democracy, and now you can see how a democracy works! And then some journalist will pick it up in a headline: ‘Media Author Stole My Idea,’ Says Fan.

“Reading the newsgroups was a great seven years. I had marvelous feedback, a whole panel of experts if I needed some particular bit of help. But I kept seeing that ‘Media Author Stole My Idea’ headline. With Discworld, if you have a grain of creativity, you can postulate what-ifs based on the point characters have got to on the story arc. So can I. There's lots and lots of material there to draw on. I don't want to live in a universe where once a week I send my notebook to my lawyer to date-stamp it.

“The Internet community is kind of fannish. It looks like fandom. It has the same shape as fandom, but I don't think it has the same base or solidarity. What has depressed me beyond measure is that here we have a medium which, no matter what Mr. Gates has succeeded in doing, is text-based. Never has there been a time when it's become more necessary to write so clearly and succinctly, or indeed to read with a great desire for understanding, because the words are all there are. It's a shame that large areas of the net have become colonized by people that think dyslexia, rather than being an affliction, is a kind of badge of coup. While the net may be leading to an upsurge in creativity, it may also be building a huge electronic slush pile.

“Discworld is different from science fiction, clearly, but I reckon that—thinking in UK terms—there are maybe 300,000 readers, of which maybe 5,000 fall into the center of being marked fans, by which I mean go to a convention, buy the T-shirt. … Discworld fandom intersects with general fantasy and SF fandom, but it is a separate one.

“Leaving Lord of the Rings out of it, Discworld is probably the most merchandised literary fantasy series. I wouldn't go outside fantasy for that comparison—I mean, God knows how many Dickens teapots have been made over the years. Usually you have to have a fairly large screen element before the merchandising happens.

“No fictional Discworld word is written by anyone except me, but some things I do in collaboration with Stephen Briggs. Generally speaking, Stephen does the legwork—some of that legwork, of course, is done with the head. We have 25 books, plus maps and things, for him to mine. He can tell me things I've forgotten, apart from anything else. The computer games, to a large extent, and the two video games that we've done, I was involved with. Everything else, it passes under my hand in some way. Fans say, ‘Oh, it's all being heavily commercialized,’ and I say, ‘You mean, compared to Star Wars? Star Trek?’ Effectively, there's a Discworld convention, by whatever name, going on every year. The whole spin-off side of it is fan-driven, to a large extent. I'm very pleased that there's now a buoyant North American Discworld Society. To my surprise, the first country outside the UK to hold a Discworld convention was the Czech Republic! I try to keep as far as I can, and that's pretty far, control over the other things. I get very neurotic about it.

“I'm told that every week, somewhere in the world, there's a Discworld play being performed. That's the bit that gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling. We don't mind people doing the plays, and Stephen Briggs has published I think six, but for that you send a charitable donation to the Orangutan Foundation, not to us. But the Foundation's reporting fewer charitable donations—practically zilch charitable donations, except from one or two very worthy organizations. In a world that contains the Internet, it is very hard to stage a Discworld play in secret! It is both sad and curiously pleasing to phone up a theater when they're doing the last dress rehearsal of a play that they haven't actually asked permission to stage, and say, ‘Terry Pratchett. Is there a piece of paper you should have sent to me?’ And you hear the sound of someone looking for a change of underwear at the other end of the phone.

“I think we've had a play in Japan, at least one in Indonesia, a lot in Australia. When I'm on tour there, in practically every major city the cast of an upcoming Discworld play have invaded the bookshop, and I get to kiss Granny Weatherwax—and what man could ask for anything more? I've gone to see some productions. There are one or two groups that are absolutely magnificent. I actually have seen Granny Weatherwax appear to die onstage in a production of Lords and Ladies, and we heard sobs break out in corners of the audience. I thought, ‘Yes, this one's working!’”